The Local Historian VolumeThe Local Historian 39 No 3 THETLHEOCAL HISTORIAN JOURNAL OF THEL BRITISHOCAL ASSOCIATION FOR LOCAL HISTORY August 2009 www.balh.co.uk Volume 39 No 3

Urban government in the industrial age • vestries 1780-1830 • The politics of urban improvement in • Engineering sanitary reform in Victorian Lincoln • Alexander Hathorn, the Huddersfield agent for the Ramsden Estate (photograph of portrait The Latin Project • Loyalty in Elizabethan Cumberland • Local history internet sites • by Broadhead in the Huddersfield Art Gallery collection, reproduced with the kind permission Lionel Munby and Margaret Gelling; appreciations of their lives and work of Kirklees Council Culture & Leisure Services) [see article by David Griffiths, pp.193-207]. Front Cover: The area south-east of Lincoln cathedral from Giles’ 20-inch coloured plan, with examples of contours [pecked lines], sewer routes and gradients (including curving junctions). The numbers in circles represent the intended depths of sewer trenches at selected points, the deepest in the city at 24.6 ft, central and close to the south edge of this section. The small numbers are heights at the surface above the local datum. The colours blue and red represent sizes 4 and 5. Size 4 was to be 15x9 inches if egg-shaped brick sewer, 12 inches diameter if a circular earthenware pipe; size 5 was to be 9x6 or 7.5 inches (from ms plan in personal copy of Giles’ 1849 report, from the Local Studies Collection, Lincoln Central Library, courtesy of Lincolnshire Council) [see article by Dennis Mills, pp.208-218].

The Local Historian is published four times a year, in February, May, August and November. Single copies may be purchased for £5 including postage and packing. For more information and enquiries about The Local above: part of the large-scale coloured plan showing Gadsby’s Court, at the back of Gadsby’s shop, Historian and the British Association for Local History, please visit our website at www.balh.co.uk or write to 38 Sincil Street, Lincoln, with cramped housing, piggeries, privies, close to pumps [dust holes = BALH PO Box 6549, Somersal Herbert, ASHBOURNE DE6 5WH. ash pits]. Sincil St runs along bottom edge of this section: from lithographed drawing 3 in Giles’ Articles for possible inclusion in The Local Historian should be sent to the editor, Dr Alan Crosby, 77 Wellington 1849 report; Street, PRESTON PR1 8TQ. A style-sheet, ‘Notes for contributors’, is available on request. We welcome articles below: part of the large scale coloured plan showing artisan/shopkeeper terraces below the on any subject in the field of local history, and the editor is always pleased to discuss ideas for contributions and to advise on their preparation. County Hospital. The vertical line shows the position of the geological section Giles published as drawing 1 to help demonstrate the drainage problem. His house was within less than 200 yards of All books for review, and journals for listing in the ‘Recent publications in local history’ section, should be sent the west end of Maud’s Hill Terrace: from lithographed drawing 2 in Giles’ 1849 report (both to Dr Evelyn Lord, Book Reviews, PO Box 649 CAMBRIDGE CB1 0JW. from the Local Studies Collection, Lincoln Central Library, courtesy of Lincolnshire County The Local Historian is printed by Salisbury Printing Company Limited, Greencroft Street, SALISBURY SP1 1JF Council) [see article by Dennis Mills, pp.208-218] THE LOCAL HISTORIAN

• ISSN 00245585 • Volume 39 • Number 3 • August 2009 •

CONTENTS

Editorial ALAN CROSBY 178 Aspects of urban government in the industrial age The London vestries 1780-1830: part 1 A.D. HARVEY 179 Building an alliance for urban improvement: Huddersfield 1844-1848 DAVID GRIFFITHS 192 Local studies in sanitary reform: the importance of the engineering aspect Lincoln 1848-1850 DENNIS MILLS 207

The Latin Project ANN RYCRAFT 218

‘The riders of Renwick’: loyalty to the flag in Elizabethan Cumberland RICHARD BROCKINGTON 224 Sources for local history Local history internet sites: an update for 2009 JACQUELENÉ FILLMORE 228

Appreciations: the life and work of two great figures in local history Lionel M. Munby (1918–2009) David Short 236 Margaret Gelling (1924–2009) Alan Crosby 238

Review articles Three recently-published diaries Kate Tiller 240 Local history and war Evelyn Lord 243 Landscape archaeology and landscape history Graham Winton 246 Reviews 251 Liverpool’s inconvenient imperial past (ed. Haggerty, Webster and White) Alan Crosby Historic buildings of Stevenage (Ashby, Cudmore, Killick) Adam Longcroft The impact of the first Civil War on Hertfordshire (ed. Thomson) David L. Smith Lowestoft 1550-1750 (Butcher) The history of Ipswich (Twinch) Frank Grace Woodstock probate documents 1530-1700 (ed. Crutch, Smith, Taylor) Heather Falvey VCH East Riding vol.8 Sledmere and Northern Wolds (Neave) Roger Bellingham Cartulary of Hospital of St John the Evangelist Cambridge(ed. Underwood) Claire Cross The Midland Peasant (Hoskins) Oxford Companion to Family and Local History (ed. Hey) Evelyn Lord

Recent publications in local history 260 •EDITORIAL •

The enduring attraction of sewage is one of the fixtures of local history. Few subjects are as effective in drawing a good audience to a talk a local society, few themes retain the attention of students so successfully and, as a I found by listening in to a school visit at a Welsh castle recently, nothing so grips the imagination of children. But of course sewage, and all that went with it—schemes for new sewerage systems, public health crises, heartbreaking levels of infant mortality and deplorably bad housing— was among the hottest issues in social policy and domestic politics during the 1840s and 1850s. Generations of historians have researched and analysed the process whereby, slowly and at huge cost, civilised standards of urban living were gradually adopted and enforced in the second half of the nineteenth century. But there is still so much to discover. The emergence of effective local government, a seemingly unglamorous topic, was a fundamental change in Victorian society, but local circumstances were everywhere different. Sanitary reform and the improvement of public health was a crucial force in that process, but in researching individual communities the impact of particular personalities, the power of landowners, the influence of the local press, and the prevailing social and economic context are all of direct relevance to the process. As with so much else in local history, we can delve beneath the generalisations to find the specifics—the detail of what actually happened—and then, maybe, that detailed analysis in its turn informs the wider view. In this issue of The Local Historian there are three articles which I have collectively entitled ‘Aspects of urban government in the industrial age’. Arnold Harvey, in the first part of a detailed investigation of the London vestries of the Georgian and Regency periods—that extraordinary jigsaw of authorities which constituted the local government of the world’s largest city. He shows how the force of personalities, the legacy of centuries of organic evolution, and the almost paranoid government fear of the mob helped the shape the development of the capital. In his analysis of Huddersfield, one of the archetypal fast-growing industrial towns of the early Victorian period, David Griffiths highlights the role of the landowner in determining the emergence of urban government, and points to the often bitter political arguments which raged over the wisdom and merits not only of different policies towards pressing social problems, but also of the structures of administration themselves. Dennis Mills takes a fresh look at the sewerage issue, suggesting that although many local historians have investigating urban sanitation in the 1840s and 1850s, few have paid sufficient attention to the engineering dimensions, and to the part that civil engineers played in helping to resolve public health problems in the context of local government policy. Each of these articles demonstrates that continuing research on this familiar topic can provide new insights and understandings, and that—as Dennis Mills points out—other local historians can research their own communities and contribute to our knowledge of this crucial period in our history. But remember—reading some of the contemporary material requires a strong stomach!

ALAN CROSBY

178 Aspects of urban government in the industrial age Parish politics: London vestries 1780–1830 (part 1)

A. D. HARVEY

Introduction At the beginning of the nineteenth century the metropolitan area outside the —south-east Middlesex, north-east Surrey, north-west Kent and south-west —was administered primarily by the vestries of over ninety ecclesiastical parishes.1 Some were still largely rural, built up only along the main roads leading out of the City. Others, such as Chelsea, where there were extensive nurseries, or , on the eastern edge of ‘the great garden … for the supply of London’, were substantial communities set amid greenery: Chelsea had a population of 11,604 in 1801 and 32,371 in 1831, and Kensington grew to over 20,000 inhabitants by 1831.2 From Hyde Park to Bow the built-up area extended without a break, though there were still odd corners in which to erect new dwellings. Altogether fourteen metropolitan parishes outside the City of London had populations of over 20,000 in 1801, and eighteen had over 30,000 in 1831 (including two, St Marylebone and St Pancras, with populations of more than 100,000). These parishes were major administrative entities—the civic leaders of St Luke’s Middlesex referred to themselves as ‘the Inhabitants of this extensive parish inferior in population only to six Cities and Towns in and Wales’.3 Most of the surviving public buildings erected by nineteenth-century vestries belong to later in the century, but the vestry offices of St Martin in the Fields at the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square, blending harmoniously with the grand buildings all round the square, date from before 1830. Nevertheless, like their successors, the London boroughs of today, these parishes were too hemmed in by similar municipalities to generate any particular sense of local identity except among a busybody local elite, for all that they impinged forcibly on their residents by levying local taxes or dispensing welfare. An increase in the frequency of public perambulations of parish boundaries in this period, and a competitive efflorescence of street bollards marked with the parish’s name or monogram, indicate a growing sense of communal pride, but probably only among a minority.4 Westminster was theoretically a City, with a high steward appointed by the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey, and Southwark nominally an out-ward of the City of London, but in practice the nine parishes of Westminster and six of Southwark were as autonomous as their neighbours. Westminster and Southwark were also parliamentary boroughs with a ‘scot and lot franchise’, which meant that the vote was held by the ratepayers, but at election time the hustings were divided so that the citizenry could vote (and have their standing as ratepayers checked) each with his own parish.5 On occasion, metropolitan vestries contacted one another in an attempt to concert action against some parliamentary measure that might affect them all, but they did not even have a collective name: the term ‘within the Bills of Mortality’ was still in use, but it did

179 © British Association for Local History 2009 180 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 not cover St Marylebone, St Pancras or Chelsea, and had any no real relevance to the urban geography of the 1800s.6

Religion and the ecclesiastical role It must be emphasised that these, though each ‘a little independent state’ in some respects, were ecclesiastical parishes.7 The vestries were responsible for the administration of the Poor Law, the maintenance of streets, and the supply of quota men for the militia, but they also maintained the fabric of the parish church and saw to the appointment and remuneration of the lecturers who assisted the regular parish clergy. In many parishes the only notice of forthcoming vestry meetings was an announcement in church on the preceding Sunday.8 The parish priest, if he attended the vestry meeting, would either take the chair as of right or be voted into it as a matter of course.9 Some parishes had no name, in either official or popular usage, other than that of the saint to whom the church was dedicated: St Luke’s Middlesex; St George’s Middlesex; St Pancras Middlesex.10 In the latter case, very few people lived in the vicinity of the church and its nearest significant neighbours were the burial grounds of St Giles in the Fields and St Martin in the Fields, parishes which had run out of space in their own territory. The main focus of population in eighteenth-century St Pancras was in Kentish Town, though Camden Town, Somers Town and the northern part of what is now termed Bloomsbury grew rapidly after 1800.11 A few parishes, such as St George Bloomsbury and St George the Martyr, combined together with neighbours for Poor Law and other administrative purposes, but the general distinction between civil and ecclesiastical parishes only established itself later in the nineteenth century. Because parish government was not mentioned in the Corporation and Test Acts, which since the reign of Charles II had excluded Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics from public life, there was no legal bar to Dissenters and Catholics taking an active part in vestry administration. Thus John Wilks, vestry clerk of St Luke’s Middlesex from 1809 to 1827, was joint-secretary of the country’s main Dissenting pressure group, the Protestant Society for the Protection of Religious Liberty. The Reverend William Francis Platt, minister of a Calvinistic Methodist congregation in Chapel Street, Curtain Row, Shoreditch, was an active vestryman in Bethnal Green, on occasion chairing the meetings.12 In St Pancras a Roman Catholic coal-merchant, Thomas Murphy, was leader of a group that eventually succeeded in overthrowing the parish’s self-elected closed vestry. How far religious animosities affected parish politics is unclear. In 1819 the rector of St Luke’s Middlesex informed vestry members that the Commissioners for Building New Churches considered the parish should have two new churches. The vestry, ‘decidedly of opinion’ that they did not want any new churches, determined that as the information came unofficially from the rector they could not ‘with propriety adopt any practical proceedings thereon’. It is evident that Wilks, the Protestant Society leader, took a leading part in this stratagem, as he was voted thanks ‘for his very great ability displayed on this occasion’.13 But Bethnal Green also turned down two new churches, though there the rector seemed in the ascendant following a local power struggle. In St Luke’s a new church was built but the vestry rejected, as ‘derogatory to the honour of the parish’, an offer (made by its newly-appointed minister) to supply communion plate and other necessary furnishings. Instead, it footed the bill itself. In contrast, in Bethnal Green the rector maintained a rearguard action against the one new church which was built locally, on the grounds that it would cut into his income.14 When the distinctly Tory rector decided to apply for a Local Act to alter the way his PARISH POLITICS: LONDON VESTRIES 1780-1830 181 parish was governed, he hired the Nonconformist lobbyist John Wilks as a solicitor. It seems likely that the man who put them in touch was William Francis Platt, whose Calvinistic Methodist chapel was a quarter of a mile from Wilks’s home in Hoxton Square, and much the same distance in another direction from the Calvinistic Methodist chapel in Moorfields, where the minister was Matthew Wilks, father of John and, like Platt, a product of Trevecca College (a Calvinistic seminary) and an active member of the London Missionary Society.

The involvement of the elite The metropolitan examples were not the only enormously overgrown parishes in England. Manchester and Birmingham were even more populous than St Marylebone, though in both places a exercised certain key administrative responsibilities, and in Manchester the parish was subdivided and functioned for most purposes as a number of separate townships.15 But simply because the metropolitan parishes were in the capital their administration involved special features. Thus, when in March 1815 a mob rioted in St James’s, St Giles and the southern part of St Marylebone, the home secretary thought it necessary to circularise the vestries of the neighbouring parishes, urging them to swear in extra and organise special sittings of local magistrates. In July 1821, in anticipation of disturbances at the coronation of George IV, the vestry of St John’s Westminster was instructed by the home secretary to have all the parish fire engines ‘in complete Readiness’, and all the streetlamps lit by sunset.16 Furthermore, the people involved in running these parishes were often also active in national politics and administration. The parliamentary printer Luke Hansard and his son and successor Luke Graves Hansard were prominent in the vestry of St Giles in the Fields: in 1829 the younger Hansard became treasurer of the poor, responsible for the largest department of parish expenditure.17 Richard Birnie, formerly churchwarden and later éminence grise of the parish of St Martin in the Fields, was the Bow Street magistrate who in 1820 led the raid on the house in Cato Street which netted the conspirators planning to blow up the cabinet. The Benjamin Capper who, retiring as churchwarden in Lambeth in 1819, received a vote of thanks ‘for his constant attention to the interests of this Parish, and for the urbanity of conduct, uniformly displayed by his easy access and conciliatory manners towards his fellow Parishioners’, was probably Benjamin Pitts Capper, clerk in the Aliens Office.18 The speaker of the House of Commons was regularly co-opted to the vestry of St Margaret’s Westminster, and lords chief justice and judges were generally co-opted to that of St Giles in the Fields. ‘When you look at the list of the vestry and see [Lord Chief Justice] Tenterden, Mr Justice Best and the Judges, and such respectable persons on the vestry, how can you imagine any thing can be going on wrong?’, it was asked—though they never attended, and when the topmost legal dignitary of all, the lord chancellor Lord Loughborough, made the first of his two appearances at the vestry of St George’s Bloomsbury the meeting was not quorate, so he could not be elected to membership.19 St James’s Westminster had a policy of appointing one-third of the vestrymen from the titled nobility, one-third from ‘gentlemen’, and one-third from tradesmen. Although it was alleged that the upper-class members never came to meetings, in fact Earl Spencer, formerly first lord of the admiralty and soon to be home secretary, attended regularly in 1804-1805, and another frequent attender, over a longer span of years, was Sir Christopher Hawkins MP: he was one of the leading boroughmongers in the country and, since at least four of the Cornish boroughs he controlled had a ratepayer franchise, arguably England’s greatest expert in the art of manipulating parish 182 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 vestries.20 St George’s Hanover Square was even more exclusive: tradesmen were admitted only to vestry committees, and occasionally vestry meetings seemed to be adjournments from the Houses of Parliament. The 64 vestrymen who attended to elect lecturers on 13 June 1795 included two bishops, two dukes, one marquis, seven earls, two viscounts and eleven barons, along with a field marshal and several MPs.21 As with Hawkins in St James’s, such people had significant track records of exercising political control in localities outside London. William Sturges Bourne MP, a St George’s vestryman, promoted much of the legislation relating to parish government in this period and was briefly home secretary in 1827. He was also, between 1817 and 1822, chairman of the Hampshire quarter sessions. Sir James Graham, another St George’s vestryman who became a cabinet minister, was a magistrate in Cumberland, where he was involved in a dispute with the clerk of the peace over the ‘cut’ the latter took on county contracts.22 John Simeon, brother of Charles Simeon the Evangelical leader, was a St Marylebone vestryman, had been recorder of Reading, and was later one of that borough’s MPs.23

1. Metropolitan parishes in early nineteenth century Middlesex, outside the City of London (drawn by Alan Crosby)

Closed vestries and open vestries During the later 1820s much noise was made over the actual membership of vestries. There had never been any Act of Parliament to establish an organisational model for parish government, so the rules and customs were everywhere different. The most PARISH POLITICS: LONDON VESTRIES 1780-1830 183 obvious variation was between parishes where the inhabitants were members of the vestry (these being known as open vestries) and parishes where there was a closed, or select, vestry, appointed by co-option. Some closed vestries had been established by Act of Parliament, some by bishop’s faculty, others merely by custom and prescription. In some the leading parish officers—the churchwardens and overseers—were vestrymen, but elsewhere one qualified for membership by being chosen by the existing vestrymen to serve in these offices. Closed vestries were very controversial at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Although the Corporations Act and related legislation during the 1660s had not referred to parishes, many Dissenters had nevertheless been ousted from urban vestries, and their sons and grandsons were making a slow comeback a generation or two later in closed vestries. In 1727 Daniel Defoe, under the pseudonym Andrew Moreton, published a pamphlet entitled Parochial Tyranny: or, the House-keeper’s Complaint Against the insupportable Exactions and partial Assessments of Select Vestries, in which he railed against ‘those Parish Jockeys who knew no Mercy … and fatten themselves with what they extort from the Parish’, referring to ‘these Parish blood- suckers’ and ‘woe to these House-keepers who disoblige the Vestry Gentry’.24 Complaints of profiteering, vindictiveness, and partisan inequality in rates assessments, soon resurfaced. In 1744 the senior churchwarden of St Luke’s Middlesex was found to have been cooking the books and was indicted for forgery: he fled the country and was outlawed.25 In the same year the inhabitants of St Anne’s, Soho physically ejected the select vestry and established ‘open’ government. Until the early nineteenth century very few people attended vestry meetings—often fewer than a dozen even in open vestries—and in some parishes meetings were at long intervals, so it is doubtful if there was much difference between the open and closed forms. A St Marylebone vestryman told a House of Commons committee that ‘I believe the circumstance of being elected by ourselves makes us perhaps less anxious to satisfy the parishioners upon every occasion; sometimes, I am aware, we have conducted ourselves with rather more hauteur than I thought became us’.26 But the disgruntled parishioners excluded from closed vestries were not necessarily of a different social class from the vestrymen. Furthermore, in open vestry parishes the spending functions which impinged most obviously on the lives (rather than simply the pockets) of ratepayers—street maintenance and watching and lighting—were usually hived off to boards of trustees, set up under Local Acts and recruited by co- option in the same way as closed vestries, whereas in closed vestry these responsibilities more often remained under vestry control. During the early nineteenth century attendance at some open vestries increased rapidly, and meetings became increasingly unmanageable. At Greenwich in April 1802 the meeting was so rowdy that the clerk could not take the minutes and ‘thought it prudent and necessary to withdraw with this minute-book, lest the same should be defaced and torn’.27 Meetings became longer, some metropolitan vestries being ‘so divided among themselves on almost every occasion, that they sat debating, like a petty House of Commons’.28 Vestry minutes, which in most cases survive in excellent condition, record decisions though no details of discussions as such, but the resolutions and committee reports written into the minute books invariably show a practised command of language, suggesting that suburban vestrymen—generally tradesmen, with a sprinkling of attorneys—were often graduates of the numerous debating clubs and political societies that flourished in London in the 1790s and again after 1810.29 184 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

In 1819 dissatisfied parishioners in St Pancras, led by Thomas Rhodes, a grazier in the remaining unbuilt areas of the parish and great-uncle of Cecil Rhodes the empire- builder, secured a Local Act to replace the open vestry with a closed one. Four years later in Bethnal Green, following a meeting so uproariously out of hand that the chairman, who was also a local magistrate, read the Riot Act, the same happened. Also in 1819, William Sturges Bourne, concerned to make Poor Law administration more efficient, promoted a General Act, the first clause of which enabled vestries to appoint a committee to be legally responsible for poor relief, everywhere the most expensive department of parish business. These Poor Law authorities also became known as select vestries, a term hitherto used interchangeably with closed vestries, and Sturges Bourne later told the House of Commons that he was ‘very sorry, that two bodies so different in their nature are called by the same name’.30 In practice his Act made little difference in the metropolitan area: of the 2525 parishes which adopted the Act by 1830 only fourteen were in Middlesex, and of these only Hammersmith and St Giles Cripplegate, in the City of London, had populations over 10,000. Paddington adopted the Act in 1820 but gave it up in 1822, and procured a Local Act with slightly different provisions in 1824.31 The Sturges Bourne Act was adopted by three of the larger Surrey parishes—Croydon, Rotherhithe and Lambeth—but the last, much the largest of the parishes to adopt the Act in southern England, gave up the arrangement in 1827.32 To have ‘served in every office in the parish’ was a matter of considerable local prestige and some quiet rural parishes really were administered more or less effectively by churchwardens holding office for two years, and elected overseers of the poor. But, given human nature, it seems unlikely that the metropolitan parishes, where rapid increase of population and budgets created something of a Klondike atmosphere, were ever governed quite in accordance with traditional expectations. There were of course frequent complaints of maladministration and incompetence, just as with central government, and even in St Marylebone—where there was no shortage of experienced businessmen and property-holders—it was claimed that the ‘accounts are constructed on erroneous principles, which defy human ingenuity to balance them in their present form’.33 In Chelsea there were complaints of outrageous perks enjoyed by the parish officers, and the overseers’ accounts were found to be ‘confused and blended in the greatest degree … each head of disbursement containing charges which should have been comprized in others,’ with ‘numerous erasures and alterations … which cannot fail to excite great doubts of the accuracy of the Accounts’.34 At St Giles in the Fields the account books simply disappeared.35 The temptation for energetic, or perhaps merely unscrupulous, individuals to take control of these major spending and patronage organisations was obvious. Magistrates had a key role in parish administration. They formally appointed the overseers of the poor and other officials nominated by the vestry, approved the rate assessments, issued warrants for distress against ratepayers who did not pay, authorised orders for the grant of poor relief, and issued licences for public houses. In richer parishes, such as Chelsea or St Marylebone, the magistrates who did this were vestrymen, held their sessions in rooms provided by the parish, and in some cases even transacted their business in the vestry room immediately before or after vestry meetings.36 In St Marylebone, which administered poor relief under a Local Act, five of the seventeen vestrymen who were magistrates in the late 1820s also served on the Board of Guardians of the Poor, and a sixth, Lord Kenyon, was a churchwarden.37 But some of the smaller parishes had no magistrates living within their boundaries, and some Middlesex magistrates such as Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, Sir John Soane the architect, or Jeremy Bentham the political theorist, were not very active on the Bench. Most of the 24 stipendiary magistrates, responsible for the day to PARISH POLITICS: LONDON VESTRIES 1780-1830 185 day enforcement of law and order in the inner suburbs, had little involvement with parish work.38

‘The Boss’: Joseph Merceron of Bethnal Green An entire section in the Webbs’ classic English Local Government is entitled ‘The Rule of The Boss’ but deals with only a single individual, Joseph Merceron, treasurer for the poor in Bethnal Green (and thus responsible for handling the largest part of the parish revenue) and also, more importantly for the exercise of power, a magistrate. Probably a Bethnal Green man born and bred, Merceron became a parish officer in the 1780s and a magistrate in 1795. He was also a commissioner for the property tax and sat on appeals for assessed taxes, which allowed him the ‘opportunity of most despotically tyrannizing over the parish’.39 Apart from a hiccup in 1804 when he resigned as treasurer of the poor after the vestry asked to audit his accounts—he resumed office at a subsequent vestry meeting, which honoured him with a special vote of thanks—there was no real opposition to his growing power and influence until the arrival in 1809 of a new rector, Joshua King of Brasenose College, Oxford. King was alarmed by the disorderliness of the parish, as well he might be, for Bethnal Green was the fifth largest parish in the metropolitan area and one of the most working-class. He told Merceron how much he would like to become a magistrate so that he could suppress the disgraceful practice of ‘bullock-hunting’ (that is, bribing the drovers of the herds which passed through the parish on the way to Smithfield to permit likely- looking bullocks to be taken out and chased through the streets). King later recalled that ‘Mr. Merceron declared that there was no kind of amusement he was so fond of as bullock-hunting … he discouraged me at the same time from entertaining any hopes of getting into the commission [of the peace], by saying, no person could be appointed unless he was recommended by the other Magistrates; and that if any other Magistrate was necessary for the district, he should take care to recommend his friend Mr. Timmings, and not me’.40 In March 1812 a meeting of the Bethnal Green vestry, with 44 inhabitants present, resolved unanimously that thanks ‘be given to Joseph Merceron Esq: our worthy Treasurer not only for the exactness and fidelity in which he has kept his Accounts for twenty five years past but also for that able advice that he has so cheerfully given to the Governors and parish officers in many difficult circumstances’.41 This sounds like a stage-managed response to murmurings against Merceron, quite possibly originating at the rectory. Merceron tried to thwart the rector’s attempts to secure a new Local Act, intended to alter arrangements for paving and poor relief and to increase the rector’s stipend. By refusing to meet the vestry committee appointed to defend the old constitution, King was held to show ‘a disposition which appears … to breathe nothing but rancour and vengence’.42 He tried to prosecute Merceron but this move, denounced by the vestry as ‘instituted to gratify passions the most abhorrent … containing charges the most disgraceful to humanity, and destructive to Society’, failed ignominiously. When a resolution in support of the rector was proposed in the vestry, an amendment was passed by 324 votes to 25 stating ‘the rector … has forfeited all claim to their respect and confidence’.43 At this time the bullocks being chased by local rowdies began appearing in the churchyard during Sunday services, which were also disturbed by dogfights and duck-shooting. King later told the House of Commons Select Committee on the Police of the Metropolis that Merceron took ‘care to elect the most ignorant and lowest characters on whom he can depend, to fill all parochial offices, and to audit his accounts; when I 186 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 say elect, I mean that his influence is so extensive in the parish, that whoever he nominates, the vestry is sure to sanction and appoint’.44 James May, Bethnal Green’s vestry clerk, giving evidence before the same committee, was reluctant to corroborate King’s accusations but provided details of Merceron’s habit of altering individual rate assessments after they had been approved by his colleagues on the bench. Another local magistrate, John Thomas Barber Beaumont, a former professional artist (the V&A has six of his miniatures) who became a successful insurance broker and building speculator, told the committee that when granting licences Sir Daniel Williams, one of three stipendiary magistrates at the Whitechapel office, systematically favoured publicans who sold Hanbury’s beer and ignored complaints against rowdy public houses that were Hanbury clients. Merceron and the Reverend Edward Robson, a lecturer at St. Mary’s Whitechapel and Trinity Chapel, Mile End, and also a magistrate, were involved in the same malpractice.45 The home secretary was so perturbed by these revelations that he drew them to the attention of the lord chancellor with a view to having Merceron, Williams and Robson removed from the magistracy.46 Though the matter was referred to the attorney general and solicitor general, the lord chancellor seemed disinclined to attach significance to ex parte statements before a parliamentary committee, and Thomas Thirlwall, another clerical magistrate, denounced Barber Beaumont’s evidence as ‘glaring and impudent falsehoods … a chapter of falsehood and malignity’.47 Barber Beaumont’s evidence was indeed suspect and, as Thirlwall showed, he was already in trouble with fellow-magistrates in the Tower Hamlets Division.48 In 1818 a very temporary alliance of Merceron’s enemies in Bethnal Green—King the rector, May the vestry clerk, and Lawrence Gwynne, a newly- appointed magistrate with a doctorate in law—obtained a vestry decision to disallow a £120 bill, which Merceron wished to charge the parish for prosecuting vestrymen for libel, and also obliged him to show his books. It emerged that he had also charged the parish his expenses in King’s unsuccessful prosecution in 1813. In April 1818 Merceron stood trial for embezzlement and for corruption in granting licences to publicans, and was sentenced to a £200 fine and six months in prison on the first charge and twelve months in prison on the second.49 The presentation by the Webbs of Merceron’s career as a ‘boss’, and his startling fall, has been closely followed in subsequent accounts,50 but there are problems with their version. First, though removed from the bench and never subsequently restored, he quickly re-established his leadership in Bethnal Green when he came out of prison. Second, though he undoubtedly packed vestry meetings and eventually swamped them by the sheer numbers of his supporters when Bethnal Green was an open vestry (some meetings were attended by hundreds and had to be adjourned to the churchyard, for want of space in the vestry room) he continued to enjoy the support of the majority of vestrymen even after the 1823 Local Act made it a closed vestry. He died in 1839 and some 20,000 people were present at his funeral. Perhaps they were anxious to assure themselves that the monster was really dead but it is more plausible that Merceron was simply very popular. ‘He was supposed to be worth 300,000l, though he always appeared to be in poor circumstances’, noted The Gentleman’s Magazine.51 The fortune may have resulted from decades of robbing the parish poor and accepting bribes from brewers, but at his trial the prosecution did not claim that he profited financially from granting public house licences improperly. As the judge pointed out, ‘corruption does not necessarily import a desire of pecuniary gain. Improper favour … by one bound to act without favour, with impartiality in such a matter, is corruption’. It is more likely that most of Merceron’s wealth resulted from successful property-dealing during a boom period. He was inclined to make up his own rules, and he liked money more than the display of it, but that does not mean he PARISH POLITICS: LONDON VESTRIES 1780-1830 187 was a financial racketeer. He was probably one of those people who like to take control, spurred not by vanity or cynicism but by the not unreasonable conviction that without them the world would be worse managed.

