Landscape and Community in England

LANDSCAPE AND COMMUNITY IN ENGLAND Winchester. Celebrated as a Roman city, the capital of Wessex and subsequently of ...

Author: Alan Everitt

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LANDSCAPE AND COMMUNITY IN ENGLAND

Winchester. Celebrated as a Roman city, the capital of Wessex and subsequently of England, and the seat of one of our oldest sees, Winchester was also an important market-centre with a great medieval fair. (From an engraving by Roberts fn.d.J after a drawing by W.H. Bartlett.)

LANDSCAPE AND COMMUNITY IN ENGLAND

ALAN EVERITT

THE HAMBLEDON PRESS LONDON

AND

RONCEVERTE

Published by The Hambledon Press 1985 35 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 VAX (U.K.) 309 Greenbrier Avenue, Ronceverte, West Virginia 24970 (U.S.A.)

ISBN 0 907628 42 7

©A.M. Everitt 1985 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Everitt, Alan Landscape and community in England - (History series; 32) 1. England — History, Local 2. England - Historiography I. Title II. Series 942 DAI Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Everitt, Alan Milner Landscape and community in England A collection of the author's essays, many of which have been previously published. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cities and towns - England - History - Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. England — Rural conditions — Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Market towns - England - History Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. England - History, Local Addresses, essays, lectures. 5. Land settlement - England History - Addresses, essays, lectures. Regionalism - England History - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title HT133.E89 1985 307.7'6'0942 85-5633 ISBN 0 907628 42 7 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Robert Hartnoll Ltd., Bodmin, Cornwall

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vi

Preface

vii

1

Introduction: Landscape and Community in England

2

Country, County and Town: Patterns of Regional Evolution in England

11

River and Wold: Reflections on the Historical Origin of Regions and Pays

41

4

The Making of the Agrarian Landscape of Kent

61

5

The Primary Towns of England

93

6

The Lost Towns of England

109

7

Suffolk and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660

129

8

The English Urban Inn

155

9

Springs of Sensibility: Philip Doddridge of Northampton and the Evangelical Tradition

201

10

Kentish Family Portrait

247

11

Country Carriers in the Nineteenth Century

271

12

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century

309

3

Index

1

331

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following chapters first appeared elsewhere and are reprinted here by the kind permission of the original publishers. 2

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 29 (1979), pp. 79-108.

3

Journal of Historical Geography, 3 (1977), pp. 1-19.

4

Archaeologia Cantiana, xcii (1977), pp. 1-31.

5

The Local Historian, 11 (1975), pp. 263-77.

6

Inaugural Lecture as Hatton Professor of English Local History in the University of Leicester in February 1970.

7

Suffolk and the Great Rebellion 1640-1660, Suffolk Records Society, iii (1960), pp. 11-36.

8

Perspectives in English Urban History, edited by Alan Everitt (Macmillans, London, 1973), pp. 91-137, 245-7, 256-60.

10

Rural Change and Urban Growth. Essays in English Regional History in Honour of W. G. Hoskins, edited by C.W. Chalklin and M.A. Havinden (Longman, London, 1974), pp. 169-99.

11 Journal of Transport History, iii (1976), pp. 179-202; Perspectives in English Urban History, edited by Alan Everitt (Macmillans, London, 1973), pp. 236-40.

PREFACE

Eight of the papers in this book have been reprinted as they were originally published, apart from minor amendments, but the remainder need a brief word of explanation. The substance of several paragraphs in the introduction, 'Landscape and Community in England', appeared under the title The Grass-Roots of History' in The Times Literary Supplement for 28 July 1972; the rest of the essay is new. The substance of The Lost Towns of England' originally appeared as my Inaugural Lecture, as Hatton Professor of English Local History in the University of Leicester, under the title New Avenues in English Local History, 1970; the opening paragraphs and the conclusion are new, however, and minor alterations have been made elsewhere. Much of the third and fourth sections of 'Springs of Sensibility' appeared under the title 'Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition' in Philip Doddridge, Nonconformity and Northampton, ed. R.L. Greenall, 1981;'both sections have been extensively revised, however, and the rest of the paper is new. The final essay, 'Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century', was given as the James Ford Special Lecture in Oxford in October 1983; it has not previously been published. I wish to thank Mrs Dorothy Brydges for typing several of the essays in this volume, and Mrs Margery Tranter for her assistance in proof-reading and in compiling the index.

In Memoriam E. M. E.

1

INTRODUCTION: LANDSCAPE AND COMMUNITY IN ENGLAND

1 When Joyce Grenfell was asked to give one of the Lenten Lectures in Truro Cathedral, she considered making use of an earlier talk on a similar topic. But as she re-read it, she said, 'I realized that I no longer stood where I had when I wrote it; the view had opened up; I had had different experiences and made new discoveries. The lecture would be on the same subject, but the horizon had altered. It always does.'1 These are thoughtful words. I have had the same feeling in re-reading a number of my own papers and articles written over the last 25 years. Some were too long to include in this volume; others were still in print; others again seemed to have been superseded. In most of those I eventually decided to include there was not much that I wanted to re-cast, except in detail. But I found that my view had opened up; I too had made new discoveries. In what ways have my own horizons been extended? England is an old country: that is one of the dominant facts in its history. In many ways it is totally unlike the England of the sixteenth century, or even the nineteenth. Yet the child is father of the man: and just as the fullgrown man is irrevocably different from what he was as a child, yet what he is now was implicit in what he was then, so the England of today is more deeply conditioned by its past than perhaps any of us realize. There is a sense in which government can revolutionize our lives; yet there is also a sense in which its power is everywhere limited by the intractability and historic depth of society itself. England is also a varied country, one of the most varied in the world in relation to its size: and this fact, too, has everywhere left its imprint on our past. Forty or fifty years ago it was more apparent than it is now. If you visited places like Hereford or Exeter, Coniston, Morwenstow, or Ottery St Mary, or even some of our less alluring provincial cities - perhaps only for a day, perhaps merely to pass through - you felt at once, this is sui generis, this is unique. Nowadays, we have lost much of that feeling of individuality. It is still there for all to see in our Victorian literature; you may still sense something of it if you leave the tarmac and take to the woods and footpaths; or if you explore the back streets of towns unknown to tourism like Leicester; or the maze of old canals (I am told) behind the factories of 1

Joyce Grenf ell, In Pleasant Places, 1980 edn, p. 158.

2

Landscape and Community in England

Birmingham. Nevertheless, the vivid expectation of finding it wherever you went - that has very largely departed, and with it the sense that it once existed and moulded all our past. Antiquity and diversity: these, then, are two of the hallmarks of the English landscape and English society. But they do not imply either a formless landscape or a society without historic rationale. On the contrary, wherever we look we see signs of a coherent pattern, evidences of the logic of history. My purpose in this introductory essay is to indicate some of the contrasting types of landscape and community to which these circumstances have given rise. 2

In an agrarian society such as England was before the nineteenth century, regional differences are inherent from the dawn of settlement in the climatic and geological variety of the country, and these circumstances alone necessarily imposed a certain form or structure on English topography. One has only to place a sheet of the one-inch Ordnance Survey for Leicestershire, say, beside one for Westmorland or Kent to realize that here we have, embedded in the cartographic palimpsest, very different kinds of settlement and society. The map of Leicestershire appears like a series of spiders' webs: the roads radiate neatly from the villages in a relatively open network, often more or less straight for considerable stretches, eventually converging on the nine or ten main roads of the county, which themselves converge in regular lines on Leicester itself - the fattest spider in the centre of the largest web. The fields are often large and straight-sided; the villages are large and nucleated. Despite seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enclosures, many farmhouses still stand in village streets, and it is rare to find any in the fields which date from much before the eighteenth century. In the rural areas of Kent - let alone Westmorland - there is no such regularity. The road-map is more like a maze, a tangle of endlessly twisting lanes sunk between wooded banks, often too narrow for two vehicles to pass. Many of the main roads have no historic unity but are modern rationalizations of ancient forest tracks, like the road from Tonbridge to Ashford; or if they are straight, like the Dover road, they are often of Roman origin. There is no obvious urban centre, like Leicester, but a series of smaller towns, like Canterbury, Maidstone, and Ashford. The fields are small and irregular, broken up with woods and copses, and peppered with isolated farms. In contrast with Leicestershire, there are more than 5,000 medieval and sub-medieval buildings still surviving in rural Kent, the majority of which are scattered farmhouses of this kind. In the Wealden parish of Smarden alone there are sixty-two distinct hamlets and isolated farms, nearly all originating in the centuries between the Conquest and the Black Death. In the downland areas many farms may be traced back, in contemporary charters, to a period before the Conquest. In many parishes


3

there is no village centre, and most of the so-called 'villages' of the county, such as Goudhurst and Chilham, are strictly speaking little decayed markets rather than farming communities in origin. It is a broken, crowded landscape compared with that of Leicestershire: crowded not because the rural population is greater (outside the commuter belt it is often less), but because of essential differences of settlement-history, social structure, and local law. Within these differences, often transcending them, there have always been other regional variations in the pattern of rural society in England. In many respects more important than differences between counties have been differences within them. In terms of rural economy most of England may be roughly divided, historically speaking, into seven or eight different types of countryside: field, forest, fell, fen, marsh, heath, down, and wald. These divisions are not confined by county boundaries; neither are they simply related to broad divisions between north and south, or Highland and Lowland Zones. There are, of course, no fells in the south and no downs in the north; but in both zones of England there are any number of field, marsh, heath, fen, wald, and forest districts. The impact of these countrysides on the course of settlement is everywhere inscribed on the landscape, and in most counties they have also given rise to very varied types of local economy and society. One of the clasic examples of a shire divided into field and forest is Warwickshire. Much of the southern half, or Felden, is broadly a country of strongly nucleated common-field parishes; whereas a good deal of that to the north, in Shakespeare's Forest of Arden, is in origin primarily an area of scattered woodland settlement with some similarities to the Weald of Kent and Sussex. Much of Arden, and the adjacent parts of Worcestshire and Staffordshire, has now disappeared beneath the bricks and mortar of greater Birmingham. But the local peculiarities of settlement in the region have influenced the whole of north Warwickshire, and the very existence of towns like Birmingham and Wolverhampton as industrial centres. Woodland districts like these were frequently areas where settlement occurred late, though we are now coming to realize that this was not always the case, and that some forest districts were intensively colonized as early as the RomanoBritish period. They were also areas where small freeholders were numerous, where manorial control was often weak, and where population tended to expand more rapidly in the early modern period than in the country at large. As a consequence, rural craft-industries often developed in these areas - cloth-weaving, ironworking, nailmaking, glassmaking, stocking-knitting, lacemaking, woodcrafts, and a host of other trades-first as by-employments to pastoral husbandry, then by degrees becoming independent of agriculture, and eventually transforming the area, as in the case of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, into an essentially industrial society. In these respects Birmingham and the Black Country are not exceptional,

4 Landscape and Community in England but simply one particularly successful example of a general phenomenon. Their rise was not due merely to the presence of coal. Several of the industrial districts of England developed for broadly similar reasons in the old forest regions, and although the proximity of coal-seams played an important part in their history, many began their industrial life without the aid of such resources, or the need for them. The Weald of Kent and Sussex is a case in point. Like the Arden, this was a pastoral forest area, mainly of late colonization, which by the seventeenth century had become one of the most thickly-settled rural districts in the south-east. It had also become one of the national centres of three major industries - cloth, iron, and glass - together with a number of basic woodcrafts essential to the economy of seventeenthcentury England. The disappearance of these industries by the early nineteenth century was undoubtedly influenced by the absence of coal; but it was due also to more complex factors which as yet have not been adequately explored. The decline of traditional industries, indeed, generally attracts less attention than their rise, though historically it can often be equally revealing. 3

Quite as important as the diversity of rural economies and pays in determining regional differences has been the diversity in the social and landed structure of the English parish. For the modern townsman all villages may seem basically alike, but historically speaking nothing is further from the truth. In the mid-Victorian era, owing to the existence of sources not available in earlier centuries, such as the Return of Owners of Land, 1873, these differences may be plotted on a national scale. Despite vast changes in landownership, it is clear that throughout England there were still thousands of small freeholders clinging on to their land, though far fewer than in previous centuries. In Leicestershire, for example, the Return records more than 4,000 small freeholders in the county, owning between one acre and 300 acres apiece. In Kent there were nearly 7,000 smallholders and in Lancashire more than 12,000. These figures also include owners of villas with extensive gardens; yet systematic comparison of the list for Kent with the evidence of directories shows that most of them were farmers, smallholders, or the like. Within this general pattern it is likewise clear, from the Return and other sources, that most rural places belonged to one or other of two essentially distinct types of community: the 'manorial parish', in which all the land was owned by a single magnate or a few large landowners, and the 'freeholders' parish', in which land was subdivided among a multiplicity of holders. This division oversimplifies a complex situation; there were many parishes which fell between these two types; but for the present argument it will perhaps suffice. It is a division which was evident in all parts of England, but there


5

were striking regional differences in the predominance of one or other type of community. In Leicestershire, for example, a little over half the county consisted of estate parishes, controlled by landed magnates, whereas 48 per cent consisted of parishes where small freeholders were numerous. In Northamptonshire, a county which had long been noted for its great estates, two-thirds of the parishes were in the hands of magnates, and in only onethird were there many small freeholders. At the other end of the spectrum was the county of Kent, where in almost two-thirds of the shire small owners were numerous, whereas only one-third was dominated exclusively by the grandees. In much of Kent the freeholder, or yeoman, was still a characteristic figure; the word 'yeoman' was still current there in the midnineteenth century, whereas in Northamptonshire it seems to have become virtually extinct by the 1770's. Yet in some counties, there is reason to think, this generalization conceals the most significant feature - the regional distinction within the shire. In Kent we have a county sharply divided, both geographically and historically, into distinct areas, and the pattern of landownership varied greatly between them. The Weald has always been thought of as the stronghold of the 'yeomen of Kent', and on the whole the nineteenth-century evidence bears out the legend. Although there were ancient parks and mansions in the Weald, such as Penshurst and Hever, in four out of five Wealden parishes small freeholders still formed a dominant element in local society. On the downland, by contrast, 70 per cent of the parishes were in the hands of the local squirearchy, and in only 30 per cent were there significant numbers of small freeholders. In this great arc of countryside, stretching seventy miles from the Surrey border to the cliffs of Dover and covering three hundred thousand acres, landed families were even more numerous, their rule even more entrenched than in Northamptonshire. Though they were rarely as wealthy as their Midland counterparts, many of them belonged to the ancient squirearchy of Kent and could trace their ancestry back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In numerous downland parishes one can still sense their local dominion, where church and manor house stand side by side, with no other building in sight, and the family tombs bear witness to generations of manorial pride. In Kent, and sometimes elsewhere, distinctions of this kind between regions of estate parishes and regions of freeholders' parishes can be traced back for centuries, in some cases to the origins of English society. The settlement of the Weald and the downland had occurred at different periods, in different ways, and under different auspices; its distinctive features in the Victorian age had a very long history behind them, and their power of survival was remarkable. These two different types of parish, the manorial and the freeholding, necessarily threw up different types of society. Clearly the latter was the freer and more independent, and one of the ways in which it expressed this freedom was in its predilection for Nonconformity. Dissent is often thought

6 Landscape and Community in England of as an urban phenomenon in England, but the Religious Census of 1851, when Nonconformity was approaching the peak of its power, shows that this view is mistaken. The census proved not only that Dissent was an essentially provincial phenomenon (the proportion of Nonconformists in London was a good deal smaller than in major provincial towns) but that it was often quite as strong in the countryside as in the towns. In the Lindsey division of Lincolnshire (the northern half of the county), nearly two-thirds of the 550 Dissenting chapels in the area were to be found in rural parishes, and little more than a third in the towns. In Leicestershire, though a markedly more urban and industrial county, more than two-thirds of the 354 Dissenting chapels were in country parishes. In Kent, it is true, the position was reversed, and nearly two-thirds of the 500 chapels in the county were to be found in the towns, though most of these were small market-centres. Yet in all three areas at least three-quarters of the Dissenting groups in the countryside were to be found in freeholders' parishes; whereas in 80 per cent of the estate parishes, where squire and parson were dominant, there was no organized Nonconformity of any kind. 4

Differences in local settlement patterns, in rural economies, in industrial origins, in parish typologies: these do not exhaust the historical diversity of provincial society. They are enough to suggest, however, that whereas we normally think of England as a single community, a unitary society, it is also legitimate to think of it as an amalgam of different societies all at varying stages in their evolution, all influencing each other, yet all developing in their own way, moving forward at different periods and at different paces, so that one finds older societies co-exising, often with equal vigour, alongside the new. Normally, for example, we think of Victorian England as predominantly an industrial society: the land of Manchesters and Birminghams. Well, of course, it was the land of Birminghams and Manchesters. Yet if one studies almost any Victorian county or region in the round, and examines the occupations of all its inhabitants, one finds a less simple but more interesting picture. The county of Kent in the 1860s may again serve as an illustration. It was not an altogether typical shire - no county can be; yet the diversity of societies within it was characteristic of almost every part of England. If we exclude the London suburban region (which contained about 30 per cent of the population), its area covered about a million acres, its population amounted to 545,000, and the occupied population to almost 300,000. (The last figure may be compared with Devonshire's 330,000 and Lancashire's 1,350,000.) Of this 300,000, nearly 65,000 were in industrial occupations, 55,000 in agricultural, and 30,000 in professional. (Compare Devonshire's 90,000, 64,000 and 4,000; Lancashire's 620,000,85,000 and nearly 30,000.)


7

Though Kent was obviously far less industrial than Lancashire, there was an important industrial element of a kind in the county, existing alongside the agricultural and the professional. Although there were no large towns, there were many of about 6,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, and there was a great deal of small-scale industry in these places, as there was in similar towns all over England. Equally important, within and beyond this industrial society, the fundamental craft culture of the county also survived. During the latter half of the eighteenth century the population of Kent had almost doubled, and during the next half-century or so it almost doubled again. As a consequence, many traditional occupations that were still basic to a largely agrarian economy not only survived but expanded. In 1870, for example, there were some 350 wheelwrights' shops in the county, 200 saddlers' and harness-makers' shops, 630 blacksmiths' forges, 1,300 shoemakers' workshops, 300 master millers, and 115 local breweries. Taken together, these occupations and others like them provide an example of what is often called 'traditional society', or what W. G. Hoskins once conveniently christened the 'Old Community'. Several of these occupations were among the largest in the county. Almost wherever one looks in Victorian England one finds evidence of this traditional society, living in juxtapostion to the newer world of industry. Its existence, not as a decaying relic, nor as a self-conscious revival, but simply as an older society with a different life-cycle alongside the new industrial world, explains much in the literature, the art, the philosophy, and the idealism of Victorian England. You did not need to travel far to find it: a morning's walk from the largest city and you were in the midst of it. And on market day in a town like Leicester or Preston, with all the scores of village carriers' carts streaming in from the countryside, it passed by your very doorstep and you conversed with it in the high street and the inn. 5

It seems to me that the coexistence in this way of contrasting forms of life, each with its own momentum, its own time-span, constitutes one of the dominant themes in English history. It was not a peculiarity of England; neither was it a peculiarity of recent centuries; it was found, I believe, in every century, and probably in every European country. Yet because it was this country that became the first industrial nation, and because the expansion of our population after 1750 was unparalleled, there is a sense in which the contrast came to be more dramatically manifest in England than elsewhere. For although these developments, among others, entailed the destruction of the old peasant economy, they did not, paradoxically, destroy local loyalties or regional traditions. There was much in the period that tended to undermine them, such as the gradual improvement of transport.

8


Yet there are reasons for thinking that in many ways regional cultures were striking deeper roots in this country between Charles I's reign and Queen Victoria's; the curve of historical evolution is not always an even or a simple one. There were a number of underlying circumstances, after all, that almost inevitably encouraged their development. One of these was the rise of industrial regions, and industrial capitals like Manchester and Stoke-onTrent, which gradually developed a culture of their own in this period, apart from the culture of the metropolis. Another was the increasing concentration of certain types of manufacture in distinct areas, and the local pool of specialist skills that came to form as a consquence in towns like Sheffield and Birmingham. Yet another was the dramatic expansion of provincial Nonconformity during the eighteeth and nineteenth centuries, and the pronounced regional connexions of some of the sects. Others again may be traced in the establishment after 1700 of influential provincial newspapers, such as the Northampton Mercury, and the development of county towns as cultural and business capitals. The pronounced decline in long-distance migration amongst apprentices, coupled with the increase of local migration, into towns like Northampton and Oxford likewise tended to deepen the roots of local loyalty. Even in London there are clear signs of some of these circumstances at work: for example in the massive increase of boys from the Home Counties apprenticed to the Weavers' Company, whose numbers rose from 42 per cent of the total in 1655-64 to nearly 96 per cent in 1786-95.2 Developments like these, I suggest, tended to anchor the mind of the local community, whether urban or rural, more firmly in its region. They were reinforced, moreover, by the remarkable development of dynastic connexion over this period at the heart of provincial society. Among landed families this was a phenomenon already well advanced in some parts of the country by the time of the Civil War. By the nineteenth century, however, the web of local family ramification had extended far beyond the ranks of the armigerous elite, and in many areas it was more extensive and more thickly woven, through ties of intermarriage and descent, than among the gentry of the seventeenth century. As is suggested in the final essay in this volume, it was particularly marked among farming families - though it was by no means peculiar to them3 - and for some of these it is possible to make a direct comparison between the seventeenth century and the Victorian era. Take the case of the Dennes of East Kent, for example, a minor landed family in origin whose name derived from that of their medieval home at Denne or Dennehill, between Dover and Canterbury. In Charles I's reign there do not seem to have been more than 2

P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1770-1800,1982, p. 69. For striking evidence of dynastic ramification in the industralized areas of south Lancashire, see Richard McKinley, The Surnames of Lancashire (English Surnames Series, IV), 1981, especially Chapter 8. 3


9

five or six branches of this family in the county; but by the 1860's they had split up, and split up again, into no fewer than 44 separately-established branches, nine of them headed by farmers, 21 by tradesmen, and 10 by professional men or minor gentry. All of these branches were still resident in East Kent, more than half of them in the same neighbourhood as their Stuart forebears, between Canterbury, Dover, and Sandwich. The ramification of families like these both deepened their roots and magnified their power in the local community. Against the 44 branches of the Dennes, or the 57 of their neighbours the Collards, or the 24 of the Blaxlands of Blaxland - and there are scores of similar examples - the relatively small number of newlyarrived farming families in Kent could rarely muster more than a single establishment. The power and cohesion of the indigenous farming clans of the county had increased dramatically since the seventeenth century: and in this respect the community of Kent was no freakish exception. Circumstances like these, it seems to me, must have played a notable part in perpetuating regional traditions. They must often have enabled older societies and older ways of thought to coexist alongside the new. They help to explain many of the apparent contradictions in our history, and much of that strange intermingling of transformation and tradition that marked English society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They help us to understand why the England of the Lancashire mill-owners was also the England of George Borrow, and the England of Jane Austen. They shed a vivid light on those deeply-rooted regional cultures portrayed for us in the novels of George Eliot and Arnold Bennett. 6

From all that has been said here it will be apparent that I believe we should study places, localities, counties, and regions not simply for their own sake, but for the light they shed on English society as a whole. There is nothing novel in this view; it has a lengthy lineage behind it. We find it in Tawney, we find it in Maitland, we find it in Seebohm. But we need to pay greater attention than we have done, I believe, to the indigenous life of the local communities of England, and to the fact that it stemmed ultimately from different roots from that of the community of the realm. No locality or community of course leads a wholly independent life; yet each, like the realm itself, has a life of its own. It will be influenced by national and metropolitan developments; but it will respond to them in its own way, drawing on its own traditions, its own absorbing historical experience, whenever it is faced with a new challenge or a new opportunity. If there is anything in these essays that helps us to understand the wealth of that experience, and to recapture the local idiosyncrasy of the past, I shall be satisfied.

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COUNTRY, COUNTY AND TOWN: PATTERNS OF REGIONAL EVOLUTION IN ENGLAND

I IT is a remarkable fact, and one that needs to be pondered, that almost all our current regional terms in this country are of very recent origin. Expressions like Tyneside and Merseyside, the West Midlands and the North-East, have no very lengthy lineage; such phrases as the Home Counties can rarely be traced beyond the early decades of the railway era; 2 the present usage even of a genuine historic name like Wessex is no more than an antiquarian revival; while the current reanimation of Mercia seems to be chiefly attributable to a contemporary police force. Perhaps the only regional name of this kind with a continuous history to the present day is East Anglia. In other words, behind most of our modern expressions, ideas and preconceptions lie implicit that were not necessarily of much significance to the people of earlier centuries. A phrase like the Home Counties, for example, implies a kind of regional unity between the shires surrounding London which until recent centuries—and in many respects until recent generations-—is entirely fallacious. There was no connexion between the origins of settlement, for example, in Hertfordshire and in Sussex, and next to none between settlement in Essex and in Kent. Even in the Civil War period there was singularly little contact and no cohesion, as parliament quickly found to its cost, between the counties surrounding the capital. These facts will bear thinking about. Most of us probably find it difficult to rid our minds of the unconscious preconceptions implicit in regional expressions like these. In studying the evolution of contemporary society, moreover, they obviously have a certain validity, and 1 This version has been slightly expanded for publication. A fuller version of pp. 2337 was given as the Gregynog Lectures at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1976. 2 The Oxford English Dictionary gives no quotations to indicate the origin of this term. It was evidently in regular use by the 18705, when it was used by Robert Furley in A History of the Weald of Kent (3 vols., Ashford, 1871-4) ; II, p. 356. It probably derives from the Home Circuit of the assize judges.

12


it would be cavalier to suggest that we should abandon them altogether. Yet there are dangers in reading them back into the past, and of attributing to them a kind of historic unity which in fact is of recent origin. It is not simply that the generalizations they give rise to are often likely to prove spurious, but that they usually impose the wrong kind of regional pattern upon the landscape of history. The tapestry of local and regional variation in England, as it appeared to our forebears, was more elaborately wrought, and more changing in its character, than such terms suggest. As historians, what exactly do we mean, or ought we to mean, by a 'region'? In England this is a particularly difficult question to answer, and the purpose of this paper is to indicate something of the character of its complexity. To begin with, regions vary greatly in kind. There is a clear distinction between what one might call a 'conscious' region, on one hand, an area with a sense of its own identity, a sense of belonging together, and, on the other hand, a region which is rather a perception of historians or geographers, and which probably had no conscious significance for contemporaries. The geographers' distinction between the Highland Zone and the Lowland Zone is one example of this latter type of'unconscious' region; what W. G. Hoskins once described in an illuminating phrase as the 'peripheral counties' of England is another; the vernacular architects' perception of a zone in which the longhouse was the characteristic form of traditional farm-building is yet another. In their own context these are useful expressions; they relate to real ideas; but one cannot say that they relate to a 'conscious' region, with its own sense of unity and identity. Then, secondly, regional definitions may vary with the kind of social order, or class, that one is thinking of, particularly perhaps in recent centuries. In the early modern period, for example, the county came to have a meaning and a coherence for the gentry of the time which it can rarely have had for husbandmen, craftsmen, and labourers. Not that those of non-gentle status had no consciousness of the county unit; in some areas, such as Cornwall and Kent, they certainly had, at any rate in times of crisis, when the shire tended to act together as a united body. But they did not form part of a single interrelated community of families, as the county gentry themselves often did. A little later, we can trace the development of another kind of social region based on the leisured classes: the 'neighbourhood', or local visiting area of what came to be called 'carriage' families: 3 a peculiarly English kind of locality which figures prominently in our nineteenth-century literature—in the novels of Jane Austen, for 3

See, for example, my 'Kentish Family Portrait' in Rural Change and Urban Growth, 1500-1800, ed. C. W. Chalklin and M. A. Havinden (London, 1974), pp. 193-4. See below, pp. 247-77.

Country, County and Town

13

example—but which can usually have had little meaning at other levels of society. Thirdly, and most difficult of all to take account of, is the fact that regions are not necessarily constant or static units: there is a kaleidoscopic character about them. Whereas one can say that local communities, like Leicester, Norwich, or Tolpuddle, have always remained continuously identifiable, and in a sense the same place, one cannot say this of the regional pattern of this country. Some kinds of region, it is true, such as the country or pays of this paper—Dartmoor or the Cotswolds, for instance—have remained similar in extent for centuries. Such areas, moreover, often have a longer and more continuous influence on provincial development than we sometimes realize. The fact that at the present time the parliamentary constituencies of North Kent—Dartford, Gravesend, Rochester, Gillingham, and Faversham—all tend to be marginal Labour/Conservative seats arises partly from characteristics in their economy and society whose ultimate origins may be traced back for many centuries, in some sense even to the roots of Kentish settlement itself. To put it briefly, they belong to a tract of countryside that since Roman times has always formed the more workaday part of the county. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the basic regional pattern in this country has in many ways not remained constant: it has been an evolutionary pattern. Not only have regional boundaries changed: at a more fundamental level, new kinds or types of region have from time to time come into existence and overlaid or transformed the old. Up to a point, after all, the reorganization of local government a few years ago, whatever we may think of its all too evident defects, was a recognition of that fact. Of these diverse types of region, the two that will be discussed more particularly in this paper are the 'country' and the 'county'. The former term is not used here to denote 'country' as opposed to 'town', or 'country' as opposed to 'court', but 'country' in the old sense of a 'countryside' or a pays. This particular meaning of the word has largely died out in the common speech of English people today, though its disappearance is relatively recent, and it still survives in a few special phrases like the Black Country. 4 That particular expression is in fact an interesting and rather rare example of its application to a comparatively modern industrial district. II

The influence of countrysides or pays upon the evolution of provincial society is probably something that most of us are now in some degree 4 First recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1834, when it was evidently not a new expression.

14


aware of. It first struck me forcibly when working with Joan Thirsk on the sixteenth-century volume of The Agrarian History of England. It struck me afresh, a few years later, in endeavouring to work out the distribution pattern of rural nonconformity in Kent and a group of Midland counties.5 Since then it has impressed me yet again in working on the early settlement history of this country, more particuarly in Kent, though also in other areas.6 What we see in all these periods is a landscape, a society, an economy, and in some respects a culture, that in every area was sharply divided into contrasting pays. Everything that we look at in past centuries is in some degree shaped by these contrasts. The fact that most of our historic regional names, apart from those of counties, are the names of countrysides is significant in this connexion: the Chilterns, the Mendips, the Cotswolds, and the Weald, for example; or Dartmoor, Charnwood, and Arden. It was their character as distinctive countrysides that impressed itself on the early peoples that named them, often in the Celtic period, and that character has in some sense remained apparent, though not of course unchanged, throughout their history. There are still many areas where these differences of pays are plain to see in the English countryside of today. We can see them in Gloucestershire, for example, between the Severn valley on one hand and the Cotswolds on the other; in Yorkshire between the lush pasturelands of the valley-floors and the bare fellsides rising above them; or in Kent between the untrammelled sheep-country of Romney Marsh and the broken, wooded, upland overlooking it. In the days before parliamentary enclosure such contrasts were a good deal more obvious than they are at the present time, particularly in the old common-field areas, where nowadays it often requires an effort of imagination to re-create them. There were few counties, indeed, where they did not give rise to marked regional variations of some kind, and in some districts these variations were to be found within the borders of a single parish. In the Cambridgeshire parish of Carlton-cum-Willingham, for instance, there was a pronounced contrast between the western half of the area, with its vast common-field of some 800 acres, the only one in the parish, and the eastern half with its parcelled assart-and-coppice country along the Suffolk'border.7 It is the exceptionally diverse physical structure of this island that lies behind this regional variation. That is why these contrasting types of countryside are rarely delimited by county boundaries, but regu5

Alan Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the Nineteenth Century (Leicester University: Dept. of English Local History, Occasional Papers, 2nd Ser., No. 4, 1972). 8 See my forthcoming book on this subject, Continuity and Colonization: the Evolution of Kentish Settlement (Leicester, 1985). 7 V.C.H., Cambridgeshire, vi, 152, 165.


