The records were given to the office in January 1992, and were assigned accession number 3360.
The collection contains title deeds (dating from 1663), probate and other registration papers, farm accounts, family memoranda and a volume of overseers of the poor's accounts for Britwell Salome. There is a quantity of family research material, mainly notes compiled by Muriel Stopes (b.1903), who traced the Stopes back to the 1500s.
In the mid-seventeenth century Britwell Salome manor was divided, and part acquired by the Stopes. They obtained the advowson, and held it virtually as a family living; during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were four rectors called James Stopes, the second of whom built a new Rectory in 1676. Many of the family in the district became farmers, who owned and occuped a number of large farms in both Britwell Salome and Britwell Prior (the two parishes were united in 1867). The tithe award of 1845 shows that a John Stopes farmed 200 acres in Britwell Prior. His daughter Ellen resided in Britwell House at the time of her death in 1919 (aged 90), and her burial is the last Stopes entry in that parish's registers. Charles Stopes, her nephew, sold the House in 1954.
Members of the Spyer family (of whom there are a few records in this archive) lived in Britwell for several centuries, up to 1944. Their direct link with the Stopes at Britwell seems to date from the marriage of John Stopes and Nelly Spyer at Brightwell Baldwin in 1828.
The catalogue has been divided into four sections, these being: Stopes' property and administrative records, geneaolgical and personal papers of the family, items specifically relating to the Spyers, and lastly documents not pertaining specifically to either family. Some overlapping of these somewhat artificial divisions does occur; for example, among the accounts listed in the first part of this catalogue are several memoranda about family events.
Catalogued by Mark Priddey, October 1992.