The role played by magistrates An anonymous pamphlet, published in 1815 by Barber Beaumont or a close associate, may have intended irony in stating that ‘We feel strongly persuaded that the great body of Magistrates in the Commission of the County of Middlesex are but little aware of the interior construction of that complex machine, which has for some years past wielded, unseen, unnoticed, unopposed, the whole patronage of the County Magistracy’.52 The Webbs suggested that William Mainwaring, chairman of the Middlesex quarter sessions—and also an MP and member of the vestry of St George's Hanover Square—not only collaborated in the dubious activities of Merceron and Sir Daniel Williams but was also responsible for ‘an extensive system of corruption’.53 They discovered, for example, that ‘the Treasury made a secret payment to Mainwaring for his services in keeping Middlesex quiet’.54 In fact similar payments were made to Mainwaring’s predecessors, and to his successors until 1833, the reason for the secrecy being that it avoided the constitutional complications of making a chairman of quarter sessions a salaried government functionary. The real point of the payments was that as chairman of quarter sessions in England’s most populous county, Mainwaring spent a great deal of time acting as a judge, not only presiding at a court with much greater sentencing powers than the ordinary sessions but also, like an assize judge, having to write detailed reports whenever there were petitions against sentences.55 In 1805 the justices of Salford Hundred in Lancashire, second only to Middlesex in the number of cases heard, sought to pay their chairman a salary. One of the arguments put forward was the ‘inconvenience if cases had to be tried at assizes’.56 Yet as far as the Webbs were concerned, Mainwaring was the secret hireling of a repressive government, and that was not all: ‘Gradually … this salary failed to content the unscrupulous Chairman of the Middlesex Bench’, and in an outrageous piece of jobbery (as the Webbs saw it) the county funds were transferred to the keeping of the family bank, managed by his ferociously-squinting son George Boulton Mainwaring.57 In due course the family bank went bust, and the Mainwarings were left owing £9177 to the county of Middlesex.58 Giving the account to the family bank was not illegal, that sort of thing being regarded as normal in this period, and William Mainwaring would have been an unusual banker if he genuinely thought other people’s businesses were more reliable than his own. ‘Whether the bankruptcy originated in miscalculation or whether it is attributable to the want of a competent knowledge of the banking art, we are not disposed to examine’, sneered the anonymous pamphlet:59 but it did not originate in any very cleverly conceived scheme to defraud the county, as the Mainwarings lost far more money than did Middlesex. The government apparently exempted them from blame, for in due course it made George Boulton Mainwaring a stipendiary police magistrate.60 Though they do not suggest he was part of what they called the ‘Mainwaring and Merceron clique’, Richard Birnie was another magistrate who aroused the Webbs’ suspicions. Having made a respectable fortune as a high-class saddlemaker, Birnie had been an energetic churchwarden of St Martin’s in the Fields, establishing almshouses and an overflow burial ground at Camden Town in the parish of St Pancras. He gained the attention of the duke of Northumberland, whose town palace was across the street from St Martin’s church (Northumberland Avenue now occupies the site) and 188 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 perhaps through his influence became a Middlesex magistrate. Like Sir Daniel Williams before him, he made the move from non-stipendiary county magistrate to stipendiary police magistrate, though he needed the stipend less than several of his colleagues and, as was arguably the case with Mainwaring and Merceron, his motivation was probably not a racketeer’s opportunism but a desire to shape his immediate environment according to his sense of what was proper. He remained active in St Martin’s affairs and (again unlike most stipendiary magistrates) was one of the justices regularly available for appointing parish officers and issuing warrants on parish business, both in St Martin’s and in neighbouring St Paul’s Covent Garden. During the early 1820s he became one of the government’s principal agents of repression, leading the armed raid that captured the Cato Street conspirators in 1820 and reading the Riot Act at Cumberland Gate during the disturbances accompanying the funeral procession of Queen Caroline in August 1821. In September 1821 he was knighted. Francis Place, leader of the Westminster radicals, was for a time willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: ‘Birnie has done strange things for the Government and would not for a moment hesitate to do anything for the powwers [sic] above him. He has some sad blemishes in his private character, but in the ordinary course of business he is an excellent Magistrate’.61 But later, when Birnie became prominent in the defence of the closed vestry of St Paul’s Covent Garden against those who wished to liberalise its constitution, Place saw him as an ‘unscrupulous and dissolute’ Scotsman, ‘that scoundrel, as you know he is, of a Magistrate Birnie, who has always in every case and in every place where he has had control promoted and encouraged and sanctioned every corruption every abuse’.62 Place even began to question his credentials as a magistrate: ‘Some misunderstanding seems at this time to have existed between the Government and the Bow Street Magistrates, not one of whom, namely, Baker, Birnie, Graham or Read, were in any way intitled to the epithet respectable. They were all mean narrow minded passionate ill informed men whom however they might suit the purposes of the Home Secretary were very much the opposite of men who ought to have been intrusted with the superintendence of the Police in the Metropolis. I was well acquainted with the past history of all these men, and knew both Graham and Birnie well’.63 Presumably this was not the period in which Place saw Birnie as ‘on the ordinary course of business … an excellent Magistrate’. Aaron Graham and James Read were frequently entrusted by the government with challenging tasks, and letters by them are frequently to be found in the Home Office papers. They appear to have been first- rate public servants, courageous, fair-minded and by no means the passionate ill- informed individuals Place complained of. The documentary record indicates that Birnie, Merceron and Mainwaring did not at all resemble the picture of them presented in the Webbs’ English Local Government. After the magistrates, the personage in the best position to dominate the vestry was presumably the parish priest, a theme which will be developed in part 2 of this article, to be published in the February 2010 issue of The Local Historian.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Richard Yates, The Church in Danger: a Statement comprising the conurbation outside the City of the Cause, and the Probable Means of Averting of London, including an ‘Interior Circle’ of 55 that Danger Attempted in a Letter to the Right parishes in which he does not include Honourable Earl of Liverpool (London 1815) Hampstead or Stoke Newington, or the listed 93 parishes [64 in Middlesex, 21 in already populous Kent parishes of , Surrey, 4 in Kent, 4 in Essex] with an Greenwich and Woolwich; John Middleton, aggregate population of 1,162,300 as The General View of the Agriculture of Middlesex, PARISH POLITICS: LONDON VESTRIES 1780-1830 189

with Observations on the Means of its Improvement Percy as a candidate against James Paull is not (London 1798) p.3 stated that ‘The Cities of confirmed by the vestry minutes (Westminster London and Westminster, and about 50 City Archives [WCA] F2009, St Martin in the adjacent parishes form one town, the Capitol Fields Vestry Minutes 1803-1818, vestry of Great Britain, known by the general name meetings 24 Jul and 30 Sep 1806) and of London’. The best introduction to parish Parliamentary Debates [PD] n.s. vol.21 col.901, government is still Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 21 Apr 1829). English Local Government from the Revolution to 6 See PD vol.33 col.20, 7 March 1816, where the Municipal Corporations Act (11 vols London Michael Angelo Taylor complains that St 1906-1929) vol.1 ‘The Parish and the County’, Marylebone ‘sent circular letters to all the though it has a detectable Progressive Party parishes of the metropolis, requesting them to bias and is misleading on certain points. call meetings for the purpose of expressing Elaine. A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: the Night their hostility’ to his proposal for an Act to Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, regulate paving in London as a whole; and 1720-1830 (Basingstoke 1998) is also useful. Webb, English Local Government vol.1 p.211 fn.1 F.H.W. Sheppard, Local Government in St. for opponents of a Local Act to establish a Marylebone 1688-1835: a Study of the Vestry and closed vestry in St Mary’s Newington Turnpike Trust (Athlone Press, 1958) and R.S. circularising vestries of neighbouring parishes Draper, ‘Democracy in St. Pancras: Politics in a with a printed form of a petition against the Metropolitan Parish, 1779-1849’, Harvard measure; see also WCA I/183/2 Paddington University PhD thesis 1979, lack comparative vestry minutes Nov 1812 to Apr 1820, vestry dimensions and are dull. The sections on the meeting of 22 Sep 1815, where the clerk is vestry in the history of individual parishes in instructed to ‘procure from other Parishes on the nowhere-near-complete Victoria County the skirts of the Metropolis Information on History of Middlesex are of uneven quality the subject of making new Gravel Roads’. and in most cases inadequate. 7 W. Mainwaring, An Address to the Grand Jury … 2 Peter Foot, General View of the Agriculture of the for the County of Middlesex, on Monday, December County of Middlesex, with Observations on the 2, 1811 (London 1811) p.11 Means of their Improvement (London 1794) p.11 8 58 Geo.III c.69 cl.1 specified that there should (not the same as Middleton, cited above); and be at least three days’ notice of vestry censuses for 1801 and 1831. For an account of meetings, but previously they sometimes the breakdown of crops in the parish of occurred the day after announcement in see The National Archives [TNA] HO church. In closed vestries there was generally 167/16/88. no public announcement; instead the parish 3 Islington Local History Centre [ILHC] St beadle delivered a note to the house of each Luke vestry minutes Jun 1808; Jan 1822, p.352; vestryman. 3 Jan1815; see also p.387, 20 Feb 1816. The 9 Webb, English Local Government vol.1 p.36 fn.2, arithmetic is only correct if the parish of St. cf. Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1830 IV p.451, Luke is compared with towns with charters evidence of the Rev. J.H. Spry, rector of St and corporations: Lambeth, Bethnal Green, Marylebone, before Select Committee on Shoreditch, St Marylebone and St Pancras Vestries 6 May 1829; Tower Hamlets Local parishes were all more populous than St History Library and Archives [THLHLA] Luke’s. L/MBG/A/1/3 p.140v, vestry minutes of the 4 A.D. Harvey, ‘Early nineteenth-century parish of St Matthew Bethnal Green 29 Dec bollards in London’, The Local Historian [TLH] 1819; ILHC] St Mary Islington Vestry Book vol.35 no.1 (2005) pp.2-8 and ‘Parish 1824–1838 p.2, 22 Jul 1824 boundary markers and perambulations in 10 The parish church of St. Luke Middlesex, later London’, TLH vol.38 no.3 (2008) pp.180-193 known as St Luke's Old Street, is now a music 5 The hustings separated into different sections education centre known as LSO. The parish for each parish are shown in Cruikshank’s church of St George Middlesex is now known print ‘The Westminster Election’, bound into as St George in the East. Though the term the British Library [BL] copy of J.J. Stockdale, Spitalfields was already current, what is now The Poll Book for Electing Two Representatives in known as Christchurch Spitalfields was then Parliament for the City and Liberty of Westminster, generally called Christ Church Middlesex; June 18 to July 4, 1818 (1818) and the Christchurch Blackfriars Road in Southwark scrapbook Gleanings relating to the Parish of was known as Christ Church Surrey. Covent Garden Westminster (BL, 1889 a 20). 11 St Giles burial ground abuts on St Pancras There had been accusations that ratepayer lists churchyard to the north, and there is now no were falsified at election time in Southwark in indication of the boundary between them: 1690 but by 1800 people preferred not voting together they form St Pancras Garden on to being listed as ratepayers. Electioneering Pancras Road, London NW1. What was St committees were established in each Martin’s burial ground, now called St Martin’s Westminster parish (probably in Southwark Gardens, is about a quarter of a mile to the too) but the statement of John Cam Hobhouse north-west: see Walter E. Brown, St. Pancras that in 1806 the vestry of St Martins in the Open Spaces and Disused Burial Grounds Fields resolved on 9 Sep 1806 to support Earl (Camden Town 1911) passim 190 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

12 J.A. Jones, Bunhill Memorials. Sacred 25 Anon. Parish Corruption in Part Display’d: or, a Reminiscences of Three Hundred Ministers and Narrative of some Late Transactions in St. Luke’s other persons of note, who are buried in Bunhill Parish, in the County of Middlesex: Especially such Fields, &c. (London 1849) pp.209-211; as respect the Indicting for Forgery, and Outlawing THLHLA L/MBG/A/1/2 vestry minutes of St Mr. Thomas Sayers, the first Head-Church-Warden Matthew Bethnal Green, p.430, 10 May 1815 in that new Parish (London 1740) p.2. For the 13 ILHC St Luke vestry minutes Jun 1808, conduct of vestries in the parishes of St Martin Jan1822, p.466, 26 April 1819 in the Fields and St Anne Soho in this period 14 M.H. Port, Six Hundred New Churches: A Study of see Journals of the House of Commons [JHC] the Church Building Commission 1818-1856 and vol.24 pp.196-211, 4 May 1742. its Church Building Activities (Church Historical 26 PP 1830 IV p.457 evidence of J.T. Hope, 6 May Society/SPCK, 1961) p.34 n2; THLHLA 1829; see however Report of the Proceedings at the L/MBG/A/1/3, p.118 vestry minutes of St Public Meeting of the Rate Payers of the Parish of St. Matthew Bethnal Green 13 Jan 1819; ILHC St. George, Hanover Square … the 18th of November, Luke vestry minutes Mar 1822, Apr 1831 p.88- 1831 (London 1831) p.10 where it is stated that 89, 4 Nov 1824 and p.126, 1 Dec 1825, cf Port, the ratepayers’ delegates sent to meet the vestry Six Hundred New Churches p.104; Victoria County found the latter ‘courteous, open, and candid’. History of Middlesex vol.11 p.104. The churches The chairman and two of the members of the in question are St John, Bethnal Green and St committee of the ratepayers group were MPs— Barnabas, (now St Clement), King Square. one of them Edward Bulwer Lytton. 15 Webb, English Local Government vol.1 pp.70-71, 27 Webb, English Local Government vol.1 p.93. At vol. 2 pp.158-159 Stoke Damerel, the parish which developed 16 Annual Register, 1815 ‘Chronicle’ pp.25-26; into what is now Devonport, the vestry minute TNA HO 44/8 f.636, Jul 1821 book had pages torn out in July 1813, so 17 Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre evidently these disorders were not confined to [CLSAC] P/GG/M/1/4 p.225 vestry minutes the London area. of St Giles and St George 4 Jan 1821: 28 PD vol.33 col.18, Michael Angelo Taylor, 7 Mar P/GG/M/1/5 p.536, 17 Jun 1829. Another of 1816 Luke Hansard’s sons, Thomas Curson 29 The earliest detailed account of what was Hansard, took over William Cobbett’s actually said at a vestry meeting (not a very Parliamentary History and founded ‘Hansard’: typical one) seems to be a police officer’s he had left the firm in 1803. report of a St Pancras meeting on 31 January 18 Lambeth Archives Department [LAD] P3/5, 1839 (TNA HO 44/52). William Cobbett, Lambeth vestry minutes Apr 1816–Nov 1826 attending a dinner to celebrate the overthrow p.90, 30 Apr 1819 of the closed vestry of St Giles in the Fields, 19 PP 1830 IV p588, evidence of George Rogers, noted ‘I heard from two of the churchwarden of St Giles in the Fields before Churchwardens speeches about a thousand Select Committee on Vestries 18 Feb 1830; times better than I ever heard from the CLSAC P/GB/M/1/1 vestry minutes of St Collective in the whole of my life’ (Cobbett’s George Bloomsbury p.299 27 Dec 1795 Weekly Political Register vol.68 col.62 11 Jul 1829: 20 Roland Thorne (ed). The History of Parliament: ‘Collective’ was Cobbett’s term for The House of Commons 1790-1820 (5 vols. Secker parliamentary politicians). and Warburg, 1986) vol.4, pp.166-170 30 PD n.s. 21 col. 905, 28 Apr 1829 21 WCA C776 vestry minutes of St George 31 PP 1830 XXXI p.50 and 1841 XXVII p.233; PP Hanover Square 1795-1802, vestry meeting 13 1830 IV p.468, evidence of Richard Pitman, Jun 1795 vestry clerk of Paddington before Select 22 J.T. Ward, Sir James Graham (Macmillan, 1967) Committee on Vestries, 12 May 1829 p.44; William Hodgson, the offending clerk of 32 PP 1830 IV p.536-7, evidence of Robert the peace, was also town clerk and later Watmore before Select Committee on Vestries of Carlisle—he and Graham were also at 28 May 1829 loggerheads there; see also Webb, English Local 33 PP 1830 IV p.429, evidence of William Government vol.1 p.507 Crawford, 5 May 1829; Crawford, though a St 23 Thorne, House of Commons, vol.2 pp.13-15 and Marylebone resident and vestryman, was also a vol.5 pp.174-175. It seems that the Simeon Surrey magistrate. interest was maintained by patronage and 34 Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea donations directed at the borough Library Service [RBKCLS] Chelsea vestry corporation rather than the borough’s three minutes 1822-1833, p.25: report of committee constituent parishes, the leading personalities 20 Jun 1822 and cf. p.32 in the latter presumably also being the leading 35 Rowland Dobie, The History of the United personalities in the former. Parishes of St. Giles in the Fields and St. George 24 Andrew Moreton [Daniel Defoe], Parochial Bloomsbury (London 1829) p.303 Tyranny: or, the House-keeper’s Complaint Against 36 Victoria County History of Middlesex [VCH] The insupportable Exactions and partial vol.12 p.210, Times 4 Apr 1828 p.3c Assessments of Select Vestries, &c (London 37 BL Add. Ms 36465 f.91 ‘A List of the [1827]) pp.4-5, cf Webb, English Local Vestrymen of the Parish of St. Mary-le-bone, in Government vol.1 p.251-256 the County of Middlesex’ PARISH POLITICS: LONDON VESTRIES 1780-1830 191

38 In 1792 the existing team of stipendiary 50 Webb, English Local Government vol.1 pp.79-90 magistrates at Bow Street was joined by newly- and cf. VCH Middlesex vol.11 p.193; Oxford appointed stipendiaries assigned to offices in Dictionary of National Biography (2004) vol.37 Marlborough Street, Queen Square, Hatton p.854 Garden, Worship Street, Whitechapel, 51 Gentleman’s Magazine [GM] n.s. 12 (1839) Shadwell and Union Hall in Southwark—three p.211 to each office. A magistrate was also assigned 52 anon, An Address to the Magistracy of the County to the river police established in 1798. In of Middlesex of the City and Liberties of Westminster Surrey the ordinary magistrates seem to have on the Motives that should Influence their Votes in objected to the Union Hall stipendiaries the Election of a Chairman of the Quarter Sessions, involving themselves in ‘county business’ in the Room of William Mainwaring, Esq. Vacated (Webb, English Local Government vol.1 p.579 (London 1815) p.3 fn.1) but in Middlesex there seems to have 53 Webb, English Local Government vol.1 p.562 (see been no such objection: exceptionally Richard also p.579) Birnie and Sir Daniel Williams, the Middlesex 54 ibid. p.564 stipendiaries most involved in ‘county 55 Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke (eds), The business’, had been non-stipendiary History of Parliament: the House of Commons magistrates before their appointments. For 1754-1790 (HMSO, 1964) vol.3 pp.97-98; Bentham, Bankes and Soane see London Webb, English Local Government vol.1 p.564 Metropolitan Archives [LMA] MJP/0/001, fn.2; see also TNA HO 47/24 f.176-178, 19 County of Middlesex: Oaths Taken by Justices Aug 1800 and HO 47/53 f. 245-50, 30 Jul 1814 of the Peace on Appointment Sept. 1761 to for examples of lengthy reports by June 1815, p.47, 69 and MJP/Q/4 Oaths Mainwaring, the latter in a clerk’s hand, but Taken by Justices of the Peace Oct. 1789 to presumably dictated, and with a very shaky Feb. 1804, pp.69 and 129. signature. 39 PP 1816 V p.155, evidence of Rev. Joshua King 56 PD vol.5 col.239, Earl of Buckinghamshire, 10 before Select Committee on the Police of the Jun 1805 Metropolis, 10 Jun 1816 57 Webb, English Local Government vol.1 p.564; 40 ibid. p.151 anon., A Full Account of the Proceedings at the 41 THLHLA L/MBG/A/1/2 vestry minutes of St Middlesex Election etc. (London [1804]) p.4 for Matthew Bethnal Green p.402, 25 Mar 1812 G.B. Mainwaring’s squint; see also Francis 42 ibid. p.423, 28 Jan 1813 Bickley (ed), The Diaries of Sylvester Douglas 43 ibid. L/MBG/A/1/3 p.6, 23 Aug 1813; p.40v, (Lord Glenbervie) (London, 1928) vol.1 p.394, 11 April 1814, The August 1813 resolution 19 Aug 1804 for Mainwaring’s questionable was, according to a marginal note, paternity. unanimously rescinded 13 June 1818 after 58 Roland Thorne (ed), The History of Parliament: Merceron’s conviction. the House of Commons 1790-1820 (1986) vol.4 44 PP 1816 V p.153, 10 Jun 1816 p.523 45 ibid. pp.69-70, evidence of John Thomas 59 Address to the Magistracy of the County of Barber Beaumont before Select Committee on Middlesex p.2. the Police of the Metropolis, 6 May 1816 60 Mainwaring resigned in spring 1822 after 46 TNA HO 43/25 pp.189-90 Sidmouth to Eldon further debts to the county came to light. TNA 21 Oct 1816, copy T 38/675 Great Marlborough St: An Account 47 ibid. p.199 Sidmouth to Eldon, 7 Nov 1816, of Salaries &c. shows quarterly payments of copy and Thomas Thirlwall, A Vindication of the salary to him from 5 Jul 1820 to 5 Apr 1822. Magistrates acting in and for the Tower Division, 61 BL Add. Ms 27826 (Francis Place Papers, from the Charges Contained in a Printed Work, Notes on Manners, Morals &c. vol.2) f.167, Entituled “The Report of the Committee on the State written June 1826 of the Police in the Metropolis’ (London 1817) p.vi 62 BL Add. Ms 35148 f.55 Francis Place to John and p.170 Cam Hobhouse, 2 Apr 1828 48 Thirlwall, Vindication p.285-313 prints letters 63 BL Add. Ms 27850 (Francis Place Papers, from Barber Beaumont and replies from Westminster & Politics) f.192, referring to Robson and Williams which make Barber events in 1810 but written many years later. Beaumont appear a very slippery character: he also published accusations against his fellow magistrates in The Times 17 Nov 1815 and The Pamphleteer vol.9 (1817) p.434-451, which was of course not a usual proceeding for a magistrate. 49 The Trial at large of Joseph Merceron, Esq. as Treasurer of the Poor Rate Funds of St. Matthew, Bethnal Green … 16th of May, 1818 was published in a single volume with The Trial at large of Joseph Merceron, Esq. for Corruption as a Magistrate … 18th of May, 1818, but the two trials are separately paginated. Building an alliance for urban improvement: Huddersfield 1844-1848

DAVID GRIFFITHS

Introduction: the crisis in urban government In the first half of the nineteenth century the population of England and Wales doubled, to 18 million. This transformation was of course driven by the industrial revolution, and the consequent unprecedented and unplanned growth of towns (in which by 1851 over half the population lived). The resulting urban crisis of insanitary housing, infectious disease and low life expectancy is a commonplace of nineteenth century historiography. Central to this process were the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and the West Riding. In the 1840s these problems were first comprehensively documented and became the focus of legislative and administrative attention. Edwin Chadwick’s massive 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain was followed by the 1844-1845 reports of the Commissioners into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts; the 1846 Contagious Disease Act; and the 1848 Public Health Act, which established the General Board of Health as the first national public health agency. Friedrich Engels’s trenchant description of The Condition of the Working Class in England was published in 1845, though not translated into English for many years. Alongside new national legislation, attention also focused on the adequacy—or more often inadequacy—of the machinery of local government in the afflicted towns. In the 1840s there were two models of urban local government, one very new and the other very ancient. The ‘new’ model was provided by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which applied initially only to the 178 boroughs which had been incorporated by royal charter over preceding centuries. In most, the corporations had been private oligarchies of self- perpetuating groups of freemen. The 1835 Act replaced these often corrupt bodies by town councils elected on a resident ratepayer franchise, and imposed certain duties upon them, notably to meet in public, publish audited accounts and establish a watch committee.1 Unlike the 1832 Reform Act, however, which had established parliamentary constituencies in many previously unrepresented towns, the 1835 Act incorporated no new boroughs. However, it did allow towns to petition for incorporation, and by 1879 some 62 had been successful,2 including Huddersfield in 1868. Unincorporated towns relied for their governance on a quite different model. Because of their status they came ultimately under the jurisdiction of the county magistrates, typically rural gentry whose focus on urban problems was limited. Closer to home were the parish or township vestries, which from Tudor times had undertaken secular responsibilities such as the relief of poverty and the maintenance of roads. Manorial courts had jurisdiction over a range of civil and minor criminal matters; indeed, in his 1842 report Chadwick noted that the courts leet, though in ‘desuetude’, remained the ‘constitutional machinery’ for the protection of public health.3 These traditional institutions, conceived in utterly different times, had in many cases been supplemented more recently by bodies of commissioners or trustees established by

192 © British Association for Local History 2009 BUILDING AN ALLIANCE FOR URBAN IMPROVEMENT 193 private Acts. ‘Whether called street, sewer, water or police commissions’, wrote Derek Fraser, ‘these bodies were but forms of a statutory authority for improvement which is generally known as the improvement commission’. It is testimony to the obsolescence of the old regime that ‘no less than 300 were created between 1800 and 1830’.4 The result is well-summarised by Tristram Hunt: ‘Responsibility for sanitary reform in the Victorian city was not a clear-cut issue. A Babel of competing boards, authorities and surveyors exercised control over various different aspects of the urban infrastructure … None of them co-ordinated their actions with one another and each jealously guarded their own administrative patch’.5 But this complexity was not just an administrative phenomenon. All these bodies functioned in an atmosphere of partisan conflict and shifting political alliances, reflecting the acute social divisions of the emerging industrial society. The early 1830s had seen the struggles for a wider suffrage, typically Whigs and Radicals against Tories; and for factory reform, typically Tories and Radicals against Whigs. In the mid-1830s the same Tory/Radical alliance opposed the Whig plans for Poor Law reform, while in the 1840s the Chartist campaign for further democratic reform ran alongside, and sometimes clashed with, the Liberal campaign to repeal the Corn Laws. As Fraser emphasised, these battles were played out in all available arenas, including the institutions of urban local government.6 With the benefit of hindsight, it may be tempting to argue that the unprecedented urban conditions of the time, and the ever- growing public concern with these problems, made inevitable the emergence of modern forms of local government. But even if one inclined to this ‘Whig’ interpretation of history over the longer term and on a national scale, the resulting local institutions, as Oliver MacDonagh argued, ‘are not a whole, are not uniform, are not without theoretical and normative contradictions and anomalies; and such differences frequently arose from the social atmosphere, the circumstances and the personalities of the participants at the moment when the measures in question were initiated’.7 Put more practically, reform happened locally at different times and in varied forms. My aim in this article is to investigate the particular configuration of forces which achieved Huddersfield's first comprehensive improvement measure, the Huddersfield Improvement Act 1848, the provisions of which are summarised in figure 2.

The condition of Huddersfield In many ways Huddersfield was typical of the burgeoning new towns where the urban problems were concentrated.8 As recently as the 1770s, it had been little more than a village, with ‘one straggling street with church and market place in the middle and clusters of buildings at either end’,9 and its development as a town had all occurred since that time. The population more than quadrupled from 7,268 in 1801 to 30,880 in 1851, though this was by no means an extreme example. A great deal of the land, including almost all of the Victorian town centre, was owned by the Ramsden estate— indeed, David Cannadine, the historian of urban landlordism, describes Huddersfield as unique for England in having one landowner with such preponderance.10 Its own equivalent of the great national ‘blue books’ of the 1840s was the report of the 11-day public inquiry into the 1848 Bill, held in February 1848 before two government surveying officers. Their report and the transcript of evidence provide a rich inventory of the problems that the Bill proposed to address.11 The report included mortality data for the Huddersfield Poor Law Union area in 1839-1841.12 These showed that average life expectancy in the town ranged from 32 194 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 years for gentry and professionals to 28 for tradesmen, 21 for artisans and 14 for ‘persons whose condition in life is undescribed’. The very low averages and sharp class gradient largely resulted from child mortality: just over half of all deaths occurred below 15 years, and survivors to adulthood had a better life expectancy, of 49-54 years. One in six of all deaths was accounted for by epidemic disease, particularly typhus, which in 1847 played a significant part in crystallising support for the 1848 Bill. Cholera, less contagious but more deadly, had visited the town in 1831-1832 and would return later, in 1848. The condition of working class housing was a key factor in poor health. Lodging houses were often packed with newly-arrived Irish labourers, drawn by industrial expansion and the railway boom or escaping the potato famine from 1845. In April 1847 a parish , William Townend, drew up a report to the magistrates on conditions in the lodging houses. In one street and adjoining yard he found 91 inmates occupying 20 beds, noting that these included six sick and two dead persons; unsurprisingly, ‘the privies and cesspools in the yard are also in a most shameful and disgusting state’.13 The cottage dwellings, hastily thrown up in courts off the public streets and largely out of sight of the 'respectable' town, were little better. In the inspectors' vivid account, The courts … are generally destitute of drains, and where drains are to be found, they are often worse than useless, being rather in the nature of cesspools than channels … It often happens, also, that they pass under several cottages, occasioning noisome exhalations, and sometimes pouring their contents into the cellar and ground floors of some of the dwellings … The courts in which these dwellings are situated being generally unpaved, and … undrained, are wet and filthy in the extreme. In some of these pigs are kept, and, as an accompaniment, tubs of sour and putrid wash, the food of the pigs … Tubs containing urine, to be used in the manufacture of cloth, are also abundant … In addition to this, there is generally to be found in each court a heap of dung, ashes, and every description of filth, which often remains for months in a state of fermentation and putrefaction.14 Lack of foul drainage was clearly a key element of unhealthy housing. Of 3,211 houses, only 800 drained into sewers and the inspectors noted that ‘the whole town … appears to have been built piecemeal’,15 a consequence of the unplanned building process, based on largely unregulated ‘tenancies at will’ on the Ramsden estate.16 Streets were as often unpaved as unsewered. Foot-pavements were the responsibility of property owners (strictly, the head leaseholders from the ground landlord) and varied in levels and standards accordingly, while the courts were rarely paved. The public streets were swept weekly, but in the inspectors’ judgement they were ‘very insufficiently cleansed, and the courts and alleys scarcely cleansed at all’.17 Water supply was generally well-managed: ‘The management of the waterworks is by two local Acts of Parliament passed in 1827 and 1845, vested in certain Commissioners, and the manner in which they discharge their duties gives general satisfaction … The supply of water is most abundant; in the majority of instances it is introduced into the houses, and, when this is not the case, ready access may be had to public taps at no great distance’.18 This contrasted with the poor state of street lighting: ‘The town is very indifferently lighted, and the gas appears to us to be of inferior quality … The hours of lighting and extinguishing the lamps are not identified by any time-table … but depend upon the discretion of the proprietors of the gas company. Complaints are frequent and well-founded that the lamps are lighted too late in the evening and extinguished too early in the morning’.19 BUILDING AN ALLIANCE FOR URBAN IMPROVEMENT 195

Failed institutions Huddersfield had never been an incorporated town, and therefore faced the new challenges under the ‘ancient’ local government system. The manor had been owned since 1599 by the Ramsden family. From the 1750s to 1780s they had sponsored far- sighted projects to enhance the town’s (and their own) fortunes, including the Cloth Hall (1766), Shambles (1770), Broad Canal (1774-1780) and several turnpike roads. But they did not live locally, and by the early nineteenth century had seemingly lost interest in Huddersfield except as a source of revenue. Sir John Ramsden (1755-1839), the fourth baronet, hardly ever visited and even the lackadaisical John Bower, his agent from 1816-1844, only appeared on quarter days, or even less frequently, to collect the ground rents.20 Other than organising the street pattern (though not, as we have seen, the standards of building), the estate took no positive initiatives for town improvement during this critical period. Nor did the manorial court leet have much impact as a regulatory institution, though it sprang to life to prosecute various sanitary nuisances during the 1831-1832 cholera epidemic.21 The township vestry elected annually the constable (formally ratified by the court leet), overseers of the poor and surveyors of highways. By the 1840s the constable was only one part of a policing jigsaw and the overseers had lost most of their power to the Board of Guardians of the Poor Law Union. However, in 1837 an elected Board of Surveyors was established under the 1835 General Highway Act, with a professional surveyor and clerk and a small workforce. This had powers to pave and maintain adopted public streets, but its writ did not run to the courts and the Act provided no sewerage powers (though in practice the Board exceeded its brief to install nearly four miles of sewers in 1837-1848). The ‘improvement commission boom’ had brought two such bodies to Huddersfield, both oligarchic rather than elected: the 1827 Waterworks Commissioners, noted above, and the Commissioners for Lighting, Watching and Cleansing [CLWC], established in 1820. As its name implied, this body of 59 Commissioners had powers to light and cleanse the streets and to provide the night watch. Its members were nominally appointed by the Ramsden estate—though in practice self-selected—and originally included Sir John, his four sons and the agent Bower, though none attended. In the judgment of the surveying officers, a combination of inadequate powers and lack of vigour from the Commissioners led ‘the public affairs of the town to have been badly managed’.22 The CLWC lacked powers of paving and sewerage and of day policing (though from 1837-1845 they in fact appointed three day patrolmen), but they also neglected to apply powers and duties that they did have, notably to provide surface drains and a weekly refuse collection service. By the 1840s Commissioners who died or lapsed were not being replaced, and only 21 remained in office by 1848.23 Nominally overseeing these conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions were the magistrates. Before 1837 there had been three ‘acting magistrates’ (as distinct from purely honorific JPs) for the Huddersfield and Upper petty sessions area (thereafter there were eight) and in 1820 all three had joined the CLWC; but they hardly ever attended. Reflecting both their judicial role and their typical profile as minor gentry rather than leading men of the industrial town, they stood aloof from the problems of urban government. Even during the 1831 cholera epidemic, when the Government mandated their participation in shortlived Public Health Committees, in Huddersfield they failed to serve.24 196 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

Incorporation: a false start After 1835 one potential response to these urban and institutional problems was to obtain a charter of incorporation, which would provide a properly-constituted democratic local authority with clearly defined powers and duties. In Huddersfield an attempt was made to achieve this goal in 1840-1841. Thus far, only Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton and Devonport had gained incorporation under the 1835 Act, and in some of these places legal challenges to the outcome were still under way.25 The incorporation campaign in Huddersfield is remarkably under-reported. There was no local newspaper at the time, and details in the papers are frustratingly scanty. Apparently petitions were mobilised for and against, and those in favour had a clear majority both of ratepayers (2505 to 183) and the rateable value they represented (£23,021 to £18,385). But those against were evidently much more substantial individuals, and the petition was rejected by the Privy Council.26 Incorporation in these years was invariably a Whig/Liberal project, and the return of a Conservative government in 1841 may have been decisive—only Sheffield and Salford obtained charters during the term of the 1841-1846 Peel government, with the number of successful incorporations picking up sharply after that administration fell in the Corn Law crisis. In any event, the arguments in Huddersfield seem to have centred on the possible introduction of a county police force under the Rural Constabulary Act 1839, rather than issues of town improvement,27 and Huddersfield did not become a borough until 1868. The 1844 initiative and Joshua Hobson Of much greater significance for the 1848 reform was an initiative launched in 1844 by the Chartist Joshua Hobson (see fig. 1) and his allies. The summer of that year was hot and dry. Although the 1848 inspectors were later to praise the Huddersfield Waterworks Commissioners (HWC), by the mid-1840s the supply from the one reservoir they had built (in 1827) was quite inadequate for the much- enlarged town. In June they resolved to build a second reservoir, and on 19 July a public meeting was convened to gain the town's support for the necessary new Bill.28 Radicals active in the vestry and its Board of Surveyors, increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of both bodies of Commissioners, took over the meeting and carried a 1. Joshua Hobson, campaigner for resolution, moved by Joshua Hobson improvement and first clerk to the and seconded by the iconoclastic Whig Improvement Commissioners, painted postmaster William Moore (and in 1874 by Richard Waller (1811-82) reportedly carried nem. con.) to [from the Huddersfield Art Gallery establish a committee to consider a collection, with permission of Kirklees general improvement measure Council Culture and Leisure Services] instead.29 BUILDING AN ALLIANCE FOR URBAN IMPROVEMENT 197

Hobson (1810-1876) has achieved some fame in the national historiography of Chartism, chiefly as the printer and publisher of Feargus O'Connor's Northern Star, the leading Chartist newspaper. His father died young and Hobson had little education, working as a weaver and apprentice cabinet maker in his teens. In 1831 he was one of the six men who famously solicited Richard Oastler’s leadership of the campaign for the ten-hour day, in the ‘Fixby Hall Compact’. By then he had already joined the agitation for electoral reform, and in 1833 launched an unstamped newspaper, Voice of the West Riding, under the imprint of the Huddersfield Political Union. This brought him prosecution and imprisonment after eight issues. While living in Leeds in the early 1840s he was successively elected as improvement commissioner, highway surveyor and councillor on a Chartist platform. When the Northern Star moved to London in 1844 he returned to Huddersfield and launched his campaign for improvement in his home town. He was a passionate orator, pamphleteer and controversialist whose character will emerge from much that follows.30 The committee established on 19 July theoretically had some 150 members, though most had no intention of taking part. Its report, produced three weeks later, was signed by the committee's chairman, Jonathan Leech, but is acknowledged to be Hobson’s work. Entitled Why Should Not Huddersfield Become one of the Best Regulated Towns in the Kingdom?, it is said to have been ‘closely written on nineteen foolscap pages’,31 but survives among the Ramsden papers in the form of a printed broadsheet poster.32 Its title and opening paragraph give a flavour of Hobson's rhetorical style:

Why Should Not Huddersfield Become one of the Best Regulated Towns in the Kingdom? Answer, any Inhabitant, and say why not? It is most delightfully situate, amidst scenery of the boldest and most enchanting description. It has a superabundance of the finest stone in the kingdom for building purposes, at its very threshold. The character of the major portion of the dwellings in it, even those of the lowest class, are far superior to those of any other large town that could be named. The natural drainage is first rate. The air is remarkably salubrious; and there exists every natural facility and advantage for making the town, were those natural advantages turned to best account, the cleanest, the neatest, the sweetest, and the best-regulated of any in England. And yet there are blemishes, blotches, that disfigure it most frightfully. The town possesses not even an apology for a Slaughter-House; but the slaughter of cattle necessarily takes place in the small confined shops of the Shambles, where children are wont to assemble to witness the ‘deeds of blood’, and the whole place is rendered one scene of filth and nastiness horrible in the extreme. There are whole streets, courts and alleys, which would vie with the worst that could be pointed out in either Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, or St Giles's itself. And why are those things so? Because there exists no power, either in the general or local Acts, by which Huddersfield is governed, to cause it to be otherwise.