15

larly stretch across the borders of one shire into the next, and in their essential characteristics are often echoed on similar landforms elsewhere. There are obvious resemblances between the settlement of the Weald of Kent and the Weald of Sussex, for example, and the whole Wealden area is more like the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, or even Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, than the marshlands or the coastal plain of Sussex and Kent. There are also closer resemblances between the Gault Vale settlements of Kent on one hand, and of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire on the other, than there are between those of the Kentish Gault and of Romney Marsh. That does not mean that these areas are identical or that their history has been shaped by crude determinism; but it does mean that it has been influenced by complex human responses to particular kinds of environment. The fact that in Kent alone nearly a thousand years elapsed between the oldest English settlements of the coastal plain and the latest English settlements of the Weald bears testimony to the profound effect of these differences of pays upon the progress of colonization. The fact that that lengthy period elapsed also meant that very different types of economy and rural society developed in the various parts of the county. To a perceptive eye, these differences are still apparent within the social, economic, and political contrasts of the present day, though they are not of course the only factors to take account of in that connexion. In approaching the problem of regional development, then, what we really need at the outset is a systematic map indicating the general framework or pattern of pays in the country as a whole. In some parts of England not enough is yet known regarding the origins of settlement or the subsequent evolution of local society to reconstruct such a map with any great confidence. But it seems clear that in general we must envisage a pattern of sharply-localized contrasts: an elaborate mosaic of interlocking rural economies more closely resembling the geological map than that of our modern regions or our ancient counties and kingdoms. Not that this pattern will exactly repeat the geological map, for geology is but one of many factors shaping a countryside or pays, but that it will bear the same kind of regional imprint, the same kind of localized diversity, the same intricacy and contrast. In making these remarks one is clearly begging the difficult question of how far we may expect to find continuity of outline between the pays of the settlement period and the pays of more recent centuries. How closely do the agrarian countrysides of the late eighteenth century, say, really approximate to those of the pre-Conquest period? The answer to this question is obviously not at all simple, and may well differ widely from county to county. Nevertheless, although

16


agrarian practice itself has varied greatly over the generations, in many pays it will be found to have varied only within the more or less distinct limits imposed upon it by the local environment. In many areas it was not until the period of parliamentary enclosure, the building of railways, the mechanization of agriculture, the invention of clay-pipe drainage, or some other technical advance, that fundamental change in regional outlines became possible. When it occurred at an earlier date, as in the development of orchards and hop-gardens in sixteenth-century Kent, it was usually restricted to certain types of countryside, and often fitted into the ancient pattern of farms, fields, woods, lanes, and boundaries.8 In other words it did not as a rule create an entirely new countryside, or wholly redraw the outlines of the ancient pays. In many areas, therefore, though not in all, the historic framework of agrarian regions, before the changes of the last century took place, is of a broadly similar pattern to the framework of early settlement-zones. In some counties, such as Buckinghamshire and Kent, a marked correspondence has persisted to the present day, and there is really nothing surprising in this kind of continuity. The natural properties of districts like the Chilterns, the Weald, and Romney Marsh, after all, have necessarily entailed a certain basic, though not immutable, pattern upon their agrarian evolution. It is not part of the present purpose to describe in detail how to set about reconstructing a systematic map of countrysides or pays in England. As a first step, however, it is useful to recognize that the English landscape is composed of a number of distinct types or species of country, so to speak, and on this subject something must be said. For although no two areas exactly repeat one another, it is possible to classify the multifarious local countrysides of England, and to perceive a tentative pattern both in the way settlement proceeded from one type to another, and in the varying kinds of society to which they tended to give rise. In the space available, attention will be devoted to their influence on the origins of settlement rather than their subsequent effect on local society. Provisionally, and perhaps rashly, the present writer would suggest a broad classification into eight types or categories of countryside: the fieldenor 'champion' areas, the forest areas, the fell or moorland areas, the fenlands, the marshlands, the heathlands, the downlands, and the wold or wald countrysides. These categories are only rough and ready ones; at many points they clearly overlap; and they must not be thought of as either rigid in their boundaries or unchanging in their character over the centuries. No classification can be alto8

As is still evident from the fact that most of the isolated farmsteads and many of the woodland names in the earliest fruit-growing area, around Faversham and Sittingbourne, are recorded in medieval or pre-Conquest documents.


17

gether satisfactory, and a number of further subdivisions might obviously be suggested. There are marked differences, as well as resemblances, between the 'fell' or moorland countries of the Pennines, the Lake District, and Dartmoor, for example. There are also major differences between the 'fielden' countrysides of Warwickshire, Kent, and the Welsh Marches. In Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, the High Weald is in some ways very unlike the Low Weald, and in places little more than sandy heathland, though in general both areas may be thought of as classic forest country. Nevertheless, for elementary purposes this broad classification of the English landscape into eight divisions will perhaps serve. At least it may help to fix in the mind a different kind of pattern from that of our contemporary regional terms. Up to a point, it seems clear that these different types of country often tended to be settled in different periods.9 In some areas we do not yet know enough to be positive on this point, and there must always have been wide variations of dating between similar types of landscape in different parts of the country. Nevertheless, a number of tentative generalizations can perhaps be advanced. In the fielden or 'old arable' countrysides many settlements are certainly very ancient—though of course not all—and it seems likely that most of the earliest English and pre-English places are to be found in these areas. They are particularly associated with river valleys—the Thames, the Ouse, the Nene, and the Medway, for example—and with major spring-lines, such as that of the Gault in Kent and Buckinghamshire, though not with all low-lying districts. The fell, forest, and heathland areas, by contrast, usually tend, by and large, to be settled relatively late. In the two latter types of country at least a good deal of colonization is of post-Conquest origin,10 and in some areas new settlements were still being established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This seems to be the period of origin of many places called 'row', for instance, such as Keysoe Row in Bedfordshire and Whitley Row in Kent, and probably also of many settlements called 'common' and 'heath'.11 In fenland areas a number of very early 9

See my article, 'Place-Names and Pays', in Nomina, iii, 1979. These views have recently been challenged by P. H. Sawyer in his 'Introduction: Early Medieval English Settlement', Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change, ed. P. H. Sawyer (London, 1976), pp. 1-7. For a critique of Professor Sawyer's views, see my forthcoming book referred to in n.6 above, where the relationship of settlement origins and dating to types of countryside is explored in detail. I should not dispute that some forest settlements may be very early; but when topographical as well as documentary evidence is taken into account, it seems indisputable that permanent and continuous colonization (as distinct from summer pasturing) in areas like the Weald began late in the Old English period and was far from complete in the eleventh century. When closely examined, the evidence that Professor Sawyer cites does not in fact conflict with that view. 11 Such settlements usually arose through encroachment on common land, or on 10

18


settlements may also be found, such as Ely in Cambridgeshire; but here there may have been wider diversities of date in different localities, since variations of a few feet above sea-level dictate essentially dissimilar topographical conditions in this type of country. In marshland areas it is also occasionally possible to find very early places, such as Lydd in Kent. But if the Kentish evidence in general is any guide—it may well not be—much marshland settlement did not originate until the tenth or eleventh century, or even later, owing to problems of drainage and reclamation. In these areas early settlements often seem to have developed from very localized circumstances: at Lydd itself from the existence of a shingle island at the tip of a tidal lagoon in the Romano-British period.12 It is the wald and the downland areas of England that are in some ways the most enigmatic and perhaps the most diverse in their settlement origins. In these terms one must probably include most of the upland or watershed countrysides of the Lowland Zone, apart from the late-settled forests and heaths, whether they are known as 'wolds' and 'downs' or not. Amongst them we must thus think of regions like the Chilterns, the Kesteven uplands, the West Cambridgeshire uplands, and perhaps much of the higher country of the eastern counties, as well as classic downland areas like the Berkshire Downs and the Yorkshire Wolds. In some of these regions settlement as we know it began relatively early in the Saxon period, and in many cases it seems to have been more or less complete by the tenth or eleventh century.13 Unlike the fielden areas, however, these were generally pays of colonization, or in some cases recolonization of secondary woodland, rather than of primary settlement. Except in river valleys, as at Lambourne in Berkshire or Chilham in Kent, it does not seem to be usual to find very early primary settlements in downland countryside, though in some areas there was substantial prehistoric and Roman settlement. Further examination may well modify this view, however, in some parts of the country. parish boundaries, during a period of rapid population growth, particularly c. 15701640. See, for example, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500-1640, ed Joan Thirsk (London, 1967), pp. 409-12. Keysoe Row developed on the boundary of Keysoe and Bolnhurst; Whitley Row on that of Sundridge and Chevening. 12 Lydd is recorded in a charter of 774, much earlier than any other marshland settlement. Its Roman remains include an earthwork, a track, and second-century pottery. There is Saxon work in the church. (J. K. Wallenberg, Kentish Place-Names (Uppsala, 1931), p. 55; G. J. Copley, An Archaeology of South-East England: a Study in Continuity (London, 1958), p. 277). 13 Cf. Alan Everitt, 'River and Wold: Reflections on the Historical Origin of Regions and Pays', Journal of Historical Geography, III, i (1977), 1-19- Nearly all the parishes in a typical 'wold' area, such as the West Cambridgeshire uplands, are recorded in Domesday Book. See below, pp. 42-59.


19

Nowadays, the typical wold and downland areas of England—in Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, or East Sussex, for example—are notably bare of trees, and many people think of them as always having been woodless. There are grounds for thinking, however, that some of them were at one time extensively wooded, and in regions like the Kentish Downs and the Chilterns substantial wooded stretches still remain. At present we cannot be sure that the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds, or the Berkshire and Wiltshire Downs, were ever so afforested, and the archaeological evidence suggests that parts of the latter at least have been bare since prehistoric times. In a recent article in the Journal of Historical Geography, however, the present writer was able to show from place-names and topographical evidence that the bare downland areas of East Kent were at one time thickly forested, and the word wald still survives in many local names, such as Womenswold and Waldershare. A further article, by Delia Hooke, shows that the Cotswolds also were once well-wooded; and so too were areas like the West Cambridgeshire uplands, the Kesteven uplands, the Bromswold of Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Northamptonshire, the upland country bordering Essex, Cambridgeshire, and Suffolk, and the south Leicestershire uplands overlooking the Welland valley.14 If areas like the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds were in fact once wooded, they nevertheless gave rise to very different types of settlement and society from those of the Kentish Downs or the Chilterns, so that it is convenient to think of them as a distinct kind of country, although their period of colonization was often probably similar. It is for this reason that the word wald is used here to distinguish the early-colonized but wooded upland countries from the barer wolds and downlands. Like the classic forest countries, much of the wald and downland countryside of England thus originated from the clearance of woodland, or wald, from which the word 'wold' is itself derived. It differs from the true forests, as the term is used here, in that its clearance began at a much earlier period, and in many cases was probably approaching completion when that of the true forests began. As a rule, moreover, the social and ecclesiastical structure of the wald areas was very different from that of the classic forests. By and large the wald and downland countrysides thus seem to have been areas of intermediate colonization, predominantly settled between the invasion period and the Norman Conquest. This broad classification of English countrysides into eight types, it must be stressed, is no more than a provisional one. It seems useful, however, to keep a general outline or framework of regional evolution of this type in mind. It is important to recognize that, within wide 14 Ibid.; Delia Hooke, 'Early Cotswold Woodland', Journal of Historical Geography, IV, iv (1978), 333-41; Alan Everitt, 'The Wolds once More,' ibid.;V, i (1979), 67-

71.

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limits, the settlement of these various kinds of countryside tended to originate in different phases of colonization, and to give rise to different kinds of society, however diverse the dating of those phases may have been in different parts of the country. There can also be no doubt that these differences of origin ultimately lie at the root of many of the regional contrasts that we still see in the Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian countryside. The work of Joan Thirsk and others, after all, has shown how basic was the division between fielden and forest countrysides in the early modern period, and how continuously that division has shaped our history. More recently this kind of regional analysis has been further exploited in varying ways by scholars like Margaret Spufford in Cambridgeshire and W. J. Ford in Warwickshire.15Inthe writer's viewit may now be pressed further in studying and comparing the settlement, the economy, and the society of the heathland, fenland, downland, marshland, moorland, and wold or wald types of countryside, both with one another and with their counterparts in different parts of the kingdom. It may well shed a good deal of light on such vexed questions as the origins of the common fields,*6 for example, or the distribution of deserted medieval settlements.*7 Ill

Important though this kind of regional division is, it is obviously not the only one that needs to be taken account of in studying provincial society. A country or pays is basically a natural region; the county or shire, to which we now turn, is basically an artificial one, an essentially human creation, often with no significant natural boundaries. In other words the map of our 'coloured counties' has no obvious relation with that of our countrysides: the regional pattern is of a quite different kind. All our historic counties go back in some form for centuries. Several 15

See, for example, Agrarian History, ed. Thirsk, ch. i ; Joan Thirsk 'Industries in the Countryside', Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge, 1961); Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974); W. J. Ford, 'Some Settlement Patterns in the Central Region of the Warwickshire Avon', Medieval Settlement, ed. Sawyer, pp. 274-94. 16 The fields of Carlton-cum-Willingham in Cambridgeshire, referred to earlier, provide a good example of the way field-systems tend to become eccentric towards the outer edge of a common-field countryside. Those in the Granta valley to the southwest of Carlton, by contrast, broadly conform to the classic common-field system. 17 To some extent the sites of deserted medieval villages have been related to different types of terrain; but a more rigorous examination is desirable. In particular the word 'village' itself needs to be more carefully defined. In areas of scattered settlement, such as Kent, the idea is often inappropriate, and Deserted Medieval Village status has been claimed for many isolated church sites where in all probability no true village ever existed.


21

of them, like Sussex, have developed from Old English kingdoms, or, like Kent, from territories whose ultimate origins lie beyond our present knowledge. It is the later phases in their history that concern us in this paper, the period when these ancient units of local government seem to have entered on a new phase in their life-span with what has been described as the 'advent of the county community' in the post-medieval period.18 Although this development was obviously an evolutionary process that cannot be dated with any precision, and in some areas may have begun earlier than is generally supposed, we can probably look to the Elizabethan, Stuart, and Hanoverian periods as the time when the county as a self-conscious society achieved its floruit. It is not part of the present purpose to trace this process, or to explore the complex reasons behind it: political, social, administrative, economic, cultural, familial, religious, and so on. I have nothing new to add to what I have said elsewhere on this head, or to what others have said better than I can: Dr Hassell Smith in Norfolk, for example, Mr Fletcher in Sussex, and Dr Morrill in Cheshire.19 Although these and other studies have naturally brought to light much diversity between the different shires, and a good deal of variation in the sense of identity and degree of cohesion within them, the 'county commonwealths', as Namier called them, now seem to have found an established place in our historical thinking. During the period uttder discussion, they surely ceased to be simply administrative units and in many cases became genuine self-conscious regions, with a life of their own, and an obviously growing authority in provincial society. There is one aspect of this subject, however, to which one wishes to draw particular attention, and that is the rise of the county town as the focus or heart of the county community, or in other words as a kind of regional capital. There are two reasons why it seems desirable to discuss this point. First, it is doubtful if one can really understand a regional society in the full sense without some appreciation, some sympathetic recreation, of the life of its capital: and as yet there are remarkably few such places for which this has been adequately undertaken.20 Quite a good case might indeed be made out for the view that without an urban focus of some kind a truly regional culture 18 By Peter Clark in English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics, and Society in Kent, 1500-1640 (Hassocks, 1977). 19 Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Leicester, 1966); A. Hassell Smith, County and Court (Oxford, 1974); Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600-1660 (London, 1975); J. S. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630-1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974). 20 The best-known study is Sir Francis Hill's four-volume work on Lincoln. Some of the more recent V.C.H. volumes, such as those covering York and Warwick, are also valuable in this connexion. In another category is Alan Armstrong's quantitative

22


can hardly come into existence. Our modern regions, after all, are essentially based on industrial and commercial capitals like Birmingham and Newcastle. The rise of 'occupational regions' in the early modern period was likewise associated with the development of'entrepreneurial' towns like Sheffield in the metal trades and Northampton in the shoe industry. The great regional cultures of the medieval world were no less obviously centred on European cities like Florence and Venice. Some theorists might go further and suggest that the relative insignificance of regional cultures of this kind in medieval England is in some way linked with the relative insignificance of our medieval towns. It seems doubtful if such abstract arguments are very convincing, and certainly many of the countrysides spoken of earlier existed for centuries with a culture of their own, yet without any major urban focus. Nevertheless, over the last three or four centuries there can be no doubt that the English town has fulfilled a crucial function in the development of regional self-consciousness. The county capital, the 'entrepreneurial' town, and the industrial city have all exerted a decisive influence in this respect. The second reason why one wishes to draw attention to the county town is that it was there that both 'county' and 'country' met. These regional capitals, in other words, were not only the natural focus of the county community; they were also the natural focus of the countrysides or pays surrounding them; and it was the influence of both county and country that shaped their distinctive economy and society. In this sense, although there was no obvious relationship between the pattern of shires and the pattern of pays, there was a close connexion between them, and a constant interplay, within the county capital. What one really means by that statement is this. During the period of emergence of the county community, we also see the development of increasing specialization in agriculture in the contrasting English countrysides. Like the county itself, this specialization was not an altogether new development, and to some extent it was implicit in the basic diversities of these countries themselves. Nevertheless, there was a massive intensification of regional specialization in farming in the early modern period, and in consequence a massive increase in internal trade between one kind of countryside and another, an increase which was necessarily channelled through the market towns of the kingdom. Yet when we turn to look at the pattern of these market towns, and compare it with that of the high medieval period, what we find is that there has been a drastic decline in the number of markets, a reduction, in fact, of at least fifty per cent, from more than 1,500 in the late thirteenth century to a mere 750 in the and sociological study, Stability and Change in an English County Town: a Social Study of York, 1801-51 (Cambridge, 1974).


23

seventeenth. This is now a well-known theme and needs no labouring; but the consequence to note was the evolution of a widespread network of 'regional' or 'cardinal' markets through which the market trade of this country came to be increasingly channelled. This network of regional markets, it is true, was not at all points identical with that of the county towns; the former were in fact more numerous than the latter, and in a few counties, such as Buckinghamshire and Somerset, the old capitals never became important commercial centres. Nevertheless, by and large, it was the county towns of England, in most areas, that also became the dominant regional markets.21 One thinks of places like Norwich and Exeter, for example, of Chester and York, of Leicester and Nottingham, of Worcester and Shrewsbury, of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Oxford, of Ipswich, Colchester, Maidstone, and so on. These were the places, in other words, that focussed not only the life of the county community, but also the life of the countries or pays around them. How was it that this double influence, of county and country, was actually articulated in the economy of the county town? What exactly were its urban consequences? In what way did these^places develop over this period in response to it? What kind of regional culture, if any, did they give rise to? The answers to these questions are obviously far from simple and vary widely from place to place. At the risk of considerable oversimplification, however, they can mostly be grouped under six interrelated headings. The following pages are based on an examination of five towns in particular— Exeter, Shrewsbury, Canterbury, Maidstone, and Northampton— together with a more superficial analysis, for comparative purposes, of several other county capitals and a group of smaller market towns. In most cases the period under review is George Ill's reign; but for Northampton the study has been extended back into the late sixteenth century. Altogether, the occupations of more than 50,000 townsmen have been traced and tabulated. What are the main conclusions, very briefly summarized, to which the evidence points?22 IV

First, the county towns of Hanoverian England were not generally centres of staple trades, nor were they usually industrial towns in the sense in which we use that term of the Industrial Revolution. Some 21 Cf. Alan Everitt, 'The Marketing of Agricultural Produce', Agrarian History, ed. Thirsk; Alan Everitt, 'The Primary Towns of England', The Local Historian, xi, 1975. I owe the phrase 'cardinal' markets to J. D. Goodacre, 'Lutterworth in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,' Leicester Ph.D. thesis, 1977, chapter I. 22 For the sources employed, see Appendix at end of this article.

24


of them had once been centres of this kind, as Exeter was of the serge industry; a few, like Norwich, still remained so; and a few were developing into major centres of new industries. Maidstone, for instance, was gradually becoming the dominant focus of the paper industry; Worcester of the glove industry; Northampton of the shoe industry; and Leicester and Nottingham of the hosiery trades. But in the period under review we must not exaggerate this tendency. In none of the five towns in question did any single trade occupy more than 15 per cent of the recorded population, and the emphasis everywhere was on occupational variety.23 Altogether some 400 distinct occupations have been traced in the five towns under review: 142 in Northampton, 150 in Canterbury, 174 in Shrewsbury, and 246 in Exeter.24 The real total was no doubt substantially larger than that, since it is not possible to compile a fully exhaustive census, and it had certainly increased greatly over the period since Queen Elizabeth's reign. Amongst the thousands of apprentices recorded in the Northampton Registers, for example, the number of separate trades to which they were articled rose from forty-five under Queen Elizabeth to eightythree in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and 114 between 1716 and 1776. This was a real increase, moreover; it does not simply represent old trades masquerading under new guises; and it was an increase that was far more strikingly apparent in county towns than in most other urban centres. The fundamental development that it points to is the expanding role of these places first as centres of organization, and secondly as nurseries of skill. One of the aspects of their role as centres of organization was their remarkable development over this period as inland entrepots, as exchanges or meeting-places of traders, factors, drovers, middlemen, wholesalers, and wayfaring merchants of all kinds. This is the second point to note in the evolution of the county town. In part it arose from the position of these places as regional markets; but it also went a good deal further than that. It gave rise to a whole range of new business facilities based on urban inns, for example, whose numbers in Northampton increased, not untypically, by 300 per cent between 23 Shoemakers formed the most numerous occupational group in four of the five towns: in Northampton (1768), fifteen per cent of the population; in Shrewsbury (1796), twelve per cent; in Canterbury (1818), eleven per cent; in Exeter (1803), six per cent. In Maidstone (1802) papermakers formed the largest recorded group (thirteen per cent), closely followed by the Medway hoymen and watermen (eleven per cent); but the Maidstone poll-book is much less full in its coverage. By 1831, significantly, the Northampton shoemakers had increased nearly five-fold, and accounted for thirty-six per cent of the recorded population. 24 Compare these figures with 283 separate occupations in Bristol (1812); sixty seven in Wellingborough (17 7 7), the largest Northamptonshire town after Northampton itself; thirty in Thrapston, a typical small market-centre; and fourteen in Clipston, a large Northamptonshire village.


25

25

1570 and i77o. It also gave rise to a rapidly expanding network of stage-coach routes and, perhaps more important, to a vast nexus of local and long-distance carriers' services.26 It gave rise, moreover, to a fascinating development of these towns as regional shoppingcentres, a subject on which the evidence is massive and yet in most places is still virtually unexplored.27 Finally, and in one sense perhaps most important of all, it both encouraged and was itself encouraged by the development of the provincial newspaper, particularly after 1720. Not all early papers, it is true, were centred in county towns. Some were established in ports like Bristol; some in rising industrial centres like Birmingham; some in social capitals like Bath; and a few in minor market towns like St Ives. But the overwhelming majority were produced in the old county capitals: in Canterbury, Exeter, Northampton, Salisbury, Derby, Norwich, Nottingham, York, Worcester, Gloucester, Leicester, and so on. It might well be argued that no single development has been more important in the rise of regional self-consciousness in this country then the establishment of provincial newspapers. Though to begin with their local news was scanty, their advertisement pages from the outset focussed the life of their hinterland, week by week, as nothing else had done hitherto.28 Closely connected with the entrepot character of the county town was its third characteristic: its development as the professional and entrepreneurial centre of its region. During the eighteenth century old professions like those of the doctors and attorneys continuously expanded in numbers, while a wide range of new professions arose in response to the new requirements of the age: land-surveyors, appraisers, printers, publishers, accountants, architects, engineers, bankers, insurance offices, and so on—often appearing roughly in that order. In addition to these general professional occupations, moreover, which by 1800 were to be found in virtually every county town, and in addition to the facilities for business education developing alongside them, a number of towns also developed a more specialized entrepreneurial role, as centres of organization of some particular regional craft or industry. One of the salient themes in occupational development in this country over the past three centuries or so has 25 Everitt, 'Marketing of Agricultural Produce'; Alan Everitt, 'The English Urban Inn, 1560-1760', Perspectives in English Urban History, ed. Alan Everitt (London, 1973), pp. 91-137; see below, pp. 155ff. 26 J. A. Chartres, 'Road Carrying in England in the Seventeenth Century: Myth and Reality', Econ. H.R., and Ser., xxx (1977); Alan Everitt, 'Country Carriers in the Nineteenth Century', below, pp. 271 ff. 27 Particularly informative is the evidence of probate inventories, wills, and newspaper advertisements. 28 As G. A. Cranfield has shewn in his fine study, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700-1760 (Oxford, 1962).

26


been the tendency for certain staple crafts, once practised widely, to become concentrated in a gradually narrowing circuit of countryside, or occasionally in two or three separate areas, until a distinct craftregion emerges, with its own character, its own traditions, its own sense of identity, and its own distinctive culture. Such developments did not occur in all staple trades; 29 they did not always take place during the same period; they were often more gradual than is generally realized ;30 and they were highly complex processes about which, in many cases, little is yet known. Nevertheless, the evolution of distinct occupational regions of this kind can clearly be observed in such industries as glove-making, shoemaking, lacemaking, nail-making, scythe-making, needle-making, stocking-knitting, and plush-making: and in every case an 'entrepreneurial' town of some kind played a crucial role in this development. By no means all these towns, it is true, were county capitals: many of them had originated as lesser market centres, and either eventually developed into industrial cities like Birmingham and Sheffield, or else remained local market towns like Banbury and Newport Pagnell. In a substantial number of cases, however, it was the county town that became the predominant centre of organization in the development of'occupational regions', and where this occurred it added a further dimension to their role as nurseries of business expertise. In the hosiery industry, for example, it was chiefly Leicester and Nottingham that fulfilled this function; in the glove industry it was Worcester; in the paper industry it was Maidstone; and in the shoe industry it was Northampton. 31 The fourth characteristic of the county town to note was its development as a centre of leisured life—the life of the gentry. For county families this often involved an annual migration into town, usually 29

They did not occur in the wood-crafts, for example, although some towns acquired a notable reputation in certain specialized fields: e.g., Wymondham for spoon-making, King's Cliffe for turnery ware, and High Wycombe for chairmaking. 30 As in the case of the shoe industry, for example, which despite increasing concentration in Northamptonshire (and to a lesser extent in Norwich, Leicester, Somerset, and Westmorland), still remained widely dispersed in the late nineteenth century. See P. R. Mounfield's three studies: 'The Place of Time in Economic Geography', Geography, Ixii (1977), 272 fF; 'Early Technological Innovation in the British Footwear Industry', Industrial Archaeology Review, ii (1978), 137; 'The Footwear Industry of the East Midlands (IV): Leicestershire to 1911', East Midland Geographer, iv, No. 25 (1966), 8-23. See also V. A. Hatley and J. Rajczonek, Shoemakers in Northamptonshire, 17621911: a Statistical Survey, Northampton Historical Series, No. 6, 1971. 31 Other'entrepreuneurial' towns, both large and small, included such places as Birmingham and Wolverhampton (metal trades); Sheffield (cutlery, scythe-making, etc.); Olney, Newport Pagnell, Towcester, and Stony Stratford (Bucks lace industry); Honiton and Ottery St Mary (Honiton lace industry); Charlbury (glovemaking); Hinckley and Mansfield (framework-knitting); Kettering and Wellingborough (shoemaking); Redditch (needle-making); Gloucester (pin-making); Luton and Hitchin (straw-plait industry).


