In the late 1960s, my first real job on taking up the post of a youthful Records Assistant (as I was called) at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, was a challenge  – to produce an integrated catalogue of the papers of the Gregory family of Stivichall. Some material deposited a few years earlier, mostly medieval deeds, had already been dealt with but alongside them was a large pile of some two thousand items, most of them covering the years 1520 to 1750 still awaiting attention.

However, this more modern material turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of the collection. That it existed at all was really due to two men, Thomas Gregory (c. 1560-1574), and his son Arthur Gregory (1540-1604). On his father’s death, Thomas, from a modest land-holding family in Asfordby, in Leicestershire, promptly moved to Coventry and, taking advantage of his legal training, quickly established himself as an important figure in local government. He sent his son to Oxford, and then to the Inner Temple, and between them these two lawyers built up a sizeable landed estate. 

These acquisitions brought with them many of those medieval deeds by which the family papers were, at that point, better known. At the same time, though, at least in my view, these later papers served as an excellent example of how a middling family, like many others at the time,  came to greater prominence by way of the legal  profession, and were therefore worth more detailed study. In fact, Arthur, a man not without faults, failed to ensure that this upward trajectory would be maintained, at least in the short term. Nevertheless, I thought it a theme worth exploring, not least because the story could be told to a great extent though the magnificent collection of archives which I had spent two or three years cataloguing.