The report advocated a single body of Commissioners, comprising the magistrates and fifteen representatives elected by the ratepayers, to whom they would be accountable through the vestry. Their functions would include paving, sewerage and drainage, operating a water and gas supply, and providing public baths and a town hall, though day policing would have been provided by elected parish constables. The recalled 198 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 public meeting on 5 August was attended by 400-500 people, ‘mostly of the operative classes’,33 and the report was approved unanimously. Hobson had, apparently, secured a dazzling success (albeit at the expense of immediate attention to the water crisis): a new and more manageable committee of 24 was established and given three months to prepare the proposed Bill. Yet at a final public meeting on 11 November it recommended that the Bill should not be pursued, and this was accepted.34 Meanwhile, undaunted, the Waterworks Commissioners had pressed on with their own private Bill, passed as the Huddersfield Waterworks Act 1845. Crucial to these complex events was the changing role of the Ramsden estate.

New management at the manor When Sir John Ramsden died in 1839 after 70 years as lord of the manor, the estate passed to his seven-year-old grandson John William (1831-1914). For more than a decade, therefore, it was administered by trustees, including the young boy's mother, the Hon. Isabella Ramsden; her brother, the earl of Zetland; and her brother-in-law Earl Fitzwilliam, the prominent Whig landowner. They were prepared to return to the active development role which had been pursued by the estate in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In May 1844 the neglectful agent John Bower, in post since 1816, also died and the trustees moved quickly to find a vigorous replacement. The appointment of George Loch (1811-1877) was in fact part-time—he also remained deputy superintendent of the earl of Bridgewater's industrial estates in Lancashire— but he was by all accounts an exceptional man, originally an auditor but also a lawyer who was called to the bar in 1847, becoming a QC in 1863 and an MP in 1868.35 Three weeks after Bower died Loch arrived in Huddersfield to make his first inspection, staying five days and meeting local sub-agents and leading men of the town. He rapidly grasped the extent of his predecessor’s ‘lamentable’ mismanagement of the estate’s interests in the town and the consequent damage to the Ramsden interest.36 On 6 June he reported his findings to Mrs Ramsden, in a 21-page letter which reads like a modern management consultant’s report, particularly in its advocacy of a clear separation between strategic oversight and local administration of the estate’s affairs (the latter to be vested in a full-time local agent with an annual salary of £200).37 Applicants for this position were soon sought and a Bridgewater colleague, Alexander Hathorn, was in post by October.38 Loch’s report focussed strongly on the opportunities offered by railway development, and he was soon best-known locally for his role in bringing the railway to Huddersfield on an advantageous line. This enabled the estate to develop a handsome ‘new town’ centred on Pritchett of York's magnificent Palladian station, one of the finest in England.39 During the second half of 1844 he moved promptly to tackle the stand-off on town improvement, placing the estate firmly behind the waterworks initiative and opposing the rival general Bill proposal, assuring the Waterworks Commissioners that ‘It is on all grounds desirable that there should be an improved supply of water to the Town, and I can conceive no good purpose answered by mixing up this important subject with all the doubtful and intricate matters that were suggested’ in Hobson’s report.40 But having rebuffed the township radicals on one front, he encouraged them on others. One of Hobson’s complaints had been the absence of a slaughterhouse, and this was now built at the expense of the estate.41 Loch also met the committee preparing the general Bill, after an overture from its secretary Edward Whitworth, chairman of the Board of Surveyors and a Tory Radical ally of Hobson. He persuaded BUILDING AN ALLIANCE FOR URBAN IMPROVEMENT 199 the committee of the new regime’s activist intentions, and ‘in consequence of what had fallen from that gentleman’ [Loch] the committee recommended in November that the Bill project be adjourned until the estate’s own proposals had emerged.42 The Bill was not heard of again. Loch handled these manoeuvres himself, but Hathorn had to take matters forward after the dust had settled. Though quite unlike Hobson, he too was a strong character, as their portraits nicely capture (Hobson: fig.1; Hathorn: colour portrait on back cover). The quality of the man was captured by George Phillips in his Walks Round Huddersfield.43 One walk led past Longley New Hall, where the agent lived, and the author described the fine garden which Hathorn had created in what until recently had been a ‘wild and uncultivated’ dell: ‘Let all people under this agent's jurisdiction have a care how they demean themselves; for, very clearly, he is a man who will war with all disorder, and put up with no wild nonsense either from men or nature. The man who can turn a savage, stony dingle into a garden is just the man to stop all nuisances of what sort soever, and look well after all sanatory [sic] matters within his authority’. On occasions Hathorn was to feel burdened by ‘wild nonsense’ from Joshua Hobson, but their complex relationship of mutual respect and suspicion was to prove central in moving forward the town’s improvement.

New relationships and a fever crisis 1844-1847 Between October 1844 and the spring of 1847 there were many twists and turns on sanitary questions, but the triangle of relationships between the Ramsden estate, the Board of Surveyors and the CLWC was central. There was growing trust and co- operation between the estate and the Board, though with periods of tension. Alongside other leading Radicals, including the nationally-known Chartist Lawrence Pitkeithly, Hobson and Whitworth remained the driving forces in the Board’s affairs (though Hobson was mainly operating behind the scenes, only serving as a member in 1846-1847). Agreement was reached on street improvements, executed by the Board but financed by the estate; and on drainage projects and the provision of public conveniences at the Cloth Hall. In August 1846 Loch expressed the strong desire of the Ramsden Trustees to co-operate with the inhabitants ‘in all intelligent schemes of improvement’, especially ‘for the health and comfort of the poorer classes in the town’. Hobson, in response, was satisfied that with such a feeling of mutual confidence between the authorities of the town and the managers of the Ramsden property, all ‘intelligent improvements’ might be effected in a comparatively short period.44 But it proved harder to reach agreement on the funding of a sewerage system; and after Hobson himself was appointed as paid inspector of nuisances, he exceeded his remit to the point where Hathorn exploded to Loch: Mr Hobson is attempting far too much, taking too much upon himself and endeavouring to introduce and carry into effect such sweeping reforms as are inconsistent with the existing state of things … Hobson is a very clever intelligent energetic person, but I should fear that he is very deficient in tact and prudence—too much bent upon sweeping measures and having too little consideration for the persons and objects intended to be benefited by the proposed schemes of Reformation.45 This was a brief outbreak of tension in a generally constructive relationship, but the relationship between the Board and the CLWC was the reverse: the appointment of an inspector was a rare and short-lived attempt at co-operation. Fearful of infectious disease, the two bodies had established a joint public health committee at the Board's 200 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 initiative. With Hathorn's concurrence, Hobson began a programme of inspections of sanitary nuisances, most of them inevitably—given the pattern of landownership in the town—on Ramsden property. The CLWC withdrew its support after three months, in Hobson’s view because they represented the owners of the cottage housing whose state was under critical inspection. Hostilities were resumed. Some leading CLWC members did indeed own appreciable holdings of working-class housing, leased from the estate and sub-let to tenants. In the main these active commissioners were not the leading manufacturers and merchants, but a ‘shopocracy’ of smaller businessmen whose ownership of such property supplemented their own trade or profession. Typically they were Whig in politics, in contrast to the Board’s Tory Radicals.46 By virtue of the 1820 Act, the CLWC was in theory a ‘Ramsden’ institution, as all appointments thereto had to be endorsed by the manorial authorities. However, by this time the estate did not see it as a useful instrument: the vacancies left by the deaths of Sir John Ramsden (1839) and his son John Charles (1836) were unfilled, and neither Loch nor Hathorn joined the Commissioners in place of the previous agent Bower. Thus the third side of the triangle, between the estate and CLWC, was almost non-existent. Also conspicuous by their absence from the improvement efforts of these years were the larger businessmen of the town and the magistrates. Huddersfield suffered from a typhus epidemic throughout 1847: Thomas Heaton, relieving officer of the Poor Law Union, told the 1848 Inquiry that there were 221 cases in overcrowded lodging houses from Christmas 1846 to Christmas 1847.47 Official action began in December 1846 with a report to the Board of Guardians from the workhouse medical officer, Robert Tatham, detailing the typhus cases there and urgently demanding additional accommodation for the sick.48 Constable Townend's report on conditions in the lodging houses followed in April 1847. Both were batted about inconclusively between the various authorities, including the Guardians, CLWC and JPs, but in May the leading mill-owner and magistrate Thomas Starkey paid with his life for inquiring at firsthand into the state of the disease-ridden lodging houses. His fellow magistrates were at last galvanised into action and on 1 June held a public consultation ‘as to what steps should be taken to allay the fearful spreading of typhus fever’.49 On 4 June two of them met the Guardians, who agreed to expedite their plans for new workhouse sick wards, and on 7 June a public meeting considered the town’s response.50 It was chaired by John Sutcliffe JP, Whig merchant, leading CLWC member in the 1830s, and confidante of Mrs Ramsden.51 Speakers included the Anglican vicar, the Catholic priest and the Poor Law medical officers, followed at characteristically great length by Hobson. Hathorn, having overcome his earlier exasperation, recorded that Hobson made ‘a long and effective speech which was tempered with more discretion and judgement than usual’.52 A deputation was sent to meet the Board and the CLWC, the latter being ‘urged to look into their Act of Parliament more minutely, for the purpose of discovering if it does not give them the power of exercising more stringent measures for the removal of nuisances’.53 The CLWC agreed, as in 1846, to employ an inspector of nuisances—this time William Stocks, a recent-bankrupted linen draper who was a former CLWC member (they had parted on the worst of terms), veteran of the Oastlerite campaigns of the 1830s, and long-standing activist in vestry affairs. But in mid-November they terminated the appointment, amid recriminations identical to those of 1846.54 BUILDING AN ALLIANCE FOR URBAN IMPROVEMENT 201

The birth of the Bill The CLWC had once again proved ineffective and was about to be completely bypassed. The Huddersfield magistrates had two full-time clerks and following Starkey's death one of them, Thomas Bradley, pointed out the 1847 model clauses Acts, newly passed by the Whig government, and suggested that these should be adopted in a short new local Bill for Huddersfield. The initial response of the magistrates is unknown, but according to Hobson he and Thomas Clough, a solicitor, discussed this suggestion and Clough, on his own initiative, gave notice to Parliament of his intention to promote the legislation. Only then did he seeking to involve the Ramsden Trustees and other ‘influential inhabitants.55 By November his draft Bill was causing alarm in the Ramsden camp: Hathorn, writing to Loch, was ‘very glad to find that you entertain such an adverse opinion of the Clauses which Mr Clough would seek to cram into his proposed application to Parliament’.56 Loch and Hathorn were apparently unsure whether to support the Bill, and in December Earl Fitzwilliam weighed in with the view that ‘We must oppose any Bill that does not originate with us, or does not preserve intact all the rights of the Lord of the Manor … indeed I rather think that any improvement bill ought rather to be a bill for regulating and improving the jurisdiction of the manorial court’.57 But Hathorn, like Edwin Chadwick, regarded the court leet as ‘literally a dead letter’,58 and found a more realistic way forward. He called on Joseph Brook, a JP from a major manufacturing family who, like Sutcliffe, had vast experience in the affairs of the town: We came to the conclusion that Mr Clough should be instructed to prepare his Clauses of the Bill and a list of 12 respectable gentlemen as a Committee—that being done, a … meeting of all these gentlemen to be called for the purpose of discussing and settling the Clauses of the proposed Bill and other preliminary arrangements, and when all these should have been agreed upon, to call a public meeting and lay everything before them fairly and openly. Objections are of course only to be looked for from the Radical portion of the people. There can be little doubt that Clough started the affair under radical auspices such as those of Hobson and one or two others—but there can be no better way of disarming them in any hostile intention that they may have of interfering unduly with the power of the Trustees, than by associating them with people of weight and respectability and who will not lend themselves to any measures going in opposition to the interests and wishes of the Trustees— therefore it is at present considered to have Hobson one of the Committee.59 And so it came to pass. The committee of 12 was formed on 10 January 1848 and pressed on with the Bill. Its members included five of the eight acting magistrates (Sutcliffe and Brook, with the prosperous merchants W.W. Battye, Joseph Armitage and George Armitage); Hathorn and the estate steward Fenton; and of course Clough and Hobson, the promoters. Conspicuous by their absence were the remaining active members of the doomed CLWC and of the Board of Surveyors, where in April 1847 control had been seized from the Hobson/Whitworth leadership by a group led by the CLWC member and Whig merchant Thomas Kilner. A public meeting on 17 January embodied the alliance that had been created. Sutcliffe took the chair on the motion of J.C. Laycock, the other magistrates’ clerk, seconded by chief constable Jonathan Leech, a tinner by trade and the highest elected officer of the township. In his opening remarks Sutcliffe noted the cordial support of the Ramsden trustees for the initiative to obtain proper sanitary powers, and a 202 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 resolution repudiating the 1820 regime was carried unanimously. Clough presented the proposed measure in detail and after discussion the principles were unanimously supported and the committee of 12 enlarged to 25, from whom the first eighteen ‘elected’ Commissioners were to be chosen by ballot.60 Hathorn reported that ‘we had last evening a most successful meeting—all having passed off in the best possible spirit’.61 After some dissension from new members of the committee, including William Willans, a prominent Whig and grandfather of Herbert Asquith, the Bill was presented in Parliament on 8 February and the surveying officers opened their Inquiry at the George Hotel.

THE HUDDERSFIELD IMPROVEMENT ACT 1848 An Act for better Paving, Lighting, Watching, Sewering, Draining, Cleansing and otherwise Improving the Town and Neighbourhood of Huddersfield, in the West Riding of the County of York; for maintaining an efficient Police, and removing and preventing Nuisances and Annoyances therein The Huddersfield Improvement Act 1848 (12 Vic, cap. cxl) received Royal Assent on 14 August 1848. Like the preceding 1820 Act, its jurisdiction was limited to a 1200-yard radius from Huddersfield Market Place, and then only on the left bank of the river Colne, a substantially smaller area than Huddersfield township but including most of the population. There were to be 21 Commissioners (18 initially named in the Act and thereafter to be elected by the ratepayers, and 3 to be nominated by the lord of the manor). The franchise was to be as specified in the Commissioners Clauses Act 1847, i.e. male ratepayers with votes proportionate to rateable value. The Commissioners' powers were largely incorporated from national enabling legislation: • The Towns Improvement Clauses Act 1847 provided comprehensive regulatory powers over sewers, house drains, paving, street improvement, ruinous or dangerous buildings, street cleansing, smoke and other nuisances, lodging houses, street lighting and slaughterhouses. • The Town Police Clauses Act 1847 enabled the establishment of a comprehensive day-and-night police service, to ‘prevent any Mischief by Fire, and all Felonies, Misdemeanours and Breaches of the Peace’. • The Gas Works Clauses Consolidation Act 1847 enabled the opening of streets and laying of pipes [though gas itself was provided by a private company]. But the local Act extended these powers in several directions: • The street regulation powers were also to cover all ‘courts, passages and other places’, and the Commissioners could ‘do all necessary acts for promoting the health and convenience of the said town’ • The drainage powers were extended from residential to industrial premises. • The Commissioners’ permission was required for the conduct of all noxious and offensive trades. • JPs were empowered to close lodging houses. • Funding was to be from a general and a sewer rate, with a power to borrow up to £50,000, amortised over 30 years. The new body replaced the 1820 Commissioners for Lighting, Watching and Cleansing and assumed the responsibility of highway surveyors, replacing the 1837 Board of Surveyors.

2. The main provisions of the 1848 Huddersfield Improvement Act BUILDING AN ALLIANCE FOR URBAN IMPROVEMENT 203

Conclusion To explain both the timing and the form of the Huddersfield Improvement Act of 1848, we need to look at the roles of general social forces, particular individuals and unique local circumstances. An ‘ideal’ analysis of the typical forces producing reform in urban government would see them as victories for a rising urban bourgeoisie over a backward-looking landed interest, much like the 1832 Reform Act or the repeal of the corn laws in 1846. The Radicals who championed the working class interest found themselves sometimes in critical support of these Whig initiatives, sometimes against. But Huddersfield's story conforms only in part to this stereotype. An obvious difference is that there the landed interest—the Ramsden estate—played a crucial part in the alliance which achieved the 1848 Act. One can see this as enlightened self- interest. George Loch and Alex Hathorn were undoubtedly forward-looking estate managers, who appreciated the benefits of an active policy of urban improvement and development. This was in the economic interest both of the town and the estate. As Hathorn argued, the formation of new streets ‘may to a great extent be looked upon

3. The memorial to Joshua Hobson at Edgerton Cemetery, Huddersfield (author's photograph) 204 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

(and in reality is) as a private speculation with the object of improving and increasing the value of their estate’, and the estate should therefore pay to sewer them.62 From 1844, while carefully reserving the estate’s position, this patrician leadership formed an unlikely alliance with a more grassroots activism, much influenced by Oastlerite campaigns and Chartism and dominant in the Board of Surveyors. From their different perspectives both elements shared a desire to improve the condition of the town, and a view that incorporation was not the best way to achieve it. Incorporation would have ended the estate's direct role in town government, but it is more surprising that Hobson and his allies advocated elected commissioners, rather than municipal incorporation. At the time, however, Chartists and Radicals were more often allied with Tories against incorporation—this was the case, for example, in Salford, and Oldham during the 1840s.63 Incorporation was often seen as an attempt by Whig industrialists to pass off to ratepayers the social costs of their businesses and to evade the popular democracy of the vestry. The third component of the decisive coalition, arriving late on the scene, was the group of substantial businessmen and magistrates referred to by contemporaries as the ‘influential inhabitants’.64 They had stood aloof from town affairs for most of the previous three decades (though some were among the inactive members of the CLWC) but were sharply engaged by the death of one of their number from typhus. John Sutcliffe JP and Joseph Brook JP went on to become the first two chairmen of the new Commissioners. These men had a strong interest in the health and public order of the town, based in their economic stake as employers and their typically Whig views and Christian values. Opposition to the Bill came from the CLWC and, following the change of leadership mentioned above, from the Board of Surveyors. When in May 1848 a complex though tangential dispute about a turnpike tollbar derailed the Bill’s parliamentary progress, these groups mobilised petitions against it. Their complaints were typical of the economising ‘shopocracy’ often noted as a force in Victorian municipal affairs: that lower-value property would be rated for the first time (it had been exempt under the 1820 Act) and that various parts of the Bill would ‘violate property rights’.65 Interestingly, many of Hobson's former Chartist allies had joined the opposition, including Edward Whitworth.66 The ‘uproarious and disgraceful’ public meeting of 17 May 1848 which opposed the Bill was described as consisting largely of Chartists, with one Edward Clayton complaining of the property-based suffrage, Ramsden nomination rights and transfer of necessary paving and sewering costs from the estate to the ratepayers.67 By this time Hobson himself was a firm Ramsden ally in support of the Bill (though in later years the former Chartist was to be something of a thorn in their side as editor of the Tory Huddersfield Chronicle). Back in January, the only bone of contention at the public meeting which adopted the Bill had been the level of property qualification for commissioners and Hathorn had recorded that ‘Fenton, Hobson and myself have gone carefully over the Rate Book and find that it would be quite safe to lower to £25’,68 an odd concept for a Chartist. Hathorn’s tactic of bringing Hobson ‘inside the tent’ had been successful, and Hobson was later offered one of the ‘Ramsden’ Commissioner appointments (though he declined, preferring to become the salaried clerk). This emphasises that, however we analyse the social and political forces at work, the role of individuals is also important. The alliance developed from 1844 because Joshua Hobson turned his attention to the affairs of his home town while Alexander Hathorn arrived to personify the new Ramsden activism in Huddersfield after decades of neglect. Practical co-operation between Hathorn, Hobson and other BUILDING AN ALLIANCE FOR URBAN IMPROVEMENT 205 members of the Board of Surveyors, though stormy at times, built mutual confidence. The Whig legislation and typhus epidemic of 1847 crystallised the fruits of their co- operation in the 1848 Bill. The resulting Act was inevitably a compromise between the various interests involved, but in 1848 Huddersfield gained a local council in disguise. The powers it took through the 1848 Act were very similar to those obtained (in charters) by councils elsewhere, and several of its near neighbours successfully sought incorporation as boroughs at almost the same time—Bradford in 1847, in 1848 and Oldham in 1849. Huddersfield immediately adopted a committee structure on the template which served local councils for the next 150 years. But by being constituted as a Commission, with reserved seats for Ramsden nominees and a property-weighted franchise, the estate’s particular and unusual interest in the town’s affairs was protected for another generation.

Acknowledgments I am grateful staff of Archive Service (Kirklees) for help in navigating the Ramsden papers, to the editor for his advice on adapting an earlier essay for publication, and to John Halstead for correcting several errors of fact and interpretation. Any that remain are of course entirely my responsibility.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 See Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the KMT99 (hereafter MPPI). Victorian City (Blackwell, 1979) ch.1, for full 12 RoC, p.10. The Poor Law Union comprised the details of the Act. four parishes of Huddersfield, Almondbury, 2 Derek Fraser, Municipal Reform and the Kirkburton and Kirkheaton; even the single Industrial City (Leicester UP, 1982) p.6 parish of Huddersfield was substantially larger 3 Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition than the township, in turn larger than the area of the Labouring Population (1842), edited by to which the Act was to apply. M.W. Flynn (Edinburgh UP, 1965) p.423 13 RoC, p.12 4 Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England 14 RoC, pp.9-10 (Leicester UP, 1976) p.91 15 RoC, p.6 5 Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and 16 This aspect has been thoroughly documented in Fall of the Victorian City (Weidenfeld & several publications by Jane Springett, for Nicholson, 2004) pp.217-218 example ‘Land development and housebuilding 6 Fraser, Urban politics, p.91 in Huddersfield, 1770-1911’, in Martin Doughty 7 Oliver McDonagh, Early Victorian Government (ed), Building the Industrial City (Leicester UP, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977) p.10 1986). 8 Though see Nigel Richardson, ‘Typhoid in 17 RoC, p.8 Uppingham, Rutland, 1875-77’, The Local 18 RoC, p.7 Historian vol.38 no.4 (November 2008) for a 19 RoC, pp.15-16 corrective to the view that Victorian sanitary 20 Whomsley, ‘Market forces and urban growth’, is problems were confined to the larger towns. the standard account of the Ramsdens’ changing 9 Derek Whomsley, ‘Market Forces and Urban relationship to the town in this period. Growth: the Influence of the Ramsden family 21 WYASK DD/R/M/11-12 Almondbury Court on the Growth of Huddersfield, 1716-1853’, Rolls Journal of Regional & Local Studies no.4 (1984) 22 RoC, p.17 10 David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: the 23 A more positive case can be made for some of Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774-1967 (Leicester their earlier work on lighting and watching, UP, 1980) p.42 but by 1848 they were a spent force: see David 11 Respectively, Huddersfield Improvement Bill: Griffiths, Pioneers or Partisans? Governing Report of the Commissioners of Her Majesty's Huddersfield, 1820-1848 (Huddersfield Local Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works and History Society, 2008) for a full account. Buildings, PP135-19, 1848 (hereafter RoC); and 24 The membership was listed in the Halifax & Minutes of Proceedings on a Preliminary Inquiry Huddersfield Express 14 Nov 1831. into the Huddersfield Improvement Bill, West 25 This and other national information in this Yorkshire Archives Service, Kirklees (WYASK) section is from Fraser, Power and authority. 206 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

26 Northern Pioneer 13 Aug 1882 leading merchant manufacturers joining the 27 WYASK KC174/5/115 'Rural police or self- bench; LM 5 Jun 1847 government', poster in Tomlinson collection 50 Board of Guardians minutes, 4 Jun 1847 28 WYASK KHT2/4 HWC minutes 1844-1869 51 Sutcliffe started out in life as an apprentice 29 WYASK Ramsden Papers [RP] DD/RE/C/2 woolstapler; for his unusually ‘meritocratic’ minutes of the meeting, enclosed in Fenton to ascent to the county bench see David Griffiths, Loch 20 Jul 1844 (J.C. Fenton was the 'John Sutcliffe JP (1775/6-1858) - 'a very Ramsden estate steward and solicitor in useful man' ' (Huddersfield Local History Society Huddersfield; George Loch the estate's overall Journal, winter 2008/9). agent.) 52 RP DD/RE/C/37 Hathorn to Loch 10 Jun 30 See Stanley Chadwick, ‘A Bold and Faithful 1847 Journalist’: Joshua Hobson, 1810-1876 (Kirklees 53 ibid. Council, 1976) for a full, though wholly 54 MPPI, Q1376-94 uncritical, biography. 55 Hobson's evidence to 1848 preliminary 31 ibid., p.40 inquiry; MPPI, Q448-73 32 RP DD/RA/C/4/1. It also found its way to 56 RP DD/RE/C/42 Hathorn to Loch 23 Nov Engels, who briefly quotes its description of 1847 Huddersfield's sanitary conditions (The 57 RP DD/RE/C/43 Fitzwilliam to Loch 7 Dec Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845; 1847 Penguin edition, 2005, p82). 58 RP DD/RE/C/28 Hathorn to Loch 3 Sep 33 Leeds Mercury [LM] 10 Aug 1844 1846 34 Leeds Intelligencer [LI] 16 Nov 1844 59 RP DD/RE/C/42 Hathorn to Loch 23 Nov 35 Whomsley, ‘Market forces and urban growth’ 1847 (Hathorn’s underlining) 36 Loch's interview notes and impressions are 60 Account of the meeting from LM 22 Jan 1848 recorded in a notebook; WYASK 61 RP DD/RE/C/44 Hathorn to Loch 17 Jan DD/RA/C/24. 'Lamentable' was the chosen 1848 epithet of John Sutcliffe JP, whom we shall 62 RP DD/RE/C/34 Hathorn to Loch 11 Mar meet shortly. 1847. The context was a weary 37 WYASK DD/RA/4(1) Loch to Mrs Ramsden acknowledgement that Hobson had been right 38 Hathorn's background from Whomsley, on this point. As Whomsley remarks, ‘Hobson ‘Market forces and urban growth’; his date of could argue with anyone at any time—and he arrival from Isaac Hordern's Notebooks, at had the infuriating habit of being generally Huddersfield Local Studies Library (Hordern right’. was another Ramsden employee). 63 Respectively discussed in John Garrard, 39 See Derek Whomsley, 'A Landed Estate and Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial the Railway: Huddersfield 1844-54', Journal of Towns, 1830-1880 (Manchester UP, 1983); Transport History new ser. vol.2 no.4 (1974) Adrian Elliott, 'Municipal government in 40 RP DD/RE/C/4 Loch to Fenton 7 Sep 1844 Bradford in the mid-nineteenth century', in 41 Isaac Hordern's Notebooks, op.cit. Fraser (1982); John Foster, Class Struggle and 42 LI 16 Nov 1844 the Industrial Revolution (Methuen, 1974). 43 George Phillips, Walks Round Huddersfield 64 This description recurs in the 1848 Inquiry (reprinted for Toll House Bookshop, evidence (MPPI). Similarly Garrard, Leadership Holmfirth, n.d) and power, notes the ‘constant references’ in 44 RP DD/RE/C/27 Hobson to Loch 21 Aug Bolton, Rochdale and Salford to ‘men of 1846 influence and standing’ (p.41). 45 RP DD/RE/C/28 Hathorn to Loch 3 Sep 65 RP DD/RE/C/48 Fenton to Loch 24 May 1846 1848 46 The memberships of the various bodies are 66 House of Lords Select Committee, 19 Jun fully analysed in Griffiths, Pioneers or partisans? 1848 Parliamentary Archives 47 MPPI, Q685 HL/PO/PB/5/14/1 48 WYASK Huddersfield Poor Law Union 67 RP DD/RE/C/48 Fenton to Loch 18 May P/HU/M/5 Board of Guardians minutes 11 1848 Dec 1846 68 RP DD/RE/C/44 Hathorn to Loch 17 Jan 49 Since the Poor Law agitation of 1837-1838 the 1848 number of ‘acting magistrates’ had grown from three to eight, with some of the town's

DAVID GRIFFITHS is a retired local government officer and an active member of Huddersfield Local History Society (www.huddersfieldhistory.org.uk). He is continuing to research the pre- municipal governance of the town and would be pleased to hear from anybody undertaking comparable work elsewhere, via [email protected] Local studies in sanitary reform: the importance of the engineering aspect—Lincoln 1848-1850

DENNIS MILLS

Introduction There have been three studies of Victorian sanitary reform in The Local Historian in recent years, on Reading, Berwick-on-Tweed and Uppingham, and a number of other local studies have been published elsewhere.1 This is a subject of several different aspects, including the medical, social, financial, and political/ideological, as well as technical engineering element. It is not a criticism of these relatively brief articles to say that they have not individually stretched to cover all these approaches. However, it would be right to say that they have collectively neglected engineering, and the same might be said in smaller measure of a number of major national studies.2 This article is an attempt to rectify the imbalance by concentrating on the well-documented proposals put forward in Lincoln in 1849 by George Giles MICE (1810-1877), in the context of his career and looking at the plans he produced in support of his proposals. Such plans are important sources of information on the engineering involved in underground sewerage schemes. They had to show the proposed routes of sewers, which might include some relatively fine detail in the closed courts of which there were so many in the Victorian period. In the case of Lincoln, Giles produced a manuscript plan on the scale of 40 inches to the mile, and a manuscript 20-inch copy for his own reference (see the coloured illustration on front cover).3 Gradients are shown by ratios such as 1 in 250 (1 foot fall in every 250), as in railway construction. There was, however, the added complication that sewers sometimes had to fall in the opposite direction to the ground surface above them, in the interest of constructing an integrated network leading efficiently to the sewage depot or other outlet. Thus it was also necessary to show at sufficient intervals the height of the surface by means of spot heights and contours, as well as the depths at which the sewers were to be laid. The recommended sizes, or bores, of sewers had also to be shown. All these details were needed to demonstrate to local authorities that an adequate scheme was being offered and to provide tendering contractors with enough information to cost the requirements fairly. In the same manner, sewerage plans allow historians to judge the likely effectiveness of schemes on offer, an especially important point in the 1830s to 1850s when many defective schemes were put forward and some put into operation. As well as plans, the local sources used in this article include Giles’s report to the sanitary committee of the city council, that committee’s report to the full council, the latter’s minute book, the very full reports in the Lincolnshire Chronicle, and biographies of councillors prepared by Winifred Craven for Sir Francis Hill’s Victorian Lincoln. Hill also made use of the briefer cover in the Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, a Liberal newspaper which balanced the Tory Chronicle.4

207 © British Association for Local History 2009 208 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

A further preliminary point is that local historians should be aware of the prevailing scientific context relevant to the period of study. In the present case, miasma theory still held full sway—that is, it was firmly believed that diseases such as cholera and fever (and sometimes typhoid) were spread by the noxious smells abounding in towns and cities. Proper attention was not being paid to the purity of water supplies, or to the accumulation of polluted water that could be found in overflowing cesspits and even running watercourses. It was only in 1849 that John Snow put forward the theory that cholera is a water-borne disease, and it was several decades before germ theory finally triumphed as the accepted explanation of contagion.5 However, in trying to get rid of unpleasant smells, the sanitary reformers of mid-century were fortuitously also attacking polluted water supplies, which were the real source of much contagion. The sanitary condition of Lincoln was much like that in many other towns in the same period—traditional methods of drainage and waste disposal could not cope with the increased population, especially that packed into closed courts with very primitive arrangements even by contemporary standards. The city council was prompted into greater action by the Public Health Act of July 1848 which set up the General Board of Health (GBH) in Whitehall. Although this Act is best regarded as little more than an enabling measure, its inception added to the impetus behind local authority activity in

1. Photograph of George Giles, 1850: this picture was unlikely to have been taken in Lincoln before Giles left for France, but was perhaps taken in London on his way there (courtesy of Edward Giles) LOCAL STUDIES IN SANITARY REFORM: LINCOLN 1848-1850 209 two particular respects. Firstly, Lincoln was one of the towns reported by the Registrar- General to the GBH as having an average death rate more than 23 per 1000, the threshold above which local authorities were intended to take some action. Secondly, the appointment of Giles in December 1848 can be seen partly as a means of evading central government interference (via the GBH). By briefing an engineer, the sanitary committee ensured that the GBH would accept that the city was taking effective action and would give them a free hand.

George Giles MICE (1810-1877) George Giles was born into an important dynasty of engineering surveyors, being a nephew of Francis Giles (1787-1847), the leading professional in the family. Francis had been trained by his elder brother Netlam, who subsequently took him as a partner, and he directed the family firm after Netlam’s early death in 1816. Francis trained two sons of his own and two sons of his brother Peter, including our subject, George junior. The firm specialised in civil engineering surveying, and carried out a great deal of canal, river and harbour work in the early years of the nineteenth century, followed by railway projects from 1828.6 During the 1830s George worked on the preliminary survey for the London and Southampton Railway, and designed and constructed most of the Winchester- Southampton section. Subsequently he was responsible for building the Rugby bridge on the Midland Railway and a nearby portion of the line. In the 1840s he went to Hamburg to work on local railways under William Lindley, another trainee of Francis Giles. They remained in the city until 1846, moving on to the construction of schemes for sewerage and piped-water supplies. Returning to England, Giles switched back to railway construction, and worked on the Great Northern Railway from Peterborough to Doncaster via Boston and Lincoln during 1847-1849. Typically of engineers of this period, he then changed to another type of project, turning his attention to an underground sewerage scheme for Lincoln. He was well placed for this, as he had been working in the area for some time and had been, conveniently, living in the city since at least 1848.7 He was chosen as a consultant by the sanitary committee of the city council partly on the strength of his having worked on sewerage schemes in Hamburg.8

Giles’ report It is now possible to turn to a primary source created by Giles himself: his report to the sanitary committee.9 This was presented in September 1849, printed in December, and distributed in January 1850—and the proposals were turned down at two public meetings in January and May 1850. Giles used 9000 words of his 12,000-word report to elaborate the current deficiencies, making as bold a bid as he could to ensure that his proposals were seen as essential to the health of the city. He followed accepted practice in setting out, street-by-street, the problems of cesspits, effluvia draining into cellars, the pollution of wells, the proximity of pigsties to dwellings, and the dangerous state of the area downhill from the Butchery quarter where all the city’s slaughtering was done. He described the flows of drainage along open channels down the streets and in short lengths of covered drains sufficiently clearly to allow their reconstruction in map form today. The River Witham and the Brayford Pool, through which the river flows, were the recipients of most of the waste that was not removed through night-soil collections and the inadequate use of cesspits. 210 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

As part of his description, Giles chose two small areas for detailed study and illustrated them with lithographed drawings, at the large scale of one inch to 40 feet and correct to 1849. One showed the Sincil Street area close to the River Witham, which by the mid-1860s was one of the worst districts of the city, despite the fact that the housing had been built as recently as 1825-1840. Indeed, it could be claimed that it had been ‘designed’ as a slum, complete with courtyards behind the main street façade, liberally supplied with piggeries, and with pumps situated only a few yards from privies (see the coloured illustration on inside back cover [above] and fig.2). The 1851 census shows that the socio-economic standing of the courtyard population was very low, with about 60 per cent of household heads in the lowest classes (IV and V). The 1901 census records that only three of the 46 households of that year had four rooms—nineteen had only three, and 24 had only two.10 In another drawing Giles presented a geological section across the Witham valley at Lincoln, elucidating the basic features of the city’s physical geography—distinct uphill (largely middle class, associated with the cathedral) and downhill (commercial) areas in the valley bottom near the river. Giles chose the Michaelgate Terraces to demonstrate the problem of leakage of sewage down the slope. Respectable terrace streets inhabited mainly by artisans and shopkeepers were receiving waste originating from the County Hospital and made more unhealthy by its transit through the hospital burial ground (see the coloured illustration on inside back cover [below]).

