Eulalia Page in the Archives

My journey into the Page of Plymouth project began in February 2025 when Helen Chaloner, CEO of Literature Works approached me to ask whether I would be interested in delivering two workshops as part of a project based on a lost play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker. As someone who had written their undergraduate dissertation on Ben Jonson I was intrigued and agreed right away. When Helen got back in touch in the summer to say the application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund had been successful, the trepidation started to set in. The prospect of engaging with 16th century documents was daunting – I had completed my archive training 25 years earlier and not worked with records from that period since. The universe provided (or more likely, the algorithms) and an advert popped up on my Facebook feed for a workshop on reading Tudor and Stuart Handwriting, to be held at Dorset History Centre (a short drive from my house) and delivered by none other than Claire Skinner (formerly Archivist at The Box).

The development of the workshops gave me an insight into the experience of engaging with archives as a researcher – there were no shortcuts for me despite my status as a professional archivist, and the standard processes of advance booking, purchasing a photography permit, leaving my bag in a locker, and showing ID to prove my name and address all applied. Once I had read through the rules for handling original documents, and signed to say that I understood and accepted them, it was time to delve into the records. The Collections Assistants on duty in the Cottonian Reading Room had already engaged with me via email as part of the booking process and were aware of my research. They introduced me to an invaluable publication: the Calendar of the Plymouth Municipal Records by Richard Nicholls Worth, published in 1893. This book not only describes the content of the archives at that time but provides transcriptions of key documents, making the job of reading the originals much easier.

A major challenge proved to be the impact of Plymouth’s history on the survival of its archives. This story of loss was explored in the first workshop: we spent time reading an entry in the ‘Black Book’ (Ref 1/46) which describes the loss of the “townes evydence” thanks to an attack by Cornish rebels in the Western Rising of 1549, and viewed the earliest surviving Royal Charter issued a few years after this event by Mary I in 1554. Plymouth was famously impacted by the Blitz in 1940-1 and we were able to view a parish register that had been bombed not once but twice, and survived to tell the tale with the edges of its pages dramatically burnt, but the text still legible.

Patchy survival of the official record is not unique to Plymouth: at an early stage of planning the project Claire Skinner had flagged up that key documents which would have provided insights into the life and trial of Eulalia Page had not survived. As a general rule, murders were not dealt with by local courts but by the Assizes, in Plymouth’s case the Western Circuit. These records would normally be held at The National Archives in Kew, but do not survive for Devon before 1670. The initial case might have been heard by the county Quarter Sessions prior to the Assizes, but the records for Devon only begin in January 1592, just after Eulalia’s case. The only formal record we could find of Eulalia was the entry for her burial in the parish register for Bishop’s Tawton, and this was held at Devon Archives and Local Studies in Exeter (Ref: 1469A/PR/1/1). Luckily we were able to view a digital copy via the Find My Past web-site.

Despite these frustrations, there were moments of serendipity, and we discovered records that we were not expecting to find. The project’s Dramaturg and Producer David Prescott stumbled across a web-site created by genealogist Teresa Ann Goatham. This included an entry for Eulalia Glanville, including a note on her marriage to William Page: “I suspect the marriage might have been in Tavistocke, for which the P[arish] R[egister]s for the period do not survive.” Amazingly, it also referenced a family tree for the Glanville family created as part of the College of Arms heralds’ visitation to Cornwall in 1620. This includes Eulalia, and is preserved in a manuscript now held in the British Library. 

Thanks to a chapter on Eulalia Page published in Devonshire Characters and Strange Events by Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould we discovered that while the official record of the Assizes which sentenced Eulalia to death had been lost, some details of the event survived in the diary of Philip Wyot, town clerk of Barnstaple at the time. These reveal that the March 1591 assizes were held at Barnstaple ‘the plague being much at Exeter’ and that one of the lawyers present was ‘Sergt. Glandyl’ (Eulalia’s uncle John Glanville, serjeant-at-law).

During the second workshop we explored the ways in which the published accounts of Eulalia’s life, trial and death had varied in their telling of her story, and considered the ways in which contemporary records confirmed or contradicted these accounts. One asserts that Thomas Stone (one of the two men employed by Eulalia to murder her husband) “was married upon the next day after the murder was committed, and being in the midst of his jollity was suddenly attacked and committed to prison to bear his fellow company”. We had assumed that this detail was an embellishment. The parish register for St Andrew’s Plymouth records baptisms, marriages and burials in three columns, and when we viewed the burial entry for William Page sure enough there in the adjacent column was the record of Thomas Stone’s marriage. An extraordinary moment which reminded us that archives provide unique moments of contact with the lives of people from the past.