27

at the time of the assizes and horse-races, when they came to spend part of the winter in their town houses, or in one of the great inns. Both races and assizes, as a consequence, often became the occasion for county meetings of every description: administrative, economic, political, charitable, scientific, cultural, social, horticultural, and so on. According to Edward Hasted in the 17905, the Canterbury races, for example, were 'attended by most of the Kentish gentry and a great number of people from the neighbouring parts; and this city being their usual rendezvous, it brings a vast concourse of them to it for the time, when there are assemblies, plays, and other entertainments, during the whole time of the race week.'32 When Hasted wrote, places like Canterbury were still at the zenith of their influence as social capitals of the county aristocracy. Within a generation, by the 18205, this particular role of theirs had begun to decline, as transport improved, as wealth increased, and as the superior charms of the London season were opened up to a widening circle of landed families. As residential centres for the minor gentry, by contrast, and for the ever-growing numbers of landless or pseudo-gentry of the time, such places continued to expand. What Hasted said of Canterbury in this respect may be paralleled in many such towns between Charles IPs reign and Queen Victoria's: 'many gentlemen of fortune and genteel families reside in it, especially within the precincts of the cathedral, where there are many of the clergy of superior rank and fortune belonging to it; and throughout the whole place there is a great deal of courtesy and hospitality.'33 The precise numbers of these landless or 'town' gentry, as they were sometimes called, are usually not at all easy to establish and no doubt fluctuated.34 In the second half of the eighteenth century there may have been about 600 of them, including dependants, in Shrewsbury, a town of some 15,000 people, and about 220 in Northampton, a town of some 6,000.35 If these 32

Edward Hasted, History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 2nd edn., Canterbury, xi, 101-2. 33 Ibid., p. 101. The Hasteds themselves were typical of this social class, and the historian lived for some time in Canterbury. I have traced their history in 'Kentish Family Portrait', Rural Change, ed. Chalklin and Havinden, pp. 169-99. 34 The phrase 'our town gentry' first appears in Northampton shortly after the great fire of 1675 and subsequent rebuilding. Not all such families were landless. John Toke of Canterbury, for example, came of old Kentish landed stock and moved to the county town only after his wife's death in i 770, leaving his family-seat and estates at Godinton to his eldest son. Probably many town-gentry, moreover, like the Hasteds themselves, invested in landed property, though they did not build up an estate as such or reside on their scattered farmlands. 35 Parliamentary poll-books form the most obvious source. In many cases they probably under-record local gentry; but at Shrewsbury in i 796 and Northampton in i 768 the figures they give, of 129 and forty-seven respectively, may be near the mark. Assuming an average household of between four and five, these would suggest a total of about

28


figures are at all typical, the urban gentry may have comprised abou four per cent of the population in the county town, and thus formed an important element in its society. In a sense, indeed, because they were permanent rather than seasonal residents, their influence was ultimately more significant than that of the aristocracy. Two things in particular seem to have attracted them. First, there was the charm of a more urbane way of life, the polite social intercourse hinted at by Hasted, or what The Northampton Mercury nicely called 'the soul of conversation',36 in an expanding circle of like-minded people. So we find contemporaries like Defoe commending Exeter, for example, as a city that was 'full of gentry and good company,' and Maidstone, a little surprisingly, as a town 'where a man of letters, and of manners, will always find suitable society, both to divert and improve himself.. ,'37 But although these families were leisured folk, we must not think of them as necessarily very wealthy; and as well as the soul of conversation it was often the charm of economical living that attracted them. '... Its a pleasant town to live in,' said Celia Fiennes of Shrewsbury, 'and great plenty, which makes it cheap living ...'. '.. .Abundance of good families live here,' Defoe said of York, 'for the sake of the good company and cheap living.''38 Cheap living, of course, was one of the advantages which a town that was a good regional market could offer: just as today a city like Leicester offers more economical living than a small market town like Lutterworth, because it affords greater variety and commercial competition. It was from such roots as these, predominantly though not exclusively, that the county town also developed in this period as a cultural centre. This is its fifth characteristic to note, and one that has recently been the subject of scholarly study by Peter Borsay and others.39 We must not exaggerate its importance, of course. The places one refers to obviously cannot be compared with London or Vienna in these 600 gentlefolk in Shrewsbury and 220 in Northampton. The households of widows and spinsters are not included in these figures; But it should be remembered that some of the gentlemen who voted were no doubt unmarried. 36 In the first number of The Northampton Mercury (hereafter cited as NM), 2 May 1720: 'It is surprising to think that this famous, this beautiful, this polite corporation, has not long ago been the object of those many printers who have established printing offices in towns of less note. And certainly it argues their want of thought: for the soul of conversation must be absolutely necessary to a body of people that excel therein.' 37 Daniel Defoe, A Tour through England and Wales, Everyman edn. (1959), I, pp. 222, 115 (first published 1724-6). At Maidstone Defoe attributed this character partly to the numerous gentlemen's houses in the surrounding countryside. 38 The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London, 1947),p. 227; Defoe, Tour, II, p. 230. The italics are mine. 39 Peter Borsay, 'The English Urban Renaissance: the Development of Provincial Urban Culture, c. 1680-1760', Social History, v (1977); Everitt, 'English Urban Inn', pp. 113-20.


29

respects. Though they gave birth to a fair number of celebrated figures, such as Garrick and Johnson at Lichfield,40 the magnetic influence of the metropolis ultimately attracted much of the brightest talent away from them. Yet if they were rarely peopled by many men of genius, the scale and variety of cultural life in towns that rarely numbered more than 15,000 inhabitants was often remarkable. It surely indicates a very substantial cultural public. If they produced little of truly international genius, moreover, it is worth noting how many of them, while imitating all the cultural modes of their neighbours—literary, scientific, antiquarian, artistic, dramatic, musical, educational, and so on—also managed to shine out in some particular speciality of their own. One thinks, for example, of the important school of water-colourists at Norwich; of the highly original group of early industrial artists headed by Joseph Wright at Derby; of the Three Choirs Festival founded in connexion with Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford; of the similar Southern Choirs Festival of Salisbury, Winchester, and Chichester; of the literary, antiquarian, and publishing circle around Canterbury in East Kent;41 of the architectural and building connexions of Warwick and York; or of the musical life of Hanoverian Leicester, where Haydn's chamber music was played at picnics in Bradgate Park, and where the music of Beethoven was first introduced to the British public by a master-hosier, of all people, William Gardiner (1770-1853). It is to Gardiner's autobiography that we owe much of our knowledge of this musical life, and surely no autobiography ever had a more felicitous title—Music and Friends (1838) ,42 Amongst those friends, one whom he visited on the continent, was Beethoven himself. Such matters as these by no means exhaust the range of broadly cultural, intellectual, and humanitarian activities arising in the county town at this time. Typical of another aspect of Hanoverian 40 In Staffordshire the characteristics of a county town were in a sense divided between Stafford, the assize-town, and Lichfield, the ecclesiastical centre. Neither place was altogether comparable with such shire-towns as Leicester or Exeter. 41 An interesting insight into this circle is given in the list of 338 subscribers to Hasted, History ... of Kent, first edition (1778-99). Both editions were published in Canterbury (by different firms), where there were then several printing and publishing houses, and where an interesting range of antiquarian and topographical works was produced. In addition to Hasted himself, these antiquarian and literary figures included, inter alia: Andrew Ducarel, John Buncombe, William Gostling, John Burnby, Henry Todd, Osmund Beauvoir, and John Monins, all of Canterbury itself; together with William Boys of Walmer, Edward Jacob of Faversham, Egerton Brydges of Denton, William Boteler of Eastry, Bryan Faussett of Heppington, and (at an earlier date, d. 1747) John Lewis of Minster-in-Thanet. 42 Gardiner's own musical compositions are now forgotten; but the account of him in the D.N.B. seems unduly scornful. Paganini and Weber were also among his many friends and cultural acquaintances.

30


enterprise was the movement to found county infirmaries, for example, beginning with Winchester in 1736, York in 1740, Exeter and Northampton in 1743, Gloucester and Shrewsbury in 1745, and Worcester in 1746.43 No less interesting was the widespread development of private and business schooling at this time,44 and an apparently massive expansion of the reading public indicated by some thousands of book advertisements, covering virtually every subject, in newspapers like The Salisbury Journal and The Northampton Mercury. Quite different again, yet equally important in its own sphere, was the remarkable revival of the devotio moderna under Philip Doddridge and his followers at Northampton: an unexpected and far-reaching movement of human feeling and religious enterprise which stemmed from purely local and provincial roots, and yet ultimately became crucial to the Evangelical Revival, to the development of English hymnody, and to the foundation of missionary activity overseas.45 This was a movement, by the way, which touches on yet another kind of English region: the region of religious influence.

V The last characteristic of the county town to note, and one that in a sense was fundamental to the others, was its development as a centre of craftsmanship, as a nursery of skill. In many ways this was its most important characteristic, as it is also the least understood, so that it is worthwhile commenting, on it in some detail. To begin with, the gentimental belief that the craftsman was essentially a pre-industrial and a rural figure, a picturesque survival if not an anachronism by the time of the Industrial Revolution, must be firmly dismissed from our minds. The reality is more complex, and much more interesting. 43 Courtney Dainton, The Story of England's Hospitals (London, 1961), pp. 85-8; Imperial Gazetteer, 1870, sub York; NM, 5 December 1743. Other early hospitals included Bristol in 1737 and Liverpool in 1745; but the great majority were in the county towns. Dainton's list is not complete. 44 Between 1723 and 1760, for example, more than 100 schools in the Northampton area, many of them newly established, though not all private, advertised in NM (Granfield, Provincial Newspaper, pp. 195-6, 215). The most popular subjects advertised were the three Rs, 'followed by Latin and Greek, and, significantly, book-keeping and accounts'. 45 As minister of the Independent congregation at Northampton, and principal of the Dissenting Academy there from 1729 until his death in 1751, Doddridge was a seminal figure in eighteenth-century religious development. I hope to publish elsewhere my work exploring his influence, based partly on the subscribers' lists to his Family Expositor (1739-56) and his voluminous correspondence. Dr G. F. Nuttall's work on Doddridge is invaluable, particularly Philip Doddridge, 1702-51 (London, 1951), and Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge: a Study in a Tradition (Oxford, 1951). Characteristically Doddridge was the moving spirit behind the Northampton Infirmary, and one of the founders of the Northampton Philosophical Society.


31

In the fullest occupational census we have for any county in the eighteenth century, the Northamptonshire Militia Lists of 1777, the names and callings of nearly 12,000 people are recorded. Amongst these occupations, there are about eighty that must be classified as crafts, and of these eighty about half-a-dozen basic skills were widely represented in Northamptonshire villages: blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, weavers, and wheelwrights, who between them accounted for ninety per cent of all rural craftsmen. The remaining seventy or so crafts, by contrast, were almost entirely confined to a few towns, and in many cases largely confined to Northampton. Even blacksmiths, tailors, shoemakers, and carpenters were more numerous in towns than in villages, and there is really nothing surprising in this fact. Craftsmanship, after all, depended on a lengthy apprenticeship, and apprenticeship was in essence an urban idea. Although the Northamptonshire pattern was not repeated in all areas, it was not an untypical one. Outside the new industrial districts, the concentration of the more highly skilled and recondite crafts in county towns was a general phenomenon. Secondly, craftsmen everywhere seem to have formed an expanding section of the urban population: expanding that is in numbers, though not necessarily in wealth or status.46 Whereas in Northampton the population just about doubled between Queen Elizabeth's reign and George Ill's, the number of boys apprenticed in each decade more than trebled. In the none too easy employment conditions of the time, moreover, masters were often able to pick and choose their apprentices, so that up to a point intelligence and enterprise were channelled into the craft-structure, and these towns came to be widely recognized as centres of training. By the late eighteenth century, as a consequence, craftsmen usually formed about half their recorded population, a substantially higher proportion than in smaller urban centres.47 In most places they were apparently three or four times as numerous as the unskilled labourers and domestic servants put together,48 and nearly four times as numerous as the retail shopkeepers, despite a massive increase amongst retailers themselves. 48

In Northampton, which was probably not untypical in this respect, their inventories usually indicate only a modest level of prosperity, never comparable with that of the major innkeepers, drapers, tanners, etc. Very few of them ever became mayors or aldermen. The pattern in York seems to have been similar: P. A. Berryman, 'The Manufacturing Crafts in York, 1740-1784', Leicester M.A. dissertation, 1978. 47 The proportion varied from forty-three per cent at Canterbury to fifty-three per cent at Northampton; but the Canterbury poll-book is less complete in its coverage and no doubt under-represents craftsmen. In the non-county towns studied, the proportion rarely exceeded about a third, except in an important city like Bristol. 48 These figures are based on the Militia Lists for Exeter in 1803 and Northamptonshire in 1777. The latter covers all the towns in the county. No reliable figures of servants

32


Everywhere, in short, they formed by far the most numerous occupational category, and in a very real sense the craftsman's shop was the hallmark of the Hanoverian county town. One wonders, indeed, if the phrase 'a nation of shopkeepers', which is often attributed to Napoleon but in fact antedates the French Revolution, did not originally refer to workshops as much as retail businesses.49 Certainly in the eighteenth century it might have borne either meaning. Thirdly, we must not think of the traditional skills of the craftsmen as having survived unchanged from a timeless past, as the Arts and Crafts Movement sometimes seemed to suppose.50 On the contrary, they were in process of gradual but continuous evolution, and in the period under discussion their most remarkable feature was certainly their adaptability and inventiveness. For the craftsman, we must remember, was first and foremost a man who was skilled with his hands, often extremely skilled at the end of his seven-year apprenticeship: twice as long a training, after all, as that of a modern undergraduate. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the eighteenth century the English craftsman came to be associated with all those qualities of deftness and individual ingenuity that we now associate with the Japanese. Whenone turns to examine the craft-economy of any particular place in depth, as a consequence, what one finds is certainly not a static or hidebound structure. On the contrary, new branches of established crafts were developing all the time, new skills were arising in response to new needs as if by spontaneous generation, and old skills were continually splitting up and splaying out into new specialisms. By 1700 the old trade of the wheelwrights, for example, had given rise to the separate skill of the coachbuilder, that of the joiner to the cabinetmaker, and that of the brazier to the clockmaker; while the millwright was branching out into a wide range of mechanical contrivances. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, as a consequence, the number of separate crafts that had arisen in this way, each with its own distinct training, was remarkable. In the five towns under review there were at least 160 different types of craft workshop, and if it were possible to reconstruct an exhaustive occupational census, the real total might well exceed 200. There were sixty-two separate kinds of craft shop in Northampton, for instance, a town of only 6,000 and labourers can be based on poll-books. Militia lists should not under-record these groups, proportionately speaking; but one gets the impression that they in fact underrecord domestic servants. 49 It was used on both sides of the Atlantic in 1776: by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, and by Samuel Adams in a speech reputedly at Philadelphia (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1948), pp. i, 403). Presumably it was not then a novel expression. 50 This is perhaps the one misconception in parts of George Sturt's great work, The Wheelwright's Shop (Cambridge, 1923).


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people, and almost 100 in Exeter, where there may have been nearly 1,000 craft workshops in a city of 17,000 inhabitants. 51 Mere figures, however, do not convey an adequate impression of this vivid diversity. Take the metal trades, for example, although any other group, such as the wood-crafts, would serve equally well. None of the five towns under review was particularly notable as a metalworking centre; they were not miniature Sheffields or Birminghams, yet they contained at least 350 master metal-craftsmen, and the real total was probably nearer 500. Of these 350, 150 were engaged in a single trade, that of blacksmith; but the remaining 200 followed a great variety of crafts, at least thirty-five in all. In Shrewsbury, for instance, they included braziers, cutlers, whitesmiths, pewterers, pump-makers, scythe-makers, gunsmiths, gun-finishers, locksmiths, pin-makers, nailers, chape-makers, and so on. Elsewhere they included many of these occupations, and often a number of others as well, such as scalemakers, stilliers, warming-pan makers, clockmakers, mathematical instrument-makers, and makers of surveyors' equipment. None of these trades was on a large scale; there were rarely as many as a dozen of any of them in most county towns; as a rule they were clearly not producing for an overseas or a national market, but essentially for a regional one, for an extensive rural hinterland. That is why crafts of this kind came to be centred predominantly in the county towns of England: in those old centres of skill, in other words, that you naturally went to for all your more unusual requirements: just as in Leicestershire today you still visit the capital of the shire for these purposes. What sort of goods, then, did these craftsmen make? A typical cutler, such as one of the Tuckwell family of Northampton, made not only knives and forks, but all sorts of scissors, razors, pen-knives, lancets, flems, butchers' steels, shoemakers' knives, heelmakers' knives, shop-knives, sheep-shears, swords, and scabbards.52 A typical brazier or whitesmith, such as one of the Tyers or Revell families, made not only all kinds of saucepans and other cooking-ware, but tea-kettles, coffee-pots, plate-warmers, barrel-cocks, tea-canisters, fenders, coalscoops, chimney-cowls, coffin-furniture, and so on.53 Everywhere, 51 The figure of 1,000 is a tentative guess. Thirteen hundred craftsmen are recorded in the Exeter Militia List. This includes journeymen as well as masters; but masters are under-represented since men over fifty-five were excluded. We know very little of the average size of craftsmen's shops at this time; but such indications as there are suggest that in county towns they were normally small family affairs, with perhaps one or two journeymen and one or two apprentices apiece on average. With an average of one master and two journeymen, a population of perhaps 5-6,000 adult males, of whom half were engaged in crafts (49.7 per cent in the Militia List), would suggest c. 850-1,000 workshops. 52

NM, 24 and 31 May 1725.

53

NM, 5 and 12 April 1756.

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moreover, such men were branching out into new directions in response to the new demands of the age. One of the Tuckwells, for example, specialized as a maker of instruments, probably for surveyors.54 One of the Revells became a well-known maker of warmingpans and 'salamanders', that is a pan 'which does its office without leaving any sulphurous smell' in the bed.55 One of the whitesmiths became a surgical beltmaker, and was highly commended by the medical profession.56 One of the scalemakers, Richard Butlin, became a notable land-surveyor; and it was he who made the exceptionally fine survey of Northampton in 1746, on which every street, lane, yard, garden, and ground-plot is accurately delineated.57 Perhaps most interesting of all was the ebullient Thomas Yeoman, a Northampton millwright whose occupation extended into both the metal and the wood-working fields. As well as designing and building many mills in the area, including a cotton-mill which for a time he managed himself, he erected weighbridges and invented a new machine for cleaning corn which was described in the Gentleman's Magazine in December 1746. Amongst a whole range of goods that were made in his shop were air-pumps, bucket-engines for raising water, ventilators for hospitals and granaries, backheavers for winnowing corn, hollow-sticks for ventilating corn, refracting and reflecting telescopes, mathematical instruments, philosophical instruments, and 'electrical machines for the studies of the curious'. As if this were not enough, he was also a skilled land-surveyor, a leading member of the early Northampton Philosophical Society in the 17408, the author of a Treatise on Mechanics, principally for the use of other millwrights, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the founders of the Royal Society of Arts.58 54

Thomas Tuckwell was described as a cutler and instrument-maker when made free, 18 September 1671 (Northampton Borough Records, Assembly Book, 1627-1744, p. 222). His son, Samuel, seems to have taken over his late father's business in 1725 (NM, 24 May 1725). 55 NM, i October 1759. 56 NM, 27 September 1756. 57 See Northampton Borough Records, Assembly Book, 1627-1744, pp. 390, 528; Gentleman's Magazine, XVII ( i 747), p. 446; NM, 20 April and 6 July 1752, where Butlin's shop is said to be continued as a scalemaker's and stillier's after his death. A 'stillier' was a maker of distilling equipment. 58 NM, i December 1746, 23 March and 27 April 1747; Gentleman's Magazine, XV (1745), p. 355; V.C.H. Northants., ii, 334-5; Eric Robinson, 'The Profession of Civil Engineer in the Eighteenth Century: a Portrait of Thomas Yeoman, F.R.S., 1704 (?)1781', Annals of Science, xviii, 4 (1962), 195-215. The latter article, on the development of the engineering profession from the ranks of millwrights and instrument-makers in the eighteenth century—Yeoman in fact described himself as a millwright, not an engineer—is of more than local interest. It justly points out that 'the vitality of markettown society was a sound basis on which to construct a community of scientific interest among engineers and gentlemen' (p. 215). The Northampton Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, was one of the earliest provincial scientific societies. Other leading


35

Individually, developments like these may seem perhaps trivial, and even in some cases a little comic, in the light of the great inventions of the Industrial Revolution. But we need to see them as part of a whole, as symptoms of an attitude of mind, as signs of a climate of ingenuity. Even relatively small and slowly-expanding county capitals, like Northampton, need to be visualized as vital nurseries of skill, as centres of an inventive temperament, as fertile seedbeds of discovery. The career of a man like Thomas Yeoman, though in a sense unique, was also in a sense intensely typical, both of his town and of his time, and it clearly illustrates how occupations once relatively simple in their nature59 were now developing into complex and recondite skills. Although the old peasant-world of the English countryside was everywhere disintegrating in this period, under the impact of population-pressure, capitalist farming, landed aggrandisement, parliamentary enclosure, and other forces, the infrastructure of craftoccupations that had grown up alongside it was thus by no means disintegrating. On the contrary, it was still going from strength to strength alongside the new industrial world, which had developed out of it and which at many points still remained a part of it. The crafteconomy of these county towns or regional markets, in short, found a new role for itself in adapting its skill to the needs of an increasing population, a changing countryside, and an expanding leisured class. Of the impact of the demands of the leisured class on the craftstructure little has been said; but it was certainly very apparent in the fine work of the wood-carvers and stucco-artists, for example; of the cabinet-makers and coach-builders; or of the watchmakers, clockmakers, statuaries, goldsmiths, and other fine-craftsmen. The evolution of this craft-structure in seventeenth and eighteenth century England would well repay more thorough and systematic investigation, both locally and nationally, than it has yet received. In considering the origins of the Industrial Revolution, we need to take more serious account perhaps of the remarkable efflorescence of craftsmanship that heralded it, and of the evolution of the older craftcentres of this country. Most of these places, it is true, were not destined to advance very far into the next phase of industrialization and become fully developed manufacturing cities during the Victorian period. It is chiefly for that reason, perhaps, that their economy has rarely been studied in detail and has perhaps been visualized as hidemembers included Doddridge and such prominent local gentry as Sir Thomas Samwell. It met from an early date at Yeoman's house in Gold Street ('Portrait of Thomas Yeoman', 202-3).

59 But only relatively simple: a mill, after all, is itself a complicated piece of machinery, so that it is not surprising that millwrights became key-figures in the early mechanization of industry in this country.

36


bound and reactionary. Yet to read back the conditions and preconceptions of the nineteenth century into the eighteenth and seventeenth is surely unhistorical, and can only distort our understanding of the origins of manufacture itself. The Industrial Revolution did not develop on the basis of hidebound custom, and it certainly could not have arisen out of a static world. In many ways the revolution of industry really arose out of the evolution of crafts. When we turn to examine the nineteenth century itself, moreover, we find that this craft-structure not only survived until a remarkably late period, but in many trades continued to expand alongside the industrial world of the Victorian era. Judged by its contribution to overseas trade, perhaps, or by the yardstick of productivity, that structure may seem relatively unimportant. Judged by its contribution to the basic needs of the home market, however, and by the substantial numbers of people employed in it, it was far from negligible. In the Census of 1861 about a quarter of the occupied population of the so-called 'agricultural' counties of the Lowland Zone was reckoned as 'industrial', in comparison with forty-three to forty-six per cent in the four most industrialized counties—Lancashire, the West Riding, Warwickshire, and Nottinghamshire.60 Amongst that quarter there was in fact a good deal of small-scale industry, such as brewing and malting; 61 but there can be no doubt that craftsmen also formed a substantial element in it. In Kent alone, for example, Kelly's Directory of 1870 lists nearly 6,000 master-craftsmen engaged in some 140 separate trades, and that list is evidently not an exhaustive one. At that date there were still some 1,300 shoemakers' workshops in the county, 600 smithies, 350 wheelwrights' shops, 200 saddlers' and harness-makers' shops, and a whole range of other craft-activities: 110 cabinet-makers' shops, for instance, eighty stonemasons', eighty shipwrights' and barge-builders', seventy-five coopers', seventy-five coachbuilders', seventy basket-makers', fifty-five braziers' and tinmen's, and so on.62 To a greater degree than is sometimes realized, 60 See the summary tables in The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, [ 1868], XII, Appendix, p. 5. In seventeen of the thirty counties generally thought of as 'agricultural', including all those south of the Thames except Berks and Wilts, the 'industrial' population actually outnumbered the 'agricultural'. It was chiefly in the eastern counties that the 'industrial' population was lowest. 81 Kelly's Directory of Kent for 1870 lists 115 breweries and sixty-five makings in the county. 82 The figures are rounded to the nearest five or ten. Victorian trade directories of this kind were concerned with recording business units, and hence normally list masters only, not employees. In general I have therefore assumed that each individual represents a separate shop, unless two or more men occupy the same premises. Those described as 'manufacturers' have generally been excluded, though many 'manufactories' were probably little more than workshops. All who appear to be retailers only (e.g., 'curriers and leather-sellers') have also been excluded, and all engaged in process-


37

the domestic world of mid-Victorian England was still the hand-made world of the craftsman.63

VI Behind all these multifarious characteristics of the county town we can see one simple, inescapable human tendency at work, a tendency that explains much in the evolution of early modern society: birds of a feather flock together. None of these features, it is true, was entirely peculiar to places of this kind. The capitals of our shires were not the only inland entrepots of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the only cardinal markets and regional shopping-centres. They were not all significant entrepreneurial towns, and the urban life of the leisured classes was by no means wholly confined to them. They did not form the only focal points of cultural and religious activity, or of medical enterprise and educational opportunity. Neither were they the sole centres of specialist craft-training, or the sole nurseries of ingenuity and skill. Some of these activities were certainly to be found in secondary towns like Stamford and Banbury, or in many smaller market centres, while others were more prominently developed in rising industrial towns like Birmingham, in social capitals like Bath and Brighton, and above all in the metropolis. Yet what was remarkable about the English county town of the Hanoverian period was the concentration of so many varied functions within it, and the range, the scale, the scope, and the quality of the facilities it afforded. For that reason these places came increasingly to focus the economic and social activity of the countryside around them in the early modern period. Within a pattern of great diversity from one county to another, there was clearly a certain common mode to which most ing and wholesale trades, such as brickmaking and malting. Where crafts are concerned, it is impossible to say how complete the directory is. About 4,600 farmers are listed, which may represent something like two-thirds of the total, since there were then about 7,000 farms in Kent. A few craft-occupations are obviously under-represented, such as sawyers, of whom only two are listed; but these seem to be exceptional. One might hazard the guess that perhaps two-thirds of the master-craftsmen in the county as a whole are recorded. This would give a hypothetical total of some 9,000 masters, and if these employed an average of two men and two apprentices apiece, the craft-occupations would account for roughly half the total 'industrial' population of the county (93,000). No doubt large numbers of the remaining half were employed as 'craftsmen' of a kind in the dockyard towns. 83 A recent study of the furniture industry in 1800-51 has found no evidence of mass production even at the end of the period. English furniture was still made overwhelmingly in cabinetmakers' workshops, and in the 1851 Census the average shop still employed only five craftsmen, including the master; ninety per cent of all shops, in fact, still employed fewer than ten men. (Times Lit. Supp., 24 March 1978, reviewing E. T. Joy, English Furniture, 1800-1851}.

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of them tended to approximate, and in most counties their influence on the new currents of the time was evidently magnetic. It was not only the life of the county community itself that they attracted, but the life of its constituent pays as well, in all their absorbing contrasts. As they expanded in scale, as a consequence, and as the scope of their facilities increased, they also began to give rise to a new kind of region, the modern urban hinterland, and to impart to that region a growing sense of solidarity, a deepening consciousness of belonging together. Within their ambit, moreover, the people of the area were gradually brought into increasing touch with the trade and industry of the country at large: with the agriculture, the commerce, and the manufacture of other regions; with the drovers, the factors, and the carriers of distant counties; with the wayfaring traders of Scotland, Ireland and London; and with the products of the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Orient. Silks and velvets from Italy, wine and brandy from France, sugar and spices from the Indies, tea and porcelain from China, timber from Honduras and the Baltic: by 1750 these and many other overseas commodities had become commonplace amongst the merchandise of the English county capital: chiefly imported to meet the demands of the local gentry, no doubt, yet also opening up a world of wonder and novelty to townsman and countryman as well. It has been the argument of this paper that the historic pattern of English regional development is a good deal more subtle and complex than at first sight appears. Although in contemporary matters it is often convenient to employ such terms as Merseyside, the West Midlands, and the Home Counties, historically speaking these phrases conceal at least as much as they illuminate. Behind them we must envisage a whole spectrum of local and regional diversity of which they fail to take cognizance. England, after all, is one of the most varied countries in the world in its physical structure, and this variety has inevitably given rise to very diverse landscapes within a relatively small compass: often within the borders of a single county, and certainly within the borders of our contemporary regions. Moreover, these contrasts are not confined to physical characteristics alone; they are also marked by different periods of settlement, and they have given birth to very varied forms of local life. In tracing the social and economic development of this country as a whole, in consequence, we must not expect to find a homogeneous or coherent pattern of evolution, but a piecemeal, localized, and fragmented one: a pattern of regional paradoxes and survivals, in short, where landscapes of poverty and plenty exist for centuries side by side, and where in almost every county the advanced and the primitive, the familiar and the remote, remained strangely intermingled until the eve of the railway era. Gradually, moreover, and particularly over the last three or four


39

centuries, this small-scale network of contrasting pays has been further complicated, and in places transformed, by the rise of a succession of human regions, if so they may be called, such as the county community, the urban hinterland, the occupational region, the industrial region, the social neighbourhood, the region of religious influence, and so on. It is from such origins as these that the modern manufacturing areas of South Yorkshire and the Black Country have arisen, for example, no less than the old lacemaking districts of East Devon and the South Midlands, or county communities like Norfolk, Sussex, and Kent. And yet within these new 'human' regions, the old English pays still survived until well into the nineteenth century, still embedded in their local environment, still vivid with their own historic idiosyncrasies, as readers of Hardy or George Eliot will realize. Such are the circumstances that have given rise to that elusive and kaleidoscopic character of regional development in this country which was remarked on at the beginning of this paper. The coexistence of contrasting landscapes and economies, each with its own history and its own individual life-span, surely forms one of the most pronounced, the most persistent, and the most far-reaching themes in the evolution of English provincial society. If the pattern outlined in this paper seems to complicate unduly the task of recreating that society, it should perhaps be remembered that it is from the perpetual interplay between these diverse economies, from their impact upon one another over the centuries, and from their occasional conflicts and collisions, that the vital spark of progress and originality in this country has often arisen. APPENDIX The principal sources on which the study of county towns is based include the following. ( i ) . Exeter Militia List, 1803, ed. W. G. Hoskins for Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1972 (lists occupations of 2,642 men); Northamptonshire Militia Lists, /777, ed. V. A. Hatley for Northants. Record Society, 1973 ( i 1,955 men, of whom 8,188 were rural); parliamentary poll-books for Northampton in 1768 (1,299 men), Shrewsbury in 1796 (1,967 men), Canterbury in 1818 (1,125 men), and Maidstone in 1802 (433 men); Northampton Apprenticeship Registers, 1562-1776, formerly in Town Hall, now in Northants. Record Office (c. 7,000 boys). These are the sources on which most of the figures for occupations cited in the text are based. They give the occupations of a total of some 18,250 townsfolk, but in the case of Northampton there is some overlap between the sources, and apprenticeship figures obviously cannot be amalgamated with others in the same table. For Northampton, a wide range of borough records has also been examined; together with all the surviving wills and inventories for the town, from c. 1560 to 1770, in the County Record Office (the inventories survive only from c. 1660); the complete run of The Northampton Mercury, 1720-70; and a very varied collection of printed material in the Local History Collection in the Borough Library. (2). In addition to the above, the following poll-books have also been systematically analysed: Northampton, 1774, 1784, 1796, 1818, 1826, 1831, 1837; Canterbury, 1790,

40


1796, 1826, 1830; York, 1807; Norwich, 1812; Great Yarmouth, 1754 and 1831; Nottingham, 1754; and Bristol, 1812. These give the occupations of a further 23,450 townsmen; but in the cases of Northampton and Canterbury there is again some overlap between the sources. They also vary widely in their coverage from place to place and for different years in the same town, so that a combined tabulation is not practicable. For Northampton and Canterbury, however, they afford a useful indication of the changing occupational pattern in the urban economy. In the former town, for example, they show that numbers engaged in the shoe-trades gradually increased from 192 in 1768 to 910 in 1831, or from fifteen per cent to thirty-six per cent of the recorded population. Amongst other towns for which poll-books have been analysed are Newark, Dover, Rochester, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (3). A full critique of these sources would be out of place in this article. It should be pointed out, however, that militia lists tend to under-record the gentry and professional classes. Since they exclude men over about the age of forty-five (fifty-five at Exeter in 1803), they also under-record the older master-craftsmen and other senior groups. On the other hand, one would expect them to provide a useful check on the number of servants and labourers, who must often be under-recorded in poll-books. In the cases of Shrewsbury in 1796 and Canterbury in 1818, however, labourers actually formed a larger percentage of the recorded population (c. ten per cent) than in the Exeter Militia List (7.5 per cent). Is it possible that the very large percentage of unskilled labourers found in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century towns, sometimes as much as a third of the male working population, had dwindled so substantially by the late eighteenth century ? If so, there may be a connexion here with the increasing number of trained craftsmen. (4). Poll-books obviously vary widely in usefulness according to the local franchise. The most useful relate to towns where the vote was vested in the householders, as at Northampton. Where the vote was limited to freemen, as was often the case, poll-books may nevertheless sometimes afford quite substantial coverage of master-craftsmen and master-tradesmen. Of the poll-books used in the main tabulation (see ( i ) above), those for Northampton in 1768 and Shrewsbury in 1796 were chosen because, for various local reasons, they happen to be particularly full for the years in question; that for Canterbury in 1818 is the best available for that town, though it is not as good as the two former. In Northampton many non-householders as well as householders voted (illegally) in 1768, so that the poll-book lists almost 1,300 adult males (i.e. of voting age) out of a total male population (including children) of c. 3,000. The least full of the poll-books is that for Maidstone in 1802; but it has been included because of its unusual evidence of family trade-groupings and of the migration of men trained in the town (particularly in paper-making) to other centres. In all towns, out-voters have been excluded from the figures. In most cases, these were purely political and are of little or no interest from the point of view of the local economy. At Maidstone, however, they included many of the locally-trained men who migrated to other towns, and in that respect are of great interest, though necessarily excluded from the tabulation of townsmen. In addition to under-representing servants and labourers, many poll-books also appear to under-record gentry, professional men, and a few other groups, such as innkeepers. For most towns few, if any, exist before 1750 (or indeed 1780), though there are earlier ones for such cities as Norwich and York. Poll-books of county elections, it should be stressed, are of relatively little use for occupational analysis owing to the limitation of the franchise.