2. Photograph of Gadsby’s Court c.1930 before clearance, looking towards Sincil Street, with children playing and neighbours chatting. The passage is still used as a short cut from the Sincil Street shops to the bus station (from the Local Studies Collection (LCL 257), Lincoln Central Library, courtesy of Lincolnshire County Council). LOCAL STUDIES IN SANITARY REFORM: LINCOLN 1848-1850 211

Proposals Giles’ proposals must be seen in the context of Edwin Chadwick‘s 1842 report, which established beyond reasonable doubt that large areas of British towns were in such an insanitary state that water-borne sewage disposal was absolutely essential.11 While many middle-class areas were reasonably healthy, diseases such as typhoid and the much- dreaded cholera presented great dangers to the whole urban population. Moreover, it was argued persuasively that the manual methods of waste disposal commonly in use were more expensive to operate than underground sewerage systems which required a plentiful supply of water that could only be assured by the existence of a piped supply. Fortunately the Lincoln Water Company had just started to supply parts of the city when Giles formulated his proposals, although it is doubtful if the volume available would have been sufficient for both domestic and sewerage purposes.12 Piped water supplies provided an income sufficient to attract private enterprise, but there was no such possibility with a sewerage system—so Chadwick and Giles pinned their hopes on the sale of dried sewage to farmers as manure. In due course Chadwick and the GBH promulgated guidelines for engineers, involving the construction of arterial systems, sewers at depths sufficient to prevent breakages and the flooding of cellars, and indications as to where earthenware pipes could be used instead of brick-built sewers. However, the GBH was not set up until 1848, and although there were inspectors in the field from that date, it was not until 1852 that an agreed set of guidelines was issued.13 Consequently, Giles’s proposals were couched within the context of the considerable debate stimulated by Chadwick’s report, rather than being designed specifically to get GBH approval for purposes of raising a 30-year treasury mortgage. The city council were not seeking central government assistance. Like so many other urban authorities, they wished to avoid anything that might have brought unwelcome interference into their affairs. Giles offered a thoroughly up-to-date system. He introduced features used by Lindley and himself in Hamburg, including separate upper and lower arterial systems of sewers to prevent river flooding from affecting the whole system; curves of large radius; tangential junctions to facilitate the flow, ensuring that sewage was carried away in a fresh condition; and a complete system of artificial flushing. Fifty flushing stations were recommended, taking water from the rivers or, where necessary, from the piped water supply. These features were regarded as novel in 1842, but came to be widely copied.14 Giles’s proposals related to two arterial systems designed to carry ‘fresh’ sewage rapidly and in a co-ordinated way, to a sewage depot where it would be treated. Hitherto, sewers had often been constructed in a piecemeal fashion to answer particular problems as they arose. The frequent result was that sewage lingered or, not unusually, ‘escaped’ with unfortunate consequences—and certainly did not arrive at the depot in the ‘fresh’ condition desirable for its most effective treatment. Touching on a controversial subject, Giles proposed that ‘the house drainage shall be kept entirely distinct and separate from the surface drainage’. Since the house drainage was such a small flow compared with rainwater received during periods of heavy rain, this meant that the underground system could make use of sewers and pipes of relatively small bore. The largest would have been egg-shaped brick sewers, but egg-shaped pipes were suggested as a possibility for the smaller sizes. This sectional shape was designed to speed the flow of material when water levels were low, by concentrating it in the narrower dimension at the bottom of the sewer. Giles was not dogmatic on this point, because in districts (such as Lincoln) where pipes could not 212 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 be manufactured through lack of appropriate materials their transportation from a distant supplier would be expensive compared with bricks made locally. The range of sizes was from a maximum of 36x24 inches (egg-shaped sewer) down to an egg-shaped pipe 6x4 inches or a circular pipe 5 inches in diameter. Giles recommended house drains of 3 or 4 inches in diameter and suggested that the chief drain for a row of houses should be laid at the back of the row, where most of the waste originated. It is profitable to ask why, in his proposed system, he did not include manholes, an important means of clearing blockages that was to be recommended in 1852 by Robert Rawlinson, one of Chadwick’s engineers at the GBH.15 In his own schemes Rawlinson had started laying sewers in straight lines in lengths as long as practicable, with manholes at changes of direction, including right-angle junctions, supplemented by lamp holes, so the light was never lost through the sewer. In this way, a blockage could be much more easily traced than simply relying on the evidence it produced on the surface. The use of manholes also avoided the need to break into the roofs of brick-built sewers or to disconnect pipes in order to find blockages. By putting a short curve into the sewer within a manhole, the transition of flow achieved by tangential junctions was maintained. But even in 1849 the manhole had not been ‘invented’, or at least had not been widely discussed and demonstrated as desirable. For example, the Croydon sewers, constructed in 1851 and the first designed under GBH guidance, had only five manholes in seventeen miles of sewers.16 Sewer technology was changing almost as quickly in this period as computer technology in our own day. The concept of sewage farms with filter beds appeared only in the late 1860s, so the Lincoln scheme would have disposed of sewage by Higgs’ method of precipitating the solid material chemically so it could be used in the same way as guano. Unfortunately, this was one reason why the method was undone, for guano was about to enter the market and was several times more effective as a fertiliser than human excrement.17 The sanguine hopes of men like Giles were to be disappointed, for there was no way in which a profit could be made out of the material.

The reception of the report by the Sanitary Committee and full Council Early in October 1849 the Sanitary Committee met in the Guildhall to consider Giles’s report. The reception was favourable. Dr Charlesworth, a prominent city physician and hospital governor, was in attendance to give the committee ‘the benefit of his experience’. He extolled the proposals and ‘looked upon Mr Giles’ plan as an admirable one’.18 However the discussion centred very largely on the manufacture of manure from sewage. The technicalities of sewer routes and gradients, curved junctions designed to prevent blockages, or flushing heads were probably beyond the competence of the committee, but in any case their concern with profitability inexorably drew their attention to the prospect of an income from the manure. It was noted that if the works were carried out, they would be entirely in the hands of the city council. Two resolutions were adopted by the committee: that, in view of the need for a sixpenny rate, they ‘did not feel themselves called upon to order so great a work, without having the opinion of the citizens’, and that 500 copies of the report be printed and sold at one shilling a copy, except for ‘the authorities of the city’, who were to receive theirs free.19 At least they made a bold attempt to carry the public with them. In its report to the full council, the Sanitary Committee set out the terms, under the Public Health Act, on which the council could ‘borrow upon mortgage of the rates’, with repayment over a period of 30 years; but they left entirely on one side the LOCAL STUDIES IN SANITARY REFORM: LINCOLN 1848-1850 213 possibility of making money from the manufacture of manure. They urged the council to press ahead, bearing in mind the national trend towards sanitary reform and the great benefits to be obtained from such a work. The full council could either ‘determine upon it on their own responsibility’ or ‘appeal to the Citizens generally for their opinion at a Public Meeting’. It chose the second course.20

Public meetings In the event, two public meetings were organised by the city council. However, before the first of these had been held, ratepayers in three of the central parishes (containing many shop properties) held their own meeting. In the chair was Thomas Nettleship, a druggist, JP, and former councillor, who moved that Giles’s report be not adopted. This was passed with only five dissenting votes.21 The mayor, Alderman James Snow, opened the first public meeting in the Corn Exchange on 24 January,22 stating that the Sanitary Committee wished to proceed to a full underground scheme. In proposing the adoption of the report, Dr Charlesworth referred specifically to the fact that Lincoln had a large proportion of ‘table land’ (meaning porous limestone), which was not provided with underground drainage. Liquid waste was percolating downwards taking noxious gases with it into the lower areas of the town. When Councillor Thomas Brogden, an auctioneer and editor of the Lincolnshire Chronicle (fig.3), rose to second the proposal, the meeting became very rowdy and the remarks shouted out included ‘sewerage means more money for Mr Giles’. People presumably thought that he would be the engineer-in-charge if the scheme went through. Several voices said that £80,000 was the likely cost, not the £30,000 proposed by Giles, and there was commotion when Brogden mentioned the possibility of official visits from London, which a treasury loan would have made necessary. Charlesworth pointed out that privy vaults were preferable to cesspools, since it was obvious when they needed emptying, which was then arranged, and their contents were a source of profit (for the night soil men, presumably). By comparison, cesspools were seldom emptied, and, as it was more difficult to see the need, they drained themselves away secretly and the ground then emitted poisonous exhalations. When it was suggested that some of the city’s common land could be sold to pay for sewerage, there was such an outcry that the mayor was obliged to declare the meeting dissolved. Undeterred, the Sanitary Committee prepared a scheme to sell the best sites for ‘villas and residences’ on the fringes of the South Common and brought this forward to a second public meeting on 27 May.23 Attempting to respond to a series of hostile speakers at this meeting, Mr Bellatti, probably the printer of Giles’ report, met with the most horrible yells. Although on the platform, he had his coat ripped off and needed a police escort to get away from the Exchange. The proposal was defeated by a ‘large and decided majority’. The council considered the matter once more and took the decision to drop the scheme.24 Lincoln had to wait until 1866 before a local board of health was set up, it was another ten years before an underground sewerage scheme was adopted, and it did not come into use until 1881.

Conclusions The city council had been relatively progressive in Giles’s time. In essence, it had tried sincerely to get a scheme accepted, but had given in to resistance among less well-off ratepayers who were supported by the kind of rough working-class ‘rent-a-crowd’ 214 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

(including many non-ratepayers) common in this period at Lincoln elections. Many schemes proposed in other towns got no further, or not even as far as Giles’ scheme, but he might have succeeded in gaining acceptance for a cheaper, lower quality plan. One example of a less satisfactory scheme that was put into operation is that in Darlington (1850), quoted by Wohl as typical of the period. It was criticised by the GBH inspector, who found that only thirteen of the 54 streets were fully sewered, and even those sewers which had been laid lacked an overall plan. In section they were three sides of a square, the ‘missing’ side being the base, for they were without bottoms (a widespread, but old-fashioned form). Their depths necessarily varied, but some were level with street surfaces, making drainage of cellars very difficult.25 Giles may have lost his Lincoln scheme, but 3. Councillor Thomas Brogden, an important his standards had not been pro-sanitary reform member of the council in compromised in that way. Giles’ period, mayor in 1854 and 1879 (from mayoral photo-portrait in the mayor’s parlour, The Lincoln experience suggests courtesy of City of Lincoln Council and that rather than criticise the early R. A. Davey Photographic) Victorians, we should acknowledge what progress they were able to make in the face of formidable obstacles. The council seriously considered Giles’s scheme, though one of their motives for engaging him was to forestall interference from central government in the form of the GBH. They were stymied by factors that were found in many other places. First, the ‘shopocracy’ were extremely suspicious of anything that would increase the burden of rates. Second, there were the suspicions of those elements of the working class who were prepared to support the shopocracy despite living in the worst affected housing—elsewhere it has been suggested that fear of a rent rise and the pressing problem of feeding themselves made them ignore the more remote possibility of dying of cholera.26 Third, those who made decisions in council had few professional officers to advise them, so were understandably bewildered by the conflicting ideas and suggestions put forward. A more specifically Lincoln problem was the opposition to the proposal to sell off some of the South Common—most objections came from the freemen, many of them working class, who had rights in the common. To what extent was the actual cost of the scheme responsible for its rejection? To find comparisons with other towns is difficult, as it probably was at the time. However, a few figures are available. In Lincoln the Giles scheme would have cost an estimated £30,000 for a population of about 17,500 (£1.71 per head). Hamlin states that for a LOCAL STUDIES IN SANITARY REFORM: LINCOLN 1848-1850 215 population of about 30,000 in 1849 (and rising rapidly), Merthyr Tydfil had spent £27,000 by 1869 (90p per head). At Leicester, with a population of 59,000 in 1851, it was proposed to borrow £35,000 in 1850 (also 90p). Another scheme making Giles’s look expensive was at Berwick-on-Tweed (1841 population 8,000) where Hunter reports that £10,000 had been borrowed by 1854 (£1.25). Against these examples is Brayshay and Pointon’s figure of debts in Plymouth at £67,000 by 1852 (£1.29) in connection with an unfinished scheme for a population of about 52,000.27 Three local Lincoln figures are also available, although their comparative value is more limited. The capital obtained by the Lincoln Water Company between 1846 and 1850 amounted to £24,000: of this £6,000 had been borrowed and the balance raised in 750 shares of £25 each. This figure was not dissimilar to Giles’s £30,000, and was no doubt familiar to many who took part in the sewerage discussions. However, the water company was a private venture and had the prospect of a steady income. Eventually Lincoln had to borrow £134,000 in 1876-1881 from the Public Works Loan Commissioners for the successful third scheme. This was for a population twice the size of 1851 and included the costs of a sewage farm and a pumping station to send the waste to it. Meanwhile the mayor in 1865-1866, during the second attempt to get underground sewerage, offered a prize of ten guineas for essays on the subject. The winner was David Middleton, estate agent for Lord Monson at nearby Burton Hall, who costed his proposals at £9,000—his scheme was palpably less impressive than Giles’s, but he may have pitched it at an expenditure level he thought the city would accept.28 However, it is reasonable to assume that it was neither the technical quality of Giles’s scheme, nor its precise cost, that led to its failure. Rather, it was the wholly novel idea of ‘mortgaging the rates’. Lincoln’s experience in having its first attempt at building an underground system rejected was replicated in many other towns and cities. A note on further reading may be helpful for local historians who find they have access to good sources for their town. The references given in note 2 are good starting points, providing a general background, including engineering issues. In note 1, as well as Elliott’s Victorian Leicester, the volume edited by Denis Smith is also important and contains a chapter on the problem of deciding whether rainwater should be kept separate from the foul water, as Giles had suggested. Hamlin’s article on the pipe-and- sewers war brilliantly demonstrates the ideological and technical combat between Chadwick and the engineers, a general topic of special relevance to early schemes carried out under GBH guidance.29 Chadwick was very keen to use pipes of smaller dimension in conjunction with a fast flow of water—indeed, one engineer quipped that the ultimate in Chadwickian logic was that if sufficient speed could be made available, sewage would flow through a quill!

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the staffs of Lincoln Central Library and Lincolnshire Archives; John Herridge of the Heritage Services Team; Julie Duxbury, the Mayor’s Officer, City of Lincoln Council; and Michael Harrison of R. A. Davey Photographic, for their much appreciated assistance with the sources used in this article. I would also like to record the considerable expert guidance I have been given by Tony Keyworth, MICE, and Dr Rob Wheeler. I express my special thanks to Sibthorp Library at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, for giving me rapid access to specialised books and journals in their own stock and through the use of the inter-library loan system. At a very late stage I was grateful to have the help of Edward Giles, a great-great-grandson of George Giles, and Mike Chrimes of the Institution of Civil Engineers in sorting out the relationship of George to the other Giles engineers. 216 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 K.J. Dodds, ‘Much ado about nothing? used by the Ordnance Survey for a selection of Cholera, local politics and public health in towns in 1851. Most plans are manuscript, nineteenth-century Reading’, The Local even those drawn by the Ordnance Survey, Historian [TLH] vol.21 no.4 (1991) pp.168- and their very large sizes have militated 176; D. Hunter, ‘Cholera and the struggle for against their survival. For more detail on clean water in Berwick-upon-Tweed Poor Law sewerage plans see Dennis Mills, ‘Public Union 1848-1871’, TLH vol.37 no.2 (2007) health, environment and surveying’, Social pp.104-116; Nigel Richardson, ‘Typhoid in History of Medicine vol.22 no.1 (April 2009) Uppingham, Rutland, 1875-1877: reassessing pp.153-163. the social context’, TLH vol.38 no.4 (2008) 4 Sir Francis Hill, Victorian Lincoln (Cambridge pp.274-288; M. Brayshay and V.F.T. Pointon, UP, 1974): as a city councillor and ex-mayor, ‘Local politics and public health in mid- Hill familiarised himself with the records of nineteenth-century Plymouth’, Medical History the city council, making chapter VIII of the vol.27 (1983) pp.162-178; G. Gill, ‘Cholera Victorian volume a particularly fitting starting and public health reform in nineteenth- point for the present study, pp.156-171. The century Wallasey’, Transactions of the Historic earlier situation is well reported in his Georgian Society of Lancashire and Cheshire vol.150 (2001) Lincoln (Cambridge UP, 1966). I have also pp.57-95; Denis Smith (ed.), Public Health used M.J. Robinson, Two themes of life in Engineering (Ashgate, 1999) contains two Victorian Lincoln: drink and sewage, dissertation chapters on Portsmouth, ch.6 by Mary Hallett for the University of Nottingham Certificate in and ch.13 by R.A. Otter; J Perry, ‘Cholera and Local History, 1978, Lincoln Central Library public health reform in early Victorian (LCL), L.LINC.908. Other local sources not Chester’, in R. Swift (ed.), Victorian Chester: cited separately include Lincolnshire Archives essays in social history, 1830-1900 (Liverpool UP, [LAO], Hill 7/5-7 and 10-11, 1825; directories; 1996) pp.119-148; and C. Hamlin discussed Winifred Craven’s biographical notes (now in Merthyr Tydfil and Leamington Spa LAO, Misc Dep 531) and D.R. Mills and R.C. (sewerage) and Wakefield and Cheltenham Wheeler, Historic Town Plans of Lincoln 1610- (water) in his ‘Muddling in Bumbledom: on 1920 (Lincoln Record Society vol.92, 2004, for the enormity of large sanitary improvements the Survey of Lincoln Project). in four British Towns, 1855-1885’, Victorian 5 John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Studies Autumn 1988 (no vol. no) pp.55-83. Cholera (London, 1849), 2nd rev. edn. 1855, However, undoubtedly the best study of an containing further statistics collected in 1854. individual city for the local historian is M. 6 Giles pedigrees courtesy of Edward Giles; Elliott, Victorian Leicester (Phillimore, 1979) ‘Obituary of George Giles (jnr)’, Proceedings of which, despite the cryptic title, is largely about the Institution of Civil Engineers [PICE] vol.50 pt the social history of the city and has a whole 4 (session 1876-1877) pp.177-178; ‘Obituary of chapter as well as other sections on sewerage Francis Giles (snr)’, PICE vol.7 pt 2 (session 2 See, for example, A. S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: 1848) p.9; M. Chrimes, ‘Francis J. W. T. Giles, Public Health in Victorian Britain (Dent, 1983); 1787-1847’, entry in Oxford Dictionary of B. Luckin, ‘Pollution in the city’, chapter 7 of National Biography vol.22 (2004) pp.226-227; A. M.J. Daunton (ed), The Cambridge Urban Skempton (ed.), A Biographical Dictionary of History of Britain III, 1840-1950 (Cambridge Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland UP, 2001) pp.207-216; and M.J. Daunton, (Thomas Telford, 2002); ‘Obituary of William House and Home in the Victorian City: working- Lindley’, PICE vol.142 (1899-1900) p.363. class housing 1850-1914 (Edward Arnold, 7 He appears in Kelly’s Lincolnshire Directory for 1983). However, G. M. Binnie, Early Victorian 1849 as ‘gentleman’, living in Asylum Lane, Water Engineers (Thomas Telford, 1981) Lincoln; and his son George Edward was born concentrates on the engineering issues, as the in the city in 1848. After working in Lincoln, title suggests and H. Barty-King, Water: The Giles is reported to have spent the rest of his Book. An Illustrated History of Water Supply and career on foreign railway surveys and Wastewater in the UK (Quiller Press, 1992) is construction: ‘Obituary of George Giles (jnr)’ also very helpful. 8 Mentioned in the speech of the town clerk to 3 The 40-inch plan survives at City Hall, where the public ‘sanatory’ meeting in May 1850: there are three more similar maps, two Lincolnshire Chronicle [LC] 31 May 1850, p.8, relating to the abortive attempt in 1866, the col.1 other drawn in 1878 part way through the 9 George Giles, Report to the Sanitary Committee of successful scheme, when the council had to the Corporation of Lincoln… to which is appended a instruct a second contractor, the first having report of the Sanitary Committee …to the Council of gone bankrupt. How many more sewerage the Corporation (1849) LCL, 628.2, Glass plans lie forgotten in such places, or in Cabinet. The Central Library has two copies, reference libraries and record offices? Many that in the Glass Cabinet being Giles’s personal sewerage plans were on scales very much copy, which uniquely contains a 20-inch larger than the 40-inches to one mile scale manuscript copy of his large plan for an chosen by Giles, in particular the ten-foot scale underground sewerage system. He was paid LOCAL STUDIES IN SANITARY REFORM: LINCOLN 1848-1850 217

only £175 for his report according to City of 16 C. Hamlin, ‘Edwin Chadwick and the Lincoln Abstract of Receipts and Expenditure, 1849- engineers, 1842-1854: systems and antisystems 51 (1849-1850) p.12: LCL, L.LINC.352. in the pipe-and-brick sewers war’, Technology However, it is clear that he was able to use J.S. and Culture vol. 33 (1992) pp.680-709 Padley’s 1842 20-inch plan of Lincoln, (especially pp.699, 704-705) corrected to mid-1847, as the basis for his own 17 Binnie, Water Engineers, p.32 plan, thus avoiding a completely new survey: 18 LC 5 Oct 1849, p.3 col.4: Charlesworth was a Mills and Wheeler, Historic Town Plans of Lincoln well-established physician and a governor of 1610-1920, and personal communication from the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum, which was known Rob Wheeler. For comparison, the Ordnance for its forward thinking on mental health Survey in 1851 charged Coventry £890, 19 Possibly the fifteen parish vestries, the lighting Stratford-on-Avon £600, and Warwick £400 for and paving commissioners, the board of their much larger scale sewerage plans, without guardians, and so forth reports (J. B. Harley, ‘The Ordnance Survey 20 LAO, L1/1/1/10, pp.101-110 1:528 Board of Health town plans of 21 LC 25 Jan 1850, p.6 col.3 Warwickshire 1848-54’, in T. R. Slater and P. J. 22 LC 1 Feb 1850, p.3 cols.4-5, item headed Jarvis (eds.), Field and Forest: an historical ‘Sanatory (sic) Improvements in Lincoln: geography of Warwickshire and Worcestershire (Geo disgraceful disturbances’ Books, 1982) pp.347-384, data taken from 23 LC 15 Feb1850, p.5 col.3 and 3 May 1850, p.3 p.367). The Coventry plan probably covered a col.4; LAO, L1/1/1/10, pp.136-138; LC 17 larger area than the Lincoln plan, but the May 1850, p.3 col.2 other two areas must have been much smaller. 24 LAO, L1/1/1/10, p.139 10 It is reasonable to assume that the properties 25 Wohl, Endangered Lives, p.151 had changed little between 1851 and 1901. 26 M. Sigsworth and M. Worboys, ‘The public’s There was no definition of a room, but as view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain’, courtyard houses did not have sculleries, Urban History vol.21 pt.2 (October 1994) bathrooms and indoor toilets, or even single- pp.237-250, especially pp.245-248 purpose kitchens, it is reasonable to think that 27 Hamlin, ‘Muddling in Bumbledom’, p.62; the rooms reported were all either ‘living’ Hunter, ‘Cholera and the struggle for clean rooms or bedrooms water’, p.113; Elliott, Victorian Leicester, p.60; 11 E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of Brayshay and Pointon, ‘Local politics and the Labouring Population of Great Britain, 1842, public health’, p.167 edited with an introduction by M. W. Flinn 28 White, Directory, pp.104-05; Robinson, Drink (Edinburgh UP, 1964). The editorial and Sewage, p.30; and Drainage of the City of contribution is an important addition to the Lincoln: Prize Essay, 1866, Lincoln Central literature. Library, LIN 627.5 12 W. White, Directory of Lincolnshire (1856) p.104- 29 Ch.13 by J.A. Tarr in Smith’s book is entitled 105 ‘The separate vs. combined sewer problem: a 13 In 1852 the GBH published its guidelines case study in urban technology and design report as Minutes of Information on Sewerage and choice’, pp.289-320 and is a reprint of an Cleansing of the Sites of Towns article by the same title in Journal of Urban 14 ‘Obituary of William Lindley’, pp.365-369 History, vol.5 (1979), pp.308-339; C. Hamlin, 15 R. Rawlinson, ‘On the Drainage of Towns’, ‘Edwin Chadwick and the engineers’ PICE vol.12 (1852-1853) pp.25-109, especially pp.38, 104 and figs.1-8

DENNIS MILLS is a ‘retired’ historical geographer, whose main publications have been on ‘open and closed’ villages and the census enumerators’ books. Since returning to the city where he went to school, he has taken a deeper interest in its recent history. He edited Twentieth Century Lincolnshire, volume XII of the History of Lincolnshire series (1989), and in 2004 co-edited with R. C. Wheeler, Historic Town Plans of Lincoln 1610-1920. The Latin Project

ANN RYCRAFT

… animi atque argenti causa …1 One of the best activities, at any age, must surely be working on a project with a group of fellow enthusiasts. History, especially local history (as the lists of publications in this journal demonstrate), offers many opportunities for group work. It is, however, unusual for an amateur group working on the history of a local place, person or topic to go further back than the early modern period, unless their material is in print. The ability to read and use original documents dating from earlier than, say, the sixteenth century is rare. The scripts, and the languages—Latin, early French, or English before spelling was standardised—often prove too great a challenge. The Latin Project, a York group which works on documents and manuscripts dating from before 1500, in Latin with occasional French and English, is therefore something of a rarity. While it is not essentially a local history group, it nevertheless increases the ability of its members to use early material and, through its occasional publications, makes local documents more widely available. Fourteen years ago, sixteen people met for a two-term class entitled ‘Reading Latin Documents’, organised by the York branch of the WEA. The brochure described the class as being for students who could read Latin and had some experience of reading documents, and who wished to unite these two skills at some level. Of those who met that afternoon in Henry VIII’s wine cellar, some had come all the way through previous classes, organised by the WEA or by Hull University’s Centre for Adult Education, learning Latin from scratch. Others had joined the later of these classes, revising or improving their existing Latin. Some had been to classes on reading and using documents, and a few had very good classical Latin and had begun to work, or were hoping to work, on documents. They all wanted to practise and improve skills, and none had been put off by the word ‘masochists’ in the class description. All sixteen enrolled and settled to learn or revise the abbreviation conventions and to practise applying them, reading and translating facsimiles of documents written in straightforward Caroline minuscule script. They worked with patience and persistence, offering and receiving help with Latin and palaeography as needed. Facsimiles were taken home each week for single combat and gradually everyone’s confidence and knowledge grew. Some of the facsimiles used were of documents still kept in the City, so the last session of the first term was spent in an archive examining the originals. One facsimile which the group began to read was part of a probate inventory, made in 1400, recording the property of Thomas de Dalby, archdeacon of Richmond and prebendary of Thockerington. It was carefully written, with easy grammar but unusual, even abstruse, vocabulary, so that Latham was added to the dictionaries, Kennedys, Gooders, and Cappellis already on the table.2 The actual inventory in York Minster Archives impressed everyone—it is about 21 feet long, very well-written and, although part of the last membrane is missing, in excellent condition.3

218 © British Association for Local History 2009 THE LATIN PROJECT 219

At some time during the second term, it was proposed that the class should read the whole of this inventory. An incomplete version and a partial translation were already in print, but the aim was to make a complete transcription and translation of a document which had caught everyone’s interest.4 The first problem was not academic but financial. A copy of the whole document was needed, but this, added to the cost of copies of documents already made for the group, would use up nearly all the WEA expenses allowance, and seventeen copies were needed. Generosity solved the problem. The WEA, recognising the enthusiasm of the class, allowed an increase in expenses. A photograph was obtained and the Minster Archives generously permitted copies to be made from this for the students (who paid for their own copies). Part of the inventory was read and translated each week, alongside documents already prescribed for the class, which continued after the advertised time for a few extra sessions. When the question of a further class arose, continuing with the inventory seemed an obvious idea. The archdeacon’s will (of which two copies existed) would be read, together with any surviving documents concerning people mentioned in the inventory or the will.5 This was in fact a wide scheme, using palaeography, Latin, and research skills. It would be necessary not only to read and translate, but also to search the archives of the archbishopric, the dean and chapter and the city. All this could be organised into a class, and the result was The Latin Project. The idea of calling this a ‘project’ was that, although there would be a tutor, the format would be shared work, the emphasis on a communal approach. A piece of work would be undertaken and completed; the door would then be open for another ‘project’, should an idea arise. At this point people could leave, stay or join so there could be a continuing but changing group. Most of the original class joined the Project, together with three newcomers. The wills were read and translated, and as well as being very interesting, provided useful examples of the diplomatic form of the medieval will.6 The inventory, which recorded the sale of property after the archdeacon’s death, was exceptional. In cash there was just over £803, and all the possessions of that extremely wealthy cleric were carefully recorded, room by room. There followed the buyers’ names and the prices paid when the items were sold. The weights of all the silver and gilt vessels, and any inscriptions, were recorded, their total value being over £70. There was some suspicion that, since the goldsmiths who were the valuers were also purchasers, they might have been allowing themselves some ‘discount’, but one student worked out the troy weights and prices, and decided that any discrepancy could be attributed to minor accounting error. The expenses of bringing the archdeacon’s body from his prebendal manor outside York to the Minster, the cost of the burial and attendant ceremonies, and the payments to his household when it was eventually dispersed, were all recorded. There is now no trace of the archdeacon’s manor, but the Project and friends had a most enjoyable visit to the surviving prebendal manor at Nassington, and went on to Southwell, where the layout of the prebendal town houses, alongside the Minster, survives.7 As well as being archdeacon of Richmond, Dalby held the prebend of Thockerington.8 One member visited this, the most northerly of the York prebends, discovering that the village had been virtually wiped out by a later plague (her beekeeper husband, who had been persuaded to drive her, was rewarded by being able to take a swarm at one stop!). Once the wills and inventory had been read, transcribed and translated (just a few words here, which underplay a great deal of time and hard work in and out of the regular meetings) a search was made for any other documents concerning the Thomas de Dalby. Early records of archdeacons, because they lacked continuing and settled bureaucracies, have not survived well, so there was not much; formal references in the dean and chapter archives and fragments of a register.9 This 220 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 last did record, among formal business, one interesting event: a visitation, apparently in person, by Dalby to the nuns at Nun Monkton, about seven miles from York. Various misdemeanours were uncovered (such as luxurious dress, accepting gifts, and entertaining male visitors) which led the Archdeacon to issue firm injunctions to this Benedictine house in July 1397. Next, the group looked for surviving records of everybody named in the will and inventory. Not surprisingly, for most of the servants and minor colleagues nothing could be added to the names and dates already gleaned. However, for his patron, Archbishop Thomas Arundell, and his senior colleagues, more survived: 27 wills of varying length, two administrations, one probate act and a damaged inventory. A copy of the will of Arundell was obtained from Canterbury Cathedral Archives and copies of his biography were acquired for some extra-curricular reading.10 We also had individuals outside the male clerical Minster circle—an apothecary, two goldsmiths, a lawyer, a merchant, the apothecary’s wife and two of a goldsmith’s wives (he seemed to have had four, if not five!). These people took the Project out of the church into the City. At some point, the idea emerged that it might be interesting to publish the work, partly because the archdeacon’s circle was intrinsically interesting and partly to provide varied and interesting material for those who, like us, wanted to improve their Latin, extend their vocabulary, and increase their ability to understand and use medieval documents. For the finished work to be interesting and useful it required some supporting text, with very accurate transcriptions and, to be really useful, translations as well. So transcripts and translations were revised and polished; an introduction, footnotes, mini-biographies and index were written, and permissions to publish obtained. The result was then discussed with local record societies which, though moderately interested, had no publication space for some years ahead and little money. Faced with this, we decided to try to publish independently. The first Latin Project now ceased to be a WEA class and became an independent group devoted entirely to publishing the book. Faciendi plures libros nullus est finis—and this was only one book.11 Preparing the text had already taken a great deal of time and arranging a publication took almost as much again. Brochures on self-publishing were not much help, as they seemed mostly to deal with family history or reminiscences, or were thinly disguised advertisements from printers or editors. But, as so often with a continuing education class, there were people with relevant skills—a member skilled at word-processing to prepare camera-ready copy; her husband, likewise experienced, who voluntarily helped to set the main texts so that the Latin transcriptions and English translations faced; a professional editor experienced in proof-reading; an accountant trained in the days of pounds, shillings and pence; and an English teacher to provide help in interpreting the English terms to which the scribes, their Latin failing, resorted.12 Eventually there was a complete book: cover, frontispiece (photographed by a group member), prelims, introduction, biographies, facing texts, footnotes, bibliography and an index. Three local printers were asked for quotations and the Print Unit at the University of York was given the job. Financed by a loan from the York branch of the WEA, and grants from a local charitable trust and two local history societies, the book was published in May 2000, six centuries after Archdeacon Thomas de Dalby’s death.13 A quarter-peal in his honour was rung on the bells of St Martin Coney Street, a church which has in its east window a portrait of one of the book’s testators, and after this the Latin Project I retired for coffee and cakes.14 Meanwhile, a new class, the Latin Project II, had started. Some members of Project I had enrolled for it, joining new students, and so another class of ‘masochists’ of varying ability started. Their plan was to read and translate the fifteenth-century THE LATIN PROJECT 221 account rolls of the York bridgemasters, who maintained the City’s two bridges over the rivers Ouse and Foss using the rents from various city properties.15 The accounts proved to be very repetitious—the same property or type of property paying rent and requiring the same sort of repair year after year. The group eventually felt this was not really extending or improving their reading ability and, having learned a good deal of building vocabulary, abandoned the Project. Project III followed with, as usual, a mixture of old and new students. This time the material was the Latin documents in one of the books which record the City Council’s meetings, House Book 7 (1490- 1496).16 This is the earliest unpublished house-book and marks the time when English was taking over from Latin as the language of record. Some of the documents were particularly interesting; one, an much older early medieval text produced before the Council in the late fifteenth century, was clearly as difficult for the clerks to read then as it was for us! However, most of the Latin documents in this book were judicial, particularly bonds for keeping the peace. The next Project (IV) read the chronicle of the Archbishops of York, written by the City’s common clerk and bound into a city memorandum book.17 The originals of the documents used in these three Projects were kept in the City Archives, next door to where we met, so it was easy to consult them. But Project V was a complete change; to read the services and prayers in Books of Hours. These manuscripts survive in large numbers and are frequently exhibited for the beauty of their illuminations, but what they are, and what texts they contain, is not often explained. So, armed with facsimiles and helped by books and articles on the contents of these manuscripts, the class set out to read the very attractive but confusing and compressed ‘gothic’ script. The work was often hard and included reading highly abbreviated Latin (and occasionally English or French), interpreting the abbreviated cues for psalms and prayers, and translating. But we all gained more knowledge of the content and use of these devotional books. This Project was not meant to be a feast for art-lovers, but we were able to use the beautifully decorated Books of Hours in the Minster Library. At this point we decided to leave the WEA. This had been discussed for some time and was occasioned not by any dissatisfaction with the local branch, which was always most supportive, but by the paperwork which had to be completed by all. This took an unnecessary amount of time and was often not relevant to the Project and its purpose. Some questions seemed meaningless, others intrusive.18 So the next Project (VI) took place without the WEA though with the support of the Centre for Medieval Studies, which made a workroom available. It focussed on the Blakburns, a leading York family of the later fifteenth century. They were merchants who married into other merchant families, a city elite depicted in a window in one of York’s finest churches, and they had been much written about.19 The group set out to read all the surviving documents concerning them, to sort out the main family from others called Blakburn, and to disentangle some legends and misunderstandings—while of course improving their Latin, reading and translation. It was decided that as this family had held such a central position in the city’s history, it would be useful to publish the documents. This time the process was speedier, as lessons had been learnt from preparing the previous book. Our own records were better kept and could be accessed more easily; there was more knowledge of the work required, so it could be shared out more effectively; the layout and design of the first book provided a template; and the same printer would do the work. Last, but not least, there was money in hand. The first book, thanks to the grants which had assisted its publication, made a profit which could pay for printing, and for four colour plates and an improved cover. The whole process benefited from the different expertise of new members, among whom was a new volunteer at the word- processor. And this time the group remembered to date the book!20 222 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

