The Chambers family, though we do not find them quite so far back as the Warings, were established at Tanworth at least a century before the commencement of the Registers. They were seated at Woodend, but later became an influential family at Studley and Gorcott where they dated from the reign of Edward VI, producing an Admiral in the reign of Elizabeth, and being patrons of the living of Spernall.

The first Chambers of Tanworth to show himself is one Henry, a member of the Guild of Knowle in 1461. It is also a Henry who winds up the connection with Tanworth as far as the Registers show, and this later Henry of about a century ago was a pauper!

William Chambers appears among the tenants of the IvIanor in Sir Robert Throckmorton's Survey of 1571 The name is plentiful in the Registers from the earliest days to the end of the eighteenth century, when it fades away to three entries in the first half of the nineteenth century, and none at all in the second half. One of the first pair of churchwardens to sign the Registers is Richard Chambers, ' who signed page after page when the transcript from paper to parchment was made towards the end of the sixteenth century.

The family seem to have been very important during the commonwealth, when William Chambers, son of John Chambers of Woodend was appointed "Register" in 1653. He was styled "the younger," his Uncle William presumably being "the elder." The number of entries made by him could, with advantage, have been larger, there being many omissions, and his handwriting being so good; but he compensated us for this by making some pious reflections under cover of the Registers, and evidently gave satisfaction, being elected for a second period of three years. He died in 1660, four years after his uncle, William the elder, and ten years before his father, John Chambers, of Woodend.

John Chambers had married Anne Bayleys, of Haselor, who pre-deceased him in 1650, at the age of thirty-four, when one of the Chambers brasses was placed in Tanworth Church to her memory. She left three sons, William, Edmund, and John, the first-named being the Register, while Edmund was described as "of Studley," at his death in 1709. He married Margaret Anderton, who died young in 1666, when he placed in Tanworth Church the second of the Chambers brasses, to her memory; the third brass being in memory of Edmund's father, the above mentioned John, who died in 1670. John was a man of so religious a turn of mind "that he almost dwelt in the church wherever he happened to be."

Edmund Chambers left a son, William, who died in 1721; a series of Williams, Edmunds, and Thomas's following to the end of the century, when the name virtually becomes extinct so far as the Parish Registers are concerned.

Extract from "The Story Of Tanworth In Arden", by John Burman. Published in 1930