3

RIVER AND WOLD: REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORICAL ORIGIN OF REGIONS AND PAYS This paper examines the historical origin of two related but distinct types of countryside or pays in England: those based on early-settled river-valleys and those associated with areas of wold. W. G. Hoskins has pointed out that in Devon early places like Tawton and Taviton derived their names from rivers and were associated with outlying stocks or cattle-farms—Tawstock and Tavistock—which originally formed distinct but related parts of the same river-estate. A similar association is found in many areas. Two examples in Kent, where the evidence for early settlement is unusually abundant, are examined in detail: the estates of the Darenth people and the Bourne people. In both cases settlement pressed inland from the river itself, far up into the wooded Downland or wold. As well as their original river communities they thus developed an outlying area of summer pasture based on isolated forest shielings. The former may have originated before the English invasions and were certainly very early. The development of the shielings into permanent farms occurred later, mainly in the middle- or later-Saxon period. The Kentish evidence is significant for three reasons. First, there can be no doubt that in the county as a whole the wold region or Downland originated as the outlying summer pasture of the river-estates. Secondly, as the isolated shielings evolved into permanent farms, the region developed an independent life of its own, with distinct characteristics from those of the parental river-settlements. Thirdly, the word wold occurs widely in the Downland place-names of East Kent, where it definitely denotes woodland or forest, and not simply the "elevated stretch of open country" which it is often said to signify. Did other areas of wold, now largely woodless, such as the Cotswolds and Lincolnshire Wolds, also originate as the outlying wood-pasture of early river-peoples ? Introduction

Over the past few years the word "region" has become something of a vogue word in this country.tl] The idea behind it is obviously essential to both history and geography; but the problem of identifying and denning a region historically is often less simple than it appears at first sight. We need to be cautious in reading the modern regional pattern back into the past. It is easy to assume that such contemporary concepts as the South-East or Humberside, for example, had some real existence in the seventh century or the seventeenth, when in fact they may rather obscure the process of historical evolution than illuminate it. To unlock the secrets of the past we generally need, in my experience, to develop more sensitive categories and sometimes to admit their tentative character. The difficulty of defining an historical region arises partly from the fact that, unlike many local communities and some political units, it is not often a constant [1] The original draft of this paper was read to a conference of Local History Tutors at Nottingham in December 1975. Since then it has been substantially revised. Of those who have been good enough to comment on it I am particularly grateful to Dr Margaret Gelling and the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Geography

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entity. Its boundaries will vary according to the period you are studying and will probably change from century to century. They will also vary according to whether you are thinking of a regional landscape—a topographical area on a map—or whether you are thinking of a regional society, a human organism with a conscious life of its own, a conscious identity or sense of belonging together. They will vary according to whether you are thinking of a natural pays, a settlement area, a farming region, a social neighbourhood, a county community, an urban hinterland, an industrial region, a dialect region, a building region—and so on. All these are valid units of study; they relate to real historical ideas; but their boundaries will very rarely be coterminous with one another. A seventeenth-century farming region, for instance, may well bear little or no relation to a social neighbourhood of the same period. A dialect region may have little or no respect for a county boundary; and although it may bear some relation to an urban hinterland—for towns, as meeting-places, have an effect on the dialect around them—the two are unlikely to be identical. My first point, then, is that an historical region is often necessarily a flexible, a variable entity, according to your period and according to the aspect of human activity you are studying. My second point is the obvious one that, although on the one hand we may in some contexts extend the idea to the scale of a zone, such as the Highland Zone or Lowland Zone, on the other hand there are often equally important differences of historic countryside within the space of a single shire: differences of pays which generally show little regard for the administrative boundary, however ancient that may be, but cross it at many points into the neighbouring counties. It is these small-scale areas, or pays, that I wish to direct attention to in this paper rather than the greater regions or zones. Geographers have of course long been aware of their importance and have devoted a very extensive literature to them. Their ultimate origins in the varied geological structure of Great Britain are sufficiently familiar to most of us. But in recent years ideas on their historical evolution have been changing so that it may be useful to examine that evolution in a corner of England where the evidence happens to be exceptionally abundant. The desirability of examining different types of countryside, historically as well as geographically, struck me forcibly when Joan Thirsk and I were working on Volume IV of The agrarian history of England. Approaching the 1500-1640 period from very different angles, we found ourselves arriving independently at the same simple but fundamental distinction in most parts of England between the forest areas and the fielden or "champaign" areas, between predominantly arable societies and predominantly wood-pasture societies. These distinctions may now seem rather obvious, and in themselves they were no new discovery on our part. Their importance had long been recognized both by geographers and by the older agricultural writers like William Marshall. But what was interesting to observe was the way they affected not only agricultural practice but almost every aspect of human life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: social structure, demographic development, settlement history, manorial organization, styles of building, distribution of wealth, religious mores and many other matters. Moreover, it seemed remarkable that in so many areas they should form the salient historical division of the countryside, even in counties that in other respects seemed totally different, such as Warwickshire and Kent. That is not to say that all parts of the country in the sixteenth century fell into one or other of these two categories: obviously they did not: the fen areas and the

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fell areas of England, for example, clearly formed other types of countryside with their own distinctive historical development. Neither am I saying that all woodpasture areas proved to be identical or that all communities in any one forest were identical: far from it: the differences between them and within them were indeed as illuminating to follow up as the resemblances. Nevertheless, up to a point there were pronounced typological resemblances of settlement, farming, social structure, and so on between, say the Forest of Arden and the Weald of Kent in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that were not to be found between the Weald of Kent and Romney Marsh: and these resemblances proved very rewarding to examine on a comparative basis from one part of the country to another. Over the past few years it has been my fortune to put in a good deal of work on the landscape and settlement history of Kent, and this work has pointed up a further seminal subdivision of the English countryside. Everyone is familiar with the basic distinction in Kent between Downland and Weald; but it has now become apparent to me that within the area rather loosely thought of as the Downland there was another basic underlying division of at least equal importance. This is the distinction between the River or Vale communities on the one hand and those of the higher Downland or Wold on the other. One of the principal sources I have used in this work is Edward Hasted's monumental History and topographical survey of the county, compiled between the 1750s and 1790s.[1] Hasted's Survey extends to some three million words and is important for two reasons. It was based on very extensive archival research and compiled at a time when the old legal, manorial, ecclesiastical and tenurial structure of the county still remained largely intact, in outline at least.[2] Although Hasted himself often did not realize the full historical significance of his findings, he was intensely interested in the whole body of Kentish custom and precedent and methodically recorded every vestige of it he was able to recover. Studied in conjunction with the evidence of place-names, early charters and topography his record thus enables us to reconstruct for Kent a much fuller picture of early settlement history than for most other counties.[3] Hasted's work is not only important for its historical material, however. To a perceptive eye his contemporary topographical descriptions are also revealing. Over a period of 40 years he visited all the 420 parishes of the county personally, some of them many times, and in those footpace days came to know them with unusual intimacy. Though at first sight his comments may appear unimaginative, [1] Edward Hasted, The history and topographical survey of the county of Kent (3rd ed., Wakefield 1972) 12 vols [2] It is not possible to explore the reasons for this survival here. The most important was the fact that after the Conquest William the Norman permitted the county to retain its own legal system, one of the last vestiges of which, the partible inheritance of land, was not finally abolished by Act of Parliament until 1927 [3] Except in built up areas local topography has in general been subject to much less change in recent centuries in Kent than in most Midland shires, so that the vestiges of early landscapes are more abundant. Most farm-sites, for example, have remained unchanged for many centuries, often for more than a thousand years. There are also more pre-Conquest charters for Kent than for any other county, chiefly because of its early monastic houses with a relatively undisturbed history, particularly at Canterbury and Rochester. Owing to the scattered nature of Kentish settlement its place-names also are more numerous than for any county of comparable size. The English Place-Name Society has not yet covered the county. Meanwhile J. K. Wallenberg's two volumes Kentish place-names (Uppsala 1931) and The place-names of Kent (Uppsala 1934) are still invaluable, though now in need of revision

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they in fact yield a good deal of detailed information about the landscape and settlement history of Kent before the changes of the nineteenth century. Taken as a whole they indicate startling contrasts between the advanced and the primitive areas of the county, between its regions of prosperity and its regions of decay. Take what he says of the rich arable countryside of East Kent between Adisham and Thanet, for instance: "a remarkable beautiful and pleasant [area], being for the most part an open champaign country, interspersed at places with small inclosures and coppices of wood, with towns, frequent villages and their churches, and many seats, with their parks and plantations, throughout it. The face of the whole of it is lively, and has a peculiar grace and gaiety." Then contrast it with this, of Stelling Minnis, a few miles away on the Downs to the south-west of Adisham: "There are numbers of houses and cottages built promiscuously on and about [the Minnis, i.e. common waste], the inhabitants of which are as wild, and in as rough a state as the country they dwell in." Or with this of nearby Paddlesworth, also on the Downs: "a lonely and unfrequented parish, situated very high, among the hills . . . very small, the church standing in the middle of it, near three or four mean cottages, which make the village, the inhabitants of which are poor indeed. The soil is much like that of the last described parish of Acrise, only still more barren, with a great deal of heath or common throughout it, a wretched and miserable country."m True, we have here a picture refracted through eighteenthcentury eyes; but Hasted was himself a small landowner, who knew the properties of the soil, and in fact each detail is carefully observed and historically significant. Taken in conjunction with similar remarks regarding other parishes, they show that these contrasting patterns of poverty and plenty were not scattered at haphazard through the county but were grouped in clearly denned regions within it. Essentially they were related to contrasts of pays, to types of countryside in vale and upland whose historic differences often lay far back in the origins of Kentish society: in variations of settlement and farming, of land-forms, siting, soil-types and geology that had shaped the very beginnings of colonization. In this paper I wish therefore to examine these two related types of countryside, those of the River Valleys and the Wolds, by indicating the way in which they originated, and suggesting that these origins have done much to shape their subsequent history. Although my examples are drawn mainly from Kent, they are of wider significance than that and are paralleled in many other parts of the country, particularly in the Lowland Zone. I hope in that way that they may be of some general use and interest. River valley settlements

It is now more than 20 years since W. G. Hoskins, in his essay on "The making of the agrarian landscape" of Devon, suggested that many of the earliest settlements in that county were associated with river-names.[2] More recently Margaret Gelling has made the same point regarding early places in other parts of the kingdom.[3] Hoskins cited the examples of Tawton with Tawstock on the Taw, [1] Hasted, op. cit. IX 180-1; VIII 79, 118 [2] W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, Devonshire studies (London 1952) 302-5 [3] Margaret Gelling, The place-names of Berkshire, Part III English Place-Name Society, LI (1976) 820-2. Dr Gelling informs me that she has also made this point in a forthcoming paper for Medieval settlement: continuity and change (ed. Peter Sawyer). C. T. Smith alludes to this point in respect of the Eastern counties generally in The drainage basin as an historical basis for human activity, pp. 104-5 of R. J. Chorley (Ed.), Water, earth, and man (London 1969)

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Plympton with Plymstock on the Plym, Taviton with Tavistock on the Tavy and Cullompton with Culmstock on the Culm. The stocks and the tuns on these rivers have long been separate places, in some cases situated several miles apart; but originally each pair of names formed a single unit or estate and each estate appears to have been called simply after the name of its river—Taw, Tavy, Plym or Culm— without the addition of any English suffix. It was only at a later date that the element tun was added to the river-name, and the stock came to form the outlying cattle-farm or dairy-farm of the estate. Tawstock, for instance, was the stock or dairy farm belonging to Tawton, and the whole estate of Taw (or Tawton) originally extended to some 21,000 acres.[1] Professor Hoskins then went on to suggest that there were probably other very early regions or estates of this kind in Devon, named after the rivers flowing through them and called Coly, Greedy, Clyst, Claw, Teign and Ashburn. In most of these cases the English word tun was subsequently added to the name of a river-estate so that the place-names became Colyton, Crediton, Ashburton and so on. Now these early river-estates, or settlements of the river-peoples, were not a peculiarity of Devon. They were to be found in many parts of the country. There were several in the neighbouring county of Dorset, for example, such as Wimborne, whose original territory of about 21,000 acres extended eight miles along the parent stream, the Wim Bourne, from Wimborne Minster to Wimborne St Giles, and included all the six later parishes lying between them, which were subsequently carved out of the original territory: Knowlton, Hinton, Moor Crichel, Chalbury, Gussage and Witchampton.[2] There are clearly other examples in Dorset, besides Wimborne, such as the Cernes and the Tarrants, though I have not myself worked on them. There are also many instances in other areas, in counties as far afield as Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Somerset and Essex, though again I have not examined many of these in detail.[3] Two further points of a general kind may be made in regard of these estates or regiones of the river-peoples before I turn to examples in Kent. First, in many cases [1] These stocks bear some resemblance to the Kentish steads discussed below. Stock is not a common place-name element in Kent, but where it occurs, as at Woodstock and Pitstock in Tunstall (near Sittingbourne), it is in a parallel situation to the steads: both stocks and steads were outlying livestock-farms [2] The evidence is complex and can be only briefly summarized here. As its name implies, Wimborne was an early minster church, in existence by 705. It lies close to a Roman road and may have been a Roman station. Its area is thickly studded with prehistoric sites, of which the chief is the vast Iron Age camp Badbury Rings, a major tribal centre on which four Roman roads converge. Until the late nineteenth century the parish of Wimborne, like so many early ones, was very large, still comprising 12,000 acres, or more than half the original 21,000 acres of the river-estate, and as well as the town of Wimborne including Holt, Leigh, Badbury, Kingston Lacy, Barford, Barnsley, Cowgrove, Houndhill, Pamphill and Stone. The distribution of these places, the shape of the parish boundaries and the siting of Badbury Rings on the edge of Shapwick parish suggest that Shapwick also once formed part of Wimborne, of which it was no doubt the outlying shop wick or sheep farm. Wimborne St Giles was probably not separated from Wimborne Minster till the formation of the six very small intermediate parishes mentioned in the text. The smallness of these latter is characteristic of many middle- or late-Saxon parishes on river-estates, and is paralleled in the Kentish examples mentioned below [3] Definite and suspected examples include territories based on the following places: Calne (Wilts.), Thame (Oxon.), Luton (Beds.), Louth (Lines.), Taunton and Frome (Som.), the Colnes (Essex), the Candovers (Hants.), the Colnes (Glos.), Bottesford and Medbourne (Leics.), Ashwell (Herts.) and perhaps Colne (Lanes.). All of these except Louth, Bottesford, Medbourne and Ashwell derive from Celtic river-names

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they are significantly associated with river-names of Celtic origin, and where they are not they generally incorporate some very early English element in their placename. All the examples I have cited derive from Celtic rivers except Ashburton and Wimborne, both of which incorporate the word bourne, which can generally be taken to indicate an early origin although it does not invariably do so. Secondly, a remarkable number of river-estates, or regions of the river-peoples, gave birth at some subsequent period in their history to market towns, such as Wimborne Minster, Crediton and Cullompton. There is also reason to think that in many cases these towns date from an exceptionally early period. Although, generally speaking, they did not acquire formal market charters or borough charters from the crown till the twelfth or thirteenth century, it is clear that the grant of a charter often only confirmed in law trading rights which had been exercised by customary (or "prescriptive") right from before the Conquest. Certainly Wimborne Minster is a case in point, for it is actually recorded as a borough in the Domesday Survey. It is a clear example, in fact, of what I have ventured to call elsewhere a "primary town", that is to say a market town of pre-Conquest origin: and it is remarkable how many of these primary towns—though again not all—do originate in the regiones of these river-peoples.[1] In turning to the evidence from Kent, we find these settlements of the riverpeoples on most of the main watercourses of the county except in the Weald, where different settlement factors operated. One obvious example is that of the five Grays—St Mary Cray, St Paul's Cray, Foots Cray, North Cray and Crayford— which once formed a single continuous territory simply called Cray, deriving its name from the Celtic word for the river running through it.[2] That word is identical in meaning with the Afon Crai in Breconshire and signifies "fresh" or "clear": a description which nowadays, alas, is singularly inappropriate, but which must obviously have appealed to a primitive people. Another striking example in Kent is Dover, deriving its name from the little River Dour, a place of Roman or pre-Roman origin, which in Saxon times gave birth to all those little settlements in the deep downland combes that converge on the seashore beneath Shakespeare's Cliff. As in the case of Cray, Dover has retained its Celtic river-name in a simplex form unchanged throughout its history, without ever acquiring the suffix tun which was added to the river-settlements of Devon. Its name is in fact identical with the Welsh word dwfr, of which it was originally the plural form, and which simply means "the waters". Like Wimborne, and perhaps long before that place, it became one of the earliest English market towns, although it is obvious that in this case somewhat exceptional factors were at work, since Dover was also a Roman settlement and a port. Before leaving Dover, it is worth observing that the same Celtic river-name, dwfr, appears in the names of at least two other very early English towns, Andover and Wendover. There are two other territories of the river-peoples in Kent that I wish to speak about. The first is to be found in West Kent and derives its name from the River Darent. It comprised North Darenth, South Darenth and Dartford, which all derive their names directly from the river, and seven other parishes adjoining these or reaching up into the Downs to the south: Stone, Wilmington, Sutton-at-Hone, [1] For "primary towns" see my article, The primary towns of England The Local Historian 11 (1975) 263-77 . See below, pp. 93-107. [2] The sixth Cray, Barnes Cray, is of later origin and was never an independent parish. St Mary Cray was South Cray in Domesday Book

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St Margaret Helles, Horton Kirby, Maplescombe and Kingsdown.[1] Like its tributary the Cray, and like the Dour at Dover, the River Darent derives its name from a Celtic word and is identical with Derwent and Dart, meaning "oak-river". The original region or estate of the Darent people probably extended to about 21,000 acres, and was thus similar in size to that of Tawton with Tawstock in Devon and the Wimbornes in Dorset. The whole of the Darent Valley, of course, has long been recognized as one of the earliest cradles of English settlement in Kent. In recent years, particularly with the excavation of the great Roman villa site at Lullingstone, it has become increasingly evident that here the gap between Romano-British and English, if gap there was, was of the narrowest description. Practically every village in the 12 miles between Dartford and Otford is neighboured by the site of its Roman villa; but it was only recently that the significance of the place-name Darenth, two or three miles above Dartford, struck me. Typologically, as you can see, Darenth is identical in form with those Celtic river-places such as Taw and Tavy that Hoskins noted in Devon; but, like Dover and Cray, and in contrast with the Devonshire places, it never acquired the suffix tun but has retained its Celtic place-name, in a simplex form, unchanged throughout its history. I am inclined to think that the fact that such places in Kent have retained the simplex form of their names points to a very early origin indeed for these riverestates in that county, to a period in fact before the word tun had become current in English speech. Such an early origin cannot be doubted in the case of Dover, the Romano-British Dubris, and it is only what we should expect to find in the Darent Valley. The presence of pagan Saxon burial grounds in the vicinity of Darenth itself reinforces this view, whilst the Celtic name of the settlement itself, its neighbouring Roman villa and the Roman brickwork in its church, may well indicate a greater antiquity than that of the Saxon period: perhaps much greater, if we may judge from the Neolithic remains in the vicinity. My present purpose, however, is not to raise the difficult question of continuity between Roman and Saxon, but simply to suggest that, just as Tawton and Tawstock once formed a single early riverine estate in Devon, and just as the two Wimbornes did in Dorset, so the two Darenths and Dartford, together with all their seven or eight dependent parishes, also once formed a single indivisible entity, or region, in Kent. It was a great estate, in fact a royal estate, kept entirely in the king's hands till the tenth century, stretching ten miles and more from the Roman ford across the Darent at Dartford far up into the wooded valleys of the Downs, at its highest point touching 750 feet where the prehistoric Downland ridgeway forms the southern boundary of Kingsdown. The fact that it was a royal estate is of course what gave Kingsdown its name—the King's stretch of downland. In Kentish usage that does not connote bare hill-country like the Berkshire Downs or the South Downs in East Sussex, but a densely-wooded upland, deeply scored by narrow combes. Kingsdown, in short, was the outlying forest or wald of the whole estate, just as the neighbouring parish of Stansted was part of the forest or wald of Wrotham. C2] [1] South Darenth, St Margaret Helles and Maplescombe subsequently lost their parochial status, probably in the late medieval period, though they still survive as settlement-names. North Darenth is now known simply as Darenth [2] There are still many stretches of woodland in Kingsdown, and the church is curiously sited in the middle of one of them, perhaps once a sacred grove. Twenty-two "wood" names, one "hurst", one "grove", one "rough" (the local word for "scrub") and two "shaws" are recorded on the 2£ inch map. Cowless Shaw means "cow-pasture wood": one of many little indications that this area was the outlying wood-pasture of the estate

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At Dartford itself this estate of the Darent people, like that of the Wimborne people in Dorset, gave birth to what was probably one of the earlier post-Roman towns of Kent. For although Dartford is not specifically recorded by that name until 1086, by a lucky chance its ancient port-street, that is to say "market street", is recorded in an Anglo-Saxon charter of the year 995, by which date the town also appears to have had its own mint.[1] Dartford, in fact, bears most of the marks of a primary, or pre-Conquest, market town: it was perhaps always the economic and administrative centre of its estate; it was sited at an important river crossing; it was also on a major Roman road; it was at or near the point where the lost Roman route following the Darent Valley branched off this major road to the south; and it was situated in a neighbourhood thickly strewn with Roman and Romano-British relics. Nearly 50 miles to the east of Darenth, in the valley of the Little Stour, lies another of these ancient river-estates. This was the territory or region of the Bourne people, and as well as including the four parishes that still bear the name of the Bourne—Littlebourne, Bekesbourne, Patrixbourne and Bishopsbourne—it also comprised five or six other parishes—Ickham, Wickhambreaux, Bridge, Kingston, Barham and probably Stodmarsh—together with parts of Denton and Wootton.[2] All in all it probably extended to about 21,000 acres, or very much the same area as the other estates I have mentioned. In this case the name of the estate did not derive from a Celtic root but, like Wimborne and Ashburton, from the Old English word bourne, which was an early alternative name of the Little Stour. The Stour itself may derive from a Germanic root, [3] but originally it does not seem to have been applied to the Bourne but only to the Great Stour, which in fact gave rise to another river territory based on Sturry. As so often in the river-peoples' territories, settlement on the Bourne began near the mouth of the river, and then gradually moved upstream, in this case in a

[1] Assuming that the unidentified "Darent" in R. H. M. Dolley and D. M. Metcalf's, List of mint-signatures from the reign of Eadgar, before and after 973, in R. H. M. Dolley (Ed.), Anglo-Saxon coins (London 1961) 145, relates to Darenth/Dartford. Wallenberg, Kentish place-names 312 interprets portstrcete as "gate street". This seems very unlikely: he offers the same interpretation of "port" for the two Kentish Langports (at Canterbury and Lydd), both of which are well known on other grounds to mean "Long Market". As in many places known to have had markets before the Conquest, Domesday records no market at Dartford; but it does record two hithes or havens and as many as three chapels as well as the parish church (Hasted, op. cit. 294, 295): the place was clearly already a small town [2] There were formerly two other bourne names, Kenewesbourne and Shelvingbourne alias Hautsbourne. The exact site of the former is not known, but it appears to have been in what is now Bridge parish. Shelvingbourne survives as a single house, Bourne Place, but has lost its prefix. Neither of these places was an independent parish. Stodmarsh can be assigned to the estate only on topographical grounds; but there cannot be much doubt, as its name implies, that it was the "stud farm" of the estate. Most of the estates in this part of Kent developed (in addition to their wolds) an outlying marshland farm in the Stour Levels, perhaps as the tidal land between Thanet and the mainland, which had been sea-covered in the early Roman period, dried out [3] A. H. Smith, English place-name elements II (Cambridge 1956) 165. It is worth pointing out that most of the significant river-names in the earlier-settled parts of Kent are Celtic: Cray, Darent, Medway, Limen, Dour, and the original names of the Eden (Avon), Len (probably Carey) and West Brook in Herne (Colne).

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south-westerly direction into the wooded recesses of the Downs, though not in an exactly regular progression. The earliest settlement actually recorded in a written document is Littlebourne, which is found by that name in one of the oldest Kentish charters, dating from the year 696. But the name Littlebourne must imply an even older, earlier Great Bourne, and although no place of this name now exists, it can be pretty safely identified with the neighbouring parishes of Ickham and Wickhambreaux, which lie immediately below Littlebourne. These two places stand adjacent to one another on either side of the river, close to its original mouth, and historically they have always been closely connected. Like Darenth and Dartford, they are sited on or close to a major Roman road;[1] they have significantly early types of place-name ;[2] they are associated with important Roman and Romano-British sites; and taken together they cover about 5,000 acres,[3J or roughly three times the extent of their daughter-community, which was thus aptly named Littlebourne. The next settlement of the Bourne people to be formed after Littlebourne must have been Bekesbourne, which immediately adjoins it upstream. Bekesbourne was subsequently divided into two parts and its daughter settlement, which eventually came to be called Patrixbourne, gave birth at different dates to three distinct settlements. Bishopsbourne was the earliest and most important, and this in turn gave rise to Barham, which itself seems to have been the mother-community of most of Wootton parish and part of Denton. Probably well before Denton and Wootton were created, Patrixbourne had formed its second subsidiary settlement at Kingston, the king's farm.w Its third foundation, Bridge, was almost certainly the last parish to be established in the territory and was probably of quite recent origin when first recorded in Domesday Book in 1086. Though it lies in the centre of the estate, sandwiched between Patrixbourne and Bishopsbourne, Bridge in fact bears the marks of a relatively late street-migration. As its name implies, it is sited at the point where the Lesser Stour is crossed by the Roman road from [1] From Canterbury to Richborough. Much of this road has now disappeared, but its course is reasonably certain. It is worth noting (a) that Richborough, not Dover, was the chief point of entry into Britain in the early Roman period, so that this road, not that to Dover, was the real continuation of the London-Canterbury route; (b) that the Richborough road is studded with very early settlement sites, whereas on the Dover road there are probably none belonging to the first phases of English settlement. The numerous tumuli on Barham Down and the fact that Barham happens to be recorded in a charter of 799 have led to the erroneous impression that Barham itself is a very early settlement, and that the Dover road played an important part in the English colonization. In fact Barham lies, significantly enough, just off the Dover road, which in any case traverses a stretch of country far less fertile and attractive to early colonization than that between Canterbury and Richborough [2] For the Romano-British connotations of the Wickhams cf. Margaret Gelling, English place-names derived from the compound w'ichdm Medieval Archaeology XI (1967) 87-104. The first element of Ickham is the Kentish yoke, which is derived from iugum of the Roman period [3] The original area, before Trenley Park was taken out of Wickham parish. Until Hasted's time Trenley formed an outlying part of Wickhambreaux, significantly separated from it by an intervening piece of Littlebourne. It was not a park in the sense of a pleasure ground, but a hunting enclosure formed out of Wickham's outlying wood-pasture soon after the Conquest [4] In apposition to the adjacent Charlton, or "ceorls' farm" in Bishopsbourne. For the relationship of such Charltons and Carltons with royal manors see H. P. R. Finberg's seminal study Charltons and Carltons, pp. 144-60 of H. P. R. Finberg, Lucerna (London 1964). That study was based mainly on parish names, so that this particular example in Kent is not included though it fits his thesis. Two other Kentish Charltons (near Dover and Greenwich) are included

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Canterbury to Dover, on which it forms the only settlement in a stretch of 10 or 11 miles. It is eccentrically sited on the very edge of its own parish, moreover, and directly abutting on that of its parent-community. Although there appears to be no record of a market grant to Bridge after the Conquest, and indeed it was too near Canterbury to develop into a genuine town like Dartford, the possibility that it originated as a small pre-Conquest trading centre for the Bourne people should not be ruled out. Certainly its topography suggests that possibility.C1] The territory of the Bourne people is closely paralleled in East Kent by a number of other river-estates in the same stretch of country between the Stour Valley and the Channel coast. Next to Bourne, adjoining its eastern boundary over much of its length and originating from the Wingham River, was the region of the Wingham people. This also extended for some 20,000 acres, from the Stour Levels on the north to Womenswold high up on the Downs to the south. The name "Wingham River" is a relatively modern one and the meaning of Wingham, like that of many early places in Kent, is much disputed; but one possibility advanced by both Karlstrom and Wallenberg suggests that its first element incorporates an old name for the river. Like the Darent estate the regio of the Wingham people almost certainly gave rise to one of the earlier market towns of Kent; for although there is no clear documentary proof that Wingham was a trading centre until after 1086, its topography and early history like that of Dartford display the characteristic features of a pre-Conquest market. Beyond Wingham, again moving east, lies Eastry, the territory of the "eastern people", situated at the source of its own small stream, and giving rise at Eastry to yet another early market. Finally, between Eastry and the coast there was a second Bourne territory, originating from Northbourne and like the others stretching up into the Downs to the south. Wold settlements Each of these river territories of East Kent presents distinctive features of its own, and these differences shed a good deal of light on early settlement history in Kent and other counties. I must hasten on, however, to the general point of interest that they raise. Towards the southern, upland end of the Bourne territory, high on the Downs in the parish of Barham, there are several large stretches of woodland, and amongst them is one that bears the significant name of Walderchain. This word contains the same element, wald, as we find in weald and in wold, deriving from the Germanic wald, a forest or wood, so that Walderchain actually means "the chine or ravine of the forest dwellers". In other words, just as Kingsdown formed the outlying forest or wold of the Darenth people—though the word "wold" is not often used in West Kent—so Walderchain and its adjoining woods formed the wold, or wood-pasture, of the Bourne people. Now the interesting thing is that towards the southern end of every river territory between the Stour Valley and the coast there is distinct evidence, in place-names and topography, of an outlying region of wald, or wold, or wood-pasture. Adjoining Walderchain to the east is Womenswold, the wold or wald or forest of the Wingham people. Beyond that is Sibertswold, and beyond Sibertswold Waldershare, meaning the "boundary of the forest dwellers". Altogether, in its various local forms—weald, wald, wait, wold and wild—this word appears in at least fourteen place-names in [1] Settlements on Roman roads generally tend to be either very early, as in the case of Canterbury, Dover, Rochester, Eastry, Ickham and Wickhambreaux, or else late (usually post-Conquest) street-migrations, frequently founded as markets, as at Stony Stratford and Fenny Stratford in Buckinghamshire