The work on the merchant Blakburns led to the extensive archives of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City. Some years before, as part of a palaeography course, a small group of students had started transcribing the earliest account rolls of the Fraternity of Jesus and Mary, precursor of the Merchants’ Company, but had been unable to finish. Incomplete work is no use, so Project VII, again with a changed team, took it up. The Company (whose assistant archivist was a member of the group) allowed access to the original documents, the first of which, dated 1357, was the earliest of their documents.21 The Adventurers were to celebrate their 650th anniversary in 2007, so the Project decided to publish this little collection of five rolls, from which the Company dated its existence, in that year. This proved something of a challenge, as the documents were badly-written and in places very faded. Much of the material consisted of lists of names, so the previous practice of facing Latin and English was changed—only the Latin text was printed, with extensive footnotes on translation, grammar and meaning.22 This book was financed with the profit from the previous two. A new group has now embarked on a Project to read and translate any surviving documents concerning those who appear in the account rolls and also to read the account book, which is contemporary with the rolls but appears to bear little if any relationship to them.23 What is the verdict on the Latin Projects? The work is often hard (especially on the eyes) but it is a pleasure to work with an enthusiastic group, all contributing knowledge and experience. Is this worthwhile, for the individuals involved and for those who use the group’s work via its publications? There are pros and cons. An afternoon class (which all the Projects have been) excludes those in full-time work, a loss on both sides, though some in employment work part-time or flexi-time or juggle their schedules to make themselves available for two hours on alternate Wednesday afternoons. A Project has never consisted entirely of the retired (whatever that means today) and the age range has been from early twenties to early nineties.24 Does the group attract only former teachers, as someone once asked? People who have passed a Latin examination at school are perhaps more likely to be in some professional work, but there has been a variety of backgrounds in each Project, mainly because of the entry of those who have learnt Latin, as adults, from scratch. There has rarely if ever been a problem with this; the need for help is acknowledged and help is given and accepted cheerfully. No one has yet has left a Project because their Latin or their transcribing was too bad (or too good). The presence of old hands and newcomers, and the changing faces from one Project to another, have always been a strength. A long-term project has to change in order to live, and the Projects were set up to allow for and indeed to encourage this. One great disadvantage, the loss of publicity, did follow secession from the WEA. Now that the group no longer appears in a widely circulated programme, any opportunity to publicise it has to be taken; personal contact, contacts with local organisations, libraries, archives, selling the books, tutor’s talks. So far this seems to have worked. The personnel, with comings and goings, have always numbered about a dozen; the present Project has thirteen students. A much larger number would present difficulties, given the participation, discussion and individual attention necessary for the work—and nor would our usual table, though large, accommodate a larger number. However, an eye needs always to be kept on recruitment if a group is to thrive. The Latin Project is not the kind of odd, lively, adult learning group which is envisaged, in the current discussion on ‘informal adult learning’.25 But, as someone has occasionally been heard to say when discussion or even argument continues about what exactly a scribe has written or how exactly it is to be translated, the tourists strolling outside in the sun would probably say that we are all mad anyway! THE LATIN PROJECT 223

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 ‘for pleasure and profit’ (not a literal 13 The Testamentary Circle of Thomas de Dalby, translation) Archdeacon of Richmond d.1400 (not dated). 2 R.E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List Thinking that this would be the only book a (1965); B.H. Kennedy, The Revised Latin Primer, Project would produce, the group decided not edited and revised by J.F. Mountford (1974); to buy ISBN numbers. This was a mistake; a E.A. Gooder, Latin for Local History, 2nd number makes it much easier for a book to be impression with corrections and additions traced and purchased. (1979); A. Cappelli, Dizionario di Abbreviature 14 Robert Semar, died 1443, who personally paid latine ed italiane (Milan, 1999) for part of the rebuilding of the church, of 3 York Minster Archives [YMA] Ll. (17) 34 which he was vicar. The inscription in the 4 J. Raine (ed), Testamenta Eboracensia (Surtees window quotes part of the preamble to his will, Society vol.45, 1864); A.R. Myers (ed), English which was also the preamble to Archdeacon Historical Documents, 1327-1485 (1969) Dalby’s will. 5 Borthwick Institute for Archives, Register 16 15 York City Archives [YCA], C 80.1-19 (Scrope), fo 139v; YMA Probate Register 1, fo 16 YCA B 7 124v: at this time there was a difference 17 Roger Burton, common clerk 1415-1436, in between the terms ‘will’ and ‘testament’; the YCA Memorandum Book B/Y, fo 101ff former dealt with personal property and the 18 The tutor also disliked having to rank the latter with real estate. Will is used here to students, and to assess if ‘learning had taken cover both. place’ for each. 6 Knowing what a document might say is a very 19 All Saints North Street, the present east useful aid to reading, and so it was here, since window the work was mainly to do with testamentary 20 The Blakburns in York, Testaments of a Merchant business. Family in the Later Middle Ages (2006) 7 Nassington now has a web site, www.prebendal- 21 Archives of the Company of Merchant manor.co.uk. Adventurers of York [ACMAY], Guild of St 8 Thockerington (Northumberland) was one of Mary, Account Rolls, c.1357-1367 the poorest of the York prebends, but Dalby 22 Before the Merchant Adventurers, the Accounts of also held a vast and wealthy archdeaconry. the Fraternity of Jesus and Mary (2007) 9 A. Hamilton Thompson, The Registers of the 23 ACMAY Guild of St Mary, Account Book, 1358-69 Archdeacons of Richmond (Yorkshire 24 The present oldest member is 93. A respected Archaeological Journal vol.25, 1920) local historian, he learnt Latin from scratch, 10 Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Register G, fo and has since been involved in every Project. 283. M. Aston, Thomas Arundel (Oxford, 1967) 25 Department for Innovation, Universities and 11 ‘Of the making of many books there is no Skills, Consultation Document, Informal adult end’, Ecclesiastes 12, v.12 learning—shaping the way ahead (January 2008) 12 English (or sometimes a sort of French) tended to be used for cloth, garments, and household equipment.

Thomas de Dalby, The Blakburns and Before the Merchant Adventurers can be obtained from The Latin Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King’s Manor, York, YO1 7EP. The respective prices are £11.50, £9.50 and £6.50; please add £1.50 each for postage and packing. ‘The riders of Renwick’: loyalty to the flag in Elizabethan Cumberland

RICHARD BROCKINGTON

On 20 February 1570 a battle took place near the River Gelt, just south of Brampton in Cumberland. A force of royal troops from the Berwick garrison, under the command of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsden, Lord Warden of the English Eastern March, and supported by 500 Northumberland march riders, was attacked by forces under the command of Leonard Dacre. The royal troops prevailed and Dacre fled: his force has been estimated at 3000, mainly the ‘the banditti of the borders’,1 and it doubtless included groups of border reivers. But local studies in the village of Renwick on the edge of the Cumberland Pennines, and a manor owned since 1341 by Queens College, Oxford, suggest the involvement of disciplined tenantry with a proud record of service to the English Crown. This paper considers why such men, who were not Dacre tenants, may have risked everything to support the personal ambitions of a nobleman’s second son. The suggestion that these tenantry were involved in the battle of February 1570 derives from a single document—the Renwick manor court roll of 3 September 1571.2 Dr Alan Scott, provost of Queen’s College, travelled 200 miles from Oxford to preside over this small and remote manor court, at which all nineteen customary tenements were the subject of admittances. The manorial lord, being a corporate body, was an unchanging entity and there is no other surviving example of a general demission in Renwick manor court. The combination of the presence of the most senior official of the College, and the general demission, suggest that something very unusual had happened—timing and circumstantial evidence indicate that this was probably the participation of the tenantry in Dacre’s rebellion eighteen months earlier. At least four, and possibly six, of the previous tenants had recently died, but the absence of surviving court rolls between 1561 and 1571, and of contemporary church records, makes it impossible to be certain that these men had died on the Gelt. However, the level of turnover seems consistent with battlefield mortality.

The Dacres of the North, and Renwick The barons Dacre of Gilsland and Greystoke dominated eastern Cumberland after 1485. Lord Thomas, second baron Dacre (1467-1525), inherited the baronies of Gilsland and Burgh by Sands and acquired the barony of Greystoke by marriage. He was the eighth wealthiest nobleman in England, and had at his disposal what Stephen Ellis describes as ‘a significant military resource of battle-hardened tenantry’, which was used decisively at Flodden in 1513.3 Both Thomas, and his son William, third baron Dacre (1500-1563; father of Leonard) held at various times the English office of Lord Warden of the Western March. The association of Renwick with the Lord Thomas Dacre and his successors was perhaps a consequence of the manor’s situation, surrounded as it was by Dacre-owned manors and situated only three miles from Kirkoswald Castle, a principal baronial

224 © British Association for Local History 2009 ‘THE RIDERS OF RENWICK’: LOYALTY TO THE FLAG 225 residence. The 1561 manorial roll lists William Dacre as a Renwick freeholder:4 he owned three small farming tenements in the outlying hamlet of Scalehouses together with the former manor house in the middle of the township, consistent with the presence in Renwick of four Dacre military retainers. It seems likely that during the fifteenth century the Renwick tenantry had become part of the significant military resource of battle-hardened men to which Ellis refers. The pageantry of the period had a powerful influence: the device on the battle flag, or guidon, of Lord Dacre was a red bull, and when going into battle his men would shout “A Dacre! A Dacre! A red bull! A red bull!” The guidon was their equivalent of a regimental honour, and to ride behind the red bull was both a source of pride and an assurance of competent leadership in a time and place of constant peril. The memory of the triumph at Flodden was no doubt kept alive by constant retelling for the lifetimes of the participants, and to the men of eastern Cumberland was inseparable from the name of Dacre, the red bull guidon and all it stood for. Something else emerges from the manor rolls of Renwick—a sense of unswerving devotion to the traditional ways, and determined adherence to the rules and customs of the manor. In the north during the Tudor period there was much adverse comment about the ‘decay’ of tenements through subdivision, a process which was understood to weaken the ability of the tenantry to maintain military readiness,5 but nothing of that sort happened in Renwick. There the principle of primogeniture was strictly maintained, even a century after the union of the crowns had allowed the demilitarisation of Cumberland. There seems to have been an ideal of the 40-acre tenement passing intact from father to eldest son as the best assurance of maintaining a full complement of men-at-arms, with horses and equipment, ready for service. In the period after 1570, when they no longer had Dacre captains, their manor court juries required all men to join the ‘fray and following’ (the collective response to reiver attack) upon pain of 12d, half to the lord of the manor and half to the men who did follow the fray. Several men were fined for non-compliance in 1592 and 1599.6

The evolution of the crisis in 1570 The 57 years between the battles of Flodden and the Gelt encompassed the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the widespread northern rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-1537). In 1534 William, third Baron Dacre, who had succeeded to his father’s command in the wardenry, was arrested and tried on a charge of treason: as Lord Warden of the Western March he needed to maintain contact with Scottish counterparts for the policing of the turbulent frontier, and in time of war this could be misconstrued. He defended himself and was acquitted of the capital offence, but was nevertheless punished for the lesser offence of misprision of treason, removed from office, and ordered to live in the south of England. He was not restored to office on the Western March until after the death of Henry VIII in 1547. Nevertheless he maintained his loyalty to the Crown, and it is noteworthy that his tenantry did not at first participate in the Pilgrimage of Grace.7 It is possible that, as a consequence of his dismissal, the Dacre tenantry were not available to the march- wardens in the intervening years:8 the general rule, that ‘the tenants of Cumberland and Westmorland held their lands on the condition of rendering military service when summoned by the warden of the Western March’, appears not to have been accepted on the Pennine edge.9 There, as both the small size of the English force at Solway Moss (1542) and events in 1569-1570 seem to show, men rendered military service only when summoned by Lord Dacre. 226 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

After William’s death in 1563, the barony passed to his eldest son Thomas, fourth Baron Dacre, and at about the same time Lord Henry Scrope was appointed Lord Warden of the Western March. The fourth baron died in 1566, and the barony descended to his infant son George, while his widow, Lady Elizabeth, remarried, became duchess of Norfolk, moved to Thetford with the infant fifth baron and his three sisters, and died there in childbirth before the end of 1567. In 1566 the man who, back in Cumberland, held the red bull guidon was Leonard Dacre, oldest surviving son of the third baron and uncle of the fifth. He had served with distinction as his father’s deputy in the 1550s.10 On 17 May 1569, about one year after the flight of Mary Queen of Scots to England, the 7-year old fifth baron Dacre was killed in a gymnastics accident in Norfolk. Leonard Dacre, believing himself to be the heir by entail, at once moved to claim ‘the barony, honor, title and name of dignity of Lord Dacre … and tendered his livery before Sir William Cecil, master of the wards and liveries for all lands and hereditaments of George late Lord Dacre’.11 This claim was opposed by the duke of Norfolk in the interest of the three daughters of the fourth baron, the wardship of whom he was exercising on the queen’s behalf—but Norfolk also espoused the girls to his three sons by an earlier marriage. When the case was heard in the Earl Marshal’s Court on 12-19 July 1569 Leonard Dacre was unable to produce documents supporting his claim, because Lady Elizabeth Dacre had previously removed them to Norfolk and they were now in the custody of his opponent.12 Judgment went against him and he was forbidden to call himself Lord Dacre. Dacre returned to Cumberland ‘very angry that so large a patrimony should by law descend unto his nieces’,13 and soon afterwards entered into conversations with the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, fellow-Catholics motivated by a desire to help the incarcerated Mary Queen of Scots—but Dacre’s concern lay with his own future and not hers. When in November the earls rose in her support and laid siege to Barnard Castle they doubtless expected him to join them. Either he had no such intention, or he realised that the rebellion was likely to fail. He went to Windsor and promised loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, and on his return to Cumberland mustered his men ostensibly to support the Crown forces now engaged in mopping up after the flight of the earls towards on 16 December. At Christmas Lord Scrope wrote to London suggesting that Dacre, among others, should receive a royal commendation.14 But interrogation of prisoners revealed his association with the rebels, and there was growing concern that he had not disbanded his forces but was holding Naworth Castle, near Brampton, in great strength. According to Robert Daynam, a spy sent by Sir John Forster, Lord Warden of the Middle March, he had cannon at Naworth and was calling himself Lord Dacre in defiance of the court decision.15 The Queen ordered his arrest. The task initially fell to Lord Scrope at Carlisle, but he could do nothing without substantial help. He wrote on 18 January 1570 to the earl of Sussex that ‘beside the Borderers, whom he has made sure with fair words and great promises, the whole country, as well gentry as others, are so addicted to a Dacre, as although I find no fault with them in any other service, they are not to be credited in this’.16 The task of arresting Dacre then passed to Lord Hunsden at Berwick, who marched his forces through the winter snows to Hexham, where on 18 February he was joined by Sir John Forster. According to his report of the battle, composed at Carlisle on the evening of 20 February,17 Hunsden tried unsuccessfully to take Dacre by surprise by a night march, withdrew from Naworth towards Carlisle, and, approaching the crossing of the Gelt, was attacked by Dacre whose men ‘gave the proudest charge upon my shot that ever I saw’. The royal troops were outnumbered but had the advantage of muskets: Hunsden used his cavalry to break up the attack, inflicted much slaughter, and took the red bull guidon. A few days later Hunsden wrote ‘THE RIDERS OF RENWICK’: LOYALTY TO THE FLAG 227 that ‘I never heard any man so cried out upon and cursed, both of men, woman, and children, as Leonard Dacre; all affirm that he persuaded them that it was only for maintenance of his title, and to keep the possession, which would otherwise be taken from him by force’.18 After the battle, Dacre fled to the Netherlands, and died at Brussels in 1573. With hindsight we can see that Leonard Dacre’s cause was hopeless, and could only end in disaster for all who supported him. It is likely that the men of Renwick were among them, and that they remained enthusiastically loyal to a man who was neither their baron, nor the owner of the land they tenanted, and nor (as it transpired) a commander worthy of their confidence. This can only be understood by reference to the long history of conflict on the Anglo-Scottish March, and the achievements of the house of Dacre as defenders of the area. The Renwick men and the Dacre tenantry shared an identity and a mutual comradeship as followers of the red bull guidon, similar perhaps to a regimental esprit-de-corps. To preserve this it was necessary for Leonard Dacre to ‘keep the possession’, the barony, the castles, and the guidon. To the riders of Renwick this was a cause worth dying for.

Acknowledgements I have drawn extensively from the articles about Thomas, William and Leonard Dacre, referenced below, by Stephen Ellis and Henry Summerson in the ODNB, but any errors in this paper are mine and not theirs. My special thanks are due to Michael Riordan, archivist at Queen’s College, Oxford, and the staff of the Cumbria Record Office at Carlisle. Thanks also to Alan Crosby for editorial adjustments and improvements, and the referee who took the trouble to read the first draft and made valuable suggestions which have mostly been adopted.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 G. Ridpath, The Border History of England and 10 T.H. Hodgson, ‘Extracts from the Reports of Scotland (1848) p.435; the figure of 3,000 the Privy Council relating to Cumberland and comes from Lord Hunsden’s report of the Westmorland in the reign of Queen Mary’, battle. Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland 2 Archives of Queen’s College Oxford [AQCO] Antiquarian and Archaeological Society old ser. 5A-4 vol.13 (1894) p.227 3 Stephen G. Ellis, ‘Dacre, Thomas, second 11 Cumbria Record Office (Carlisle) baron Dacre of Gilsland (1467-1525)’ (Oxford D/MH/10/7/8, pp.219ff, a transcription of Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB] the 1569 court record by the Carlisle lawyer Oxford UP, 2004) and antiquarian George Gill Mounsey. I have 4 AQCO 5A-3 modernised the spelling of the quoted words. 5 c.f. e.g. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, The History 12 H. Summerson, ‘Dacre, Leonard (d1573)’ and Antiquities of Westmorland and Cumberland (ODNB) (1777) vol.1 p.xc 13 The quotation is originally from Camden, 6 AQCO 5A-9 and 5A-15 Annales, ed 1625-9, i.222; 7 Stephen G. Ellis, ‘Dacre, William, third baron 14 State Papers, Domestic: Addenda, Elizabeth, vol.15 Dacre of Gilsland (1500-1563)’ (ODNB) p167 8 M. Bush, ‘The Problem of the Far North’, 15 ibid., p.219 Bulletin of John Rylands Library (1995) 16 ibid., p.214 9 Victoria County History of Cumberland vol.1 17 ibid., p.241 (1901) p.285 18 ibid., p.244

RICHARD BROCKINGTON is a retired lawyer who lives in Renwick. He is chair of the Cumbria Local History Federation, and is studying at Lancaster University for the Diploma in Local and Regional History.

227227 Sources for local history Local history internet sites: an update for 2009

JACQUELENÉ FILLMORE

Once again we are pleased to be able to bring you a listing of websites for the local historian. As before, there is an update to previous handlists and a list of further websites for you to explore. In this selection we include a range of sites which are geographically specific. Of course this is not exhaustive, but it gives a very useful indication of the diversity of material which is now available. This article does not provide a critical review of sites, but a further selection off such reviews will be published early in 2010. Please note that: • many of the brief descriptions have been adapted from those given on the websites themselves; • inclusion on the list below does not in any circumstances constitute formal endorsement of a website by the British Association for Local History; • if you find errors, or would like to suggest new websites for inclusion in a future article, or have comments on this paper, please feel free to contact either the editor, Dr Alan Crosby, or Jacquelené Fillmore at [email protected].

1. Update to previously published handlists 2007 and 2008 [all sites current 14 May 2009] a) changes to name of site and web address: 24 Hour Museum: gateway to UK museums, galleries and heritage attractions: this site has moved and is now known as Culture 24 http://www.culture24.org.uk/home b) changes to web address (new address given here): Archaic Medical Terms: as the name suggests, this site offers a useful resource of archaic medical terms for the genealogist and historian http://www.neonatology.org/classics/old.terms.html British Library: Collect Britain: over 90,000 images and sounds from the UK and beyond http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/index.html British Library Sound Archive: one of the largest catalogues of its kind anywhere in the world, covering both published and unpublished recordings in all genres from pop, jazz, classical and world music, to oral history, drama and literature, dialect, language and wildlife sounds http://www.bl.uk/nsa City of London: official website of the London Metropolitan Archives http://search.lma.gov.uk/OPAC_LMA/onlineresources.html Deaddocs: bibliographical index of obituaries and posthumous accounts in British medical journals and related sources 1750-1850 http://ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/collection.htm?uri=hist-4996-1 English Catholic History: links to Catholic websites, including reading lists for Catholicism since the Reformation http://www.catholic-history.org.uk/catharch/catharch/index.htm Environment Agency: Water Framework Directive datasearch. Categories include Rivers, Lakes, Transitional Waters, Coastal Waters, Groundwaters and their risk assessments http://maps.environment-agency.gov.uk/wiyby/wiybyController?ep=maptopics&lang=_e

228 © British Association for Local History 2009 LOCAL HISTORY INTERNET SITES: AN UPDATE FOR 2009 229

George Cross Database: lists recipients, and links to other sites about George and Victoria Crosses http://www.gc-database.co.uk/alpha.htm Huguenot Society of Great Britain & Ireland: the collections library and archive were formed from the collections of the Huguenot Society and the French Hospital and contain the most complete body of Huguenot literature in this country http://www.huguenotsociety.org.uk/library-and-archive/collectionsarchive.html The Irish Times: digital archive containing exact reproductions of all articles published by the Irish Times from 1859 onwards; text archive contains material published on the website from 1996 onwards http://www.irishtimes.com/search/ Michael Warren’s Chronology: of state medicine, public health, welfare and related services in Britain: 1066-1999 http://www.fphm.org.uk/resources/AtoZ/r_chronology_of-state_medicine.pdf The Wartime Memories Project: recollections from the Second World War, including women’s land army http://www.wartimememories.co.uk/ c) pages no longer found: The British and Foreign School Society: searchable database of the archives of the school. http://www.bfss.org.uk/archive/index.html British Transport Police: history of the BTP http://www.btp.police.uk/History%20Society/ Commonwealth War Graves Commission – French site: gave information on The Somme http://www.anzac.org Farming Life (1900s to 1950s): a compilation of audio interview extracts detailing memories and anecdotes covering many aspects of farming life in Leicestershire in the first half of the 20th century http://www.showcase.commedia.org.uk/article/view/573/1/1/ PaperofRecord.com: an American site showing digitised images of papers from around the world, including The Maple Leaf (1945-46), a Canadian newspaper given to Canadians fighting in the UK, Daily Mirror (1953), and Liverpool Echo (1886-1964 – partial) http://www.paperofrecord.com/ PaperofRecord.com has recently been bought by Google, who are ‘currently working on the most effective way to search and browse this valuable content’. Many historians worldwide have complained about the sudden demise of this site. It is now understood that Bob Huggins, former CEO of PaperofRecord.com, has been in negotiation with Google and gained permission to re-start the website. When up and running this will be available through subscribing academic portals, i.e. universities, colleges, libraries. Roman Roads: shows how Roman roads were made, with click-on links to maps in each county including an enlarged map of main Roman roads in Britain http://www.romans-in-britain.org.uk/inv_roads.htm York History Net: great page with links to complete scanned electronic versions of old (out of copyright) editions of texts http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/hist/library/frameset.html?internet/intro.html

2. Annotated list of additional internet sites for local history [all sites current 29 May 2009] Abandoned Communities: this website commemorates all abandoned communities, with a focus on some specific deserted places. It considers what type of community lived there, the events leading up to abandonment, and what happened to the inhabitants after they moved away. http://www.abandonedcommunities.co.uk/ Aberdeen Built Ships: search for information about any of the nearly 3,000 recorded ships built in Aberdeen since 1811 and see what objects are held at Aberdeen Maritime Museum. http://www.aberdeenships.com/ The Accrington Pals: site dedicated to the memory of the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington) East Lancashire Regiment, better known as the Accrington Pals, perhaps the best remembered of the battalions raised in the early months of the First World War in response to Kitchener's call for a volunteer army http://www.pals.org.uk/pals_e.htm Am Baile: discover the history and culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands through photographs, illustrations, rare books and documents, and short films, audio clips, interactive games and comics http://www.ambaile.org.uk/ Backstage: a single point of entry for finding and searching performing arts collections in the UK http://www.backstage.ac.uk/ 230 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

BIAB online: the British and Irish archaeological bibliography http://www.biab.ac.uk/ Bibliomania: access to free online literary study guides and texts http://www.bibliomania.com/ British Armed Forces and National Service: contains Service stories from regular and National Service veterans, regimental and military information with many links for veterans and researchers; over 2,500 Regimental Badge illustrations and 20,000 images of troopships http://www.britisharmedforces.org/index.htm British Book Trade Index: an index of names with brief biographical details and trade details of people who worked in the book trade in England and Wales and who were trading by 1851 http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/ British Castles: a guide to castles of the British Isles including descriptions, histories, photos and maps http://www.britishcastle.co.uk/ British Chemical Community: website with biographical data on some 4,950 chemists (1881-1972) http://www.open.ac.uk/ou5/Arts/chemists/ British Coastguards: a list by Stan Waight, of British coastguards 1841-1901 http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/Coastguards/ British History: the Etrusia history pages cover the span of (mainly British) history from prehistoric times up to the Tudor period http://www.etrusia.co.uk/ British Medals: free online information resource for anyone with an interest in British medals from 1790s to the present day http://www.britishmedals.info/ British National Bibliography: available to search free online, through the British Library Integrated Catalogue http://catalogue.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=BNB British Origins: offers access to the most authentic English genealogy collections online, including unique English ancestor records; maps of England and Wales; gazetteers; Boyd's marriage records; burial records; court depositions; 1841 and 1871 censuses; apprenticeship records; and wills: all accessible via a free British and English name search and UK place search http://www.britishorigins.com/ Cambridge Alumni Database: this database will contain biographical details of everyone who has been identified as being academically associated with the University of Cambridge, 1200-1900 http://venn.csi.cam.ac.uk/ACAD/intro.html CASBAH: a pilot website for resources relating to Caribbean Studies and the history of Black and Asian peoples in the UK. Use this web site to search and browse the CASBAH database and to view the full text survey reports. The site is based upon research in the main collections relevant to these areas of research and also looks at sources in some general collections http://www.casbah.ac.uk/ Cassini Maps: Cassini Historical Maps are created from Ordnance Survey’s definitive mapping series, surveyed and printed from the early 19th century onwards. They are ideal for anyone who has interest in old maps or the history of their area, wishing to trace the changes that their area has undergone since the Industrial Revolution http://www.cassinimaps.co.uk/ Census.ac.uk: home of the ESRC Census Programme, providing a one-stop gateway to data and support services allowing users in UK higher and further education to access the 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001 UK censuses. The site also provides access to other important census related resources http://www.census.ac.uk/ Charles Darwin: the complete works of Charles Darwin online http://darwin-online.org.uk/ Church Crawler: the intention of this website is to share news and information about churches, and to feature the less-well-known churches that do not appear on the tourist trails of the world http://www.churchcrawler.co.uk/ Churchplans Online: a searchable database (based at Lambeth Palace Library) of over 13,000 parish church plans in England, Wales and Scotland held by the Church Building Society 1818-1982 http://www.churchplansonline.org/ Chronicon: free electronic journal devoted to history (ancient, medieval and modern) with a particular focus on Irish history. Published by the History Department of University College Cork, articles are published in HTML mark-up and, from volume 3 onwards, in PDF format. Submissions welcomed http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon/contents.html LOCAL HISTORY INTERNET SITES: AN UPDATE FOR 2009 231

City Ark: web presence of the Medway Archives Service—a searchable database of piece-level descriptions of original documents in their custody, and an image base of their most popular records http://cityark.medway.gov.uk/ The Complete Morris's British Birds 1891: the full collection of original colour British Bird prints from 1891 http://www.birdcheck.co.uk/frame.htm Connacht Landed Estates Project: aiming to assist and support researchers working on the social, economic, political and cultural history of Connacht from circa 1700 to 1914; a comprehensive and integrated resource guide to landed estates and gentry houses in Connacht http://www.landedestates.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/ Convict Transportation Registers Database: website operated by the Queensland Government; holds the British convict transportation registers 1787-1867 database, compiled from the British Home Office (HO) records available on microfilm http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/info/fh/convicts A Cornish Sourcebook: a wealth of information on Cornwall, including place-names, maps and plans, historical illustrations of ancient Cornwall, and much more http://www.cornovia.org.uk/ The DiCamillo Companion: database detailing over 6,000 English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish country houses as part of an ongoing project to document every country house ever built in Britain and Ireland http://www.dicamillocompanion.com/index_2.html Dictionary of Slang: English slang and colloquialisms used in the http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/ Elizabethan Norton: website based on research by the late Jos Kingston about a Derbyshire parish now in Sheffield; includes Norton baptism, marriage and burial records 1560-1620, and evidence from local registers, wills and inventories http://www.joskingston.org/LDEN/CHAP3.html Emerald Ancestors: subscription site specialising in Northern Ireland genealogy with an extensive Ulster ancestry database containing birth, marriage, death, and census records for over one million Irish ancestors in Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone http://www.emeraldancestors.com/ English Emblem Book Project: scanned versions of the complete texts of nine emblem books printed in early modern England, providing a source for the study of daily life in the 16th and 17th centuries http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/home.htm English Monastic Archives: direct links to three online databases: religious houses, properties and archives http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history2/englishmonasticarchives/ Essex Place Names: database containing names of fields, roads, inns, houses, farms, manors, places, rivers, streams, woods; and names of owners, tenants, landlords, parties to agreements; recorded from documents such as tithe records, rentals, surveys, maps, rolls, inquisitions, deeds and charters http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/esah/essexplacenames/ Fifteenth Century Life: An annotated bibliography: although the site is provided by the Richard III Society (American Branch) the bibliography covers books from Britain as well as America http://www.r3.org/life/biblio/biblio.html The First World War Poetry Digital Archive: an online repository of over 4000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/ Food Timeline: a clickable timeline which holds interesting facts about food http://www.foodtimeline.org/ From History to Herstory: a major and unique project in women's history, which examines—through the lives and organisations of Yorkshire women—the role which women have played in history http://www.historytoherstory.org.uk/ From Weaver to Web: the visual archive of Calderdale history giving access to over 23,000 images of historical documents http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/ The Glasgow Story: as told by some of Scotland’s best writers, and illustrated with thousands of images from the collections of the city’s world-famous libraries, museums and universities http://www.theglasgowstory.com/index.php Glaswegians Photo Archive: a selection of images from 30,000 photographs taken 1989-1992 http://www.glaswegians.org/ 232 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

A Guide to History Libraries and Collections in London: individual entries under each library include the name, address and telephone number, hours of opening, access, staff and catalogue information and details of the history collections, including any special strengths http://www.ull.ac.uk/his/introhis.html Heritage Paths: central bank containing information on all usable old and heritage paths in Scotland http://www.heritagepaths.co.uk/ History and Policy: a website, written by historians, offering a wide range of resources giving historical insights into current policy issues http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/ History from Headstones: the largest collection of online gravestone inscriptions in Northern Ireland: over 50,000 inscriptions from over 800 graveyards in the Six Counties http://www.historyfromheadstones.com/ The History of British Towns: a useful website for any researcher of towns, houses and historic buildings http://www.r3.org/life/biblio/biblio.html History of Hereford: a site run by Archenfield Archaeology Ltd concerning Hereford since prehistory http://www.archenfield.com/history_prehistory.htm Histpop: the Online Historical Population Reports (OHPR) collection provides online access to the complete population reports for Britain and Ireland 1801-1937. The collection goes beyond the basic population reports, with a wealth of textual and statistical material giving an in-depth view of economy, society (via births, deaths and marriages) and medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries http://www.histpop.org/ohpr/servlet/ Humanities Web: the mission of the Humanities Web is to build a humanities site showing the inter- connections between history, the arts, and culture, and how each plays off and influences the others http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=w Ideal Homes: Suburbia in Focus: old photos, old maps, and historic documents from the rich and unique archive and local history collections of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich, Lambeth, Lewisham, and Southwark, this site explores the origins and significance of suburbia as revealed through the history of South London http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/index1a.html Internet Modern History Sourcebook: a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html In The First Person: a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. The site allows searching by keyword from more than 700,000 pages of full-text by more than 18,000 individuals from all walks of life. Contains pointers to some 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records http://www.inthefirstperson.com/firp/index.shtml John Major: a biography of the former prime minister, his policies and speeches, links to relevant sites and much more. It also contains data and resources about the 1990-1997 Conservative administration http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/ John Snow: site devoted to the life and times of Dr John Snow (1813-1858), a seminal figure in the history of public health, epidemiology and anaesthesiology http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html Key to English Place Names: database intended to provide an up-to-date guide to the interpretation of the names of England's cities, towns and villages, drawing on the work of the English Place-Name Society and other researchers http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/ins/kepn/ Lancashire Police Database: database providing names of police officers, particularly those who served with the Lancashire County Constabulary from the force’s inception in 1840 up to 1925 http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/education/record_office/records/police.asp Learn Out Loud: browse the internet’s largest catalogue of educational audio books, podcasts, downloads, and free audio and video. Over 20,000 titles from hundreds of authors and publishers http://www.learnoutloud.com/ Library History Database: information on over 27,000 libraries in the British Isles, based on over 1,200 published works http://www.r-alston.co.uk/contents.htm Life of King Edward the Confessor: an illustrated Anglo-Norman verse, written in England in the late 1230s or early 1240s, and preserved in this manuscript from 1250-1260. A masterpiece of mid thirteenth century English illumination, the present manuscript preserves evidence for the study of the hagiographical writings about St Edward sponsored by Henry III (1216-72), and also for the complexity and sophistication of English pen and wash narrative art in this period http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/MSS/Ee.3.59/ LOCAL HISTORY INTERNET SITES: AN UPDATE FOR 2009 233

Liverpool History: website dedicated to the history of Liverpool http://www.lmu.livjm.ac.uk/lhol/ Long Bennington: website recording and publishing people’s memories of the Lincolnshire village of Long Bennington http://www.lblhs.org.uk/index.htm London Jews: a database of names, addresses and some other information about Jews who lived in London in the first half of the nineteenth century http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/uk/londweb.htm London Music Trades 1750-1800: this database, an on-going project hosted by the Royal College of Music, provides basic biographical information about people working in all branches of the music business (composers, performers, publishers, instrument makers etc.) in London 1750–1800 http://lmt.rcm.ac.uk/ Looking at Buildings: an introduction to architecture with pages on building types, architectural styles and traditions, and building materials and methods of construction, as well as an expanding guide and introduction to buildings in seven English cities http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/ Made in Birmingham: Birmingham’s industrial history website, celebrating the unique industrial history of Birmingham and Smethwick http://www.madeinbirmingham.org/ MAPCO: website aiming to provide genealogists, students and historians free access to high quality scans of eighteenth and nineteenth century maps and plans of London and the British Isles and also nineteenth century maps and engravings relating to Australia http://www.archivemaps.com/mapco/ The Mills Archive: a searchable database of milling, giving over 30,000 separate references to individuals, giving the person’s name and trade, gender, place and county as well as notes of interest and the source of the information (such as directory, census or other record). The site also includes a glossary based on a database of more than 2700 mill-related items http://www.millarchive.com/3library/portal.aspx The Mitchell and Kenyon Collection: browse through frame grabs of films from this remarkable collection, an amazing visual record of everyday life in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/mk/ Mostly Medieval: Exploring the Middle Ages: a fully searchable database offering information on heraldry, myths, religion and medicine during the Middle Ages, with a special emphasis on Scotland and England; divided into seven thematic areas (ballads, beasties, Book of Days, God and war, heraldry, and medicine). Users can view complete text versions of numerous ballads, information on the time-honoured practise of heraldry, and a dictionary of ‘beasts’ used in coats-of-arms http://skell.org/explore/index.htm MOTCO: UK Directory & Image Database: containing a reference database of topographical prints, maps, prospects and panoramas of London, the Thames and other parts of the United Kingdom http://www.motco.com/ Old Occupation Names: an A-Z of old occupations and their new name and meaning http://www.rmhh.co.uk/occup/a.html OliveTreeGenealogy.com: passenger lists, naturalisation records, palatine genealogy, Canadian genealogy, American genealogy, Native American genealogy, Huguenots, Mennonites, almshouse records, orphan records, church records, military muster rolls, census records, land records and more http://www.olivetreegenealogy.com/ships/hug_index.shtml Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: a free and authoritative index of people from British history [biographies available by subscription including all UK public library services] http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/ Parish Register.com: family history website of Docklands Ancestors Ltd, which holds searchable records of Docklands, East End and Thames watermen and lightermen ancestors http://www.parishregister.com/default.asp PastPlaces: a global resource for finding or listing video, images, information, memories, and stories of people, past places, past times, houses, homes, friends, family, ancestors, communities, towns, cities, streets, history and events http://www.pastplaces.com/ Portable Antiques Scheme: a voluntary scheme to record and provide a database of archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales http://www.finds.org.uk/ Port Cities: website dedicated to the maritime histories of UK port cities http://www.portcities.org.uk/ 234 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

Revolutionary Players: a website focusing on the history of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700-1830 http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/home.stm Roll of Honour: databases of those fallen while fighting for their country, including records and images of war memorials from around the UK http://www.roll-of-honour.com/ Roman Numeral and Date Conversion: tool for converting between Roman and Arabic numerals and dates http://www.guernsey.net/~sgibbs/roman.html SCAN: the Scottish Archive Network online catalogue, which houses information on more than 20,000 collections of historical archives throughout Scotland http://www.scan.org.uk/aboutus/indexonline.htm Scottish Archaeological Internet Reports: published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in association with the Council for British Archaeology and Historic Scotland, this site lists full archaeological excavation reports. Available free of charge (see Terms and Conditions of Use) http://www.sair.org.uk/ Scottish Book Trade Index: lists names, trades and addresses of people involved in printing in Scotland up to 1850 http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/resources/sbti/index.html Seaside History: a nostalgic look at the British seaside holiday http://www.seasidehistory.co.uk/ The Ships List: free access to over 3,000 web-pages with new databases added regularly; including immigration reports, newspaper records, shipwreck information, ship pictures, ship descriptions, shipping-line fleet lists and hundreds of passenger lists to Canada, USA, Australia and South Africa. http://www.theshipslist.com/ Sites of Memory: an informal archive of information about Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/hospitalproject/sitesofmemory/ South Wales Coalfield Collection: gives insights into the experience of the South Wales Valleys during a period of industrial turmoil, from institutional and personal perspectives. The site contains records of trade unions (notably the South Wales Miners' Federation, later the National Union of Mineworkers (South Wales Area) and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, South Wales Division), miners' institutes, co-operative societies, and individuals connected with the mining community http://www.swan.ac.uk/swcc/ Sussex Online Parish Clerks: a volunteer site offering free material for researchers: census returns, parish register transcripts, bishops’ transcripts, churchwardens’ accounts, overseers accounts, land tax records, postal directory extracts, church and village histories within Sussex http://www.sussex-opc.org/ TimeRef.com: detailed timelines contain events for years between 800 and 1547, and maps show the locations of castles, abbeys and cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales http://www.btinternet.com/~timeref/ TimeSearch: a search tool devised by Bamber Gascoigne, combining timelines from his HistoryWorld with text and image search from Google or Wikipedia. www.timesearch.info/ Tudor England: information on Kings Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Queens Jane, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Provides details of Henry VIII’s wives and biographies of important people in Tudor history, genealogical trees, chronologies, and descriptions of life and architecture in Tudor England http://www.tudorhistory.org UK Burials and Cremations: a new site which claims to be the first central database of statutory burial and cremation registers for the UK and Republic of Ireland. A unique resource for family history researchers and professional genealogists, it holds records from 1837 onwards http://www.deceasedonline.com UK National Statistics: the first port of call for all those seeking the latest statistics from government departments in the UK http://www.statisticsgov.uk/hub/index.html UK Press Online: gateway to over a million pages of the twentieth century’s biggest-selling newspapers, from 1900 to today, all as on the day they were published and all searchable by name, word or phrase http://www.ukpressonline.co.uk/ukpressonline/ Victorian and Edwardian Photographs: a personal collection by Roger Vaughan dating from 1859 to early twentieth century, especially useful for those trying to date a family photograph http://www.cartes.freeuk.com/ LOCAL HISTORY INTERNET SITES: AN UPDATE FOR 2009 235

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS): the online resource for visual arts http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/search.php Water Levels, Tides & Currents: an American site, with interest for the British visitor, giving an explanation of the basic astronomical factors which produce tides and tidal currents, as well as useful information on measuring water levels and currents http://co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/about2.html Wealden Iron Research Group: this site holds a searchable online reference for all known iron- making sites in the Weald. The data has been collected since 1968 by the Wealden Iron Research Group http://www.wirgdata.org/ The Weald of Kent, Surrey and Sussex: an online resource for the major towns in the Weald http://www.theweald.org/ Who’s Who: the definitive online directory of everyone who’s anyone in Britain, and beyond, today http://www.ukwhoswho.com/ Women as portrayed in British WWII advertising: a brief look at how women were represented in popular advertising in the wartime Britain of the 1940s http://www.cyber-heritage.co.uk/ww2women/

ON-LINE REVIEWS on the BALH Website: August 2009 In addition to the reviews published Local History Society 2008 96pp ISBN: and printed in The Local Historian, 978-0-9541485-1-5) £5.99 [reviewed by other books are reviewed on-line on the Ruth Larsen] BALH website. Please go to RAILWAY ANCESTORS A guide to the http://www.balh.co.uk/online- staff records of the railway companies of reviews.php to access this section. All England and Wales 1822-1947 David T. printed reviews are also published on our Hawkings (History Press 2008 508pp website. The list below gives the eleven ISBN 13: 978-0750950589) £20 [reviewed publications for which on-line reviews by Phillip Arnold] have been added in the last quarter. MANCHESTER The hidden history SEAL: THE HISTORY OF A PARISH Michael Nevell (History Press 2008 162pp Jean Fox, David Williams, and Peter ISBN 13 978-0752447049) £17.99 Mountfield (Phillimore 2007 ISBN 978 1 [reviewed by Ben Edwards] 86077 464 5) £20 [reviewed by Christopher Chalklin] ELLEN TOLLET OF BETLEY HALL Journals and letters from 1835 edited ROCK ART AND RITUAL Interpreting Mavis E. Smith (author 2008 254pp ISBN the Prehistoric Landscapes of the North 978 0 9538151 3) £12.50 [reviewed by York Moors Brian A. Smith and Alan A. Joan Tucker] Walker (Tempus 2008 160pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4634 9) £14.99 [reviewed by Melvyn HARD TIMES IN HEREFORDSHIRE Jones] The effect of the workhouse and the New Poor Law John Powell (Logaston Press MAPS OF THE WITHAM FENS from the 2008 x+214pp ISBN 978 1 906663 00 1) thirteenth to the nineteenth century edited £12.95 [reviewed by Sarah Boulton] R.C. Wheeler (Lincoln Record Society 2008 173pp ISSN 0267 2634) £30 RICHARD SCROPE Archbishop, rebel, [reviewed by Michael Chisholm] martyr edited P.J.P. Goldberg (Shaun Tyas 2007 x+254pp ISBN 978-1900289-849) ATHERSTONE A pleasantly placed town £35 [reviewed by John S. Lee] edited Nat Alcock and Margaret Hughes (Phillimore 2008 252pp ISBN 978 1 WOOD & INGRAM A Huntingdonshire 86077 493 5) £25 [reviewed by Ken nursery, 1742-1950 John Drake Sleath] (Cambridgeshire Gardens Trust 2008 260pp ISBN 978 0 9538542 1 9) £12 CANARY GIRLS OF CHILWELL [reviewed by Richard Gant] Maureen Rushton (Beeston and District Lionel M. Munby 1918 – 2009: an appreciation

DAVID SHORT

Lionel Munby, who succoured local history in Hertfordshire and the country for over fifty years, died peacefully on Sunday 19 April 2009. He was born in Oxford on 7 May 1918. His father was a surgeon and his mother, having read chemistry, became ‘a lady factory inspector’. After school in Oxford and at Clifton College, Bristol, he entered Hertford College where, in 1939, he took a first in modern history. It was during the 1930s that his interest in social history and politics developed and, like many intellectuals of his generation, he joined the Communist Party while at university. From August 1940 until Christmas 1945 he saw service in the Royal Artillery, mainly in Italy. Although a good officer he did not get the promotion expected of him. One day he was called into the office where he was told that it was silly that he was not being promoted just because he was a Communist. They then proceeded to put the offending pages of his service record into the fire. Promotion soon followed and he finished the war as Adjutant of Milan. It was while in the army that Lionel learnt one of the fundamentals of lecturing. On Friday afternoons all those soldiers who did not have other activities had to attend a current affairs lecture. Because of his interests Lionel was told to give one of these lectures. Afterwards he was approached by the regimental sergeant major who said: ‘Munby, I will get you for that! I normally have a good snooze on a Friday afternoon but you have kept me awake’. It was not the subject matter that had done the trick but the way the lecture was given. As Lionel told me, by continually modulating your voice, changing the tone, volume and pace, you make it difficult for people to sleep. In 1946 he was appointed to teach modern economic and social history with special reference to trade union education at the University of Cambridge’s Board of Extra- Mural Studies. In 1948 he approached the secretary of the Board and asked if there were any places where there was an unsatisfied, latent demand for local history classes. The answer was Hertfordshire. The rest, as they say, is history! Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s there was much in print on Hertfordshire, such as the Victoria County History and the calendars of the quarter sessions, which he could rely on. However there were no published aids and no method of copying documents. To the end of his lecturing days he relied on the blackboard. ‘Nothing to go wrong’, he said. Furthermore, he was only familiar with printed nineteenth-century sources and had no experience of using original documents—so he taught himself. He also encouraged his class members to work on such documents, a method encouraged by the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). One suspects that lecturer and students learnt together. Getting students actively involved in their learning was an approach being taken up by other historians, many with communist credentials such as John Morris, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. These historians also rejected the traditional view that history is about the rulers and upper classes and they started looking at history from below, at the lives of ordinary people. So for Lionel documents should be read, strange handwriting deciphered, maps studied and fields walked. But this activity had

236 © British Association for Local History 2009 LIONEL M. MUNBY 1918-2009: AN APPRECIATION 237 to lead somewhere and that meant writing local history. Many will be familiar with Lionel's duplicated foolscap sheets containing analysis of census returns, militia lists, wills, inventories, and more. In some cases, as at Harpenden and Hatfield, this led to books being published. Indeed, much of what was published on Hertfordshire local history in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s owe its inspiration and editing to Lionel. Some of these classes led to the founding of local history societies, such as those in Bishop’s Stortford and Harpenden. The Hertfordshire Association for Local History benefited from his ideas, knowledge, wisdom, energy and foresight; all of which has made us, as people, the richer. He was on the committee from 1955 to 1987, the last five years as chairman, and for two years after that was president. Lionel was the inspiration and first secretary of the Hertfordshire Record Society which published its first volume in 1985 and has continued to produce one volume a year since. Lionel was never confined to Hertfordshire. He taught courses in twentieth-century social history at Madingley as well as playing a major role in local history nationally. For twenty years from 1955 he was the editor of what was initially called The Amateur Historian, the title of which he soon changed to The Local Historian—a change indicative of Lionel’s thinking. As local history became more popular the debate about professional and amateur local historians grew. He appreciated that there were people who did not make their living from local history but who had something to say that was relevant, important, well-written and a positive contribution to our historical knowledge. At the same time the standard of the journal was such that academics also valued it. He was also involved in the Standing Conference for Local History and the British Association for Local History of which he later became president. Lionel wrote a number of books which have become standard works for local historians in Hertfordshire and beyond. His The Hertfordshire Landscape is considered a classic while some of his other works, such as Hertfordshire Population Statistics 1563-1801, Tudor and Stuart Handwriting and How Much is that Worth? are a must on a local historian's bookshelves. He contributed to many British journals including Archives, Adult Education, Cambridge Review, and History of Education Society Bulletin. There were also articles in academic journals in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Norway and the USSR. One cannot write about Lionel without mentioning Diana. For years she accompanied Lionel to his classes. A tribute was paid by a young foreign student at one of Lionel's lectures. When another student asked who was the lady at the back of the class he replied, ‘Oh that is Mr Munby's wife’. But a different light was shed when he went on to say that ‘she is there to see that he gets it right’. Many of us are indebted to Lionel and Diana not only for their inspiration but also for their friendship and great kindness. We have spent time in their home in Cambridge enjoying a glass of sherry and a meal while talking local history, world events, and politics. They have listened to our woes and offered and given support in times of need. We will miss Lionel but we send our love and sympathy to Diana. An unlikely revolutionary: Margaret Gelling 1924-2009

ALAN CROSBY

Margaret Gelling, the greatest authority on English place-names in the second half of the twentieth century, died aged 84 on 24 April 2009. She was a revolutionary, who not only transformed her own specialised subject in a technical sense—the highly esoteric linguistic and interpretational studies of elements and names—but also dramatically altered its relevance. Under her authoritative guidance, English place-name studies (and, indeed, those beyond England) ceased to be one of those arcane byways only accessible to, and of interest to, a tiny group of individuals, and instead emerged as an exciting source of evidence for a wide range of historical, geographical and landscape studies. That she wrote best-selling popular books on a subject which only thirty years before would have seemed the ultimate in obscurity is a tribute not only to her powers as a writer and teacher, but also to her vision for making place-names relevant. She was born in Cheadle, Cheshire, and was always proud to acknowledge her north- western heritage (though her accent was impeccably RP, perhaps because her family moved to Sidcup when she was a small girl). After reading English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (‘a waste of time’, as she pungently noted) she took a job as research assistant to the English Place-Name Society in 1946. The Society, hidebound by tradition and dominated by lordly figures such as Sir Frank Stenton, had a distinctly unrevolutionary quality—obsessed, as she later observed, by patrician place-names and those of peoples and rulers, really not interested in the topographical ones which were, and are, by far the majority, and which reflect the names given by ordinary folk to the landscape features with which they were intimately acquainted. To those infinitely varied and extraordinarily subtle names she turned her attention, quickly appreciating the remarkable sophistication of naming processes whose peasant origins belied their complexity and grace—forty different words for a hill, according to fine variants in shape and form; many alternative terms for woodland, depending on density, size, location, quality, and condition; specialised terms for land which floods, or land which is always damp, or land which floods but drains quickly, or land which floods but is overgrown with brushwood … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. Her specialist work bore fruit in a series of the definitive county volumes published by the English Place-Name Society (the Oxfordshire survey, completed in 1954; Berkshire in 1976; and , which is still in progress). Comparing these, ever richer and ever broader in their scope, with the routine and often very abbreviated pre-war equivalents, highlights the way the evolution of her work expanded the subject. But

238 © British Association for Local History 2009 AN UNLIKELY REVOLUTIONATY: MARGARET GELLING 1924-2009 239 she also began to see the excitement of place-names and their study as a key to unlocking the process of history itself—the nature of Anglo-Saxon settlement, the application of place-name expertise to the analysis of charters and boundaries, the establishing of chronologies and spatial patterns of settlement and landscape change, and the complex political and ecclesiastical geographies of the early Middle Ages. Her work inspired many followers, bringing this dimension to a multitude of local and regional history research topics and projects. In the 1970s, as she undertook extensive continuing education and extra-mural teaching, and brought her knowledge to wider and less specialised audiences, she began to conceive a series of books which would explain these complex ideas in an accessible way. Not over-simplifying the technical aspects, but sweeping away myth and misunderstanding, and highlighting the wonderful linguistic and verbal dexterity of our forebears, books such as Signposts to the past: place-names in the history of England (1978) and Place-names in the landscape (1984) became standard texts, place-name bibles for local and regional historians. With the geographer Ann Cole she then wrote The landscape of place-names (2000), the third of a great trilogy. Margaret was a remarkable woman. She never held a formal academic post (and her job with the EPNS ended in 1953). Thereafter she was liberated from the constraints of employment, and could realise her full potential. She married the archaeologist Peter Gelling in 1952, moved with him to Birmingham where she lived for the rest of her life, and with him travelled the world—the woman who teased out the minutiae of meanings for fens and forests in Anglo-Saxon England was no less adept at cooking potatoes over a llama dung fire high in the Peruvian Andes. Appointed an OBE in 1995, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998—the highest academic distinction in this country, and a remarkable achievement for one who was largely outside the world of universities. Like Lionel Munby, who died a week before her and whose appreciation is also in this issue, she was a longstanding member of the Communist Party, and relished political argument. Her demeanour might, in her own words, have been ‘prissy’, and she was neat, precisely-spoken, and conservatively-dressed, but she had strong passions and enthusiasms. Her work was meticulous, as was her lecturing style (though she never entirely mastered the art of good photography—I remember a lecture in which slides of landscape features were shown, distant hills like little pimples, shrouded in dark cloud on a rainy day, so that the subtlety of shape was entirely unapparent). She was unhesitant in countering the interpretations of anybody who she felt was mistaken in place-name analysis—but she was also very humble, willing and grateful to be corrected if the opponent could produce satisfactory evidence. Margaret Gelling was not an obvious revolutionary, but her work revolutionised her subject. For more than half a century local historians, among many others, have benefited from her assiduous and imaginative approach to place-names, their meaning, their significance and their implications. Over the years she contributed nine articles to The Local Historian, among them (in the second issue, back in October 1952) ‘Place-names as clues to history’. There she wrote that ‘One likes to know what a name means simply for the sake of knowing. The subject is also, however, one which has important contributions to make to the study of history and language’. She dedicated the next fifty years and more to making that her own very special contribution to our historical understanding. Telling it how it was? Three recently- published diaries reviewed

KATE TILLER

THE BOUSFIELD DIARIES A middle-class family in late Victorian Bedford edited Richard Smart (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society/Boydell vol.86 2007 xxxii+233pp ISBN 978 0 85155 072 5) £25; EARLY VICTORIAN SQUARSON The diaries of William Cotton Risley, vicar of Deddington 1835-1848 selected by Geoffrey Smedley-Stevenson (Banbury Historical Society/Robert Boyd Publications vol.29 276pp 2007 ISBN 978 1 899536 84 9) £15; THE SOUTHWOLD DIARY OF JAMES MAGGS 1818-1876 edited Alan Bottomley (Suffolk Record Society/Boydell 2007 x+149pp, iii+183pp ISBN 978 1 84383 327 7) £17.99 Diaries raise heightened expectations in historians. Here is the possibility of a direct line to the past, of a source which will offer perspectives and knowledge otherwise unknown and with an immediacy and frankness not to be found in the official record. Everything may be there—great events or details of day-to-day life, private and family experience, witting or unwitting statements of intent, motivation and attitude. Equally, expectations may be tempered by encounters with the mundane and repetitive, the self-conscious or self-justificatory, and historical antennae will need to be sensitised for the partisan, the partial and the revealingly subjective. Motivations to write a diary have been myriad, from routine record, aide-memoire, description, confessional, personal discipline, and contemporary fashion to escape. Historians will always hope for a good read, but will need to marry this to the key questions of who wrote the diary, why and for what readership. The three contrasting, nineteenth-century diaries reviewed here clearly illustrate these crucial aspects. Charlotte Bousfield began her diary in 1878, at the age of 49 and at the time of her silver wedding. Hers was a long life—she lived from 1828 to 1933—and the volumes published here (three of four she wrote, abridged to around one-third of their original length) cover eighteen of those years. Her life was thoughtful and controlled, deeply-rooted in Victorian middle-class mentality, and the encompassing picture of that way of life and thinking makes this diary particularly valuable. It was an urban and provincial existence, centrally influenced by Protestant Nonconformity and a belief in the ‘restraining power’ of religion and the need for a life of ‘active duty’. This produced clear motives for keeping a diary, as an act of remembrance, reflection and recollection (this last for her five surviving children). Charlotte realised that this drew her to ‘chronicling ideas rather than facts’, something which adds much for the modern historian. Although this was not a contemporaneous record, written daily as events happened, there was considerable self-discipline: ‘I must be strictly truthful’, she wrote. This edition is greatly enhanced by an exemplary introduction which, with the footnoting of entries, takes on the necessary task of recreating the contexts—of family, household, workplace, chapel, town and wider travels—which would have been automatically invoked in the minds of the diarist and her grown-up children as they looked at the entries. We discover the mature life of a woman clearly marked by earlier influences. Charlotte was the daughter of a Congregational minister, one of seven siblings, five of whom had

240 © British Association for Local History 2009 TELLING IT HOW IT WAS? 241 died by the time she was 35. She found a living at 16 as a governess, and met her husband when she was teaching at a seminary for young ladies, he being a son of the Methodist proprietors. Life centred on making a way in the world, with respectability and, ideally, independence. However, Edward Bousfield was caught up in the failure of a family ironmongery business, necessitating a fresh start, moving in 1858 to Bedford and the burgeoning Britannia Iron Works (which by 1881 employed 650 men and boys). There he had to reconcile himself to being (in his wife’s words) ‘a servant instead of a Master’. He rose to be works manager, travelling internationally, developing products and patents. They lived in a large, modern villa, with three indoor servants and one non-resident, and had three sons and three daughters, one of whom died aged three, to the lifelong grief of her mother, as she confided to her diary. One son became a lawyer and MP, another a doctor. They remained stalwart Nonconformists, beginning Wesleyan worship for the newly-developed area of Bedford in their own new home, Alpha Villa. In 1873 they were instrumental in the building of a chapel opposite. Edward became circuit steward, and Charlotte ran Mothers’ Meetings and Sunday Schools, and visited and worked for the poor and deprived. Life was not unruffled. Charlotte was clearly a strong woman, made—by her experience and surrounding culture—fiercely respectable and craving security, yet far from subdued by domestic convention. This strength sometimes brought fallings out within the chapel, and is also reflected in the national role she played in the British Women’s Temperance Association, travelling to speak and for meetings throughout the country. She had clear views on political issues like Free Trade, and on religious controversies, including High Church Anglicanism. Her Nonconformist Liberalism and admiration for Gladstone was tempered only by her concerns about his Churchmanship and support for Home Rule, which she believed would result in a Romish Ireland. She clearly felt the excitement of the times, with the coming of the telephone, phonograph, electric light and internal combustion engine, and communication and contacts were rapid and wide. Unwittingly the diaries show the degree of her class consciousness. The servants, the needy working classes, and the sad female inebriates for whom she set up a home in London, are objects of her efforts but never come across as individual or fellow beings. The diary does include some admissions of doubt about her own worth or views, not least the inter-generational gap with her increasingly independent children. ’Am ‘I’, as I am sure my children think me, narrow-minded, strait laced & puritanical? Or do I so love my Lord and Master as to desire in all I do to serve & please Him? I do trust the latter is the case’, she mused on 18 January 1882. That ‘our temporal prosperity’ and ‘usefulness as Christians’ were the twin poles of her life is clear from a diary which is a valuable addition to local history and many other fields of nineteenth-century studies. Anglican clergymen have provided some of the best-known diaries, from Josselin to Cole, Woodforde, Skinner and Kilvert. William Risley’s diary is a welcome addition to the genre. This book is the first part of a selection from 33 volumes covering 39 years, perhaps 15 per cent of the whole. As vicar of Deddington in north Oxfordshire, Risley played a ubiquitous part in the life of this large village and its surrounding area, a position which gives his record a particularly wide-ranging value. It is noticeable that he stopped writing his diary on holiday, taking a break from the ‘duty of diarising’. This suggests an assiduous but rather impersonal motivation, probably reflected in the down-to-earth but firmly non-reflective content of the contemporaneous entries, with a pithy but wide coverage—the meticulous indexing includes a subject index of twenty pages. Risley remained a rural parson of the ancien regime, a member of a clerical dynasty, involved in landowning (with estates and votes in five counties), practical farming and employment (active in agricultural associations and shows), politics 242 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

(unashamedly Conservative), shooting and fishing (although not hunting), a magistrate for 36 years, and on dining and visiting terms with the local elite. He clung to this increasingly challenged role despite the pressures of reform, Dissent, and Chartism, all of which feature in the diary. It is particularly interesting to see how this establishment figure reacted to life in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1836, on 5 November, a notoriously volatile date, he heard cases of turnip- and walnut-stealing at the local inn and then ‘Endeavoured to stop the Bonfire from taking place in the middle of the town … a boy named John Gibbs was very impudent … I gave him a backhanded slap of the face’. Deddington’s celebrations of Queen Victoria’s coronation in June 1838 were more harmonious, but Risley’s description of the carefully ordered and separated elements of the event shows a man whose world was divided into two clearly identifiable parts, ‘the respectable Inhabitants (with 3 exceptions only)’ and ‘considerably more than 600 poor with their families’ who were regaled with roast beef, plum puddings, ale, tobacco, bands and fireworks. Although the Poor Law had been radically reformed four years before this account, the diary has many examples of the continued assumption of local responsibility and control of the poor, whether through charity, control of employment and housing, or continuing use of the vestry and rating systems. This is just one aspect of social history for which the local evidence of the diary is valuable. Perhaps it also supports the assumption of the title given to the volume, that is that Risley exercised the role of ‘squarson’. In fact the diary contains many hints that the territory was more contested, and it is interesting to note that Deddington featured in mid-nineteenth century parliamentary investigations as a distinctly open village without dominant property ownership, social leadership or Anglican dominance. A third diary takes us to a very different place, Southwold on the Suffolk coast. The present paperback edition brings together two volumes of the diaries of James Maggs (previously published in 1983 and 1984) with a consolidated index. The diarist (1797- 1890) began his record and married in 1818, at the age of 21. Life was harsh. The son of an innkeeper, who died when James was two, Maggs was one of ten children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. He was lame and unable to go to sea, and so turned to schoolteaching and scribing, moving to Southwold in 1817. He fathered 12 children, five sons all dead by the age of 28, and seven daughters, five of whom survived. He got by, as the diary’s editor sums it up, by becoming ‘the complete borough factotum’. In this small, unreformed, working town of coastal trading and fishing, with its life as a genteel resort only beginning to develop, Maggs was coroner (until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835), auctioneer, lodging house keeper, surveyor, secretary to the dispensary and to seven friendly societies, overseer of the poor and census enumerator. He must have known a great deal of what was going on in the town but, unlike our earlier diarists, did not involve himself in politics, and did not use his diary to reflect or comment. Rather this is the terse raw material of local history, a record and report, in some years supplemented by news cuttings, concerned with his world of trades, businesses and local organisations. Deaths feature prominently—by accident and suicide, and by the forces of the elements always so near in this coastal place. All three of these diaries have been fortunately preserved, by family or local societies, and are now published by local record societies. May there be many more such well- edited publications. They entertain us, but also challenge us to understand the people and the places of which they are evidence. They demonstrate again the fascination and particular value of such sources for general and local historians alike. KATE TILLER is Reader Emerita in English Local History, University of Oxford, a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow in English Local History at the University of Leicester. She edited The Local Historian from 1983 to 1988. Review article: local history and war

EVELYN LORD

War is a recurring theme of the twentieth century. The First World War is slipping from living memory, but its icons remain—lists of names on war memorials, rows of white crosses in France and Flanders, the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the novels of Richard Addison, Henri Barbusse and Robert Graves which recreate the horror of the trenches and the daily threat of instant death. The Second World War is within the recollection of many local historians, and its remains still speckle the landscape: pillboxes, concrete tank traps, the silent bunkers at Bawdsey in Suffolk, the barbed wire blocking the Canadian Road in Surrey, even the Mulberry Harbours still decaying on the beach at Arromanches. Since the end of the Second World War Britain has often been engaged in war, so that the economy of conflict and the engagements of arms are an ever-present reminder of its sacrifices and needless loss of life. And of course war, and the experience of conflict, stretches back over the centuries, a constant backcloth to the lives of communities, families and individuals. Historians write about war on many different levels, some referring to it as part of much broader analyses, others homing in on specific detail and specialised topics. Military historians cover the campaigns, the weaponry used, and the history of individual regiments. Family historians research the military careers of their ancestors, social historians discuss life on the Home Front or in occupied territories, while archaeologists and landscape historians create typologies of the artefacts of war. The books reviewed here deal both with the general and the particular. We begin with the eighteenth century, and a biography of General George Wade, a man who struck fear into the hearts of Jacobite rebels and whose actions altered the landscape of Scotland for ever. Wade was born in 1673, and the book traces his life and career, from his early years, via joining the Earl of Bath’s Regiment in 1690, to his failure to check Jacobite progress in 1745. Between these dates he had an illustrious military record, which included disarming the clans after the 1715 rebellion, but he is chiefly remembered for the roads and bridges he subsequently built across the Scottish Highlands. A great deal of research went into behind this book, and there are copious quotations. Unfortunately, none is adequately referenced, the book lacks an index, and the quality of the illustrations leaves much to be desired. But it provides a good chronology of Wade’s live and the events that affected it. From war in the eighteenth century we nearer to our own time, and an account by Philip Spinks of the 1/1 Warwickshire Royal Horse Artillery. Brooke’s Battery, as it was known, was founded in 1908 by volunteers. Spinks describes their training programmes and their mobilisation in 1914. They sailed for France on 30 October 1914. Sixty men died there, and a roll of honour is included. This is a well-written and well-referenced book, which might have benefited from more information about the background of the volunteers. In Britain the First World War marked a new level of direct engagement among civilians on the Home Front—and at the beginning of 1915

243 © British Association for Local History 2009 244 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

Germany launched the first strategic bombing campaign. In Search of the Zeppelin War by Neil Faulkner and Nadia Durrani is one of a growing number of publications on the archaeology of warfare. Based on the excavation of crash sites, contemporary accounts, and photographs the book discusses the artefacts recovered and includes a survey of defensive sites. Defending Britain, Twentieth Century Defensive Structures in the Landscape and Pill-Boxes of Britain and Ireland, both by Mike Osborne, continue the theme of war and landscape archaeology. Pill-boxes has a comprehensive typology of all the known pill-boxes, based on shapes and measurements, while Defending Britain describes aerial, coastal and inland defensive structures in detail, explaining their use, and how they can be recognised in the landscape today. These two books are valuable reference tools for the landscape historian. Books on defensive and anti-invasion sites are also appearing on a regional basis. Chris Butler takes the long view of anti-invasion sites in West Sussex from 1500-1990, placing the sites in their historical context and providing a descriptive gazetteer. Defended England 1940 is part of a regional series on Second World War defensive sites. A volume by William Foot covers the South West, Midlands and North. Directions on how to find sites are accompanied by the author’s personal reflections on what it must have been like for those manning the sites against the enemy. This addition makes this a beautifully-written and evocative book. The role of individuals in military service also appears in Departed Warriors: the story of a family at war, written by Jerry Murland with his granddaughter in mind, and as a tribute to the young men who served their country. All fourteen men described were related to Murland’s granddaughter in some way. This is family history with a difference. Finally we consider two books on the Home Front in the Second World War. Wadhurst in the Second World War, Life in a Wealden Market Town is a collection of essays based on reminiscences, parish magazines, documentary and archaeological research, interspersed with the accounts of conversations with local people. It gives an in-depth picture of life during the war as seen through the eyes of the ordinary people who experienced it, and is an excellent example of a co-operative local history project. An essential force in the Second World War was the Women’s Land Army. Stuart Antrobus discusses their role in Bedfordshire in detail. After placing the WLA in its historical context, and its organisation in Bedfordshire, it gives personal accounts of what it was like to be a land-girl. It is clear from the book’s sub-title that they ‘wouldn’t have missed it for the world’, but this raises the question of whether selective memory is at work: have the unpleasant elements been filtered out? Similarly, the photographs of the smiling land-girls in this and the Wadhurst book seem posed and perhaps do not tell the whole story. The roll-call of Bedfordshire land-girls will be a tool for local historians of the future, and the inclusion of a list of the members of the infamous County War Agricultural Executive will be of use to those working on agriculture in the Second World War and the National Farm Survey. Although none of these books celebrates war, none really gets to grips with its effects on all sections of society; of deprivation, fear and loss, the terror of air raids and the psychological effect on the military and civilians of the daily expectation of dying. Reports from across the world remind us each day that war is terrible and should be prevented at all costs. THE WOMEN’S LAND ARMY IN BEDFORDSHIRE 1939-1950 S. Antrobus (Book Castle 2008 xv+304pp ISBN 978 1 903747 93 3) £16.99 WEST SUSSEX UNDER ATTACK Anti-invasion sites 1500-1990 C. Butler (Tempus 2008 160pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4171 9) £15.99 REVIEW ARTICLE: LOCAL HISTORY AND WAR 245