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this stretch of East Kent.[1] These names, moreover, reach for nearly 20 miles in a continuous arc of countryside from Waltham, the forest ham, near Wye on the west, to Ringwould on the coastal cliff-tops south of Deal: whilst, north and south, the forest once stretched from the cliffs above Dover to within one mile of Canterbury. Although the generic term is not used in Kent, we are justified, I think, in christening these twenty miles of wooded countryside the Kentish Wolds. You will now see the general point I am arriving at. We have many areas of wold in England today: the Yorkshire Wolds, the Lincolnshire Wolds, the Leicestershire Wolds, the Cotswolds and the former Bromswold, which once extended over a large area in Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire, and which still survives in the names of Leighton Bromswold and Newton Bromswold. There was also once a considerable stretch of wold in West Cambridgeshire, between Cambridge, Biggleswade and Godmanchester, which survives in such names as Croydon Wilds, Hatley Wilds, Wild Barns and Wald Drayton—the old name of Dry Drayton. Now it seems to me that these areas of wold raise a very interesting historical problem. For although the word itself is identical in origin with the word "weald", and should therefore signify simply "forest", the fact is that nowadays most wold areas are upland districts very largely, indeed often remarkably, bare of woodland apart from relatively modern plantations. When we say the word "weald" we still think of a wooded countryside; but when we use the word "wold" we think instinctively of an open windswept upland, probably on the chalk or some other limestone formation. Our instincts in this respect are surely right. There can be no reasonable dispute that in the Weald of Kent and Sussex on the one hand and the Wolds on the other we have, nowadays, two quite distinct types of countryside, and that their dissimilarities are in many respects of very ancient origin. How then can we explain the curious anomaly of their identical nomenclature, since both derive from the Germanic waldl According to the place-name expert A. H. Smith, whose remarks are echoed by Professor Kenneth Cameron, "With the clearing of the large forest-tracts, some of which like the Weald of Kent were on high ground, the term wald came to lose its association with woodland and now described the newly developing type of landscape; in M[iddle] E[nglish] there are few allusions to wald meaning 'woodland', but there is an increasing number of contexts which suggest the sense 'hill, down'. .. and 'a piece of open country, an elevated stretch of open country or moorland', or in short a wold.w So Smith, and others following him: but are they right ? If they mean that the word "wold" came to be applied to areas that never had been forest, I doubt if they are. So far as the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds are concerned I must not be positive, since I have done no serious work on either of them. But so far as the [1] Walderchain; Hammill(= hamol-wold); Womenswold; Ringwould; East Studdal ( = studwold); West Studdal; the vanished Southwold (near Ringwould); Waldershare; Sibertswold; Waltham; Wildage and Wheelbarrow Town (in Elham); the vanished Wadling or Wolding Wood (near Ripple); and Waddling Wood (north of Whitfield). "Wold" may possibly be represented in Garrington in Ickham, if that place is identifiable with Garwaldingtune, but this is a very doubtful case. It possibly appears in Old Downs near Sutton-by-Dover and Old Bottom near St Margaret's-at-Cliffe. These are not recorded by Wallenberg and early forms are needed; but "wold" in fact appears as "old" in many place-names: e.g. Old (Northants.), Oldridge (Devon), Oldfield, Old Hurst and Old Weston (Hunts.). With the Wold names should also be included Upper and Lower Hardres on the Downs south of Canterbury; for this very rare word, still significantly pronounced Hardz, is the plural form of the Old High German hart, and also signifies "forest" [2] Smith, op. cit. II 240

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Cambridgeshire Wolds, the Bromswold and the Kentish Wolds are concerned, I am quite positive. They were all quite certainly at an early date areas of continuous forest. During the early English period they were attached to, and divided between, the various territories of the river-peoples, for whose communities they formed the outlying wald or weald, which in many, and perhaps all, cases was chiefly used for pastoral purposes. I must not of course give the impression that all these areas of wold were identical; their differences are indeed as instructive as their similarities; yet at many points there was a general resemblance between them. It is for this reason that the early evidence from Kent is particularly illuminating because, for various reasons, it is much more abundant than for most other areas, so that we can piece together the evolution of the wold more systematically there than elsewhere. What general conclusions, then, does the Kentish evidence point to? (See Fig. 1.) First, there can be no doubt that the Kentish Wold was once continuous forest, 20 miles of forest, in the early Saxon period still haunted by the bears and wolves commemorated in the names of places like Barham and Woolage.[1] This is an important point to grasp, because for many centuries now there has been a marked

Figure 1 (see legend opposite)

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difference between the western part of the Wold, which is still thickly-wooded, and the eastern part, which is largely bare of trees and has long been mainly given over to arable farming. From the evidence of place-names, of early charters, of topography and of tenurial and ecclesiastical relationships it is quite clear, however, that this eastern Wold was originally no different from the western half of the area: both were quite certainly more or less dense, continuous forest. It is for this reason that the historical evolution of the Kentish Wold is especially interesting. For in the western half of it we can still see the process of forest clearance—begun by the seventh century—uncompleted, strikingly arrested in the midst of its development, so that this part of the area never became what we think of as a characteristic wold countryside, bare of trees. The reasons for this arrested development are not far to seek. They arise chiefly from its inherent infertility, and particularly from the fact that so much of the western Wold, in contrast with the east, is overlain with the virtually uncultivable terrain known as clay-withflints. Even nowadays much of this land is practically useless except for woodland. It is in this area that the poverty-stricken Stelling Minnis and Paddlesworth of Hasted's time are situated. [1] "Woolage" signifies "wolf hatch". The first element of Barham derives ultimately from Old English bera "a bear"; but Wallenberg, Kentish place-names 87; Place-names of Kent 552-3 prefers ham of "the men resembling bears" to "Bear-ham" as such, doubting whether bears were found so close to a Roman road in the eighth century. The latter point is invalid if this region was then dense forest almost devoid of habitation sites, a fact Wallenberg did not realize. Bears do not shun modern motor roads, for example in the Yellowstone forests of America. It seems safe to say, moreover, that the early inhabitants would not have been likened to bears unless there were bears to liken them to. It is interesting that this element bera recurs nine miles away at Bargrove in Newington-next-Hythe (Wallenberg, Placenames of Kent 453; his alternative suggestion, "barley grove", makes no good sense), and perhaps at Barfrestoh, only four miles from Barham Figure 1. River and wold in East Kent. Provisional reconstruction of the estates of the Bourne people and Wingham people Notes A. The southern boundary of the Bourne estate is indefinite. Only parts of Denton and Wootton lay within it. 2. Adisham appears to have belonged to neither estate. 3. Staple, Elmstone, Preston and Stourmouth cannot be proved to have belonged to Wingham, but their situation between Wingham and its daughter settlement of Ash and analogy with other river-estates in the area suggests that they originated from Wingham. 4. Settlement from Eastry and Northbourne followed similar directions to that from Wingham and Ickham-with-Wickhambreaux; but in these cases the estate boundaries are very difficult to determine precisely since they did not follow those of parishes, hundreds or other identifiable units. Probably most of the area between the Wingham estate and the east coast lay within their territories; but the overlapping and confusion of jurisdictions in later centuries seems to represent a less simple relationship between River and Wold than in the Wingham and Bourne regions. 5. The Wold area extended for a further five or six miles to the south of Denton and Wootton and to the west of Upper and Lower Hardres. 6. Apart from the Wold names marked on the map, those indicating old woodland and wood-pasture in the area are very numerous. Some 300 woods are named on the 2\ inch O.S. maps of the area as a whole and many more bear names not recorded by the Survey. 7. The northern boundary of the Wold cannot be precisely defined. At its maximum extent, in the early Jutish period, its outlying parts reached to within one mile of Canterbury, to sections of the Canterbury-Richborough road, and in Wickhambreaux as far as the Lampen stream. A line drawn from Hammill to Lower Hardres may roughly be taken to represent its general extent; but the forest boundary was necessarily a changing and indirect one on the dip-slope of the Downs. To the south and west it was more clearly defined by the steep Downland escarpment, some five or six miles beyond the Bourne territory

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Secondly, the pattern of woodland as it still survives in the western Wold, taken in conjunction with local nomenclature and early charter evidence, shows that there was much piecemeal clearance of woodland there at an early date by assarting, as the isolated farmsteads in the forest endeavoured to reclaim, little by little, further pockets of marginal land from the wooded wilderness around them. In parishes such as Acrise and Elmsted—the "oak wood" and the "place of elms" —this kind of assarting has left the same remarkable pattern of small irregular fields, hemmed in by crooked shaws or "shaves", that we find also in the Weald. Many of these shaws are really some of the last relics of the old forest. Altogether nearly 300 woods are mentioned by name on the thirteen 2| inch Ordnance sheets covering the area, and a further 835 are marked to which no name is attached.[1] Of course not all these woods, which vary in size from two or three acres to several hundred, are the consequence of piecemeal assarting. In the eastern half of the area it seems probable that many of them are relatively modern. But their general distribution and topography suggest that a very large proportion, particularly in the western half, are indeed the remnants of the original wald.™ Whereas in the Weald, however, the process of assarting was generally speaking only in its infancy at the time of Domesday, in the western Wold it may have more or less reached its present limits by that date, and in the eastern Wold it had already given rise, by 1086, to the open, sweeping countryside we still see today. In that respect the development of the latter area was typical of that of other wold areas, such as West Cambridgeshire, where the original forest had been almost completely cleared away by the eleventh century. Thirdly, there can be no doubt that the whole of the Kentish Wolds had once formed a great pastoral area, or rather a continuous series of outlying pastoral tracts, each attached to its own particular parental river-settlement. There is plenty of evidence for this fact in the local topography of the area; in contemporary records of pannage rights; in the forty-four place-names terminating in den, stead, tye (teag), lees (Ices), here (here or bare) and minnis (gemcennes), all of which in Kentish usage indicate pasture ;[3] and also in such local names as Oxenden, [1] Parkland has been excluded from these figures. The area as a whole comprises 75 complete parishes and parts of 10 others, or about one-sixth of the county. Of the 1,150 or so woods about 1,000 are in the Wold parishes proper, or an average of about 18 to a parish; 136 are in the River parishes of the area, or about four to each parish. Some of the latter parishes have their own small tracts of Wold on their fringes [2] About 700 of the 1,000 "Wold" woods lie south-west of the Canterbury-Dover road: 32 in Waltham parish, for example, 42 in Elmsted, 48 in Barham and 72 in the large parish of Elham [3] There are 14 occurrences of den in the area, 9 of stead, 4 (or perhaps 6) of tye, 1 of lees, 4 of here and 6 of minnis. Apart from den these elements do not in themselves necessarily signify pasture land; but in Kent that is their usual if not invariable connotation. "Lees" (often spelt "leas" or "leaze") and "minnis" refer to common pasture on the boundary of two or more parishes. The surviving evidence affords definite proof that the forest was used as pasture in 53 of the 84 parishes between the Stour Valley and the Channel coast, including all but 14 of the 55 Wold parishes in the area; 12 of the 14 lie east of the Dover road. For the place-name stead and its pastoral connotations see Karl Inge Sandred, English placenames in -stead (Uppsala 1963) 130-4, 166-75. Stead is more common in Kentish placenames than in any other county and is largely confined to the Downland. Sandred lists 48 steads in Kent (209-36) and I have myself traced several others, bringing the total to nearly 60. He lists 28 in Essex, and 21 each in Sussex and Surrey. This is not the place for a discussion of the word, but it may be mentioned that many of the Kentish steads originated as outlying farms close to or on parish boundaries. The extraordinary number of settlements in Kent sited on parish boundaries (probably more than 1,000 in all) is a puzzling phenomenon. In many, perhaps most, cases they seem to be associated with woodland settlement, the farms in question being utilized as boundary points, perhaps when an outlying swathe of common woodland was first divided between the parishes lying on either side of it.

River and Wold

55

Gatteridge (=goat + hurst) and Swanton, which mean ox-pasture, goat-wood, swineherds' farm.cl] Like the farms of the Weald at a later date, these forest farms of the Wold had probably originated as the seasonal shielings or summer pastures of the river-peoples, to which the herdsmen temporarily migrated each year, just as the Swiss cowherds still migrate to their mountain pastures with the melting of the snows. That the Wealden farms originated in this way is evident from the fact that today hundreds of them still bear the suffix den, which in early Kentish usage simply meant a "summer pasture". We cannot be quite so positive that the Wold farms generally originated in the same manner, but a number of them certainly did since they also bear the suffix den. In all probability, like those in the Weald, they only gradually achieved a permanent life of their own, as population pressure drove the younger sons of the parent-communities in the rivervalleys to seek for themselves an independent livelihood. Fourthly, it was this development of permanent farms in the forest that ultimately led to a fundamental change in the whole economy of the Wolds, a change that was possibly more or less complete well before the Norman Conquest. By that date these upland areas were no longer the subsidiary, dependent, outlying parts of the river-peoples' communities. Gradually they had become, instead, a distinct and independent region in their own right, developing, moreover, a very different type of society from that of the river-settlements. That society was based, not on the close-knit communities characteristic of the old river-peoples, not on villages composed of small landholders, not indeed on communal or co-operative farming of any kind, but on the solitary pastoral hill-farms, operated by independent families, that had arisen out of the original isolated shielings or steads, the old summer lodges in the forest. For pastoral farming, we must remember, does not necessitate a community, or a system of co-operation, but frequently gives rise to a scattered form of settlement and to isolated individual farms. In these respects, too, the settlement and society of the Wold remarkably foreshadowed that of the pastoral Weald, despite the fact that its first phases originated several centuries earlier. In a sense, indeed, we can regard the clearance of the Wold as beginning a process, perhaps in the sixth or seventh century, which, once completed in that area, was then continued, predominantly after the Conquest, in the Weald. The fact that this forest clearance in Kent extended over seven or eight centuries, as it also did in Sussex, needs pondering. When the English arrived these two counties were still largely covered by one continuous wald. True, there were several Roman roads across it—most of them minor ones—near which were small ironworkings, and in places isolated settlements. But the overwhelming fact was the wald, extending upwards of 100 miles from Petersfield on the Hampshire border to Deal on the coast of Kent, and surrounded by only a fragile rim of Roman civilization. That civilization was of the utmost significance in shaping the English colonization of the region, and Caesar may well have been right in describing Cantium as the civilest place in all this isle. But like many other travellers since his time he saw no more than its northern fringes, where the one great Roman road of the region, and its prehistoric predecessor, traversed a smiling landscape near the shore, while its forest heart remained unknown to him. In a sense what the desolate fells and moorlands were to the north, that limitless [1] There are 5 references to oxen, 3 to swine, 2 to goats, 2 to horses and 2 (or perhaps 5) to geese in the place-names of the area. Domesday Book records pannage for swine in at least 32 parishes

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forest was to these southern counties. We need not wonder, then, if the clearance of the wald took seven or eight centuries, or if Kent always displayed those stark contrasts between wealth and poverty, between an advanced and a primitive culture, that Hasted noted at the end of the eighteenth century. Fifthly and finally, although the resemblances between Weald and Wold are real enough, they hold good only up to a point. There are also some striking differences between the two regions of forest, particularly in their ecclesiastical pattern and in their structure of landownership, which in some respects shaped the whole of their subsequent history. The Weald, like many late-settled forests, is an area of large parishes, sometimes of 10,000 or 15,000 acres apiece, and generally of at least 5,000 acres. On the Wolds, by contrast—or more accurately in the whole Downland region of Kent—the average parish size is smaller than in any other part of the county, in fact no more than about 2,000 acres. In the medieval period, when there were many more churches on the Downs than there are now, the average size was probably less than 1,600 acres. Even today there are many parishes no larger than that, and a number that are much smaller. The smallness of these Downland parishes in Kent is not related, as one might suppose, to density of population, since most of them are amongst the more thinly-inhabited parts of the county. It arises rather from the fact that they generally originated as manorial chapelries, attached to those isolated steads, or pastoral estates, with which the settlement of the Wolds began. By the time of Domesday many of these manorial chapelries had become independent parishes, and they gave rise to one of the most characteristic features of the Downland landscape of Kent: the wholly isolated parish church, often attended only by a single farm: a farm that is not the last vestige of a deserted village, as it normally would be in the Midlands, but which actually represents the original isolated manor-house, or to use the local word the "court-lodge", to which the church itself was once the appendant chapel.[1] So far as the structure of landownership is concerned the contrast between Weald and Wold is also striking, although that structure has naturally been subject to greater changes than the ecclesiastical pattern and in consequence is less easy to demonstrate conclusively for early centuries. Like some other late-settled forest areas once again, the Weald has probably always been one of the classic regions of independent freemen or yeomen. Certainly it was so by the sixteenth century and it may indeed have borne something of this character from the outset of its settlement in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Wold and Downland, by contrast, early became the preserve of those landed gentry, usually of indigenous stock, and usually of comparatively modest status, who for so many centuries were so characteristic of Kent, and it is impossible not to feel that this peculiarity owes something to the original settlement structure of the area. In the mid-nineteenth century the pattern of landownership in the two regions was totally different, and this pattern was then certainly of ancient origin. In more than 80 per cent of the Wealden parishes ownership of land was subdivided amongst many small—though probably not very small—proprietors, and in only 19 per cent was it concentrated [1] Some of these chapels in fact never became completely independent parishes. In Waltham, for instance, there were four chapels as well as the church at Waltham itself: Dean, Waddenhall, Ashenfield and Elmsted. Of these four only Elmsted developed into a separate parish, and it never became wholly severed from Waltham. The other three remained manorial chapels pure and simple; they never acquired parochial rights or a distinct territory of their own and in consequence have long since disappeared as ecclesiastical buildings, though their "court-lodges" still remain as farmhouses today

River and Wold

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wholly in the hands of the squirearchy. In the Wold areas, on the other hand, it was divided amongst small proprietors in only 30 per cent of the parishes, whilst it was concentrated in the hands of the squirearchy in 70 per cent.111 In terms of landownership at this time it is also worth pointing out that the contrast between the Wold areas and the River settlements from which they had originated many centuries earlier is often no less striking than between Wold and Weald. Although by the nineteenth century the vale areas of Kent had been subjected to greater social and agrarian changes than the Wolds, it is remarkable how many of the ancient river-settlements there were still to some extent communities of small freeholders, just as they always had been as far back as we can trace. After more than a thousand years of history, the River and the Wold communities were still distinct kinds of places situated in distinct types of countryside. And indeed they still are, even to a superficial observer, today.

Conclusions

In the case of Kent there were a number of factors making for continuity of this kind which did not obtain in all parts of the country: for example, there was no parliamentary enclosure movement. How far, then, does the general pattern in Kent hold good for other parts of England ? So far as the river-settlements are concerned, I have already indicated that many similar examples to those in Kent may be found in other parts of the country. So far as the associated Wold areas are concerned, the problem is a wider one than may at first sight appear. It needs to be explored not only in such regions as the Cotswolds and Lincolnshire Wolds, but probably in areas like the Chilterns and parts of Dorset, where the word itself is not commonly found, but where a wold-type of countryside seems to obtain. In Kent, as I have pointed out, that word is in fact almost confined to the area between the Stour Valley and the coast, yet more or less identical conditions certainly obtained throughout the Downland region of the county. To that I will only add that in some districts a thorough search of minor placenames, such as P. H. Reaney undertook in West Cambridgeshire, may bring to light many unsuspected examples of genuine wold-names. In the Bromswold area bordering Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire, for example, they still survive in such names as Harrold, Brownage Wold, Yelden Wold, Souldrop Wold, Old Weston, Wold Farm in Odell and Oldfield in Ellington, as well as in Newton Bromswold and Leighton Bromswold. Although this is an area where the rural landscape has been changed much more radically in recent centuries than in Kent, there is still plenty of evidence that it was formerly forest in both the place-names and the topography of the area. Not that we must expect to find such conditions in every part of the country, of course. In some areas such as the Berkshire Downs where one might perhaps have looked for a River and Wold development there is in fact very little evidence of it. Dr Margaret Gelling tells me that "one of the striking characteristics of Berkshire land-arrangements as shown [1] Cf. the analysis of landholding in Kent (and other counties) in my Pattern of rural dissent: the nineteenth century, Leicester, Dept of English Local History, Occasional Papers, 2nd ser. 4 (1972) 20-2, 55-61. The Return of owners of land, 1873 (London 1875) seems broadly to confirm this picture, though analysis of it is fraught with difficulties of definition and identification

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in the tenth-century charters is the rarity of outlying properties of any kind".[1] She suggests that this may be because the different types of land involved lie closer to one another than in Kent, so that the landscape generally is on a rather smaller scale. Nevertheless, though we must not be crudely deterministic, the association of River and Wold is certainly a widespread phenomenon wherever the basic geographical conditions facilitated its development. Apart from Kent, I have myself examined in detail only the West Cambridgeshire area and that bordering Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire. My general conclusions are therefore tentative, but for what they are worth this is what they are. First, the wolds were in general very closely associated with the river-settlements, so closely as actually to form an integral part of their original territory, so that they were not generally regions of detached pasture, as the wealds often were, but as a rule attached though outlying pastures.[2] Secondly, since they lay between river valleys, they were essentially areas of upland forest rather than low-lying land like some of the wealds. The Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire Wolds, for instance, comprise the hill-country between the Wreake Valley and the Trent and lie at about 300-600 feet above sea-level. Thirdly, though not often areas of great fertility, they were perhaps generally rather more fertile, easily worked and accessible than the wealds, which were for the most part based on very heavy clays or very porous and infertile sandstones. Fourthly, for these and perhaps other reasons, the settlement of the Wolds began much earlier than that of the wealds, predominantly in the middle- or later-Saxon period, so that in many such areas settlement was more or less complete by the time of the Conquest, when in the wealds it was often only in its infancy. Fifthly, although the highly dispersed pattern of settlement found in Kent, consisting of wholly enclosed and isolated farms, is a peculiarity of that county, it is noteworthy that even in the Midland wold areas settlement tended to be looser and less-strongly nucleated than in the older river and vale villages, whilst the common-field patterns were also often less rigidly organized. This is particularly striking in parts of north Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire, where a few wold parishes almost approach those of Kent in the unusual dispersal of their settlement. It is less striking in Cambridgeshire, today at any rate; but Christopher Taylor has suggested that many of the strongly-nucleated villages in the western part of that county may have originated as a loose nexus of hamlets which only gradually grew together to become a single village, though it is clear that they were never as completely dispersed as in Kent. Sixthly, it is rather remarkable that, whereas the wealds so often in later centuries became the seedbeds of by-employments and industries, this development rarely seems to have taken place on the wolds. One obvious exception here seems to be the Cotswolds (but there mainly in the river-valleys, perhaps ?) and it may be that there are more exceptions than I am aware of. But if my somewhat superficial observations are correct, this is a point of considerable interest for further exploration. I hope I have said enough to show that the wold regions of England form, so to say, a distinct species of landscape and society in their own right, worth studying [1] Dr Gelling has given details of what there is in The place-names of Berkshire, Part III. The county name itself derives from the Forest of Barroc, which she believes lay in the Chieveley area south of the Downs, where there may be some examples of fairly distant woodland pastures evolving, as in Kent, into independent settlements [2] My qualification "as a rule" should be noted. There are some exceptions to this rule in the Kentish Wold and the Bromswold, but in general the distances involved were much less than in the Weald, where many pastures were 15 or 20 miles from their parent-community and a few as much as 40, as Tenterden was from Thanet

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on a comparative basis, and in some degree differentiated both from the wealds on the one hand and the river or vale settlements from which they originated on the other. In conclusion I will add only two points. First, the kinds of countryside I have been discussing do not exhaust the types of region that we have in England: there are many others. Secondly, one of the interesting things to observe in the historical study of regions and localities is the way, in subsequent centuries, they come to be transcended by the rise of quite different types of region. From the early modern period onwards, for instance, they are increasingly transcended, sometimes obliterated, by the gradual rise of industrial areas, even although many of these areas—such as the Warwickshire-Staffordshire borders—themselves originated out of the old forest pays. Then in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they are again transcended by the development of the great urban hinterlands, or rather the growing scale of regional capitals, and their growing influence over their hinterlands or dependent regions. Yet in spite of these transformations, the salient impression I am left with is the way older regions and older societies often managed to survive alongside the more modern in this country, not without changing, but each with its own independent life-span, each at any one time at a different phase in its evolution. It seems to me that it is impossible to understand the historical development of this country at all unless we recognize this fact: unless we admit that until recently England has never been a monolithic community but an incomplete amalgam of differing but related societies, of differing but related pays. The clue to so many historical problems is surely to be found in the way these societies evolved their own life and in the way they responded to one another—sometimes hesitantly, sometimes antagonistically, sometimes creatively. For the vital spark of originality, the essential principle of historic change, has often arisen from their juxtaposition, their co-existence, and their occasional collision. That, I believe, is what lies behind so many of the apparent contradictions in our national history and character.


4

THE MAKING OF THE AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE OF KENT

I. INTRODUCTORY

The landscape history of Kent is a vast subject. After working on it intermittently for the past eight or nine years, I am still baffled by many of its complexities. Nevertheless, it is a subject of the deepest interest not only for its own sake but for the light it sheds on the making of the landscape in other parts of England, particularly during the early phases of English society. In certain respects, we know more about the early settlement history of Kent than of most other counties; and although at many points that history appears puzzling or eccentric, its peculiarities raise fundamental questions about other parts of the country. I am gradually coming to feel, moreover, that although some of these peculiarities are indeed unique to the county, others were at one time not so eccentric as they now seem but were more widely typical of this country as a whole than is commonly realized. In the landscape of Kent, in short, there are substantial indications of an earlier world that elsewhere has often survived only in shadow. Through an examination of these indications, the shadows themselves seem to acquire a new meaning and a new reality. What I want to concentrate on in this paper is not so much the evolution of early Kentish society, as the evolution of the landscape itself. What is the evidence for the settlement history of the county that we can actually see in the countryside around us today? What are the

'This article is based on a paper read to the Kent Archaeological Society at Maidstone in 1975. As is obvious, my debt to other scholars is great indeed. They cannot all be mentioned here, but a special debt is due to J. K. Wallenberg's two pioneering volumes Kentish Place-Names (1931) and The Place-Names of Kent (1934). Though they now obviously need revision in the light of more recent research in place-name studies, this article could not have been written without them. An equal debt is due, as always, to Edward Hasted's History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (2nd edn 1797-1801). Of more modern studies Mr Frank Jessup's History of Kent with Maps and Pictures (1958) packs more facts, figures, and perceptive observations into its 180 eminently readable pages than any other I know.

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dominant characteristics of the landscape of Kent as they appear to me, after having lived elsewhere in England for the past fifteen years? When one thinks of its evolution over the past 1,500 or 2,000 years, what are its really most enduring features? The answer to these questions must begin by making a few negative points and disposing of some of those characteristics which are often supposed to be all-pervasive in the county but which, on the long view, are either more recent in their origin or more limited in their effects than is generally imagined. II. RE-APPRAISALS

The first of these misconceptions, as I see them, is the view that Kentish history has been chiefly shaped by the proximity of London. Now no one would deny that over the past century or so the metropolitan impact has been very great; but taking a longer view what are the facts that we need to remember? First, that London was a Mercian not a Kentish town and had virtually no influence on the early settlement history of the county. Secondly, that all its historic transpontine suburbs were in Surrey and that its continuously built-up area did not extend as far as Deptford, the first parish in Kent, until after 1800. Thirdly, that although it has always been England's largest city, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it was no larger than modern Maidstone and barely one-third the size of the Medway towns. Fourthly, in the development of Kentish society the pull of London has always been counterbalanced by the size of the county and its peninsular position, which necessarily created and for many centuries perpetuated an exceptionally inbred and introverted community. Nowadays, Kent has lost part of its historic area to Greater London, including a substantial stretch of genuine countryside around Downe; but originally the county covered 1,040,000 acres and was substantially exceeded in area only by Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Devon, Norfolk, Northumberland, and Lancashire.2 Since its extremity, moreover, lies seventy-five miles or so from London, much of the county until relatively recently lay beyond the immediate orbit of the metropolis. If one draws a circle of forty miles around the capital, the area so described comprises the whole of Middlesex, Surrey, and Hertfordshire, more than half of Essex and Buckinghamshire, and a good half of Bedfordshire, whereas more than half of Kent lies beyond it. Forty miles is no great distance in modern terms: but until the mid-eighteenth century it represented a day's journey by stage-coach along the only good road in the county, Watling Street, and two days' journey by the cumbrous stage-waggons by which most people travelled. Whenever 2 Three other counties, Essex, Hampshire (including the Isle of Wight), and Somerset, were almost identical in size with Kent. Estimates of their historic area vary; Hampshire and Somerset were almost certainly slightly larger than Kent.