GENERAL GEORGE WADE 1673-1748 D. Chauntry (Arthur H. Stockwell 2008 259pp ISBN 978 0 7223 3917 6) £13.99 IN SEARCH OF THE ZEPPELIN WAR The archaeology of the first Blitz N. Faulkner and N. Durrani (Tempus 2008 155pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4182 5) £17.99 DEFENDED ENGLAND 1940 The South West, Midlands and North W. Foot (History Press 2008 223pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4786 5) £25 DEPARTED WARRIORS The story of a family at war J. Murland (Troubadour 2008 xii+311pp ISBN 978 1906510 701) DEFENDING BRITAIN Twentieth-century military structures in the landscape M. Osborne (Tempus 2004 287pp ISBN 0 7524 3134 X) £19.99 PILL-BOXES OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND M. Osborne (Tempus 2008 317pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4329 4) £19.99 BROOKE’S BATTERY A history of 1/1 Warwickshire Royal Horse Artillery 1908-1919 Philip Spinks (Brewin 2008 ix+62pp ISBN 978 185858 4225) £6.95 WADHURST IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Life in a Wealden market town 1939- 1945 (Wadhurst History Society 2008 viii+317pp ISBN 978 0 9545802 85) £12

‘Brooke’s Battery marching along Newbold Terrace, towards the Parade, Leamington Spa, c.1912’ (photo. from the Leamington Spa Courier 29 November 1985, courtesey of the editor) [from Philip Spinks, Brooke’s Battery: a history of 1/1 Warwickshire Royal Horse Artillery 1908-1919] A review of books on landscape archaeology and landscape history

GRAHAM WINTON

Tom Williamson, in another excellent book from Windgather Press, has produced a coherent and very readable study of the important Anglo Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo. He writes from the perspective of a landscape historian, but the book has much to offer local historians. This is not yet another account of the archaeology of the famous Anglo Saxon burial mounds, but rather asks why were they located on the high ground overlooking the estuary of the river Deben in south east Suffolk, a rather remote corner of the East Anglian kingdom of the Wuffingas. It examines the geographical context of the cemetery, looking at the position of the monuments in the landscape and how that landscape has changed over time. The expert use of a variety of sources and methods enables us to understand this evolving landscape, making the book relevant to studies of local and regional geography, Anglo Saxon history, place-names, maps and archive material, and approaches to past landscapes. Chapter 1 is an excellent précis of the current state of knowledge and debate on the cemeteries and the dynasty of the Wuffingas. Chapters 2 and 3 are masterly surveys of how to study and recreate past landscapes. In the final two chapters Williamson speculates on how the evidence might be interpreted, suggesting ways in which we might think about relationships between landscape, burial and social change. He suggests that to understand the motivations and attitudes of the people who chose to bury their dead at Sutton Hoo, we must reconstruct their experience of the landscape. Interpretations of the cemetery’s location in terms of its role as a statement of power and domination are, he argues, simplistic. The choice of site had far more to do with contemporary religious beliefs and emotional attitudes, which in turn grew out of the character of the local environment. Other approaches explore the cemetery’s wider context, as part of a collection of local places associated with the Wuffingas. In explaining how the Wuffingas from this district came to dominate a large area of eastern England, he examines how patterns of movement, contact and social allegiance in sixth and seventh century England were shaped by landforms and topography, at regional and national levels. By combining aspects of ‘phenomenological’ approaches to the archaeology of landscape, (‘getting inside the heads’ of people in the past) with more traditional geographical perspectives, we can fully appreciate the significance of this very special place. In conclusion, Williamson suggests that the Sutton Hoo burials were positioned not to ensure that they could be viewed from the river Deben, but so that the river could be seen from them. The ‘Wuffingas’ river’ had a significant impact on the local inhabitants; ‘a folk deeply rooted in their local landscape’. Another Anglo-Saxon folk, relatively little appreciated, are the people of Lindsey, the small kingdom, never powerful, between the southern shore of the Humber and Lincoln. This ‘lost kingdom’ has a rich collection of legends and myths and a treasure trove of previously overlooked history and artefacts. In his new book on its archaeology Kevin Leahy suggests that it was ‘usually the grist between the grindstones of larger more powerful neighbours’. He gathers the evidence for this lost and neglected kingdom, allowing it to emerge from its own its dark ages to be considered as one of the last Romano-British strongholds; even suggesting it could have been the home of King Arthur. There are few surviving written records of the early history, reflecting the kingdom’s isolation and the failure of its leaders to make any political impact. It was subsumed into Mercia in 679. Leahy draws on the evidence of settlements, cemeteries,

246 © British Association for Local History 2009 A REVIEW OF BOOKS ON LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY 247 churches, artefacts, coins and place-names to chart the Anglo Saxon takeover of one of the richest areas of Roman Britain. Using archaeological evidence not seen before he takes us from the Roman period into the flourishing Christian culture of the eighth and ninth centuries and then to the Viking incursions of 877, looking at life and death in the North Midlands. This well-structured book begins with a section on the land of Lindsey, its boundaries, geography, and environment in the Saxon period. The chapters on the foundations of the kingdom, including the late Roman background, are of particular interest as there is no documentary record of any event in Lindsey between 314 and the mission of St Paulinus in 628, the crucial years that saw the transition from Roman province to Anglo Saxon kingdom. The evidence for the end of Roman Lindsey suggests a complicated process that cannot be seen in the simple terms of an Anglo-Saxon invasion. Fourth-century buckles and Saxon Shore-type fortifications intriguingly located inland suggest that Lindsey had a competent Romano-British population, and Leahy provides compelling evidence for British survival. What of the claim for Arthur being king of Lindsey? Leahy believes his evidence supports the possibility that the Arthurian legends are best placed not in Wales or Cornwall, but Lincolnshire. He draws on the writings of Nennius (from about 830) and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, finished about 1136, which refer to Vortigern giving many lands to Hengist and his followers in the neighbourhood of Lindsey. He is cautious in his claims, seeing the Arthurian legends as a composite, set in a political and military situation brought about by the collapse of Roman control. He postulates that this situation existed in Lindsey, since Arthur might have struggled even to find Saxons to fight in Wales and the West. This book is full of valuable material and is an excellent example of how to interpret the archaeological and written sources to recreate a local history. The Nene Valley and East Midlands have long been recognised as having major importance within the Roman province of Britannia, but no comprehensive study has ever been published. A new volume by Stephen Upex claims to unravel the complex history of this fascinating area from the Iron Age to the decline associated with the end of Roman rule in Britain and the advent of Saxon occupation. The title, The Romans in the East of England is misleading, for this is really in the East Midlands, while Eastern England is a much wider area than the lower Nene Valley. It is an excellent study of the valleys of the Nene and Welland, but anyone expecting a wider exploration of the eastern counties will be disappointed. This book has been some 25 years in the writing and summarises the excavation and survey work ongoing in the lower Nene valley for all of this time and longer. One cannot question Upex’s knowledge and understanding of the area and its archaeology. All the important sites are covered, with excellent diagrams, photographs and supporting notes. It makes a useful companion to the 2006 Tempus publication on Durobrivae by Fincham, with much of the same material but different key questions—did the Fens function as an imperial estate, what was the purpose of the Car Dyke? The concluding chapter, on the end of Roman occupation, provides all the evidence from the important sites such as Castor, Durobrivae, Cotterstock, and Apethorpe. It is good as far as it goes, but lacks material and discussion for the broader eastern region. For anyone interested in this period, and this area, the book is to be recommended—though it may not be of great value to the most local historians. A book by Richard Tabor on the South Cadbury hillfort in Somerset is a welcome addition to our understanding of hillforts, their origins, developments, use and place in the broader landscape. It draws on the work of the South Cadbury Environs Project, an extensive 1992-2000 study of the region charting its development from the Early Neolithic to the present day. Tabor gives a well-illustrated, thoughtful commentary on how different research objectives; techniques and sampling in archaeology affected the type of discoveries made, how they were analysed and consequently how the distant past of Cadbury Castle and its environs are understood. He provides a useful insight into the history of the site and its landscape, and a good guide to the archaeological approach. It should be read alongside the earlier work of Leslie Alcock (1966- 1970) and his well-known 1972 book By South Cadbury is that Camelot and the excavations by Barry Cunliffe at Danebury hillfort (from 1969) and the subsequent Danebury Environs Project published in 2000. 248 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

Tabor asks whether hillforts exist, and follows this with informative background discussion of the different types and of other contemporary structures. The evidence suggests that Cadbury hillfort has been a historical focus within a broader landscape since the Neolithic period—a defensive stronghold in times of war and a place for communities to meet in times of peace. The hillfort and its environs have provided an abundance of archaeological evidence, including the first building known to have been used for bronze casting in the Bronze Age, and the magnificent ‘dark age’ defences of the second half of the fifth century AD, perhaps the largest engineering project of the period in Britain. Archaeology provides a window onto the culture and social organisation of the area’s successive inhabitants, but even so much mystery still surrounds the region, with academic dispute as to the original purpose of the castle and whether there is any truth in the associations with the legendary Arthur. The book amply achieves one of its aims, showing what can be achieved by a group of amateur enthusiasts who, with training and experience, can become skilled practitioners producing high quality results. In the medieval period, the deer park was a key landscape element. Several papers presented at a conference at Sheffield Hallam University in 2007 have been published in a book on the history, ecology and archaeology of medieval parks and parklands. For many local historians the deer park is a significant feature in understanding how our local landscapes were developed and used. It is usually associated with hunting and played an important role in the psyche of Britain’s medieval aristocracy; a separate place for recreation or specialised activity. Yet in the early fourteenth century, when parks occupied their greatest spatial extent, a mere 2 per cent of England was imparked. The perception and function of parks changed through time with, for example, the emergence of the ‘little park’. Parks were eventually perceived more as gardens, the visual image changing with the development of park lodges and approaches to noble residences. Parks remaining today often support high levels of biodiversity, and are of considerable ecological importance. There are probably more deer in the English landscape now than for many centuries, and their conservation and management, and that of the countryside they inhabit, is of particular interest and concern within our contemporary landscapes. This book offers a comprehensive reappraisal of parks, using a diversity of landscape-based approaches to assesses their medieval economy, social role and historical ecology. The first part, ‘Approaches to the Medieval Park’, examines a series of conceptual issues concerning the place of parkland within the medieval countryside. ‘Parks in the Landscape’ is a series of case-studies, offering insights into particular problems or giving informed accounts of park development in specific areas. The contributors challenge many of our preconceptions, emphasising that parks did not follow a standardised design but varied considerably across England, as illustrated in examples from Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Cumbria. The papers highlight the multiplicity of uses to which parks were put during the Middle Ages. They were not simply backdrops to noble residences and had many functions other than deer management and hunting—their wider role in the rural economy included grazing, timber production, arable farming and industry. More recently their role as places of recreation and contemplation, and visual delight, has been a focus for research. Parks had a social function, demonstrating seigniorial control of the landscape. Imparkment often required the extinction of existing rights over considerable areas of countryside. Parks, like wood pasture and wooded commons, are part of a suite of landscape types that mix trees and grazing animals, a key element in modern conservation. For any local historian interested in parks, this book is essential and excellent reading. Less obviously part of the landscape were saints. In his new book on the subject Graham Jones suggests that much of the history of Britain’s homesteads, villages, towns and regions is bound up in the identities of the patron saints chosen for the churches, chapels, altars, festivals, fairs and landscape features. He argues that even the most popular cults, beginning with devotion to Mary, have geographical patterns which may be explained as the result of deliberate choices made by local people. The book uses case-studies to show how the choice of patrons helped individuals and communities to make sense of themselves, their surroundings and the circling seasons of the agrarian year. From the purpose and potency of dedications, and how best to A REVIEW OF BOOKS ON LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY 249 study them, the focus of the book moves on to the calendar, religious conversion, places of worship, healing and pilgrimage and to sacred landscapes. The publisher claims that this original and engagingly written book is aimed at anyone interested in the history of their town or village, while the author states that it offers an introduction to some ground-breaking ideas and approaches which are reinvigorating a much- needed topic. Such claims are somewhat exaggerated. There is a huge amount of information in the book but it reads very much like a PhD thesis reduced to a publisher’s word-limit. It is ambitious in scope, examining as its central thesis the meaning behind Christian saintly dedications through out Britain, from the late Roman period until the nineteenth century. Why are churches and other devotional places attributed to particular saints, and what do these choices reveal about the social context within which they occurred? Jones refers to ‘orthodox worshippers’ and claims that although in the High Middle Ages the views of the bishops are likely to have been decisive in the choice of patron saint, he will have paid careful attention to the wishes of influential individuals, particularly those providing funds, and above all the populace with its multifarious concerns. But who were these orthodox worshippers and who made up the ‘populace’? Is he suggesting that peasants had a say in the commissioning of churches, purchasing relics and general investment in images and fittings? These bold statements raise important questions if we are to understand what dedications meant to the ‘local people’, but sadly we are not provided with the answers. However, the book and its related electronic resource database bring together an enormous quantity of documentary evidence, which will be a useful reference point for local historians. Another book published by Tempus considers monuments in the landscape. They come in many forms, ranging from the marble-built remains of Classical Greece to the megalithic tombs or ‘squatter’ houses of the Welsh uplands. While many of these remains are visually striking and have often been studied as entities in their own right, the relatively recent development of landscape archaeology has made a significant contribution to how these monuments are perceived, particularly emphasising their place and history within the surrounding landscape. Paul Rainbird has compiled 21 studies by noted scholars taking a fresh approach to monuments of diverse eras. The prehistoric period is covered in surveys of southern England, Yorkshire, Wales and Portugal. Roman-British remains are considered from Salisbury Plain, County Durham and East Anglia, while accounts of the medieval period range from forts in Wales to upland France. The post-medieval and modern periods take us from the Scottish highlands and islands to the Peak District and Sicily. Connecting all of these reports is an appreciation of the archaeological signatures on the landscape as monuments of human endeavour. Rainbird discusses the concept of monuments and ‘contested space’, places such as Stonehenge where alternative interpretations vie with one another for public attention and the recognition of various interest groups. Helen Chapman Davey has written a book which investigates many aspects of the history and archaeology of water, including prehistoric ritual and symbolism, early technology and water- powered industries, wells and well- sinking, the phenomenon of the spa, gradual improvements in drinking and domestic water provision, sanitation and sewerage, canals and water towers. There is some very interesting material in this wide-ranging book—for example, the chapter on waste water, sanitation, sewage and sewerage, although concentrating on developments in the London area, is of particular interest in revealing the scale of the work undertaken and problems of co-ordination. However the title, ‘The Archaeology of Water’, is misleading, This is a history rather than an archaeological study and it concentrates too heavily on examples from the south of England known to the author. Some sections are very general: ‘Canals and Navigation’ begins with a very brief introduction to eighteenth century canal development before concentrating on Guilford and Surrey. This section also highlights another shortcoming of the book: it lacks plans, maps and diagrams to support the text, although there are some excellent illustrations. By the tenth chapter the structure has disintegrated and the book has become a list, including as many topics as possible (the final section is entitled ‘A Few Final Snippets’). Discussion of dams, weirs and fishponds occupies less than two pages and questions might be asked about some of the 250 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 statements made by the author (‘the religious communities were the greatest consumers of fish in the medieval period’). The section on ornamental waters fails to mention any recent archaeological work on designed medieval landscapes, on the Tudor or Stuart periods, and on the importance of water features in approaches to the main residence, parks and gardens. No reference is made to the Dutch influence of water use in garden design and for the whole of the Georgian period, about 135 years, only is Brown is mentioned, and then only in passing. The prehistoric sections are weak and very little space is given to the archaeology of water worldwide, especially in relation to other faiths—although the author does provide snippets of evidence and photographs from her travels in France. This is a disappointing book that claims much more than it delivers.

Publications reviewed in this article SUTTON HOO AND ITS LANDSCAPE The context of monuments Tom Williamson (Windgather Press 2008 154pp ISBN 978 1 90511 925 7) £20 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANDSCAPE OF LINDSEY Kevin Leahy (Tempus 2008 224pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4111 5) £19.99 THE MEDIEVAL DEER PARK New perspectives edited Robert Liddiard (Windgather Press 2008 207pp ISBN 978-1-905119-16-5) £16.99 SAINTS IN THE LANDSCAPE Graham Jones (Tempus 2007 265pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4108 5) £16.99 MONUMENTS IN THE LANDSCAPE edited Paul Rainbird (Tempus 2008 256pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4283 9) £25. THE ROMANS IN THE EAST OF ENGLAND Settlement and landscape in the Lower Nene Valley Stephen Upex (History Press 2008 288pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4118 4) £19.99 CADBURY CASTLE Richard Tabor (History Press 2008 191pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4715 5) £17.99 THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF WATER Helen Chapman Davey (History Press 2008 192pp ISBN 978 0 7524 4762 9) £17.99

GRAHAM WINTON is tutor in landscape history, field archaeology and local history with the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education

CORRECTION: my mind must have been in the rarefied realms of art history when I added an entry to the ‘Recent publications’ section in the last issue of The Local Historian. I referred therein to a book called The Wallace Collection. The actual title is The Wallace Connection, and below I give the correct details. My apoligies for this error! THE WALLACE CONNECTION Jane Allen (Friends of Orford Museum 2008 ISBN 978 0 9554738 0 7) from Mrs J. Allen, Friends of Orford Museum, Bell House, Quay Street, Orford, Woodbridge IP12 2NU •REVIEWS •

THE EMPIRE IN ONE CITY? Liverpool’s inconvenient imperial past edited Sheryllyne Haggerty, Anthony Webster and Nicholas J. White (Manchester UP 2008 xiv+237pp ISBN 978 0 7190 7887 3) £55 This challenging book comprises nine papers, with a substantial introductory essay and a long afterword. It is based on the proceedings of a conference on the relationship between Liverpool and the British Empire, held at Albert Dock in 2006, and is published by Manchester University Press as part of its ‘Studies in imperialism’ series. It thus satisfies a particular point to be made in a forthcoming article by George and Yanina Sheeran (to be published in the The Local Historian, November 2009), that local history and local historians do not engage sufficiently, or even at all, with the real meaning and impact of Empire and imperialism upon communities in the British Isles. It is, admittedly, not the work of local historians—only one of the twelve contributors has a substantial local or regional dimension to his work, the others being (for example) a fellow in business history at the Harvard Business School, a lecturer in sociology, and a ‘social anthropologist and museologist’ with a particular interest in African material culture. But if not by local historians, its content is directly relevant to the work of local historians. The exceptional significance of empire to Liverpool and of Liverpool to empire hardly needs an introduction, for not only in popular imagery but also in stark reality the city flourished with the development of a global British empire, while the darkest dimension to colonial imperialism—the slave trade—is forever associated with Liverpool above all other European cities. But this book seeks to present crucial dimensions to that experience from refreshing and varied new perspectives. In that sense it is not a straightforward history book, but is a courageous attempt to give a cross-disciplinary interpretation of selected aspects of the city and its imperial context. The 2007 commemoration of Liverpool’s 800th anniversary, and its 2008 role as one of the two European Capitals of Culture, produced a flowering of historical writing, much of it of excellent quality, and the volume under review is a worthy addition to the genre. The first paper, by Sheryllyne Haggerty, considers a crucial period in the development of the slave trade, the quarter century from 1750, while another, by Diane Frost, analyses one of the domestic consequences of empire and colonialism—the interracial relationships between white women and coloured men in the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More broadly, John Herson writes about Liverpool’s exceptionally cosmopolitan and ethnically-diverse population in the century before the First World War. International economic history is brought to the fore in discussion of the city’s trading links with Asia and South America, neither of which areas is conventionally given much attention in popular historical analysis, but both of which were essential elements in the emergence of a global network of trade focusing on the Mersey. The enabling mechanism for that process, the great shipping and trading lines, is covered by two articles which look at the Ocean Group and John Holt & Co. not in the golden age but in the deeply troubled post-1945 period—again, a

251 © British Association for Local History 2009 252 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 new perspective which affords plenty of food for thought, showing how a dramatically altered world economic and political structure impinged on the mainstays of Liverpool’s commercial life. Two chapters illuminate the psychological and cultural dimensions to the imperial connection—one looking at the development of the outstandingly important African ethnology collections of National Museums Liverpool, the other considering ways in which ‘Empire’ was commemorated and celebrated in the city between 1886 (when Queen Victoria opened the Liverpool International Exhibition of Navigation, Travelling, Commerce and Manufacture, a major showcase for and a celebration of all that Empire represented) and 1953, the coronation of Elizabeth II which saw the formal end of Empire and emergence of Commonwealth. This is a scholarly and authoritative book, challenging in that it has a wide range of specialised topics, but remarkably readable and highly stimulating. In presenting new views of a familiar theme it does a great service, reminding us that empire was about more than slavery, and Liverpool about more than ships and docks. As the editors suggest, ‘Liverpool was very much an integral component of the British imperial system, working both commercially and politically in collaboration with other cities in Britain and the empire’. They argue that this vital role has been overshadowed by recent attention that has focused especially on Liverpool’s working class history, and that more attention needs to be given, here and elsewhere, to the international and global dimensions of experience. There is an implied message here—that comparable work on other cities and towns could well be advantageous and rewarding. Local history in the traditional sense it clearly is not, and certainly does not set out to be, but anybody interested in the interaction of local history and the history and experience of empire would do well to read it. A pity about the price, therefore … ALAN CROSBY

HISTORIC BUILDINGS OF STEVENAGE Margaret Ashby, Alan Cudmore and Colin Killick (Stevenage Society for Local History 2008 84 pp ISBN 978-0-9512073-2-1) £5+p&p from Stevenage Society for Local History, Stevenage Museum, St. George’s Way, Stevenage SG1 1XX This nicely packaged little book is the culmination of five years’ work by members of the Stevenage Society for Local History and is also a memorial to Adrian Gibson, who worked closely with the members of the Society over many years, advising on and provide additional insights into the surviving buildings of the old town. Adrian, who died in March 2006, was a great champion of historic buildings, a widely respected expert on the subject, and an enthusiastic supporter of the work of local groups of this kind. The book, which includes a short biography of his life by his widow Helen, and the text of the tribute given by Russ Craig at Adrian’s funeral, is a fitting testimony to the way in which he passed on his knowledge of and enthusiasm for old buildings to local people. Adrian’s MBE, awarded in the New Years Honours of 1993, was in recognition for his services to conservation, but he also have merited an honour for his work in educating a new generation of buildings enthusiasts via local groups, and his superb teaching of the subject to WEA groups and in his public lectures. Those who respected Adrian’s expertise and research should note that the book includes a useful list of his published works. Local historians will find much of value in this book. Each building has a brief ‘potted history’ which includes observations about the development of the buildings, their ownership history and the significance of the plots on which they stand. There are some valuable insights into the structural history of the buildings—for example, in REVIEWS 253 one case it is stated that ‘The first floor would have been inserted at the time the chimney stack was built’. It isn’t always clear how the authors arrived at their conclusions, but one suspects that many emerged from Adrian’s examinations of the buildings. There are many colour images of exteriors and interior features, and the text is written in an accessible style that will ensure that even those unfamiliar with vernacular architecture can engage with the material. The book is not without flaws. The maps (pages 16-19) provide a useful means of locating the buildings discussed in the text but there is no indication of north on either map, and their scale is unclear. Most of the buildings are presented via a series of colour photographs—there are a very large number of these for a publication of this type—but there are very few line drawings or measured drawings which relate to the buildings discussed. This means that it is almost impossible, in the majority of cases, to know whether their plans conform to examples recorded elsewhere in the country. One is also left guessing as to, for example, the type of timber framing employed, the location of staircases, the use of social space, and long-term developments in roof carpentry. These are serious omissions which reflect the fact that the work was conducted as a piece of local history research, rather than as detailed examination of the constructional history of the buildings (as in the recent study of buildings in Burford by the Oxfordshire Buildings Group, or those in New Buckenham by the Norfolk Historic Buildings Group). However, the book is aimed at a general, and in particular a local, readership. While vernacular buildings specialists will find its lack of detailed diagrams frustrating, its reception amongst local historians will be warmer. ADAM LONGCROFT

THE IMPACT OF THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ON HERTFORDSHIRE edited Alan Thomson (Hertfordshire Record Society vol.23 2007 lxxxii+272pp ISBN 978 0 9547561) £22 This very useful and interesting volume brings alive the experience of living in Hertfordshire during the first Civil War, both for the Parliamentarians who controlled the county and for the defeated Royalists. It contains a wide range of documents, mostly taken from the papers deposited by the local sub-committee of the Committee for Taking the Accounts of the Kingdom. Much of the material is drawn from SP 28 in The National Archives, the so-called Commonwealth Exchequer Papers, a vast and rich class that is still largely uncalendared and for that reason remains underutilised by historians of the period. Thomson’s volume shows how very rewarding the laborious task of wading through SP 28 can be, all the more so because of (rather than despite) its often random and unsystematic nature. The admirably clear and informative introduction is itself a major piece of 73 pages. It is divided into four sections: the first presents a general background to the Civil War, and the remaining three contain a commentary on the three sections of documents. The first section offers a good account of how Parliament gained control of Hertfordshire in 1642, and how it then set up an apparatus of government through local committees. The financial mechanics of keeping troops well paid and supplied, and the resentment felt towards Parliament’s new taxes (the excise and the assessment) are analysed concisely and persuasively. The second section (and section A of the documents) explores the processes by which the county organised for war. The raising, equipping and arming of troops, the supplying of horses (be it legally or by seizure, or even theft): the role of the committees and their secretariat; and the 254 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 fortifying of garrisons and towns are examined in turn. The third section (section B of the documents) looks in depth at how the war was actually financed. This material unravels the mechanisms for raising money through rates, loans and contributions, as well as taxes such as the assessment and the excise. The procedures for paying the troops are analysed, and there is a particularly good section on the role of paymasters (documents 106-114). Throughout, the often ad hoc nature of Parliament’s fiscal machinery is evident. That said, there was no doubting its impact on communities and individuals, and this forms the subject of the final section (section C of the documents). Here we find detailed evidence of the effects of free quarter and the depredations of soldiers, and the sequestration of Royalists. The latter is brought vividly to life through the inventories of goods sold, the effects of which could be shattering. For example, Anne Fanshawe, daughter of Sir John Harrison of Balls Park, described how he lost a total of £130,000 (roughly the equivalent of £40-50 million today). The book thus evokes the experience of Royalists living within a county controlled by Parliament. All in all, this book publishes for the first time a great deal of valuable material that sheds light both on the piecemeal appropriation of power by Parliamentarian local committees, and on the sufferings of their victims. It thus gives us a remarkably clear picture of the realities of this devastating conflict within one county community. DAVID L. SMITH

LOWESTOFT 1550-1750 Development and change in a Suffolk coastal town David Butcher (Boydell and Brewer 2008 xiii+354pp ISBN 978 1 84383 390 1) £50; THE HISTORY OF IPSWICH Carol Twinch (Breedon 2008 128pp ISBN 978 1 85983 625 1) £9.99 These are two very different books about towns, one a micro-history using a huge range of documentary material, the other using what the author calls a ‘broad brush’ to look at a town over the whole course of its history. David Butcher’s Lowestoft 1550- 1750 is an academic monograph—a micro-historical investigation in minute detail of this Suffolk town during a period (1550-1750) which has become the focus of a number of urban studies in the last thirty years. The documentation is impeccable and comprehensive and each source is carefully analysed in chapters on topography, demography, the economy, making a living, administration, literacy, education and religion, so that the anatomy of Lowestoft is laid bare rather like a clinical dissection. Limitations in the sources extant are recognised and although some conclusions drawn rest on rather slender evidence, the methodology conforms to that familiar to all involved in early modern urban history and as such is a model of its kind. An admirable testimony to some 25 years of dedicated study, this is an academic text of substance and should be a useful cross-reference for all serious students of early modern towns. The volume has been published with the aid of a grant from the Ann Ashard Webb bequest to the University of East Anglia, the laudable aim of which is to support ‘an accessible series of works on the history of Suffolk which would appeal to a wider readership’. The text, however, left this reader wondering ‘how accessible’ to what ‘wide readership’? A monograph like this will certainly be a sound resource for any academic student of urban history, but there is a world of difference between academia and a wide and supposedly general readership. The latter may well find this volume heavy-going. There is an informational overload, especially of exhaustive (indeed exhausting) statistics, and this bombardment (fifty tables followed by lengthy REVIEWS 255 discussion of the findings) would tax the concentration of even the most persistent general reader. Too much history by numbers can become rather indigestible. The editors of future volumes which the School of History at UEA supports must surely have a duty to consider what is meant by ‘wide readership’ and to produce a truly ‘accessible’ series of books. Publications should move beyond the formulaic methodological parameters of the university thesis which can become dry as dust, towards books which illuminate social life and mores, culture and mentalities, and explore towns, or anything else, with literary style, using approaches that will seize the historical imagination and with which its readership can engage. Otherwise the academicians will continue to peer at and admire each others scholarly navels and the ‘wide readership’ will be left outside. That would be a pity. Despite these caveats there is much to admire in the careful scholarship of Lowestoft. Sadly there is another kind of history writing that, clearly aimed at a wide readership, seeks by way of generalised summary to cover far too vast a canvas and collapses in the process. Carol Twinch’s book The History of Ipswich admits to using a ‘broad brush’ to outline two millennia of history (should one ever use the definite article in a title?). Leaving aside the serious omissions in the text, which does suggest a rather haphazard choice of topics, an initial read of this short book did not raise confidence. There are too many factual inaccuracies: Cardinal Wolsey was never the archbishop of Canterbury, Puritan lectures are not sermons, the Ipswich Cooperative Society was not founded in 1907 but forty years before that, Woolworths was not the first department store in the town, and so on. Interpretation and analysis (if such it is) often consists of alarmingly unhistorical phrases such as ‘the ups and downs of national politics’ or of ‘the medieval economy’ (both apparently suffered the same bumpy ride), or ‘Ipswich had a respectable amount of history’. ‘Ipswich approached the Georgian era’ and ‘dusted itself down in preparation for Victoria’s reign’ (as if the town knew what was coming) and, most startling, with the arrival of monasticism ‘Ipswich was awash with friars’. This is a scissors and paste history that offers readers no sense of continuity and change, and no analysis of social structure, population change, or changing townscape. Any history should also add to the body of knowledge about its subject with work based on the author’s research in the archives, but here there is none. The History of Ipswich is a scrapbook of known facts. Though aimed at the general public, it should still be an accurate and balanced guidebook. It is not. This reader was thus left wondering what was the purpose of it. FRANK GRACE

WHERE THERE’S A WILL A study of Woodstock probate documents 1530 to 1700 edited Patricia Crutch, Anthony Smith and Royston Taylor (Woodstock Society Local History Group/Wychwood Press 2008 140pp ISBN 978-1-902279-32-9) £9.99 For over 20 years the Local History Group of the Woodstock Society has been examining the extensive early modern documentary sources from the royal borough of Woodstock. The majority of documents analysed here are from the archive of the courts of the bishop and archdeacon of Oxford, but a further 41 Woodstock wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury have also been included. The introduction lists the various types of documents studied and then gives a brief account of the probate process in general. An ‘overview’ is provided by Royston Taylor, who cautions that although probate records survive for some 343 Woodstock inhabitants during the period in question, this represents only two documents per year, compared with an average of four burials registered per year and an estimated 256 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009 death rate of sixteen per year. A chart plotting an analysis of inventory values by decade demonstrates that, not surprisingly, maximum, minimum and median values climbed over the 160 years but it is helpfully noted that whereas the median inventory 1 had increased 4 /2 -fold, the price of consumables only increased three-fold. The wealth of various testators and their economic management are also considered, the latter involving a study of the extant probate accounts. Anthony Smith discusses Woodstock houses and their furniture, as revealed by the surviving inventories. Through a series of tables he analyses the number of rooms within the houses and the value of the goods they contained, and hence ‘room values’; as the he acknowledges, some rooms may have been omitted for various reasons and some goods may have been moved into different rooms, so the resultant statistics are not as meaningful as they seem. There follows an informative discussion of the development of particular items, such as carpets and windows. The chapter concludes with an analysis of household sizes by counting family members who are legatees, a somewhat dubious correlation as married children rarely lived in their parents’ home in this period. Perhaps family sizes, rather than household sizes, would have been a more accurate description of this section. Mary Hodges briefly considers ‘the widows’ lot’ in early modern Woodstock. Within the surviving documents some 253 widows can be identified: some were poor but others were women of substance and property who contributed to the town’s wealth. One consequence of Woodstock’s proximity to a royal palace was that local shopkeepers stocked items that catered for the finer tastes of the gentry and nobility who accompanied the court: this availability ‘encouraged the locals to emulate the latest fashions’. In ‘Costumes, textiles and associated occupations’, Patricia Crutch, using the work of Molly Moisley, provides fascinating insights into this more unusual aspect of local life. Women’s wills frequently contained detailed bequests of clothing but at Woodstock several men’s wills did also, and various inventories described and valued individual items of clothing belonging to the deceased, including three men. Furthermore, the inventories of several mercers listed fabrics and other stock in their shop; the glossary of ‘costume terms’ is invaluable and alone is worth the price of this book. Personal belongings mentioned in the wills and inventories, including valuables, jewellery, weapons and books, are considered by Joan Walsh. In general, inventories are both revealing and frustrating: appraisers listed numerous items but rarely valued them individually. Of course, their purpose was to provide the overall value the moveable estate of the deceased, not to provide detailed information for posterity; nevertheless, here the writer has managed to squeeze a great deal from the documents, for example, noting where gold, silver and pewter were valued by weight. Perhaps surprisingly, given the proximity to Oxford, only one inventory valued books but since several testators had bequeathed various books, presumably these had been removed before the appraisers arrived. Again, a useful glossary has been appended. The final chapter analyses status ascriptions and various occupations mentioned in the documents: as there was little agricultural land in the borough, craftsmen and tradesmen dominated. An analysis of the occupations of the various appraisers reveals that of the 123 inventories, 64 had at least one appraiser who was mayor, alderman, gentleman or town clerk. It seems likely that these men were selected for the task because of their high status within the town since there were few discernible kinship or trade links with the deceased. This book is a good example of collaborative work interwoven with individual research; There is a certain amount of repetition and overlap that could have been removed with judicious editing, but although concerned with a small Oxfordshire town, there is much to interest local historians everywhere, especially the various ways in which probate material might be analysed. HEATHER FALVEY REVIEWS 257