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George II visited his German dominions, he was driven to spend the first night of his travels at Sittingbourne.3 It was not until well into the nineteenth century, in fact, that the transformation of west Kent under the impact of metropolitan wealth, itself a story of great interest and by no means so simple as it may appear, really began in earnest. Until then the wealth of Kent and the inspiration behind its settlement and evolution lay predominantly in the east and centre of the shire. Many little signs indicate this historic predominance of the east. Nearly all the most ancient settlements of the county, for example, apart from those in the Darent valley, are to be found in east and central Kent. All its fifteen ancient incorporated boroughs, except Gravesend, lie east of the Medway. The capital of the ancient Kingdom of Kent, Canterbury, is situated nearly sixty miles from the western edge of the shire and from London. And until the time of the Hearth Tax the fiscal records of the Kingdom clearly indicate the relative poverty of west Kent outside the three or four parishes bordering London, such as Greenwich and Woolwich.4 The second misconception which needs to be disposed of is the legendary wealth of the county compared with other parts of England. Until the sixteenth or seventeenth century that legend is in fact largely mythical. Medieval Kent indeed contained some very wealthy stretches of countryside, particularly in the north-eastern corner of the county; but it also included extensive poor districts and, as a whole, it was not among the richest counties of England, in the thirteenth century ranking only eleventh or twelfth in terms of taxable capacity per square mile.5 Everyone acquainted with Kentish history knows the old jingle: A knight of Gales, A gentleman of Wales, A laird of the North Countree, A yeoman of Kent With his yearly rent Will buy them out all three. But when comparative evidence for the wealth of the gentry first 3

Hasted, op. cit., vi, 152. See, for example, Dr. R. E. Glasscock's map of the distribution of lay wealth in Kent in 1334, in Arch. Cant., kxx (1965), 64. 5 Its assessment for the Fifteenth in 1225 works out at 16s. per square mile. This figure was exceeded by those for Norfolk, Suffolk, Lines., Rutland, Northants., Beds., Bucks., Middx., Berks., Oxon., and Glos. The comparable figure for 1334 was exceeded by those for Norfolk, Cambs., Hunts., Northants., Beds., Oxon., Berks., Rutland, Middx., and Glos. - See H. C. Darby, ed., A New Historical Geography of England, 1973, p. 141 and maps on pp. 78 and 79. This is not the place for a discussion of the validity of these assessments, a problem which is fraught with difficulties. In so far as the Cinque Ports were excluded the figures for Kent and Sussex are understated; in so far as these counties were nearer the centre of government, one suspects that they may have been overassessed in relation to remoter counties of which the government was less well-informed. 4

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becomes reasonably reliable and abundant, in the mid-seventeenth century, there is little difference between the average wealth of Kentish armigerous families (let alone the yeomanry) and those of the Welsh Marches, the east Midlands, Yorkshire, or East Anglia; though, of course, they were better off than most of the gentry of the Cambrian mountains or the remoter parts of the Pennines.6 These facts should not surprise us. On the whole, after all, the manor houses of Kent, though exceptionally numerous, are not exceptionally large or splendid. Its medieval parish churches, though of much interest ecclesiologically, are not generally of the same architectural quality as those of Somerset, East Anglia, Northamptonshire, or the Cotswolds. We have nothing to compare with the glories of Melton Mowbray or Long Melford, let alone St. Peter Mancroft or St. Mary Redcliffe. At the end of the medieval period, it is true, there are grounds for thinking that the wealth of Kent expanded rapidly, and it is this fact that lies behind the widespread rebuilding of church towers and farmhouses at this time. In the subsidies of the 1520s a larger area of the county was taxed at 405. and more per square mile than of any other shire. In the Monthly Assessments of the Civil War period Kent was one of the five most heavily burdened counties, along with Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Devon. But it is significant that in the 1650s the assessment of these five counties was substantially reduced, from 38 per cent of the total to 25 per cent; and it is not in fact until the time of the Hearth Tax, in the 1660s, that we can be quite positive that Kent was amongst the five or six richest counties of England. Even then, it was not as wealthy in relation to its size as Surrey and nowhere nearly as wealthy as extrametropolitan Middlesex.7 The truth is that until recent generations there have always been dramatic contrasts in Kent between its rich and its poor districts, and it was only the former, generally speaking, that travellers commented on in passing through the county. If the main routes through Kent had traversed the Downland instead of the coastal plain north of the Downs, they would have told a very different story. The architectural poverty of the chalk uplands and the topographical descriptions of Edward Hasted, who knew every parish in the county 6

For Kent see, Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640-60, 1966, 41, 329. For other counties Mrs. M. F. Keeler, in The Long Parliament 1640—1641, 1954, gives estimated incomes for many members of parliament. The 'particulars of estates' and other documents in the records of the Committee for Compounding in the Public Record Office shed much light on the family incomes of the gentry; these are briefly summarized in the Calendar of the Committee for Compounding. Figures for Yorkshire worked out by Dr. J. T. Cliffe shew that the broad pattern of wealth in that county was similar to that in Kent; the average income of knights and squires appears to have been actually rather higher in Yorkshire than in Kent. - Cf. J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War, 1969; Alan Everitt, Change in the Provinces: the Seventeenth Century, 19. 7 Darby, op. cit., 196; Everitt, Change in the Provinces, 16-17, 54.

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intimately at the end of the eighteenth century, bear witness to a striking difference of economic fortunes between the Downs on one hand and the rich coastal plain of north-east Kent on the other.8 Thirdly, it is not the natural fertility of soil and the consequent development of hop-growing and fruit-farming that most strike me in Kent. This popular image of the county is once again to some extent a misleading one.9 Though in Romney Marsh and in some of the fruit and hop-growing areas - for example around Maidstone and Sittingbourne we have some of the most fertile lands in England, these tracts of countryside are of limited extent and the county as a whole is not generally fertile like such east Midland counties as Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. Its orchards, though more extensive than those of any other county, comprise only about eight per cent of its area. Its hopgardens have now contracted to little more than 1 per cent, though a century ago they were four times as extensive.10 Of course, it goes without saying that orchards and hop-grounds form a prominent element in the landscape history of Kent, and an absolutely vital one in its economy. But there are two points in this connexion that need to be remembered. First, they are relatively modern developments, created entirely within the last four centuries and largely within the last two. The oasthouse as we know it today, that charming though hackneyed symbol of the county, is a purely nineteenth-century structure. Secondly, the remaining eight- or nine-tenths of the shire, where neither orchards nor hop-fields have ever been established, have also exerted a decisive influence in Kentish history. For the fact is that these areas comprise a great deal of comparatively unrewarding or intractable land, and that intractability has always been one of the most important factors in the settlement history of the county. Until the invention of satisfactory claypipe drainage in the mid-nineteenth century, moreover, the difficulties of cultivation in Kent were more widespread and decisive in their effect than they are today, particularly on the heavy claylands of the Weald.11 Even at the end of the nineteenth century, during the great farming depression, the agricultural writer Charles Whitehead remarked that 'without hops, fruit, and vegetables Kent would have felt the depression 8

See, for example, Darby, op. cit., 139, where Dr. Glasscock's map of assessed wealth in 1334 suggests that the coastal plain of north-east Kent was several times as wealthy as the Weald, and more than six times as wealthy as the south-west corner of the county. Such contrasts were not peculiar to Kent, but they were more marked there than in many counties, such as Essex, Dorset, or Northamptonshire. 9 See, G. H. Garrad's invaluable study, A Survey of the Agriculture of Kent, 1954, 1-2, and Chapter II: 'one must not think of the whole county as a fertile garden. There is a larger proportion of good and medium-quality land in Kent than in the other Home Counties, but there is also a great deal of poor land . . . there are also large stretches of poor, dry chalk downland and wide belts of wet, stubborn clay' (ibid., 1,2). 10 Garrad, op. cit., 209, 95. 11 Cf. ibid., 34-8, for the problems of farming on the Wealden clay.

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in agriculture quite as much as any county in England, as there is so much poor land within its borders, and ... many of its agriculturalists who have neither hop nor fruit land have either succumbed or are in a sorry plight.'12 It was during that depression, and often before the institution of death duties, that many of the old landed families of the shire were driven to sell up their ancestral estates. Their representatives are now often to be found only in North America or Australasia. III. CHARACTERISTICS

So much for negative points: what positive characteristics come to light in comparing Kent with other parts of England? Amongst many that might be mentioned, perhaps five are particularly worth pointing out. The first is undoubtedly the variety of landscape to be found in the county and its division into sharply-contrasted regions or pays. 'Kent, in fact, is a county of contrasts,' wrote G. H. Garrad in the 1950s. 'Owing basically to the geological conditions, the nature of the soil probably varies more frequently and more abruptly than in any other county of similar size.'13 Again, at the beginning of the nineteenth century William Marshall wrote: 'Kent, more than any other county, I think, of equal extent, naturally separates into well-defined districts.'14 His comment may seem a slight exaggeration, but Marshall was not a local man. He had wide knowledge of other parts of England, and certainly the agrarian districts of Kent are more sharply distinguished than those of Midland counties, like Leicestershire, or eastern counties, like Essex and Suffolk. Speaking very broadly they may be said to form five predominant types of country or pays: the cornland, the downland, the chartland, the woodland, and the marshland. Underlying these types of countryside in Kent is the exceptionally varied geology of the county, as is well illustrated by G. H. Garrad's map.15 Although the relationship between geology and landscape is never one of simple determinism, it is impossible to get away from the profound influence of geology in Kent in any consideration of its settlement, topography, agrarian history, or vernacular architecture. From north to south the county is based on a series of nine successive geological formations, each overlying the next and each giving rise to a distinct belt of countryside. These formations are the London Clay, the Thanet Beds, the Chalk, the Upper Greensand, the Gault Clay, the 12

'A sketch of the Agriculture of Kent', Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 3rd Ser., x, (1899), 457. Whitehead was a fruit-farmer at Harming, near Maidstone. The italics are mine. 13 Garrad, op. cit., 1-2. 14 William Marshall, The Review and Abstract of the County Reports to the Board of Agriculture, v (Southern and Peninsular Departments), (1818), 413. 15 Garrad, op. cit., 19.


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Lower Greensand, the Wealden Clay, the Wealden Sandstone, and the alluvial deposits of Romney Marsh. Within these formations there are also important sub-divisions, and the drift geology of the county gives rise to a bewildering variety of local soil types, often within a single parish. The first belt of countryside to which these formations give rise is the low-lying but gently undulating district along the northern borders of the county between the Downland and the coast. The proximity of this stretch of country to the sea, based as it is chiefly on the fertile and easily-worked Oldhaven Beds, Thanet Sands, and Brickearths was a circumstance of the first importance in the early settlement history of the county. Until recent generations it has probably always been the wealthiest and most thickly-populated part of Kent, as well as its chief corn-growing district and the cradle of its orchards and hop-gardens. In the absence of a generally accepted modern term, I venture to denominate this unromantic yet important stretch of countryside the foothills. Its height above sea-level is nowhere considerable, but it is sufficiently above the damp, unhealthy marshland and close enough to the sea to have attracted early settlement. South of the foothills lies the next region, the chalk Downland, stretching seventy miles east and west in a continuous range of hills from the Surrey border to the South Foreland, severed only by the river valleys of the Darent, Medway, and Stour. To the early settlers of the county this was a much less fertile and attractive region than the foothills, but it is one with a distinctive character of its own in the history of Kent, and it remains perhaps the most beautiful and unfrequented part of the county, now happily protected as a designated area. South of this region again, at the foot of the Downland escarpment, the Upper Greensand and Gault form a narrow yet comparatively fertile and well-watered tract of countryside which, like the foothills, exerted a powerful influence in the early settlement history of Kent. Beyond the Gault Clay rises the Lower Greensand, a hill-country still largely wooded, and often called the Stone Hills or Quarry Hills by old writers because of its many stone buildings and countless petts or quarries of the Kentish rag. The stony and infertile nature of much of the Greensand, except in the Maidstone area, accounts for its predominantly wooded appearance and gives rise to its other name, the Chartland. Chart is a word, which is cognate with the Norwegian kart, meaning 'rough, rocky, sterile soil', and it is an element frequently found in the place-names of this region, as in Great Chart, Seal Chart, and Chart Sutton. South of this escarpment, reaching to the Sussex border, stretches the vast expanse of the Weald, which is itself divided into the heavy-soiled Low Weald, or Vale of Kent, and the generally light-soiled High Weald based on the sandstones. Until the nineteenth century this was a great

KENTISH PAYS

Based upon the Ordnance Survey Map with the Permission of The Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Crown Copyright Reserved


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pastoral region which still retained much of its remote and inhospitable character in the eyes of contemporary travellers. Finally, there is the Marshland, another type of pastoral country comprising not only the famous Romney area, but extensive tracts along the north coast of Kent, and those wide alluvial Levels of the Stour, still almost uninhabited, which lie between the mainland and the Isle of Thanet. It is because of this great variety of landscape that until recent generations Kent has always exhibited, in Nellie Neilson's pregnant words, 'a remarkable combination of advanced civilization on the one hand, which prevailed along Roman roads and in those parts that were accessible to continental influence and had formed the early channel of communication with the continent, and on the other of the very primitive conditions natural to fen and deep wood'.16 The second characteristic of Kent that strikes me is the very marked dispersal of its settlement pattern. It is doubtful in fact if there are any true 'villages' in the county in the Midland sense of the word, that is to say nucleated places, historically based solely on farming and organized on a communal basis. Despite the picture post-cards and the glossy calendars, most of the so-called villages of the county, such as Goudhurst, Chilham, and Smarden, are in fact little decayed market towns rather than agricultural communities pure and simple. Such settlements existed, it is true, before they became market towns; but as yet there is little or nothing to prove that they were nucleated in form before they became trading centres, for the most part in the early medieval period though in some cases before the Conquest. Of the remaining 'villages', some are purely modern developments; the rest are either small medieval industrial communities, like Biddenden and Staplehurst, or else villages created through infilling between older scattered houses, chiefly in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, as at Boughton Street, near Faversham.163 Even if it is eventually proved that some Kentish villages were genuinely nucleated in form from the outset, apart from their subsequent status as markets, it will still be true to say that there are probably no parishes in the county where in historic times settlement has ever been concentrated in a single community. In this respect the settlement pattern of Kent is everywhere distinctly marked off from that of the Midland counties. In all parts of the shire - foothills, Marsh, Downs, Chartland, or Weald - there are numerous scattered outlying farms, 16 Nellie Neilson, ed., The Cartulary and Terrier of the Priory of Bilsington, Kent, (1928), 2. I6a Hasted writes of Boughton Street: 'This street is of late years become the principal village; the houses in it are most of them modern and neatly built...': op. cit., vii, 3-4. The original settlement was more than a mile away, near the church. The Street is clearly medieval in origin, however, and is in fact referred to by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales.

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sometimes as many as fifty or sixty in a single parish, most of them on sites that have been occupied for six or seven centuries, and not a few for more than a thousand years. In the Midlands, generally, there is no real parallel to this situation. Although it is certainly possible to find parts of central England where settlement is dispersed, and indeed such areas are more numerous than is commonly supposed, they are usually associated with old forest or woodland districts whose colonization was not part of the original English settlement and often did not take place until after the Norman Conquest. In these respects there are close resemblances between areas like the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire and the Weald of Andred in Kent and Sussex: in both cases clearance of woodland and colonization of the waste took place relatively late and was perhaps usually the work of individual freemen, carving out their own isolated farms, rather than of an organized community. From the dispersed forms of settlement characteristic of these areas we can clearly deduce nothing, in either region, about the early phases of colonization, in the Jutish or Anglo-Saxon period. But in Kent the significant fact to note is that, as far as we can see, scattered settlement has always been characteristic of every part of the county, of the Downs and of the foothills quite as much as of the Weald itself. The reasons behind this dispersal of settlement on the Downs and the foothills are complex and obscure. They may well arise, as some scholars have argued, from an underlying Celtic stratum in the settlement history of the county. There are weighty arguments both for and against this view; but in the limits of this paper, I must not be drawn into a discussion of them, however fascinating they may be. For the purpose in hand it is sufficient to say that the dispersal of settlement on the foothills and perhaps on the Downs arises from different causes from those that operated in the Weald and must certainly go back to a more ancient stratum in the history of the county. It implies, amongst other things, that those isolated parish churches which are so marked a feature of the Downlandlandscape of Kent, such as Crundale and Molash, cannot in themselves be taken to indicate deserted medieval village sites, as they normally would be in the Midlands and sometimes have been in Kent.17 17 Maurice Beresford and John G. Hurst, eds., Deserted Medieval Villages, (1971), 191-2, includes in 'County Gazetteers of Deserted Medieval Villages' a lengthy list of 69 places for Kent. So far as the present writer is aware there is, in most cases, nothing to prove that there ever was a village at the sites in question, though there may in some cases have been a manor house and perhaps one or two farmhouses and/or cottages. No sources are given, and in the cases known to me there is little or nothing in the way of earthworks, such as are common in the Midlands and elsewhere at sites of this kind, to indicate a former village. Such evidence as the decline in taxable capacity in the later medieval period, of course, generally relates to parishes, 'boroughs' (sc., Kentish for 'townships'), or the like, and does not prove the existence of nucleated settlement, though it is of course often important evidence for a decline in population. Many places listed have isolated churches, or are former isolated church sites, and it may be that this fact


11

Although there is a very large number of lost churches and chapels in the county - I have myself traced more than eighty of them - only a tiny handful of these certainly indicate the sites of deserted villages. The most well known, that of Mereworth, did not disappear from the landscape till the eighteenth century, when the present Castle was rebuilt by Colen Campbell and a new church was built outside the park. Mereworth, however, is not a typical example: the vast majority of the lost churches and chapels of Kent certainly fell into ruin during the latter half of the medieval period or in some cases the sixteenth century. The third feature that particularly strikes me in Kent is the antiquity of the landscape compared with that of the Midlands. By that expression I do not mean that the whole county was settled before the English colonization of the Midlands began. That would certainly not be true. In fact, whereas practically every village in counties like Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire, or even in Devon, had been on the map for some considerable time when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, in Kent, as in Sussex, there were still extensive regions that remained largely uncolonized till after the Conquest, including much of the Weald and the Chartland and parts of the Marshland.18 By the antiquity of the landscape I mean two things. First, in a good deal of the county, particularly on the foothills to the north and east of the Downs, the evidences of Roman and Romano-British civilization continually shew through the surface in a way that is comparatively rare in counties like Leicestershire, at any rate in the present state of has prompted their inclusion in the list. But in Kent, as is argued in this article, it is essential to keep the two concepts distinct: a deserted church site or an isolated church certainly does not prove the existence of a deserted village, though of course it is quite possible that further research or excavation may bring genuine deserted villages to light. Of the two articles for Kent describing excavations, listed on p. 156, one in fact relates to a single pagan Saxon hut; the other, A. F. Allen's article on 'The Lost Village of Merston', in Arch. Cant., Ixxi (1957), actually relates to a lost church not to a lost village. In the important current work of exploration of deserted medieval villages, a more rigorous definition of terms is perhaps needed. 18 For Devon, the case is argued by W. G. Hoskins in 'The Making of the Agrarian Landscape' in Devonshire Studies, ed. W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, 1952. So far as the sparsity of settlement in the Weald is concerned the case is difficult to put briefly. The fact that very few Wealden places are mentioned in Domesday Book is not in itself conclusive, since a considerable number of Wealden churches are recorded in the Textus Roffensis of c. 1100, which are not mentioned in Domesday. But the following facts need to be borne in mind: (1) Where Domesday does mention Wealden places, their recorded population is usually very small, so that it looks as though they must be of relatively recent prigin; (2) Very few Wealden places are clearly recorded as permanent settlements in Anglo-Saxon charters, though they may be recorded as denns, that is summer pastures; (3) When early taxation records enable us to estimate the population of Wealden parishes, it is clear that they are generally amongst the most thinly populated parishes in the county; (4) There is very little early Norman architecture in the Wealden churches; (5) Unless they relate to undoubtedly very early settlements, large parishes (such as we find in the Weald) are for obvious reasons almost everywhere associated with late-settled and thinly-populated areas, as for example the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors.

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archaeological knowledge. Secondly, quite apart from these vestiges of the Roman world, we have in Kent a landscape which, outside the urban and suburban areas, is still basically a medieval one, if indeed it is not in many of its aspects very much older. In other words, it is a landscape which, outside the built-up areas, has by and large been far less subject to dramatic changes over the past two or three centuries than that of most Midland counties. Since George II's reign, the appearance of counties like Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire has been largely transformed by parliamentary enclosure in a way that could not have occurred in Kent, where so much of the countryside was enclosed from the time of its colonization. Of course, there have been changes in Kent, and changes of great importance; but, on the whole, in the countryside at any rate, these have taken place within the old framework without revolutionizing or destroying it. As a consequence, there are probably about ten thousand farms and hamlets in Kent whose sites have been continuously occupied for the best part of 800 years, and in many cases for a very much longer period. There is little parallel to this situation in counties like Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire, where most outlying farm-sites are no older than the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The extraordinary abundance of medieval and sub-medieval buildings in Kent, which has so often been taken as a sign of wealth, should thus be seen as evidence rather of exceptional continuity of settlement than of exceptional prosperity in agriculture. Altogether there are at least 5,000 buildings that come within this category, and the true figure may well be nearer 8,000.19 19

These remarks are based on an analysis of the provisional lists of Scheduled Buildings compiled by the former Ministry of Town and Country Planning. By the term 'medieval and sub-medieval', I refer to the period during which broadly 'traditional' methods of timber-framing prevailed in Kent. So far as vernacular architecture is concerned this period may be taken, very roughly, to have continued till the midseventeenth century. Timber-framing of a kind, dating from the late-seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, is of course also very common in Kent, but forms of construction are as a rule clearly different. The Ministry listed about 4,500 timber-framed buildings of the former kind, but its inspectors generally examined them from the external point of view only. A very large proportion of such buildings in the county is in fact concealed beneath later cladding of tiles, brickwork, weather-boarding, etc. Although many of these were recognized by the inspectors, even a superficial inspection by the present writer has discovered a large number that escaped notice. A thorough examination of all the building structures of any one parish would certainly bring many more to light behind the fa9ades and rebuildings. The distribution pattern of these medieval and sub-medieval buildings in Kent is one of great interest and shews remarkable regional variations. This is not the place for a discussion of it, but it may be remarked that the heaviest concentrations are found in the Weald, the foothills between Boughton-under-Blean and Rainham, and parts of the Chartland. There are very few, it is worth noting, between London and the Darent Valley, a fact which cannot wholly be explained by their destruction in the London suburbs, and which is no doubt largely due to the relative poverty of much of this area during the period in question, though it may also, of course, have been partly determined by the local absence of suitable timber. The Downs, generally, have many fewer timber-framed buildings than the Weald and the foothills, although considerable numbers do exist in the central stretch of Downland between the Stour Valley and the Medway.

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Visually speaking that is perhaps the most remarkable indication we have in Kent of the continuity of local settlement. Such continuity as this is, of course, not peculiar to the county, but there is perhaps no part of England where it is more obviously written in the contemporary landscape, and until recently it gave to Kentish society a certain density of texture that hindered and limited metropolitan penetration more effectively than in many counties further from London. In the seventeenth century, for example, the wealth of the new gentry of the time was far more apparent in a county like Northamptonshire than it was in Kent, and certainly more influential in changing the local landscape and transforming county society.20 The fourth feature that strikes me in Kent is the importance of woodland in the history of the county. As everyone knows, the word Weald is derived from the Germanic wald and specifically means 'forest'. Perhaps less well-known is the fact that much of the Downland is also densely wooded and that Kent is still one of the most heavily forested counties in England. Its tree-cover is exceeded only by that of Sussex and Hampshire and amounts to about 100,000 acres, or more than all its orchards and eight times as much as all its hop-gardens.21 Until the draining of the Wealden clays in the nineteenth century the forested area may have been a good deal more extensive, and it was certainly much greater at the time of the Norman Conquest. As in Sussex, whose historical development in many ways echoes that of Kent, the extent and distribution of woodland has always been more or less closely related to poverty or intractability of terrain. There is practically no wood nowadays in the whole north-eastern segment of the county, in Romney Marsh, or in the Isle of Sheppey; there is very little on the fertile foothills north of the Downs or in the extensive Hundred of Hoo between the estuaries of the Medway and the Thames. It is quite likely, moreover, that in some of these districts there never has been much in the way of tree-cover.22 Apart from the difficulty of growing 20 For Kent, cf. Everitt, Community of Kent, chapter II; for a brief comparison with Northamptonshire, see, Alan Everitt, The Local Community and the Great Rebellion, (1969), ff. 19. 21 Garrad, op. cit., 198. The percentage of land under wood is also greater in Surrey, but the area is smaller than in Kent since the county itself is less than half the size. The figures are as follows: Sussex 14-6 per cent; Surrey 14-1 per cent; Hampshire 12-2 per cent; Kent 10-1 per cent. 22 But the foothill area between Blean Forest and Chatham, and across the Medway into Hoo, was clearly at one time heavily forested, forming in fact a continuation of the Blean itself. This is shown by the appearance of the rare Celtic word ceto or caito, meaning 'forest' (cf. modern Welsh coed), in at least three and probably four place-names in the district: Chatham itself, Chattenden in Frindsbury, Chetney in Iwade, and probably the lost Chetham in Ospringe (Hasted, op. cit., vi, 499). Wallenberg (PlaceNames of Kent, 127) was hesitant about accepting this explanation for the first three names (he does not mention Chetham), on the ground that Celtic names are rare in Kent. This argument is obviously a circular one, however, and there is in fact a considerable body of Celtic place-names in the county, certainly more than in a Midland county like

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forest trees in marshy areas, the land is generally too valuable in these parts of the county to waste in relatively unprofitable timber-production. Consequently, much of the remaining woodland of Kent still lies where it has always lain: on the sandy or stony soils of the Chartland; on the heavier clays and hungry sandstones of the Weald; and on the chalk Downs where they are mantled with that terrible clay-with-flints, which has been the despair of so many generations of Kentish farmers. It is principally the tree-cover on the Downland that still distinguishes the chalk country of Kent from the bare whale-backed hills that most people associate with downland scenery. It is less dramatic countryside, in consequence, than that of the Sussex downs or Salisbury Plain; but, for those familiar with its hidden woods and winding combes, it has a haunting beauty of its own, especially under the magical light that inspired Samuel Palmer. The extent of tree-cover in Kent bears witness not only to a comparatively difficult terrain but also to the relatively sparse population and poor economy of much of the county until recent times, particularly when compared with areas such as Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire, whose woods had largely vanished by the time of Domesday Book. Of course, the poverty of the Weald and Downland must not be exaggerated: so far as agricultural potential was concerned, it was not in the same category of poverty as that of the Pennine moorlands of Cumberland and Northumberland. Yet it needs to be borne in mind because of its profound and enduring influence on the settlement history of the county. Until well into the Saxon period, in fact, both Kent and Sussex need to be thought of as overwhelmingly regions of forest, and for many centuries later their evolution was still largely shaped by this brooding presence of the wald. At its maximum extent, the forest stretched for nearly a hundred miles east and west, between Petersfield and Deal, and for forty miles north and south, between Watling Street and the South Downs. Its sheer size, the density of its woods, and the difficulty of communication across it, imparted to the region an isolation which more than counterbalanced the fragile civilization along its outer margins. In many ways what the moorlands were to the North, the wald Leicestershire. There seems no real reason to doubt, in fact, that all four names contain the element ceto, as A. H. Smith demonstrates in the case of Chatham (English PlaceName Elements, (1956), i, 92). Both Chatham and Chetham are thus identical in meaning with the well-known example of Cheetham in Lancashire. The fact that all four names are found in this one stretch of country is surely significant. The forest character they indicate is supported, moreover, by the evidence of a considerable number of later woodland names in the same district, such as Haywood, Norwood, Woodstock, Grovehurst, Hurst Hill, Kemsley, and the interesting Wildmarsh, which is significantly close to Chetham and probably means 'weald marsh'. It is likely that much, if not most, of this forest was cleared before the end of the Roman period; it is traversed by Watling Street and thickly strewn with Roman remains. The survival of the four ceto names within it is therefore of more than ordinary interest.


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or forest was to these southern counties. Now that so much of the area is readily accessible to London, that fact may be difficult for us to realize: yet accept it we must, if we are to arrive at any valid understanding of early Kentish history. As for the uses to which the Kentish woodlands have been put, these have naturally varied widely from place to place, from time to time, and according to the type of tree-cover. You do not find beechwood, for example, much used in house-building, although in Kent you may find sweet chestnut, which is one of our commonest trees, as well as elmwood and the traditional oak. Timber, of course, was the basic raw material of this country until well into the nineteenth century, and a most interesting book remains to be written on its multifarious uses over the past 1,500 years. Amongst the more important of these uses in Kent were the building of ships; the construction of houses, mills, and farm-buildings; the manufacture of carts, waggons, and farm gear; the making of hoppoles, sheep-hurdles, fences, and pit-props; the burning of charcoal; and the use of oak- and beech-mast for pannage for livestock. Amongst the more modern woodcrafts peculiar to the county, one might mention the Tunbridge-ware industry, a specialized type of marquetry manufacture whose origins derived from the exceptionally varied kinds of wood growing wild in the vicinity of Tunbridge Wells during its rise to fame as a watering-place. It is perhaps the development of hop-farming which has led to the most widespread change in the silvicultural history of the county in recent centuries. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was the practice to train every hop-bine up its own pole, instead of on strings, and until the invention of creosote hop-poles required more frequent renewal than nowadays. Every acre of hop-ground, therefore, needed many hundreds of poles, and when the area under hops reached its maximum of about 45,000 acres in the mid-nineteenth century, an immense acreage of coppice woodland, cropped every thirteen years or so, was needed to sustain it. Since then, the needs and uses of coppice have fluctuated widely. The export of pit-props in their millions to the North Country coalfields in the nineteenth century arose directly out of the decline in demand for hop-poles, and the development of spile fencing in the twentieth out of the decline in demand from the coalfields. But, despite these changes, the fact that there is still far more coppice woodland in Kent than in any other county - nearly 75,000 acres - is in all probability chiefly attributable to the development of hop-farming. There are scores of Kentish parishes where the old coppices remain although their use has been forgotten and the hop-gardens themselves have long since vanished. The fifth characteristic of the Kentish landscape, as I see it, is partly associated with the extent of woodland: and this is the importance of

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livestock and pastureland in the economy of the county. Historically speaking, there is abundant evidence for this fact not only in written records but in the place-names and the road-system of the shire. It is perhaps not generally realized that Kent has for long been the least arable and most pastoral of the corn-growing counties of England,223 and it is possible that this has always been the case. That is not to say that there have not always been important arable areas in the county, particularly on the foothills and in the Isle of Thanet. But whereas in 1900 (for example) about half the area of all the eastern counties of England from the East Riding to Essex was under crops, in Kent the comparable figure was less than one quarter.22b That was at the depth of the agricultural depression, it is true; but, in the mid-nineteenth century also, the proportion of cornland in Kent, at 34 per cent, was well below that of the leading arable counties, such as Essex with 51 per cent, Suffolk with 52 per cent, and Cambridgeshire with 57 per cent.22c In more recent centuries, the emphasis in pastoral farming in Kent has always been on sheep; in earlier times, before the Conquest, it was on swine and perhaps cattle. When reasonably reliable statistics of livestock first became available, in the Agricultural Returns of 1866, there were more than 730,000 sheep in Kent, or nearly 200,000 more sheep than people. That figure was exceeded in only two other counties, Lincolnshire and Devon, both of which are considerably larger than Kent. Subsequently, the figure increased considerably and, in 1870, it is said to have amounted to about 1,120,000. So rapid a growth since 1866 is difficult to accept, but certainly during the agricultural depression of 22a Defined as the East Riding, Lines., Northants., Oxon., Berks., Hants., and all the counties to the east of these. The eighteen counties in question roughly, though not exactly, correspond to the 'Lowland Zone' of England. 22b Darby, op. cit., 686. 22c The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, [1868], xii, Appendix, p. 4. The figures for Sussex and Surrey, at 36 per cent, were close to those for Kent. During the Napoleonic Wars, however, as is argued below, there was a considerable extension of arable farming in parts of Kent, and it is possible that for a time cornland exceeded pasture. This view appears to be supported by the map of 'Land Use circa 1800' in Darby, op. cit., 405. Unfortunately, this map needs to be viewed with a good deal of caution. It is based on B. P. Capper, A Statistical Account of the Population and Cultivation ... of England and Wales, 1801, 'supplemented by the county General Views of the Board of Agriculture'. The latter at any rate vary widely in usefulness and reliability from county to county and their evidence is anything but systematic. William Marshall had no difficulty in exposing the limitations of the volume for Kent, by John Boys of Betteshanger. Boys, it seems, knew little of central or west Kent and his own district, in the vicinity of Deal, was admittedly a predominantly arable area. Regarding this area, he was well qualified to speak, but not for the county as whole. Does the unsystematic nature of the General Views partially explain some of the surprising anomalies of the map? It is hard to believe, for example, that only about 0«e-third of Essex or Suffolk was under corn but about two-thirds of Staffordshire and Herefordshire. The map also contains some obvious mistakes. The 'county acreage' of Kent is shewn as less than that of Dorset, Cornwall, and Staffordshire, and much less than that of Sussex or Suffolk: it was, of course, larger than any of these counties.