A HISTORY OF THE COUNTY OF YORK: EAST RIDING vol.8 East Buckrose: Sledmere and the Northern Wolds David and Susan Neave (Victoria County History/Institute of Historical Research 2008 284 pp ISBN 978 1 90435 613 4) £95 The latest VCH volume for the East Riding of Yorkshire covers ten parishes in the eastern part of Buckrose wapentake, an area of 32,158 acres of which 17,403 formed part of the Sledmere estate in 1913. Thus the Sykes family, who built up the estate from about 1750, loom large—their estate was the largest in the East Riding and in 1883 there were only 33 landowners with more English acres. There is a 50-page introduction to the history of the area as a whole, and then individual accounts of each parish, covering settlement and landownership; economic, social and religious history; local government; and buildings. This format works well. The introduction allows the authors to deal with matters affecting the whole area in some detail—for example the concentration of landownership from the late seventeenth century ‘led initially to the spread of sheep walks and commercial warrens’ but following the enclosure of the open fields in the late eighteenth century farming was transformed and villages rebuilt: ‘Much of the increased population was in the large isolated farmhouses where the workforce was chiefly made up of young hired men who moved on each year and contributed little to village life. The communities were dominated in the mid 19th century by the tenant farmers and tradesmen and craftsmen and were almost wholly Methodist despite the presence in every parish of an Anglican church built or restored in the 19th century by the Sykes family of Sledmere’. The introduction is excellent and one must remember that the accounts of the individual communities are not comprehensive. Thus, the significance of the nearby market towns of Malton and Driffield, the communications patterns, and analysis of population and occupations, are included in the introduction, not the parish sections. The regular layout of many of the villages suggests that they were planned communities, possibly laid out in the ninth or tenth centuries at the time of Scandinavian settlement. Most still retain this layout, but Sledmere was completely transformed by the Sykes family in the second half of the eighteenth century. The existing village was cleared and rebuilt on a new site, while Sledmere House was built and surrounded by extensive grounds. This is a classic example of a closed village with 100 per cent of the land and 99 per cent of the houses owned by the resident squire in 1910. Other villages were ‘open’, with numerous proprietors, and in the nineteenth century had rapidly increasing populations of agricultural labourers and petty tradesmen, friendly societies and other village organisations: ‘The open villages were ‘hotbeds’ of Nonconformity each having both Wesleyan and Primitive Methodist chapels in 1851’. The religious census in 1851 shows that 20 per cent of those attending services in East Buckrose went to the five Anglican churches, 34.5 per cent to the six Primitive Methodist chapels and 45 per cent to the five Wesleyan Methodist chapels. The Neaves have illustrated the history of these communities with great skill, using in particular the extensive records of the Sykes family. They have recorded the changes at the time of enclosure and the physical and social changes in the twentieth century and produced a very readable book with a remarkable absence of academic language: we are told that in the 1820s ‘Primitive Methodism exploded into the area’. The numerous tables are helpful and informative, the illustrations are in the relevant text rather in the middle of the book, and very useful maps are provided, although no scales are given in the extracts from the 1910 OS maps which appear in each parish section. Unfortunately the price tag of £95 will deter many local historians. They will have to wait in patience until it joins the earlier volumes now available on-line. ROGER BELLINGHAM 258 THE LOCAL HISTORIAN/AUGUST 2009

THE CARTULARY OF THE HOSPITAL OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST, CAMBRIDGE edited Malcolm Underwood (Cambridgeshire Records Society vol.18 2008 292pp ISBN 0904323 20 X) £16 The hospital of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge evolved from a hut erected for the poor on waste land near the main bridge over the river Cam sometime before the end of the twelfth century. Though it subsequently received endowments from the crown, the bishop of Ely and members of the secular nobility, it remained an essentially town institution. Served by a master and five priests following the rule of St Augustine it consisted initially of a long, single-storey hall with a chapel at one end. A separate, much larger chapel was built parallel to the main building in the late thirteenth century. When efficiently managed in the late middle ages it enjoyed an annual income of £70, but it had fallen into decay by the early Tudor period. This led John Fisher, the humanist bishop of Rochester, to persuade Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, to transform the hospital into a college, and in 1511 the newly founded St John’s College succeeded to its predecessor’s endowments and title deeds. It has retained them ever since. In the mid-thirteenth century these deeds had been recorded in a register for ease of reference, and it is this cartulary which has now been published. As well as calendaring every entry in full, the editor has transcribed some of the most significant documents in their original Latin. The edition also contains a detailed introduction, a plan of the hospital, plates of parts of the medieval hospital which emerged during the construction of the Victorian college chapel, a map of medieval Cambridge, and a very useful index. In its first half century the hospital attracted over two hundred usually small, local donations, which makes the cartulary a rich source for the early history of the town and its inhabitants. The prosperous Dunning, Blancgernum and Ruffus families all figure amongst the first generation of hospital benefactors to be replaced by Morices, Harlestons and Cambridges in the fourteenth century, while some of the earlier deeds mention members of the Cambridge Jewry, situated in the parishes of St Clement, St Sepulchre, and All Saints. The volume also provides a considerable amount of topographical information on the hospital’s urban property and its agricultural holdings. This edition will be welcomed not only in its own right for its contribution to scholarship, but also for demonstrating the way in which other cartularies may be able to be deployed in tracing the development of towns at a time when few other types of records have survived. CLAIRE CROSS

THE MIDLAND PEASANT Economic and social history of a Leicestershire village W.G. Hoskins (Phillimore 2008 reissue xxviii+322pp ISBN 978 1 86077 525 3) £18.99; THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FAMILY AND LOCAL HISTORY edited David Hey (Oxford UP 2008 2nd edition xxxix+661pp ISBN 978 0 19953298 8) £25 The end of 2008 saw a reissue and a new edition of two important books for local historians. The Midland Peasant marks a definitive phase in the academic development of local history, and The Oxford Companion is a reference book that surely every local historian must have consulted at one time or another. The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History is a completely revised edition of the book which used to be known as The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History. The reversal of the title tells us how commercial publishers view the relative importance of local and family historians as consumers, and although many family historians end up as local historians this alteration is something that this reviewer thinks unnecessary. The second edition is REVIEWS 259 much enlarged and the format much altered. It now has 661 pages instead of the 517 of the first edition. The opening section is completely new and devoted to thematic essays in four collected groups: family history, local history, landscape and culture, and ‘thematic’ (which deals with subjects such as population, the poor, agricultural and labour history and, unaccountably, the twentieth century). Each essay is by an acknowledged expert and gives a chronological description of the topic, its historiography, and suggestions for appropriate background reading. Thus these essays are useful additions for someone starting out to research a topic. The essays are followed by an expanded A-Z glossary. New additions include A2A, Dade registers, dataler (a coal miner paid by the day), and others add to the information previously given. The list of record offices and special collections is expanded. There are one or two oddities. Twenty-seven pages are devoted to a list of ‘Thematic Contents’ without page numbers, so at first sight the reader does not know whether these are in the essays or the glossary. All sections include enigmatic references to ‘see web links’, but nowhere are these web links given, although it is possible to find them for the record offices and special collections via the OUP website. Why were the record office and special collections web addresses not published with the address and telephone number, which would cut out an annoying stage in contacting these record depositories? At this point might I recommend the excellent annual update and description of web sites by Jacquie Fillmore in The Local Historian? Undoubtedly this book will be of great value to family and local historians beginning to explore these subjects. But if you already own the first edition you possess most of the information, apart from the essays, contained in the new edition. So are the essays worth paying £25 to read? They do contain a safe and informed discussion on a theme, they lead the reader into further research, and they are well written, but are perhaps of less value to the established local historian who is familiar with the journals that contain the more cutting edge articles of interest to local historians. Nevertheless, both editions of this book will be a local historian’s bible for many years to come. I have no hesitation in recommending purchase of The Midland Peasant. This is the second reissue of the book, and it marks the birth centenary of W.G. Hoskins. It was first published by Macmillan in 1957, and the first reissue followed in 1965. This second reissue contains the addition of a foreword by David Hey, which describes the genesis of the book, and its influence on local history. The text is unaltered and is as fresh and inspirational as ever. This reviewer read it with excitement in the 1980s and still had the same sense of excitement in rereading it in 2008. It shows how historical sources can be interpreted to give an intimate picture of the lives of ordinary people, and involves the reader with the landscape and buildings of Wigston Magna in Leicestershire. Unfortunately, neither the first edition nor the reissue contains a bibliography, and it is only from the abbreviations that it becomes clear that the Wyggeston Hospital records that form the nucleus of the book are available in print. Here one can catch up with old friends from Wigston. The reissue has an attractive cover, but comparing the quality of the plates with those in the 1957 edition shows that those in the earlier issue were much superior. For example the plate of ‘The Old Mere’ in the 1957 volume is an elegiac picture of trees and shadows on a grassy lane clearly delineated. In 2008 the photograph is a black mess, which on examination is not the original. Similarly, the other three plates, which do seem to be copies of the originals, are far too dark. Despite these small flaws this reissue is very welcome, and is a timely tribute to W.G. Hoskins. EVELYN LORD RECENT PUBLICATIONS IN LOCAL HISTORY

Only books and pamphlets sent to the Reviews Editor are included in this list, which gives all publications received between 1 February and 1 May 2009. Most books are also reviewed in this or a future issue, or on the BALH website. Publishers should ensure that prices of publications are notified. When addresses are quoted prices usually include postage and packing. Other books should be obtainable through normal book-selling channels and retail prices are quoted. The Reviews Editor is Dr Evelyn Lord, Book Reviews, PO Box 649, Cambridge CB1 0JW. Please note that all opinions and comments expressed in reviews are those of the reviewer—they do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the British Association for Local History.

LOCAL AND REGIONAL STUDIES DOWN BY THE RIVER The Thames and Kennet in Reading Gillian Clark (Two Rivers Press 2009 ISBN East 978 1 901677 58 4) £16 from THE CHURCHES OF KNG STREET, NORWICH [email protected] Richard Hale (King Street Publications 2008 reprint MEDIEVAL PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE Anne ISBN 0 9509253 7 3) £4.55 from King Street Rowe (Hertfordshire Publications: University of Research Group, Wensum Lodge, King Street, Hertfordshire Press 2009 ISBN 978 1 905313 48 8) Norwich, NR1 1QW £18.99 FLAT FYSSHE IN THE RIVER AND COALFISHE SETTLERS, VISITORS AND ASYLUM SEEKERS IN THE MUDD Fish and fishermen in 16th Diversity in Portsmouth since the late 18th century Century Norwich Shirley Harris (King Street Philip MacDougal (Portsmouth Papers 75: Publications 1992 ISBN 0 9509253 6 5) £5.35 from Portsmouth City Council 2009 ISBN 978 1 870412 above address 45 2) £2.65 from City Museum and Record Office, THE GREYFRIARS OF NORWICH Richard Hale Museum Road, Portsmouth PO1 2LJ and Mary Rodgers (King Street Publications 2004 7th THE RIVER HAMBLE A history David Chun impression ISBN 0 9509253 1 4) £4.10 from above (Phillimore 2009 ISBN 978 1 86077 538 3) £16.99 address THE ROMFORD OUTRAGE The murder of KEELS AND KILNS The story of two sixteenth- Inspector Thomas Simmons 1885 (Pen & Sword century citizens of Norwich Shirley Harris (King 2009 ISBN 1 845630 76 9) £12.99 Street Publications 1993 ISBN 0 9509253 3 0) £5.25 from above address WAPPING 1600-1800 A social history of an early modern London maritime suburb Derek Morris and Ken MEDIEVAL PEOPLE OF NORWICH Artists and Cozens (East London History Society 2009 ISBN 978 0 artisans May Wallace (King Street Publications 1992 9506258 9 8) £9.60+£3 p&p from The Bookshop, ISBN 0 9509253 2 2) £3.60 from above address Guildhall, Aldermanbury, London, EC2V 7HH or THE RIVER AND STAITHES OF TUDOR Maritime Books, 66 Royal Hill, Greenwich SE10 8RT NORWICH Mary Rodgers (King Street Publications 2007 reprint ISBN 0 9509253 5 7) £5.55 from above address Midlands MEDIEVAL COLCHESTER Lost landmarks John BAGLEY WOOD DISTRICT NURSING Ashdown-Hill (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 686 6) ASSOCIATION 1925-1948 Robert S. Sephton (author £14.99 2008 no ISBN) £3 NEW ALDEBURGH ANTHOLOGY ed. Ariane GRATEFUL TO PROVIDENCE The diary and Bankes and Jonathan Reekie (Boydell 2009 ISBN 978 1 accounts of Matthew Flinders: surgeon, apothecary 84383 439 7) £35 and man-midwife 1775-1802 vol.2 1785-1802 ed. Martyn Beardsley and Nicholas Bennett (Lincoln NORFOLK MISCELLANY Pamela Brooks (Breedon Record Society vol. 97 Boydell 2009 ISBN 1 978 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 692 7) £12.99 90150385 5) £30 MYSTERIOUS NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Daniel London and South East Codd (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 681 1) £14.99 CHICHESTER THEN AND NOW Phil Hewitt (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 701 6) £16.99 NOTTINGHAM City beautiful Sarah Davis (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 690 3) £14.99

260 RATBY Walks in the National Forest (Ratby Local Scotland History Group 2008 ISBN 0 9547994 2 9) £5+£1.50 FROM KELSO TO KALAMAZOO The life and p&p from Ratby LHG, 8 Groby Road, Ratby, times of George Taylor 1803-1891 ed. Margaret Jeary Leicester LE6 0LJ and Mark A. Mulhern (National Museums of Scotland 2009 ISBN 978 1 905267 27 9) £8.99 North General THE COTTINGHAM FLOODS OF JUNE 2007 A CARDUS Celebration of beauty: a memoir Robin portrait in words and pictures by Cottingham Daniels (Palatine Books 2009 ISBN 978 1 874181 58 residents ed. Peter McClure and Tony Grundy 3) £25 (Cottingham LHS 2008 ISBN 0 9544427 5 X) £12 inc. THE CENSUS 1801-1911 A guide for the internet p&p from Cottingham LHS, c/o A. Burrow, 76 era Stuart A. Raymond (Family History Partnership Millhouse Woods Lane, Cottingham, Hull HU16 4HB 2009 ISBN 978 1 906280 16 1) £5.95 from FHP, PO ‘THE FASTEST MAN’ Steeple Jack’s adventures in Box 502, Bury BL8 9EP Lancashire Chris Aspin (Helmshore LHS 2008 ISBN PARISH REGISTERS A history and guide Stuart A. 978 0 906881 20 0) £4.95 from author, 4 East Street, Raymond (Family History Partnership 2009 ISBN Helmshore, Rossendale BB4 4JT 978 1 906280 17 8) £5.95 from above address MUSBURY AND ALDEN Seven hundred years of CORONERS’ RECORDS IN ENGLAND AND life and landscape John Simpson (Helmshore LHS WALES Jeremy Gibson and Colin Rogers (Family 2008 ISBN 978 0 906881 19 4) £13.50 from author, History Partnership 3rd edition 2009, ISBN 978 1 The Cottage, Tor View Farm, Helmshore, 906280 13 0) £4.50+£1.80 p&p from above address Rossendale BB4 4AB VICTUALLERS’ LICENCES Records for family FLOODS IN NORTH WEST ENGLAND A history and local historians Jeremy Gibson (Family History c1600-2008 Sarah Watkins and Ian Whyte (Centre for Partnership 3rd edition 2009 ISBN 978 1 906280 14 North West Regional Studies, Lancaster University 7) £4.95+£1.80 p&p from above address 2009 ISBN 978 1 86220 217 7) £11.95 LOCAL HISTORY ON THE GROUND Tom Welsh THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF CHESTER (History Press 2009 ISBN 978 0 7524 4798 8) £16.99 Philip Jones (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 784 2) £16.99 S.P GRUNDY (1880-1942) A life of social service in Manchester and North Berkshire Robert S. Sephton LEEDS City beautiful Nigel A. Ibbotson (Breedon (author 2009 no ISBN) £3 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 678 1) £14.99 MURDEROUS BOLTON Steve Fielding (Amberley Publishing 2009 ISBN 978 0 7514 308 2) £12.99 CDs and DVDs ‘TWELVE GOOD AND LAWFUL MEN … AND THE ABERGAVENNY STORY From Stone Age to MISS PROCTOR’: Public library pioneers in the Our Age (PK Pictures: £10 from Abergavenny LHS, North West 1850-1905 John Tiernan (CILIP 2007 No 26 Avenue Road, Abergavenny NP7 7DA) ISBN) £1+30p p&p from Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre, Central Library, Old Street, DANBY COURT LEET Documentary film and Ashton-under Lyne OL6 7SG research Gillian Cookson and David Eadington (Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society 2009 MYSTERIOUS NORTHUMBERLAND Rupert ISBN 978 0 902074 18 7) from the Society c/o Matthews (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 677 4) Whitby Museum, Pannett Park, Whitby YO21 1RE £14.99 PICTORIAL PINNER IN THE YEAR 2000 (Pinner TYNESIDE FROM THE AIR webbaviation.co.uk LHS 2000: from PLHS, 68 Waxwell Lane, Pinner (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 683 5) £16.99 HA5 3EU

West JOURNALS AND NEWSLETTERS THE MEDIEVAL FRIARIES, HOSPITALS AND RECEIVED CHAPELRIES OF BRISTOL Joseph Bettey (Avon Local History & Archaeology no.1 2009 no ISBN) The more substantial articles in these journals are noted £3.50 from Hon Secretary, 1 Newport Road, Pill, below, but we do not give a full contents list. Most North Somerset BS20 0AZ journals are listed alphabetically by geographical location THE BLUE MAIDS ORPHANAGE Mary Wright , not title of publication; general journals are at (Avon LHA no.2 2009 No ISBN) £3.50 from above the end of the list. address Ayrshire Notes no.37 (Spring 2009) Ayrshire Arch. & Nat. Hist. Soc. and Ayrshire Federation of Historical Societies £2 from Rob Close, Craigbea Wales Cottages, Drongan, Ayr KA6 7EN: Old Rome: hiding Burns to hidden hamlet; William Hamilton of Ladyland, FORTRESSES AND TREASURES IN ROMAN captain in the Scottish Navy; the poor harvest of 1782 WALES Sarah Symons (Breedon 2009 ISBN 978 1 85983 699 6) £14.99

261 Cake and Cockhorse vol.17 no.8 (Spring 2009) Journal of Christchurch Local History Society no.14 Banbury Historical Society £2.50 from Jeremy (November 2008) £1 from Local History Room, Gibson, Harts Cottage, Church Hanborough, Christchurch Library, 29 High Street, Christchurch Witney OX29 8AB: Assisted emigration to Canada; BH23 1AW: New Zealand engineers in Christchurch evacuees to Oxfordshire during the Great War; Foxwood Avenue tragedy; the borough boundary; St Faith’s Fair 1258-2008 Berkshire Local History Association Newsletter no.94 (May 2009) £18 p.a. from Dr M. Simons, 80 Cleobury Chronicles vol.8 (2008) Cleobury Reeds Avenue, Earley, Reading RG6 5SR: William Mortimer and District HS: Thomas Botfield, squire of Godfrey 1610-1696; memories of Huntley and Palmers Hopton Wafers; Withypool Farm; Catherton Quarry; Paper mills at Neen Savage and the Hall family; Birmingham Historian no.33 (Spring 2009) papermaking in the 19th century; Neen Savage war Birmingham & District LH Association £3.50+75p memorials p&p from Archives and Heritage Service, Central Library, Chamberlain Square, Birmingham B3 Craven History: occasional papers relating to the 3HQ: Hansom and Birmingham Town Hall; John history of Craven in the county of Yorkshire (March Skirrow Wright; Birmingham’s slum clearance; 2008) £5+£1.50 from 4 Bright Street, Gargrave Birmingham’s first Labour MP; PC William ‘Jock’ Wilson Road, Skipton BD23 1QH: The name of Raven; the manor court rolls of Cononley and neighbouring Local History Records: journal of the Bourne communities; the industrialisation of the valley of Eller Society vol.57 (November 2008) from the society Beck at Skipton; the new schoolroom at Ermysted’s c/o 6 Tupwood Lane, Caterham CR3 6DA: Stained Grammar School, Skipton; two Yankees at the court of glass in St John’s Church, Caterham Valley; Surrey Lord Clifford; policing Keighley 2; the Quinn Brothers; indictments Elizabeth I; Purley a hundred years ago; an Edwardian child pauper emigration from Craven, Horton unexpected visual archive of 1940s Britain; Scout huts in Ribblesdale watermills and HQs in Caterham; Kenley’s astronomical observatory; A Caterham link with the Charge of the Light Brigade and Droitwich History and Archaeology Society Waterloo Newsletter no.50 (May 2009) 75p from Chris Bowers, 9 Laurelwood Close, Droitwich Spa, WR9 Brentford and Chiswick Local History Journal 7SF: Droitwich dates of interest; Edward Winslow is no.18 (2009) £5+p&p from BCLHS, 25 Hartington honoured; the cinema in Droitwich Road, Chiswick, London W4 3TL: Chiswick’s tank; the Duke of Devonshire menagerie; Brentford Monument; The Dunningite no.67 (Spring 2009) £1.50 from Bedford Park myths and misunderstandings; nursery Dunning Parish Historical Society, The Old gardeners of Strand on the Green; Christopher Clitherow Schoolhouse, Newton of Pitcairns, Dunning PH2 0SL: The Rollo Recreation Ground 1946-1971, The new Bridport History Society Newsletter £5 p.a. from Dunning School editor, 12 Bramley Hill, Bridport DT6 3DP: Dorset village life; Admiral Sir George Somers 1554-1610; Eastbourne Local Historian no.151 (Spring 2009) Bridport town centre 1952; Stonehenge and Sir Norman Eastbourne Local History Society, from the editor, Lockyer 2a Staveley Road, Eastbourne BN22 7LH: Eastbourne Model Village and Aquarium; professional photography in Charlton Kings Local History Society Research Eastbourne Bulletin no.55 (2009) from Mrs J. Sale, 12 Pine Trees, Charlton Kings, Cheltenham GL53 0NB: Farnham and District Museum Society Journal Samuel Higgs Gael and Battledown Manor; Langton vol.15 no.5 (March 2009): the priest and the House, Amberley; 194 London Road; Drinking fountain playwright; a mound on Broxhead Common at Holy Apostles; from Charlton to the world by rail; Fram: journal of the Framlingham & District LH & Charlton park in the 20th century; Cheltenham’s local Preservation Society 5th ser. no.12 (April 2009) newspapers before 1914; The Band of Mercy; early from the editor, 43 College Road, Framlingham Cheltenham manor court rolls; the Protherough family; IP13 9ER: The Society—the first 50 years; Framlingham Moses Bradshaw, clockmaker Castle; mills of Framlingham; Crown and Anchor Inn Cheltenham Local History Society Newsletter no.63 Gloucester Archives Newsletter (April 2009) (March 2009) free pdf copy from available from [email protected] [email protected] Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society new Cherry Hinton Local History Society Newsletter ser. vol.16 (2008) from D.C. Glover, 6 Baker Fold, no.5 (November 2008) from Mo Child, CHLHS, 20 Halifax HX1 5TX: Cruttonstall vaccary: the 1309 Chartfield Road, Cambridge CB1 9JY: World War II extent; drought and flood in Calderdale 1668-2000; milk deliveries James Kershaw (1726-1797) forgotten pioneer of Irish CHH News: Chester Community History & Methodism; local migration in an emerging industrial Heritage (Spring 2009) free from CHH, St town: Brighouse 1851; Joseph Horsall: from cotton to wool Michael’s Church, Bridge Street Row East, Chester worsteds; Thomas Wales (1820-1908) and the Halifax CH1 1NW: music and minstrels; Newtown remembered; smugglers 1877; 20th century precipitation records in the the black sailor and the fishwife; horrible hangings Todmorden area; nurses and nursing in Halifax and Huddersfield during the two world wars; growing up in The Past Uncovered: Chester Archaeology Design Soyland 1937-1953; Cotton Stones and Mill Bank and Conservation News (February 2009) free from Gilliam Dunn, Chester Archaeology, 27 Grosvenor Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society Street, Chester CH1 2DD: 2000 years of urban life in Newsletter no.51 (Spring 2009) Huckswood Roman microcosm; Project Jade; amphitheatre news pottery; Little Green axeheads; excavations at St Cross

262 Park 2008; New Forest National Park: archaeology and Maney Publishing, Suite IC, Joseph’s Well, Hanover the historic environment; history of West Walk, Forest of Walk, Leeds LS3 1AB: Houses for the dead: mortuaries East Bere; agricultural storage building at Silchester; in London 1843-1889; regulating London’s bus services dendochronology of Hampshire buildings 2003-2008; the 1919-1924; Stepney and the politics of high rise housing: inoculation letters of Southampton 1925-1937; East End localism and urban decay: Shoreditch’s emerging gay scene Harpenden and District Local History Society Newsletter no.106 (December 2008) Forty years at LTVAS Newsletter (April 2009) Lower Test Valley Hammonds End Farm; coming of the railways; Lunardi’s Archaeology Study Group: from Mrs B. Langdon, balloon trip ‘Wolversdene’, Whitenap Lane, Romsey SO51 5RS: Honest Caspar; Florence Horatia Suckling Hedon History: joint newsletter of Hedon Museum Society and Hedon and District LHS no.37 (Spring Pinner Local History Society News Reviews 2009) contact John Markham, 24 Wylies Road, Research no.107 (Autumn 2008) more recollections of Beverley HU17 7AP: Beilby Thompson of Escrick and Bentley Priory; Daniel Dancer: Dickens’ favourite miser; the Borough of Hedon; Withernsea at peace the 1908 marathon through Eastcote and Pinner Herts Past & Present 3rd ser no.13 (Spring 2009) The Poynton Historian no.2 £3 from Mrs G. Hertfordshire Association for LH £2.50 from Dr G. Kendall, 33 Beech Crescent, Poynton, Stockport Gear, Nicholls Farmhouse, Lybury Lane, SK12 1AW: stained glass windows in St. George’s; snowy Redbourne AL3 7JH: Hertfordshire children and the winters; Sergeant Douglas Wright MM; Amy Smith, nee First World War; Peter Victor Edison Mauger FRIBA Wright; a Wainwright family of Poynton (1896-1982) Quaker architect at Welwyn Garden City; Rickmansworth Historical Society Newsletter no.83 Arthur Sebright, Victorian ne’er-do-well; Hertfordshire and £1 from Geoff Saul, 20 West Way, Rickmansworth the slave trade WD3 7EN: Dissolution of the monasteries; Hornsey Historical Society Bulletin no.50 (2009) Rickmansworth from the Watford Observer Winter 1909 from The Old Schoolhouse, 136 Tottenham Lane, Ruislip Northwood and Eastcote Local History London N8 7EL: landscape of the Bishop’s Park; Sun Society Journal (2008) details from Heather Trease, Fire Office records; the Cowleys of Stone Cottage; our 10 Denbigh Close, Ruislip HA4 6JN more tales of Middlesex heritage; Sir Henry Wood at the Palace: 1939 Charles Lamb; two aviation disasters; relieving the poor— Handel Festival Concert; memories of evacuation during send them to Jamaica; 1908 Olympic marathon; the Green WWII Man of St Martin’s; first known Ruislip Iron Age site Ilkeston and District Local History Society Saffron Walden Historical Journal no.17 (Spring Newsletter vol.9 no.22 (Jan-Feb 2009) Woolworths 2009) £2.50+£1.20 p&p from Richard Jemmett, 9 in Ilkeston 1923-2009 High Street, Saffron Walden CB10 1AT: Saffron Centre for Local History Studies Newsletter Walden survey of 1912; Molehill Green: village in (Kingston University Faculty of Arts and Social danger; some stately homes of NW Essex; fundraising in Sciences, Holmwood House Room 27, Penryhn the 14th century: Walden Abbey and the impediment of Road, Kingston upon Thames KT1 2EE) The nurses government Regulation; true tales of the Gibson Estate below: cohort persistence and mobility in Kingston 1851- Scottish Local History no.75 (Spring 2009) £5 from 1901; children of the poor in mid-Victorian Kingston Doris Williams, School of History and Classics, upon Thames; from Kingston beyond the seas: searching University of Edinburgh, 17 Buccleuch Place, for Bloodworth and Squires Edinburgh EH8 9LN: Paisley Mission 1808- Leatherhead and District Local History Society 1829;Buchanan Castle military review; Garscadden Proceedings vol.7 no.2 (2008) from LDLHS, 64 Village’s death knell; William J. Hay (1863-1955); Church Street, Leatherhead KT22 8DP: an end to the transformation of medieval Leith; walk round an old saga of Little Ashstead ‘Manor’; the Darcy family in photograph: Corncockle Quarry Ashstead; alleged hooliganism and riotous assembly on the Send and Ripley History Society Journal vol.6 streets of Ashstead; the Liffords and Skiltons of Ashstead; no.205 (Mar/April 2009) from Norman Carpenter, where was Leatherhead’s early church; was Leatherhead Ufford, 106 Potters Lane, Send, Woking GU23 7AL: ever the county town of Surrey; early days of public Send Forge; the Ripley road; charities of Ripley and Send; electricity supply in Leatherhead Leatherhead and Barretts Garden Buildings Ltd District LHS Newsletter (February 2009) £15 p.a. from above address: Lest we forget: Charles Keigh Jago Borough of Twickenham Local History Society Rooke; Sir Frederick Milner; Ashstead Roman villa and Newsletter no.150 (April 2009) from John Sheaf, 4 tileworks, Brooklands and the Hurricane Aircraft Thames Street, Hampton TW12 2EA: Letters from the Home Front; Hampton & New Hampton Co-operative Lincolnshire Past and Present no.73 (2008) from Society; memories of West Twickenham Hard Court Club Jews’ Court, Steep Hill, Lincoln LN2 1LS: 1831 mixed fortunes for Colonel Sibthorne; Jack Richardson Wandsworth Historian: journal of the Wandsworth and the Lincoln Motor Manufacturing Company; Emma Historical Society no.87 (Spring 2009) £3 from Cheetham 1844-1936, Lincolnshire in Britannia Curiosa WHS, 119 Heythorp Street, London SW18 5BT: The 1777 Society for Lincolnshire History and Shrubbery, Lavender Gardens; CJ Stewart, master butchers Archaeology Bulletin no.73 (October 2008) from of Putney; royal beasts in Tooting; Anglo-Saxon Battersea above address and Wandsworth as viewed from Clapham The London Journal vol.34 no.1 (March 2009) £30 Wanstead Historical Society Journal no.67 (Spring p.a. from Customer Sales & Service Department, 2009) £1 from Brian J. Page, flat 82A, The Weavers’

263 House, New Wanstead, London E11 2SY: an echo of International Journal of Regional and Local Studies Wanstead House; the Wymondesolds of The Grove, ser.2 vol.4 no.2 (Autumn 2008) from the editor, Wanstead; a Wanstead House painting at Longleat? Faculty of Media, Humanities & Technology, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln LN6 The Link: journal of the Wessex Newfoundland 7TS: crawfish, better bigots and hooch handlers: Society no.77 (March 2009) £10 p.a. contact Mississippi through the eyes of P.D. East; urban planning treasurer on [email protected]: the in Portugal in the 20th century; environmental activism Newfoundland inventor; hooked mats; Newfoundland and the struggle for justice by non-governmental and Bermuda; Archbishop Edward Field (1801-1876) organisations in the Niger Delta of Nigeria; rural Woodsetts Local History Society Magazine no.36 governance in regulating customary rights of gleaning: a (2008) £2 from Stella Bolam, 39 Scholey Avenue, case study of Sherborne, Dorset 1665 Woodsetts: inn signs 3; Charles Sergeant Jagger; further William Barnes Society Newsletter no.58 (2009) fragments from WW1; tales my mother told me; Mary Ann from the editor, Alberta Cottage, Higher Sea Lane, Rawson; girls’ names in Victorian England; a Woodsetts Charmouth DT6 6BB, school composition 1924; Victorian Christmas cards Open History: the magazine of the Open University Local History Magazine no.122 (Jan/Feb 2009) History Society no.107 (Spring 2009) £5 from £22.50 p.a. from Local History Magazine, Doric OUHS, 77 Marford Crescent, Sale M33 4DN: Tom House, 56 Alcester Road, Studley B80 7LG: a British Scott: Border farmer, musician and diarist; Alice Louisa: oilfield; Barker Perkins Historical Society; Edinburgh’s villain or victim; invasion worries, military and politics oldest pubs, surviving Sissinghurst, invasion and on the South Coast in Edwardian times no.108 (Summer treachery; archers of the Weald 1216-1266; ten greatish 2009) the loss of HMS Victory and Sir John Balchen; but forgotten Britons and they’re all Essex Girls. Hettie Lilian Cheshire BEM; biography of Charles Conservation Bulletin English Heritage no.60 Graydon (1783-1853); Bible Christian Methodists of (Spring 2009) codifying conservation; putting the Gloucester; schooling in an emergency 1939-1945 principles into practice

REVIEWERS IN THIS ISSUE Frank Grace, now retired, was a senior lecturer at Suffolk College, part-time tutor Roger Bellingham was a partner in an East for 30 years with The Open University, and a Yorkshire firm of Solicitors for many years, local history tutor for Cambridge, Essex and but then decided to pursue his longstanding East Anglia Universities. For 20 years he historical interests. After taking a degree in edited Suffolk Review, the journal of the Regional and Local History at Hull Suffolk Local History Council. University he was awarded a PhD by Leicester University. Evelyn Lord is the reviews editor of The Local Historian and course director of the MSt in Alan Crosby is editor of The Local Historian. Local and Regional History at the University He holds honorary research fellowships at of Cambridge. the Universities of Liverpool and Lancaster and has written extensively on aspects of the Adam Longcroft is a senior lecturer in local local and regional history of north-west and regional studies at the University of East England. Anglia, Norwich. He has published widely on aspects of East Anglian landscape and Claire Cross taught in the History vernacular architecture and is chairman of Department of the University of York, from the Norfolk Historic Buildings Group. which she retired as professor in 2000. Her most recent publications included co-edited David L. Smith is fellow, director of studies with P.S. Barnwell and Ann Rycraft Mass and in history, and tutor for graduate students at Parish in Late Medieval England: the use of Selwyn College, Cambridge. His York (2005). She is chairman of the British publications include Constitutional Royalism Association for Local History. and the Search for Settlement, c 1640-1649 (1994), A History of the Modern British Isles, Heather Falvey teaches palaeography and 1603-1707: The Double Crown (1998), The local history for the University of Stuart Parliaments, 1603-1689 (1999), and Cambridge, Institute of Continuing (with Patrick Little) Parliaments and Politics Education. She is currently editing a during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007) volume of fifteenth century wills for the Suffolk Records Society.

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