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the later nineteenth century the figure hovered around the million mark. 23 Since then, as everywhere else, the number has declined greatly; but in the 1950s, despite extensive ploughing of pasture during the war and its aftermath, there were still more sheep to the acre in Kent than in any other county except Cumberland, Northumberland, and the Pennine area of Yorkshire.24 How far back the predominance of sheep can be definitely traced in the economy of Kent it is more difficult to say: there are no government statistics to help us. But it is certain that farming has always been based predominantly on sheep in the marshlands and in areas like the Isle of Sheppey, whose name of course simply means 'sheep island' and goes back well into the Anglo-Saxon period.25 The evidence for the importance of swine in the economy of Kent before the Conquest is well-known. It consists in the fact that the whole of the Kentish Weald, together with some smaller stretches of woodland in the east and north-west of the county, formed the swine-pastures of the Jutish kingdom. This fact is still apparent in the extraordinary prevalence of Wealden place-names terminating in -den, signifying a swine-pasture, of which more than 500 have been recorded. Swinepastures in the forest were a feature of Anglo-Saxon England generally, wherever oak woods or beechwoods predominated; they were in no sense a peculiarity of Kent. But the Weald was a larger stretch of forest than most similar areas; in Kent alone, it extends for upwards of forty miles from east to west; and there is no other area of England with the same concentration of names ending in -den, or where the swine-pastures of a primitive people have left so marked an effect on the modern landscape. In this connexion, it is worth pointing out that although at many points the early history of Sussex closely mirrors that of Kent, and despite the fact that the Sussex Weald was utilized as a pastoral region in much the same way as that of Kent, the dens become relatively infrequent as soon as one has crossed the county boundary. That fact in itself is an indication that, although the two kingdoms developed equally early and in many ways along similar lines, they also developed independently of one another: from different origins, under different auspices, and with partially distinct linguistic traditions. The swine-pastures of the Weald have also left their mark on the road system of Kent. With a few obvious exceptions, such as the Roman Watling Street and the Pilgrims' Way, most of the old roads and tracks of the county still display a marked tendency to run across the grain of 23

The figures for 1870 are taken from the generally very reliable Imperial Gazetteer, (1871), iii, 1084-5. It is there stated that there were about 300,000 sheep of a superior long-woolled breed fed on the marshes, and 'about 820,000 other sheep . . . pastured on the24downs.' Garrad, op. cit., 144. 25 Sheppey is recorded in one of the earliest Kentish charters, probably dating from the late seventh century. - Wallenberg, Kentish Place-Names, 21.

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Fig. 2.

the county, from north-east to south-west, often descending the escarpments of the Downs and the Stone Hills by narrow, twisting holloways. It is still difficult to travel directly for any distance east and west along the Downs. By car, it is often quicker to descend to the A2 or A20 - the latter a creation of the turnpike era designed to obviate the absence of roads running east and west - and then return to the hills nearer to one's destination. These difficulties, which have happily preserved the remoteness of much of the Downland, are not due to the perversities of the rolling English drunkard, as Chesterton would have it. They arise from the fact that early Kentish society, in the centuries leading up to the Norman Conquest, was based essentially on the practice of transhumance. Certainly many, and possibly most, of those sunken lanes running across the grain of the county to the south-west are


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in fact the droveways of a people whose swineherds, during the summer months, migrated with their herds from the settlements north of the Downs to their detached pasture-lands in the Weald and Romney Marsh. In a number of cases, as at Kettleshill near Under River, these lanes are still locally referred to as 'the Drove' or 'the Drift', although the expression has not often found its way on to the Ordnance Survey map and its topographical significance is now rarely recognized by those who use it. Whether or not the expression itself survives, there are still many places in Kent where these droveways can be traced on the map and in the field with reasonable certainty. The pasture of the men of Ospringe, near Faversham, for example, is known to have been situated at Tilden, fifteen miles away to the south-west in the Wealden parish of Headcorn. Although Tilden, like most dens of its kind, subsequently became an independent farm and so remains to this day, the old droveway linking it to Ospringe may still be traced by means of lanes, tracks, and parish boundaries from the point near Ospringe where it leaves Wading Street direct to Tilden itself. There is only one stretch of a few hundred yards where it has disappeared, at the marshy spot where it crosses the water meadows of the infant River Len by the aptly-named Water Lane. Further west, the detached pasture of the men of Meopham was situated twelve miles to the south in the Tonbridge area, no doubt in the vicinity of Meopham Bank in that parish. In this case there are two possible droveways that may have been used, one by way of Culverstone Green and Wrotham, the other by Stansted and Ightham, the two uniting at Bewley Bar above Fairlawne and proceeding together to Meopham Bank by High Cross, Tinley Lodge, and Coldharbour. Further west again, the summer pasture land of Lewisham, Woolwich, and Greenwich lay nearly thirty miles away on the borders of Surrey and Sussex and gave its name to the Hundred of Somerden, which simply means 'summer pasture'. The name of Somerden still survives in the farm-settlements of Somerden and Somerden Green in the parish of Chiddingstone, from which droveways still lead northwards over the Stone Hills and the Downland escarpment near Sundridge. The name of Sundridge itself is worth noting in this context, for it means 'sundered or separated pasture', though we cannot be certain in this case which place it was attached to and it is not in the Weald itself but on the wooded dipslope of the Stone Hills. It may be that, like Somerden, it was attached to the Lewisham district, as an enclosed pasture-farm or halting-place halfway to the distant Wealden pastures. In that case, it would have some parallel with Thanington in east Kent, which means the tun of the men of Thanet and lies fifteen miles or so along the road between Thanet and its Wealden swine-pasture at Tenterden - the droveden of the men of Thanet. In both cases, at Tenterden and Somerden, the pasture is sited

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unusually far from the parent community, at Tenterden more than 40 miles away. Lewisham, Woolwich, and Greenwich, it will be observed, have no connexion with London at this early period but look firmly southwards for their livelihood to the forest country around Sundridge and Somerden. In Kent, then, more obviously than in many parts of England, we have a landscape which has been largely shaped by the needs of a pastoral society based upon the practice of transhumance. Although with the permanent settlement of most of the Weald between about 1050 and 1300 this practice was on the wane, certain vestiges of it still survived as late as the seventeenth century. The Weald itself had by then ceased to be used as an area of detached pasture; but Romney Marsh was still wholly pastoral and some of the upland shepherds used to migrate with their sheep-flocks in springtime to spend the summer months in their 'old removable houses' or 'summer lodges' in the Marsh, just as the Swiss cowherds today still migrate to their mountain pastures with the melting of the snows.26 In a sense, perhaps, these customs may be said to influence farming practice today: the shepherds no longer move southwards with their flocks themselves, but the sheep are still often wintered in the upland country of Kent and then sent down to the marshland with the advent of spring. Transhumance was not of course a peculiarity of Kent. It was a wellknown feature of early Celtic society and it certainly obtained elsewhere in the Highland Zone of England. Recently, important evidence for its existence has been coming to light in parts of the Lowland Zone of England, too, apart from Kent, for example in Warwickshire, where analogical arguments from the Kentish evidence raise some interesting questions regarding early English society in general.27 But there are several reasons why we know more about the practice of transhumance in Kent than in most other areas. The first is the unusual abundance of Anglo-Saxon charter material for the county, particularly for the estates of the great religious houses of Canterbury and Rochester. The second derives from the fact that, more than in most areas, an archaic form of society lies fossilized, so to speak, in both the landscape and the parochial, manorial, and tenurial structure of the county. The reasons for this survival are complex and cannot be discussed in this paper; perhaps the most important is the well-known fact that at the Conquest the county retained the basis of its own distinctive legal system, the last relics of which were not abolished until the 1920s. Whatever the reasons, 26 An 'old removable house' in Romney Marsh is mentioned in the probate inventory of 27 Stephen Hulkes, of Newnham, in the Kent Archives Office. See, W. J. Ford, The Pattern of Settlement in the Central Region of the Warwickshire Avon, Leicester Univ. M. A. thesis, (1973), 41—57. This is an important study and Mr Ford draws a number of suggestive parallels with Kent.

The Making of th e Agrarian Landscape of Ken t

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the outlines of this ancient structure survived, by the greatest good fortune, until Edward Hasted took up his pen in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It was these vestiges, moreover, that particularly interested his somewhat dry and legalistic mind. Cautiously interpreted, and notwithstanding its errors of detail, his History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent is perhaps the most important single record we have for unlocking the secrets of the early settlement history of the shire. It is to the successive phases of that settlement history, from the fifth century to the eighteenth, that I now turn.

IV. PHASES OF SETTLEMENT

Amongst the characteristic phrases of Hasted's History, occurring in many parts of the county, we find such expressions as 'the parish of A has ever been accounted but as a chapelry of the parish of B'; or 'this manor of C claims paramount over the manors of D and E'; or again 'the patronage of this living has ever been estimated as an appendage to the manor'; and so on. Such phrases as these, and others of a similar kind, are worth pondering. When placed alongside other evidence and interpreted in the light of place-names, charters, maps, and topography, they frequently indicate not only the specific relationship of one settlement to another in the early phases of Kentish society, but also the general direction of settlement in the history of the county. This general direction or movement of settlement, from the north and north-east across the grain of the county towards the south and south-west, is one of the most striking features of the Kentish landscape. Not that there are no exceptions to the general rule: there are, and some of them are suggestive, such as the puzzling relationship of Hastingleigh on the Downs above Wye to its parent settlement at Hastings in Sussex. Nevertheless, when every exception has been admitted, it remains true to say that the overwhelming trend of settlement in Kent is from north to south. That is why there are five Suttons in the county but only two Nortons and no Eastons or Westons.273 Speaking very broadly, the earliest settlements in Kent tend to be found in one or other of three areas. Many are sited on the fertile foothills, in that long tract of gently undulating country near the coast which is traversed by the great Roman road from London to Canterbury 27i » Sutton Valence, East Sutton, Sutton-at-Hone, Sutton Baron, and Sutton by Dover. (Chart Sutton, which appears to be a sixth case, is actually Chart-«exf-Sutton.) Of the two Nortons, Norton Court in Chart Sutton is not relevant in the context of settlement direction; a third Norton, Norton Green in Stockbury, is strictly speaking North + denn (pasture). Though there is no Easton in Kent, there is an Eastchurch, so called because it lies east of its mother-church, Sheppey Minster.

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Landscape and Community in England 27b

and Richborough. Secondly, many are found in the river valleys running inland from this countryside, along the Great Stour, Little Stour, Medway, Darent, and Cray. Thirdly, there is a long line of early settlements, though perhaps not often quite so early as these, along the scarp-foot of the Downs, close to the Pilgrims' Way though not often directly on it. In a sense, this last group of places may be regarded as an extension of the second group, since owing to the configuration of the landscape the headwaters of the Stour and the Darent and several tributaries of the Medway, such as the Len, in fact run parallel to the Downland edge, so that many scarp-foot settlements also lie close to these rivers. From the first of these groups of places, settlement tended to push southwards, up into the wooded recesses of the Downs; from the last, it pressed southwards into the woodlands of the Stone Hills or Chartlands; from all three groups, the herdsmen moved each summer into the drovedens of the Weald; and, eventually, these summer pastures themselves gave rise to independent settlements of their own.27c> The whole of this complex process of colonization in Kent was a very gradual one. From first to last, it extended over the best part of a thousand years, commencing in the fifth century and ceasing only with the drastic decline of population in the fourteenth: as long a period, in fact, as separates us from the age of William the Conqueror. By the fourteenth century, however, the basic colonization of the county was virtually complete. There were three subsequent periods which saw widespread changes in local settlement - the end of the Middle Ages, the end of the sixteenth century, and the end of the eighteenth — and to these I shall return a little later. But the fact remains that the general framework of colonization had been completed by the time of the Black Death. By that date, although there were still numerous stretches of common, woodland and waste, there was no region of the county that remained wholly uncolonized, and there were no new parishes created until the nineteenth century. All subsequent changes in the settlement pattern of Kent, dramatic though some of them were, were fitted into the established structure without fundamentally altering its outlines, although they greatly modified the distribution of population. "b This was the original main route, and Richborough the principal Roman port: it was only subsequently that Dover took over that position. The present A2, from London to Dover, changes alignment markedly at Canterbury. It is significant that none of the early settlements in Kent lies on the Dover-Canter bury stretch of the A2: Bridge is a late Saxon settlement, and is not recorded before Domesday Book (Wallenberg, Place-Names of Kent, 541). The contrast is striking with the numerous early settlements near the road from Canterbury to Richborough, such as Littlebourne and Ickham. 27c For some detailed examples and maps of settlement direction bearing on this paragraph see, Alan Everitt, Ways and Means in Local History, (1971), 14—17. It is sometimes said that the Lathe of St. Augustine had no Wealden pastures. This is not strictly correct - Tenterden was the den of the men of Thanet - but they do seem to have been more limited than those of the more westerly lathes.


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The origins of the subsequent settlements in Kent as farmsteads of a single family or landowner have in many cases coloured their subsequent history. In a sense they were really 'manorial' foundations in origin, if an anachronistic term may be permitted, rather than settlements of a community of small freeholders. Even today, they rarely contain any kind of village. Their churches stand isolated by their manor houses or 'court lodges', and in most cases the patronage of their livings was, in Hasted's phrase, 'ever esteemed as an appendage to the manor'.323 It is partly in consequence of these facts that the Downland region of Kent has remained throughout its history the preserve of those minor manorial gentry who have always been so characteristic of the county. In the nineteenth century, four Downland parishes in five were still controlled by armigerous families of this kind, whereas the old primary settlements from which they had originated were still, by and large, communities of small freeholders.33 In these respects, there are few areas of England where landscape and society have till recently remained so firmly moulded by their distant past as the Downland countryside of Kent. The third type of settlement to be found in Kent arose in the 'secondary' or post-Conquest phase of colonization. It is particularly associated with the clearance of the Wealden forest, although it may also be found on the wooded Chartlands and in certain outlying parts of the Downland. Secondary settlement of this kind occurred in many parts of England at this time and it frequently gave rise to very large parishes. Those in Kent sometimes extend to more than 10,000 acres, as at Cranbrook, and in the case of Tonbridge to more than 15,000 acres. Although the origins of this kind of settlement are now known, in Kent at least, to go back before the Conquest, there can be little doubt that the great bulk of it took place between about 1100 and 1300, and that much of it was probably the work of independent freemen who cleared and enclosed their own farms direct from the forest. The fact, however, that so many farms in the Weald still bear the names of the ancient drovedens of the Jutish period suggests that in numerous cases the old summer lodges of the herdsmen formed the nucleus of the new farms, which thus gradually developed from seasonal shielings into permanent abodes. The fully-established farm first recorded in documents of the twelfth or thirteenth century may often, therefore, be the result not of any deliberate act of creation but rather the ultimate stage in a lengthy process of historical evolution. The economic impulse behind this process of secondary colonization stemmed from the rapid rise of population in the centuries following the Conquest. The inhabitants of 32

a As, for example, at Otterden: Hasted, op. cit., v, 548. See, Alan Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the Nineteenth Century, (1972), 20-22, 59-61, for regional differences in the structure of landownership in Kent and some other counties in the nineteenth century. 33

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Kent itself may have trebled in numbers between the Conquest and the early fourteenth century, so that some thousands of new farms then appeared for the first time on the map. Both the subsequent settlements of the Downs and the secondary settlements of the Weald, it will be noted, were associated with the gradual clearance of old forest country. In this respect, the colonization of the Weald can be regarded as continuing a historical process which by 1086 had already been under way on the Downs for four or five centuries, rather than as originating a wholly new phase or type of settlement. It may well be, moreover, that on the Downs the new farms and estates of the middle and later Saxon period often arose out of the old summer shielings of the herdsmen, much as they did at a later date in the Weald. And certainly it is important not to regard the political changes of the Norman Conquest as inaugurating a wholly new phase in the structure and pattern of colonization. Yet in the present imperfect state of our knowledge, the differences between Weald and Downland, between subsequent and secondary settlement, also need to be recognized, although they cannot yet be adequately explained. Not only is the scale and kind of parish to which forest clearance gave rise different in the two regions: the typology of place-names is also distinct, and the kind of society to which the two phases of settlement gave rise is dissimilar, dissi Whereas the Downland, moreover, remained till the nineteenth century the classic preserve of the landed gentry, the Weald was predominantly the home of the smaller independent freeholder, in fact as well as legend the preserve by and large, for many centuries, of the Kentish yeomen or 'greycoats'. Although the framework of colonization in Kent had been completed by the middle of the fourteenth century, when secondary settlement of the kind described came to an end, it would not be true to say, as it would in much of the Midlands, that the settlement of the county had then reached its terminus ad quern. Owing chiefly to the fact that there was still a good deal of woodland in Kent, there were, as already indicated, three subsequent periods when further colonization of the waste took place, although this colonization was fitted into the old structure and did not give rise to the creation of any new parishes until the nineteenth century.333 Each of these three periods coincided, as we should expect, with a rapid increase of population, and much of this new population seems to have been absorbed by existing communities; but in

33a

During the Civil War period Plaxtol and Stansted were for a time formed into separate parishes, but they reverted to their original status as chapelries of Wrotham after the Restoration. Three of the earliest new chapelries to be formed in the nineteenth century were Sevenoaks Weald (1820), Riverhead (1831), and Dunkirk (after 1838); but they did not become independent parishes till considerably later.


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The fact that it had taken so long in Kent to complete that structure needs to be firmly grasped. It has sometimes been implied, by historians who should have known better, that the early English colonists settled one territory more or less completely before pressing on to the next. So far as Kent is concerned there could certainly be no greater error.28 Between the lines of the early colonists' penetration, we must envisage whole tracts of countryside which for centuries were left virtually bare of permanent settlement by the English, though they may well have harboured vanquished or fugitive Britons. In few regions of the Lowland Zone did those tracts remain so extensive and so long uncolonized as in Kent and Sussex, where the Weald of Andred effectively divided the original settlements of the two kingdoms by forty miles of forest. As a result of this complex process of settlement, by 1300 or thereabouts, there had emerged three distinct types of settlement or community in Kent, each of them originating in a different period, and each giving rise to a distinct type of parish. Not that all Kentish parishes can be made to fit into this pattern with perfect precision; for, since the process of settlement had been so long drawn out, no two parishes were identical and probably few were strictly contemporaneous. Nevertheless, behind the infinite variations of locale, it is possible to discern a distinctive pattern, a pattern, moreover, which is to some extent echoed in a number of other English counties. First, there were the very early primary settlements of the county, which have already been alluded to. These tended to give rise to comparatively large parishes, often of as much as 4,000 or 5,000 acres and occasionally, as at Wye, more than 7,000. The scale of these primary parishes in Kent is not a local peculiarity but was to some extent characteristic of other parts of the country, too, for example Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire. As primary settlements, such places were in a powerful position to retain control over much of their original territory, and to cede as little as possible to their daughter-communities when these came to be created on their outlying lands in a later phase of colonization. In Kent, there is reason to think that these very early places often originated as settlements of a community, of a 'tribe' or 'people', rather than of isolated individuals or families, so that it is in them, if anywhere, that we may expect to find genuinely nucleated villages from a very early 28 Mr. F. W. Jessup's wise words, in his History of Kent, 30, will bear quoting in this context: 'The fact that few British place-names survive seems at first sight to support the tradition that the Britons either fled or were exterminated, but in some other parts of the country, where British survival is known from archaeological evidence, British placenames are scanty. In Saxon times the population of Kent was probably well under 50,000, so there must have been ample room for two races to dwell in the region without coming into perpetual conflict, especially if, as seems not unlikely, the Britons for the most part kept to the hills and the Jutes to the valleys.'

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period. It is impossible to be certain that they originated as villages, since most of them, as already remarked, at a later date became market towns and that development may account for their nucleation; but it is a possibility, which in the present state of knowledge must not be ruled out. That they were settlements of a community or 'tribe' rather than of individual settlers is in many cases borne out by the form of their placenames. Eastry, for example, contains the very early element ge, meaning a 'district' or regio, and its earliest recorded form, Eastrgena in 788, is the genitive plural of a derivative meaning 'the Eastry people'.29 Or take Maidstone, a difficult name like so many in Kent, but possibly containing the primitive Old English word mcegd, signifying a 'folk', 'tribe', or 'people'. Folkestone, another very early place, is a virtual doublet of that, meaning the 'stone of the people, or folk'.30 Lyminge and Sturry both contain the same suggestive element ge as Eastry and combine it with a river name of great antiquity, namely limen and Stour.31 The second type of settlement to develop in the colonization of Kent is more characteristic of the middle and later phases of the Anglo-Saxon period. These subsequent settlements, if I may so describe them, are particularly characteristic of the Downland areas of Kent and form a distinctive class of their own. The parishes they give rise to are generally quite small, rarely amounting to more than 2,000 acres and not infrequently to less than 1,000. They do not seem to have originated as settlements of a tribe or a substantial community but rather as the isolated farms or dwelling-places of a single family or landowner, or as discrete groupings of more or less independent farms. Many of them, there is reason to think, probably originated as the outlying stock-farms of the primary settlements, established in clearings of the Downland forest; then, at a slightly later date, they became independent holdings, perhaps worked by the younger sons of the old community, as population increased and drove them to seek a separate livelihood of their own. One of the commonest elements in the place-names of these subsequent settlements in Kent is the word stead, and Dr. Karl Sandred has argued, in a closely-reasoned study, that this word almost certainly indicates a stock-farm. Altogether, there are about sixty place-names of this type in Kent, more than in any other county, and almost all of them are situated high up on the Downland in the classic position of subsequent settlements.32 29

Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 3rd edn, (1947), 151. 30 Smith, op. cit., ii, 32; Wallenberg, Place-Names of Kent, 140,445. 31 Ekwall, op. cit., 294,430. 32 K. I. Sandred, English Place-Names in -stead, 1963: see especially, 166-75. Dr. Sandred (p. 14) gives the total number of-stead names in Kent as 48, but this relates only to those recorded before 1500. I have noted about 15 further examples. The next highest figures are: Essex 28, Sussex 21, Surrey 21, and Suffolk 15.


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the country districts of Kent, it also led to the foundation of new hamlets and isolated farms, although probably not on the same scale as in the centuries following the Conquest. Perhaps the most striking characteristics of these later phases of settlement, however, were the increase of wealth with which they were associated and the shifts of emphasis they brought about in the regional distribution of population in the county. The first of these three periods occurred towards the end of the Middle Ages, and in terms of local demographic statistics virtually nothing is known about it: all we know is its pronounced effect upon the landscape. In some parts of the county it may have continued without a break into the second period, which occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Between them these two periods witnessed the rise of Kent from a comparatively modest status in terms of taxable capacity per square mile to one of exceptional wealth. They also saw the singularly early commencement and unusual scale of the Great Rebuilding in the county, if indeed it is not more appropriate to speak of two Great Rebuildings, one in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and a second in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Finally, they witnessed the rise of the Weald from one of the poorest and most sparsely populated parts of the county to become the richest and most densely settled, apart from the foothills which remained, as they always had been, the wealthiest and most populous of all.34 The reasons behind these far-reaching changes in Kent between 1450 and 1650 are at present profoundly obscure. The cloth and iron industries of the Weald, those convenient del ex machina, are often cited in explanation, and no doubt they played a major part. But the fact is that, although a good deal of work has been done on this period, much of it has been of a piecemeal character and we still need a whole shelf-full of systematic monographs on the topography, the agriculture, the estate management, the vernacular building, the industrial structure, the social structure, and a dozen other subjects in the history of the county before the changes of the late medieval and early modern period can be fully understood. 34a The purpose of mentioning them in these pages is simply to indicate the new waves of settlement to which they give rise, particularly in the form of squatters' settlements and cottagers' communities at such places as Kennington Lees and Longbridge Lees, near Ashford, or 34 For figures of the regional distribution of population in Kent in the 1670s see my analysis of the Compton Census in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vi, 1500-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk, (1967), 410. The area described as the foothills in this paper is there called the 'Lower Downland'- The part of the Census relating to Kent is edited by Mr. C. W. Chalklin in A Seventeenth Century Miscellany, Kent Arch. Soc., Records Publication Committee, xvii, (I960), 153-74. 34a An exceptionally illuminating study in the field of vernacular architecture is Mr. S. E. Rigold's pioneering article, 'Some Major Kentish Timber Barns', in Arch. Cant., Ixxxi (1966), 1-30. We need more general surveys of this kind.

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Stelling Minnis on the borders of Elham and Lyminge in east Kent. An exhaustive examination of the county, parish by parish, would probably enable us to date the origin of a large number of new hamlet settlements in Kent to this period, particularly those like Kennington Lees and Stelling Minnis that are sited on small patches of heath, common, or waste. In many cases, it is at present difficult to assign any definite date to places of this kind, since they do not figure in the early medieval documents upon which Wallenberg based most of his work on Kentish place-names and they are not otherwise normally recorded in his pages. One thinks of places like Godden Green in Seal, for instance, first distinctly recorded by Wallenberg in a document of 1516.35 It may be to this same period, one suspects, that we must assign the first expansion of many older settlements, which had originated early in the Middle Ages as isolated farms, into those charming little 'streets' or 'forstals', to use the local expressions, that are still a marked feature of the county. The final period of new settlement in Kent, as in Sussex, occurred very late and coincided with the unprecedented growth of population in the second half of the eighteenth century. After a time of relative stagnation between 1650 and 1750, the population of the county appears to have almost doubled between 1750 and 1801.36 This was a rate of growth exceptional in southern or eastern England and without parallel in the history of Kent; but once again very little is known at present about either its local causes or its consequences in the county as a whole. It continued in the rural areas of Kent till well into the nineteenth century,37 35

36

Wallenberg, Place-Names of Kent, 64.

The population of Kent at the Census of 1801 was 317,442: see, Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure, 1967 edn., 103. The same authors give the figure for 1751 as 168,679. This is based on the Rickman estimates, whose general reliability is of course much debated; but Deane and Cole (101) seem to feel that the figure for Kent is reasonably near the mark, so that the rate of increase to 1801 was 88 per cent. Rickman's estimate for Kent in 1701 was 155,694, so that there was very little growth by comparison in the first half of the eighteenth century. In only one southern county did the rate of increase in the second half of the century exceed that of Kent, namely Surrey, where the population increased by 108 per cent from 133,427 to 277,630. This extraordinary rise in Surrey was no doubt largely due to the rapid growth of London south of the river: as explained above, the whole of the continuously built-up transpontine part of the capital was in Surrey at this time. Essex, by contrast, which was more populous than Kent in 1751 (180,465) grew exceptionally slowly in the second half of the century, and had only 233,664 inhabitants in 1801, a rate of increase of only 29 per cent. This was less than that of Dorset or Buckinghamshire, where there was an increase of 35 per cent. In the other southern counties the rate of growth came nearest to that of Kent in Sussex (74 per cent) and Hampshire (68 per cent). The increase in Kent was of course partly due to the growth of places near London, like Deptford and Woolwich, but by no means chiefly so. Although we have no precise figures, parish by parish, there cannot be any serious doubt that it was a general phenomenon throughout most of the county, though growth may have been relatively slight in the Marshland and on the Downland. 37 The census figures for each parish from 1801 to 1921 are summarized in the Victoria County History, Kent, iii (1932), 358. The population for the whole county in 1801 is given as 308,667 in the V.C.H. and thus differs by some 9,000 from the figure given by Deane and Cole, op. at., as cited in the previous footnote.


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and the whole period from 1750 to 1830 or 1840 probably saw greater changes in the rural landscape than at any comparable time since the colonization of the Weald in the generations following the Conquest. These changes cannot be explored in any detail here; but some of the more important need to be mentioned for the effect they had upon the local settlement pattern. Amongst them, for example, were the expansion of old hamlets to form small 'green' villages, as at Throwley Forstal; the filling-in of medieval street-migrations to form sizable nucleated communities, as at Boughton-under-Blean; the development of wholly new street-migrations, as at Highgate on the Rye road in Hawkhurst;38 the foundation of further squatters' settlements, often on parish boundaries, as at Brabourne Lees;39 the establishment of new farms on the edge of ancient woodland, as at Kettlebender in Waltham; the extension of cornland on the chalk, in places to the very crest of the Downs, as at Little Betsoms on the 800-ft. contour near Westerham; and, in consequence, the clearance of millions of flints from the fields, which were often used to build the new barns and farmhouses.39a The creation of new farms in Kent at this time coincided with the better-known and more widespread rebuilding of farmhouses in the Midland counties. But the impulse behind the movement in the two regions was distinct. In the Midlands, it was parliamentary enclosure of the common fields, in the name of more efficient farming, that generally provided the motive force. In Kent, there were now no fields of this kind to enclose and new farms were rarely the result of agricultural improvement. Probably most of them were founded under the intense economic pressures of the Napoleonic War period, when the difficulties of importing foodstuffs coincided with the unprecedented growth of 38 The oldest building at Highgate is Sir Thomas Dunk's school and almshouses of 1723. The place developed mainly through the coaching trade of the later eighteenth century; it was essentially an inn-settlement, situated a mile away from the original Hawkhurst. 39 In Hasted's time Brabourne Lees was a rabbit-warren: see his History and Topographical Survey, viii, 15. His map shews only two houses on it, the Warren House and Lodge House. In Kentish usage a lees or leaze is usually a stretch of common pasture on a parish boundary. The settlements that grew up at such places were usually late in date and more or less illicit in origin: see my remarks regarding Longbridge Leaze near Ashford, in Thirsk, op. cit., 445-6, where in James I's reign two poor men erected cottages 'without any authority or lawful licence' because 'they were destitute of houses and had seen other cottages upon the same waste built by other poor men ....' At Brabourne Lees, which belonged to the Scotts of Scots' Hall in neighbouring Smeeth, the operative date was probably the 1780s, when their estates were sold after a lengthy period of decline in the family fortunes. There was also apparently a barracks on the site during the Napoleonic Wars and some of the present buildings may date from that period. By 1818, the settlement was large enough to build its own Baptist chapel, which still survives and is actually on the parish boundary. In the rural areas of Kent, Nonconformity is frequently associated with settlements of this kind. 39a Most of the flint farm buildings of Kent date from this period and not before: a marked contrast with Norfolk, where flint was widespread by a much earlier date, no doubt because timber was in shorter supply than in Kent.

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population. No doubt many of them were always marginal settlements, as their situation and their nomenclature indicate. Several, for example, bear names like Starvecrow, Starveall, Mockbeggar, whilst Kettlebender derives its odd name from the humorous local word for a tinker, that most despised member of rural society. Medieval people had known quite well what they were doing when they left such unprofitable lands as these uncultivated, and many of the new farms have subsequently fallen back again to waste. At Filchborough, near Kettlebender - the farm of the fitches or polecats - the barns are in ruins, the house has vanished, the well is empty, and the site a wilderness of brambles and briars.40 Of all the changes in the rural landscape of Kent during this final period of settlement, perhaps the most widespread was the Great Rebuilding of labourers' cottages. This was a development which was closely connected with the rapid extension of arable land, the growth of fruit- and hop-farming, and a probably massive increase in the labouring population. In Kent, as in other counties, there are few genuine labourers' cottages dating from much before the mid-eighteenth century; those that are so called are in fact usually the houses of yeomen, husbandsmen, or craftsmen. But all over Kent today, particularly in the east and centre of the county, there are still many farmworkers' cottages dating from the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century: often built in little rows of three or four, sometimes standing alone on the edge of a field or wood, the earlier ones usually constructed as single-storeyed dwellings, and perhaps most of them, except on the Stone Hills, built of timber and covered with tiles or weatherboard. Such little cottage-rows as these are comparatively rare in Midland counties like Leicestershire, except within the old villages; but in Kent they immediately strike an observant visitor. They remain as silent witnesses to a period in Kentish history when the whole agricultural population of the county seems to have increased dramatically, and when more was spent on poor relief than in any other county but Middlesex.41 40

Kettlebender is not recorded by Wallenberg, and I am indebted to Mr. John Dodgson for information about it. Filchborough or Fitchborough is first recorded by Hasted in 1728 (op. cit., vii, 377), but its building remains appear to date from a later period, perhaps the Napoleonic Wars. Wallenberg attempts no explanation of it, and for the above interpretation I am again indebted to Mr. Dodgson. The fact that the polecat still survived in the woodland areas of east Kent at this time should be noted as an evidence of their remoteness. Nowadays, the polecat is confined to Scotland and the northern counties of England, where it is very rare. None of the Starvecrow, Starveall, or Mockbeggar names in Kent, of which there are several, is recorded by Wallenberg: presumably all of them are relatively late. (By 1980 Filchborough had been ploughed out.) 41 Elizabeth Melling, ed., Kentish Sources, iv, The Poor, (1964), 147-8. The amount spent on poor relief rose from £77,895 in 1776 to £213,989 in 1803 and £399,201 for the year ending 25 March, 1818. It remained at about that level for several years. The last figure represented nearly £1 per head of population. Middlesex spent about twice as much as Kent, but it had five times the population, so that the per capita expenditure was less than half as great. Sussex and Essex also spent very heavily on poor relief, more per head of population in fact than Kent, though the total figure was smaller.


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V. CONCLUSION

In concentrating attention in this article on a few broad themes in the settlement history of Kent, one is conscious of having left aside much indeed that has gone towards the making of the landscape as we still know it. Nothing has been said of the origin of Kentish towns or the unusual number of new towns founded since the sixteenth century. Nothing has been said of the effect of partible inheritance upon the landscape, and the development of those delightful little farm-clusters that are so characteristic of the county. Nothing has been said of the buildings and building materials of Kent which, like its geology, are exceptionally varied and distinctive. Nothing has been said of the rise of the professional families and landless gentry of the shire who, since the eighteenth century, have left so marked an impress on its urban and rural architecture. Nothing has been said of the great emparking movement of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose evidence survives in the remains of more than 200 pleasure grounds. Nothing has been said of the maritime influences in the county, which are so plain to see not only along the seacoast but in the family monuments in scores of Kentish churches. Nothing has been said of the nineteenth century, when the landed gentry flowered out into a new prosperity, when the old crafts and skills attained their fullest efflorescence, and when the contrasts between poverty and plenty, between the civilized and the primitive, not only remained but in some sense became more pronounced. These subjects, and many others like them, such as the development of fruitgrowing and hop-cultivation, are not less interesting or important than those that have been touched on. All one can say is, as others have said before me: so much to do, so little done.


5

THE PRIMARY TOWNS OF ENGLAND1 In recent years two fruitful developments have been taking place in the study of English local society. The first consists in a growing concern with the intensive study of some particular local community, examined in all aspects of its history over a lengthy period of time, such as we find in W. G. Hoskins' seminal volume, The Midland Peasant: the Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (1957), or in David Hey's recent book, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts (1974). The second consists in the comparative study of a certain kind or type of local community, such as I attempted myself in The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the Nineteenth Century (1972), Both these approaches to local history are essential to further advance; but in the limits of this paper I want to select bne particular type of place, of which examples occur in many parts of the country, and to talk about it in some detail. The typology of local communities, in a scientific sense, is a somewhat novel subject, but it often provides a useful point for the local historian to set out from. Over the last generation attention has often been drawn to the fruitful distinctions between 'open' and 'closed' villages; between freeholders' parishes and estate parishes; between woodland and fielden communities; and so on2. In this study of types or kinds of settlement attention has chiefly been concentrated on rural rather than urban communities; but there are several notable exceptions to this generalisation, such as Professor Beresford's seminal study of one particular type of town, the new or 'planted' towns of the Middle Ages in England, Wales, and Gascony3. It is to the subject of urban typology, and particularly to urban origins, that I wish to address myself. 1. An earlier draft of this paper appeared as a review article of the Victoria County History, County of Oxford, X, Banbury Hundred, 1972, in the Urban History Yearbook, I, 1974, under the title "The Banburys of England'. I am grateful to the editor for permission to reproduce much of the information in that article. 2. See, for example, J. M. Martin, The Parliamentary Enclosure Movement and Rural Society in Warwickshire', Agricultural History Review, XV, 1967; Dennis Mills, 'English Villages in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: a Sociological Approach', Amateur Historian, VI, 1963-5; Alan Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the Nineteenth Century (Leicester, Department of English Local History, Occasional Papers, 2nd Ser., No. 4), 1972, pp. 20 sqq.; Alan Everitt, 'Nonconformity in Country Parishes', Land, Church, and People: Essays Presented to Professor H. P. R. Finberg, ed. Joan Thirsk (Agricultural History Review, XVIII, 1970, Supplement), pp. 188 sqq.; Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500-1640, 1967, chapters I, II, and VII; D. G. Hey, "The Pattern of Nonconformity in South Yorkshire, 1660-1851', Northern History, VIII, 1973. 3. Maurice Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales, and Gascony, 1967. A useful attempt at urban classification for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is made in the Introduction to Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700, 1972.

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The great majority of English towns originate, of course, as medieval market centres. Professor H. P. R. Finberg's study, The Genesis of the Gloucestershire Towns' (Gloucestershire Studies, 1957) nas established this thesis indisputably for one county and the same general theme holds good, with minor variations, in almost all parts of the country. It is as true of most English industrial cities, like Leeds and Birmingham, as it is of places that are still thought of as market towns, such as Barnard Castle or Blandford Forum. So far as urban origins are concerned three different types or kinds of market town may be distinguished. The best-known and most readily identifiable type is that of the new or planted towns described by Professor Beresford, most of which were founded on virgin sites in the two or three centuries following the Norman Conquest. In England one thinks of places like Stony Stratford and Market Harborough, for example, or Mountsorrel and Devizes. Secondly, a more numerous group, although not always so readily identifiable, comprises the hundreds of old agricultural villages of England dating from before the Conquest, which between the eleventh century and the fourteenth were upgraded to urban status by the grant of market rights and frequently (though not always) of burghal privileges4. These upgraded villages, which in a sense grew naturally to urban status out of existing places, have perhaps most conveniently been termed 'organic towns'. Every county has numerous examples of such places—Ashford and Tonbridge in Kent, for example, or Lutterworth and Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire—though in very many instances these places have long since declined again to their original rural status. There is also, however, a third type of town, less well-known and less numerous than either the 'planted' or the 'organic' types, but of no less interest and importance. In the absence of a better term, we may perhaps venture to call this third group the 'primary towns', since (in the writer's opinion) they probably antedated the Norman Conquest in origin and are amongst the earliest of English towns to be established, apart from those of Roman foundation. Amongst these primary towns are to be found, for example, places like Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, Banbury and Charlbury in Oxfordshire, Caistor in Lincolnshire, Wendover in Buckinghamshire, Oundle in Northamptonshire, and Maidstone, Charing, Wye, and Milton Regis in Kent6. These ten examples of course by no means exhaust 4. See M. W. Beresford and H. P. R. Finberg, English Medieval Boroughs: a Hand-List, 1973. for those that became boroughs. This work is invaluable to anyone interested in urban origins. In some areas further boroughs no doubt await discovery, as Prof. Beresford points out: 'we should be the last to claim exhaustiveness, and we fully expect to learn that other scholars have noted other evidences in the PRO sources, as well as in local archives, where our own scrutiny has been only haphazard' (p. 32). 5. Many of the old shire capitals, such as Northampton and Derby, might also be reckoned amongst these 'primary towns'; but I have not included them in this paper since in many cases their origin probably involves other factors than are


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the catalogue of such places. Amongst many other suspected examples that would be worth examining are places like Taunton, Leighton Buzzard, Luton, Louth, Horncastle, Sheffield, Aylesbury, Thrapston, and Wellingborough. But the examples given above will suffice for the present argument. What are the distinguishing marks of these 'primary towns' ? They may be said to be sevenfold, although not all places exhibit all these characteristics in equal prominence. In the first place they are always very ancient settlements, quite apart from their urban status, going back at least to the early Anglo-Saxon era (as at Banbury) and sometimes (as at Caistor and probably at Maidstone) beyond it. Sometimes (as at Wye) this is clear from early documentary evidence; often it is apparent from local nomenclature and the presence of early earthworks, burhs, tumuli, megaliths, or the like; sometimes from a conjunction of these various kinds of evidence. At Wendover, for instance, the name of the place is of Celtic origin and the town is overlooked by a prehistoric hill fort to the -north and an extensive tumulus to the south. At Oundle, the name of the town derives from a very ancient tribal name, and the settlement itself formed the early administrative centre of a region known as the Eight Hundreds of Oundle. Caistor, as its name implies, is a Roman settlement in origin, a walled town which in the Roman period may also have formed an administrative centre and certainly, at a much later period, became the centre of a Lincolnshire soke, whilst in its neighbourhood there are very early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries6. In Oxfordshire, at Banbury, the -bury of both the town name and its subsidiary settlement Grimsbury is an early burh; Crouch Hill, south-west of the town centre, bears a Celtic name; and evidence of prehistoric and Roman settlement has been found within the parish, most notably in the remains of a substantial Roman building at the significantly named Wickham, a placename frequently associated with Roman settlement. At Charlbury again the bury is probably a very early burh, and there are two seventh-century cemeteries in the parish. There is also a Walcot (probably signifying 'cottage of the serfs or Welsh') just across the Evenlode; the town is sited on the prehistoric Grim's Dyke, built about the time of the Roman Conquest; there was a Roman villa in the parish at Fawler, a name which actually commemorates the building and means 'variegated pavement'; a Romano-British discussed here. As is evident from the following pages, I am really thinking of places just below the level of the old shire capitals, though in some cases—Maidstone and Taunton, for example—primary towns eventually developed into county towns themselves and supplanted the old centres. I am grateful to Professor Finberg for drawing my attention to Taunton as a pre-Conquest trading centre: a particularly interesting case, with a profitable market by the mid-tenth century. See Beresford and Finberg, op. cit., p. 158. 6. Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 1951 edn sub Wendover, Oundle; E. Lipscomb, The History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham, II, p. 481 (see also 2l/2" O.S. map of Wendover area); V.C.H., Northants., Ill, 1930, pp. 68-9, 87, 89; Alan Rogers, A History of Lincolnshire, 1970 pp. 15-17, 33.

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farm at Lee's Rest, which was occupied from the first to the third century; whilst barrows and other early earthworks abound in the vicinity7. At Maidstone, to give an instance in another district, the remains of no fewer than eight Roman villas have been found within the parish or just outside it. A large hoard of Roman coins has been discovered near the market place, as well as several more minor Roman finds elsewhere in the town. There are several important prehistoric megaliths in the neighbourhood, and the name itself, possibly meaning 'stone of the people' or perhaps 'stone of the maidens', must relate to a megalith that has now vanished, and suggests a very early origin for the settlement itself, whose parish comprises part of the pre-conquest meeting place of the community of Kent at Penenden Heath. In the same county Charing, Wye, and Milton Regis also certainly go back to the earliest days of primary settlement. They are recorded in eighth- or ninth-century charters, when they were clearly already places of some antiquity. Both Milton Regis and Melton Mowbray, it is worth pointing out, stem from the same philological root and mean 'middle tun': a name which in itself seems to suggest an early focal settlement, from which the neighbouring tiins originated8. Secondly, these primary towns are usually associated with prehistoric tracks or Roman roads, and in some cases with both. Both Banbury and Melton Mowbray, for example, are on a route of great antiquity, the ridgeway commonly known as the Jurassic Way. The former town is also sited a short distance from an ancient saltway from Droitwich and directly on the well-known Banbury Lane, a route of probably prehistoric origin following the ridge from Northampton to Banbury and continuing south-west to the Cotswolds. Wendover is sited on the Icknield Way, which forms its main street; Oundle lies just across the river from the Roman road following the Nene valley; whilst Caistor gives its name to the prehistoric Wolds ridgeway from Horncastle, known as Caistor High Street, and lies at its junction with a Roman road leading westwards to Ermine Street. In Kent Wye is sited on the prehistoric Pilgrims' Way where it is joined by the downland ridgeway at 7. The evidence for Banbury and Charlbury cited in this article is based on the accounts for these two places in V.C.H., Oxon., X, 1972; for the above paragraph see especially pp. 5-6 and 128. For the association of the place-name 'Wickham' with Roman sites see Margaret Gelling, 'English Place-Names derived from the Compound wichatn', Medieval Archaeology, XI, 1967. 8. See relevant entries in J. K. Wallenberg, Kentish Place-Names, 1931, and The PlaceNames of Kent, 1934. The origins of Maidstone are an exceptionally difficult and interesting problem; the evidence is too scattered and amorphous to summarise in this article, though I hope eventually to publish my own conclusions on the subject. Whether there was actually a Roman town or station on the site, as distinct from a nucleation of villas, has long been a matter of debate. The older antiquaries (e.g., Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 2nd edn., 1797-1801, IV, pp. 260, 264) believed there had been. Later and betterinformed archaeological opinion generally took the opposite view; but recently Ronald Jessup in his archaeological study, South East England, 1970, has spoken of 'a large settlement at Maidstone' in the Roman period (p. 167).


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its crossing of the Stour, and about a mile from its junction with the Roman road from Canterbury to Ashford9. Charing is sited just off the Pilgrims' Way and directly on the so-called 'Greenway', for which a prehistoric origin has been suggested by Mr. Ivan Margary. Milton Regis parish straddles the Roman Watling Street and the town itself lies just off it, on a trackway parallel to and possibly antedating it. Finally, Maidstone is sited directly on a Roman route—which still forms its main spine-road, the significantly-named Week Street and Stone Street—at its junction with other trackways which linked this important crossing of the Medway with the Pilgrims' Way two or three miles to the north. The third characteristic of primary towns is their importance as early religious centres. Many of them contained early minster churches and in some cases they were centres of heathen worship before the Christian era. At Banbury, as Dr. P. D. A. Harvey has pointed out, the fact that the parish extended beyond the boundaries of both county and hundred, and beyond the Anglo-Saxon episcopal estate of which the place itself was the administrative capital, suggests that it early 'became an ecclesiastical centre for a wide area and probably contained a minster church'. This church may have existed as early as the mid-seventh century, when in all probability the area was converted to Christianity following Birinus's mission to Wessex and the foundation of his see at Dorchester-on-Thames. Before this date Banbury must have been a centre of heathen worship, as the name Gritnsbury in the parish and close to the town suggests, containing as it does a pseudonym of the god Woden. Charlbury, too, was evidently an early Christian centre, probably the burial place in 658 of St. Diuma, who had been one of the missionaries sent from Northumbria to Mercia in 65310. In Lincolnshire, Mrs. D. M. Owen tells us that Caistor and Horncastle both seem to have been 'old minsters' or 'mother churches', each with 'its dependent chapels in the vills which were outlying members of the royal manor'. In Northamptonshire Oundle evidently performed a similar function, for St. Wilfred founded a minster here in the year 709u. 9. V.C.H., Oxcm., X, pp. 5-6; Rogers, op. cit., map on p. 14. For Roman routes in Kent see Ivan D. Margary, Roman Ways in the Weald, 1965 edn. 10. V.C.H., Oxon., X, pp. 6, 128. 11. Dorothy M. Owen, Church and Society in Medieval Lincolnshire, 1971, pp. 1-2; V.C.H., Northants., Ill, p. 87. Two of the chapelries of Oundle, Elmington and Churchfield, never became independent and subsequently disappeared entirely (ibid., p. 99); a third, Ashton, whose chapel was rebuilt in 1706 (cf. ibid., pp. 87, 9.3) became a separate township in 1885 (ibid., p. 93). The original area dependent on Oundle ecclesiastically is difficult to determine. Lands in the parishes of Thurning, "Winwick, Luddington, and Remington still pertained to the lordship in 1086 (ibid., p. 89), and one might hazard the guess that these parishes together with those between them and Oundle (Polebrook, Armston, Barnwell), plus Benefield to the west in Rockingham Forest, were all included in the original area. These roughly coincided with the Hundred of Polebrook, which was one of the Eight Hundreds of Oundle. It is possible, however, that Oundle's ecclesiastical district covered a more extensive stretch of the Eight Hundreds.

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In Leicestershire Melton Mowbray was certainly the minster church for a considerable territory and gave birth to Thorpe Arnold, Freeby, Sysonby, Burton Lazars, and Eye Kettleby. In Kent Milton Regis became the mother church of an extensive area, probably covering eighteen parishes on either side of Watling Street. Charing was the parent of four parishes, Pevington, Egerton, Little Chart, and Pluckley, and probably of several others beyond these, in the Weald to the south-west. Maidstone contained an important minster church, whose numerous progency of seventeen daughters formed an area extending twenty miles from the North Downs to the Sussex border. There is strong presumptive evidence that in this instance the settlement was a heathen cult-centre before the Christian era; and this was certainly the case at Wye, which became the mother church of another extensive territory, and whose name actually means 'idol'12. A fourth point, often connected with the previous one, is the fact that many of these primary towns were centres of major royal or ecclesiastical estates in the Anglo-Saxon era, and hence often administrative centres of regiones like the lathal divisions of Kent or the Eight Hundreds of Oundle. This fact in itself, of course, must have early entailed upon them certain economic functions beyond those of the surrounding communities engaged solely in farming. Banbury was the administrative centre of an important episcopal estate, first of the bishops of Dorchester and subsequently of those of Lincoln. This estate came to form the basis of Banbury Hundred, and Charlbury seems in some sense to have formed the focal point of the detached portion of the Hundred and estate in the Evenlode valley. Both Wendover and Caistor were centres of royal manors, forming part of the ancient demesne of the crown. Oundle was the centre of a great estate of Peterborough abbey from a very early period13. Maidstone was for many centuries the centre of an important archiepiscopal estate in Kent, and the medieval re-foundation of the town, apparently as a planned settlement, was due to the archbishop's control over it. Charing also was the centre of an archiepiscopal estate; it was in fact amongst the oldest possessions of the see of Canterbury, having been in the archbishop's hands since at least the eighth century and possibly from the earliest days of Christianity in the Kentish kingdom. Wye and Milton Regis were also centres of ancient estates, in these cases of the kings of Kent, the former place in addition becoming the caput of its own lathe, whilst the 12. W. G. Hoskins, Leicestershire: an illustrated Essay on the History of the Landscape, 1957- P- 7; Alan Everitt, Ways and Means in Local History, 1971, pp. 14, 15; D. C. Douglas, ed., The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury, 1944, pp. 78-9 ('Middeltune' is Milton Regis; 'Masgdestane' is Maidstone); Wallenberg, Place-Names of Kent, p. 384. For places in Kent the above account is also based on the topographical evidence of parish boundaries and on ecclesiastical dependence (occasionally also tenurial or manorial dependence) in later centuries, as recorded by Hasted, op. cit., passim. 13- V.C.H., Oxon., X, pp. 1-4, 6; V.C.H., Bucks., Ill, p. 23; Owen, loc. cit.; V.C.H., Northants., Ill, pp. 87, 89.


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14

latter contained a royal palace of the Jutish monarchy . The fifth characteristic of primary towns is also in many cases no doubt a relic of former ecclesiastical importance: and this is the unusual extent of their parishes, unusual, that is to say, in relation to the average size of parishes in their area. In most cases known to the present writer (there may well, of course, be regional variations in this respect), the original parishes have remained several times larger than those of the daughters to which they gave birth. (We cannot argue the other way, of course: it is not necessarily true that very large parishes are primary ones, since parishes formed after the Conquest, especially in the Pennines and in woodland areas like the Weald and the Forest of Arden, also often tend to be extensive.) It is not difficult to understand why this should be so, and it is not an uncommon phenomenon of primary settlements generally, as Professor Hoskins has pointed out in relation to Leicestershire15. In creating secondary parishes, the parent settlement was obviously in a position to retain control over as large an area as possible, and was reluctant to cede more of her power than was necessary. The surviving area really represents, therefore, the remains of a territory originally much more extensive. In Leicestershire, for instance, the area of Melton Mowbray (if the dependent chapelries of Sysonby, Freeby, and Burton Lazars are excluded) amounted to some 5,680 acres: an area of exceptional extent for the county as a whole, and well over.three times the average size of the fifteen parishes in its vicinity (1,702 acres)16. The fact that these three chapelries never became independent is, of course, significant in the same context; if they are included the historic parish of Melton covered more than ten thousand acres and was six times the size of its neighbours. In the adjoining county of Northamptonshire Oundle was nearly three times the size of its secondary parishes; in Buckinghamshire Wendover was more than three times as large as its neighbours; and in Bedfordshire both Luton and Leighton Buzzard were several times the size of other places in the vicinity. In Lincolnshire Caistor extended to 6,500 acres, and there is reason to think that its original area may have exceeded 10,000 acres, so that it was nearly four times the size of its neighbouring parishes. Similarly in Kent the 4,681 acres of Charing formed an area more than twice the size of the six adjoining places if the two other primary settlements of Lenham and Westwell—adjacent to Charing and also much larger than their daughter communities—are excluded. The surviving extent of the royal 14 Hasted, op. cit., IV, pp. 266, 285; VI, pp. 164, 165, 171-2; VII, pp. 345-6, 432-3. For "Wye and its lathe see J. E. A. Jolliffe, Prc-Feudal England: the Jutes, 1933, pp. 46 sqq. and map facing p. i. 15. Op. cit., pp. 12-13. 16. In this and the following paragraphs the acreages given are those of the historic parishes, before modern changes and subdivisions had taken place. The figures have been taken chiefly from those given in the relevant V.C.H. volumes, the older county histories, and Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England, 2nd edn., 1833.

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parish of Wye, with its 7,348 acres, has remained more than four times as large as that of the fourteen parishes in its hinterland. The area of Maidstone, covering 4,576 acres, was between two and three times as large as the twentyone parishes in its vicinity (1,784 acres). Maidstone's outlying daughter settlements of Marden and Goudhurst, it is true, remained larger than their parent area; but these were of the late post-Conquest type of community characteristic of the Weald where, as in many wood-pasture areas, most parishes were in any case exceptionally large and thinly populated until well into the medieval period. In the case of Milton Regis the contrast is at first sight less striking. This was in an area near the coast, of great agricultural wealth and very early settlement, so that the population had long been thick on the ground and the parishes had probably always been smaller than elsewhere in Kent. Even so, with an area of 2,559 acres, Milton Regis was twice the size of its ten neighbouring parishes. Since there is reason to think, moreover, that the adjacent settlement of Sittingbourne was a late 'street migration' on to the Roman road, evidently carved out of Milton, and first recorded in 120017, the pre-Conquest area of the royal mother-parish was probably more than 3,500 acres, or nearly three times the size of its neighbours. Precisely the same phenomenon is to be found in Oxfordshire, although in a slightly more complex form. Here the rural parishes of Banbury hundred, it is true, were unusually large by Midland standards, the historic area of Cropredy, for example, extending to 8,716 acres and of Swalcliffe to 6,946. Yet these rural tracts were in fact divided into separate chapelries, each with its own church and in some sense its own separate organisation—for example, a distinct and independent field-system—although, as in the case of Melton's daughter settlements, these chapelries did not attain complete independence. Cropredy was divided into five distinct units, Wardington, Mollington, Claydon, Great Bourton, and Cropredy itself; and Swalcliffe into four, Epwell, Sibford Gower, Shutford, and Swalcliffe Lea; so that the average area of these units was less than 1,750 acres. The 'urban' parish of Banbury, by contrast, remained a single unit throughout its history, and its 4,634 acres were never subdivided into separate chapelries. Even the part of it lying outside Banbury Hundred and Oxford county, extending to 1,226 acres, neither acquired a church of its own nor attained any measure of self-government. In the large parish of Charlbury two outlying townships acquired their own chapels and attained some degree of independence. Yet over its own 5,126 acres, which were wholly within the Hundred of Banbury, Charlbury exercised undivided control, and the area remained a single unit throughout its history, administered by the little town itself, in which was the only church. In north Oxfordshire too, therefore, the parishes of the primary towns remained two or three times as large as the rural chapelries in the area. It is true that in 17. Wallenberg, Place-Names of Kent, p. 264. The topography of Sittingbourne strongly suggests a late origin as a street migration from Milton.


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such cases as these one cannot be certain that the boundaries of parish or chapelry have never been modified; yet it is clear from a careful scrutiny of the detailed accounts in the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire (Volume X, Banbury Hundred) that the actual area of chapelry and parish cannot have varied greatly from those that still obtained in the nineteenth century and in most cases still persist today. The sixth characteristic of primary towns is in many cases incapable of documentary proof, although as a rule it can either be inferred by deduction or demonstrated from archaeological evidence. This characteristic is the presumption that they in fact acted as recognised trading centres before the Conquest, in some cases long before, and thus exhibited the first rudiments of urban status from a very early period. This does not mean that we should necessarily regard them as fully-fledged towns, but that they exhibited something in their economy over and above a purely agricultural function. Very few markets, it is true, are specifically referred to in pre-Conquest documents. Amongst the primary towns considered here, the only market specifically recorded before the Conquest is that at Oundle, • which is referred to in a charter of 972 restoring or confirming the estate to Peterborough abbey and showing that the town was then the administrative centre of its eight hundreds18. In most counties, in fact, few markets are recorded even in Domesday Book; and although this fact in itself proves only that few offered as yet a potential source of revenue, there can be no real doubt that most English towns were created, actually as well as ostensibly, by the market charters which after the Conquest gave them legal birth. In the nature of things only a fraction of the 2,000 or so places granted market rights between the eleventh century and the fourteenth can have been acting as trading centres in the economic conditions of the Anglo-Saxon period. Yet there are certainly cases where an early market can be shown to have existed, on a customary or prescriptive basis, before the grant of a charter by the crown. There are also others where no charter was ever issued, and where whatever right there was remained purely prescriptive, or (in the current legal phrase) had been exercised since the memory of man ran not to the contrary. In these cases, therefore, the market must go back at least to the early Norman era. In the writer's opinion these prescriptive or traditional markets must often have originated before the Conquest, precisely because they are so often associated with the 'primary towns' which, on other grounds, as we have seen, are most likely to have acted as local economic centres of some rudimentary kind from an early period. Let us look briefly in this connection at some of the cases hitherto discussed. In Oxfordshire Banbury is a particularly interesting example, for its marketing functions certainly antedated its first charter. Dr. Harvey has 18. V.C.H., Northants., Ill, pp. 87, 89. In 1086 the market yielded 255., and about 1126 it was worth £4 35.

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shown that an important market was in existence here sixteen years before the first charter, which was granted in 1155, In 1138-9 the Bishop of Lincoln granted Godstow Abbey as much as £5 a year from the tolls of this prescriptive market19. So valuable a source of revenue, in contemporary terms, can hardly have arisen recently, and it seems reasonable to surmise that at this economic focus of a large episcopal estate, situated as it was at the junction of important prehistoric routes, there must have been, as one would expect, some kind of trading activity for a considerable period. At Oundle, as already remarked, a market is specifically referred to in a document of 972. At Melton Mowbray a valuable market is recorded in Domesday Book, so that there can be very little doubt that here too we have a town of Anglo-Saxon origin. In Kent Milton Regis was certainly a pre-Conquest trading-centre; for although the market is not recorded in Domesday, the office of the portreeve, by whom the town continued to be governed until the nineteenth century, was in existence in the Anglo-Saxon era. The town of Maidstone was also apparently a very early borough by prescription, similarly governed by a portreeve until its incorporation by Edward VI, although the first royal charter confirming its market was not granted till the unusually late date of i26i 20 . Both Wye and Charing appear to have originated as prescriptive market-centres; and although a late charter of Henry VI either confirmed or founded the two three-day fairs of the latter place, it seems that the market was never confirmed by charter. Hasted at least, who is usually scrupulous in recording such grants and confirmations (and does give Henry VFs grant of fairs to Charing)21, evidently knew of no charter, so that the market apparently continued to be held by prescriptive right only until it ceased to function in the nineteenth century. The latter case is particularly interesting because in fact prescriptive markets were in the majority of cases confirmed at some subsequent date by a formal charter from the crown. There is at least one other instance in Kent, however, where apparently no confirmatory charter was ever granted, and this is Sevenoaks, where the market has always been held by prescriptive right only. In the present context Sevenoaks is a case of some interest, since although it can hardly be described as a 'primary town' in the sense in which that term is used here—ecclesiastically and manorially it was probably a daughter of Otford—the market has been shown to have existed well before the Conquest and very probably before the foundation of the church: a clear case of real antiquity behind a claim to prescriptive rights22. The seventh and final characteristic of primary towns relates to their sub19. V.C.H., Oxon., X, p. 58. 20. Hasted, op. cit., IV, pp. 266, 271; William Newton, The History and Antiquities of Maidstone, the County Town of Kent, 1741, pp. 21-9. 21. Hasted, op. cit, VII, pp. 431, 433. 22. H. W. Knocker, 'Sevenoaks: the Manor, Church, and Market', Archaeologia Cantiana, XXXVIII, 1926, pp. 51-68.


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sequent development and must be more tentatively advanced, since final proof requires a wider survey than the present writer has undertaken. Of perhaps 2,000 places receiving grants of market charters and in many cases achieving burghal status during the three centuries following the Conquest, more than half subsequently died out as trading centres, so that by Queen Elizabeth's reign fewer than 750 remained23. Their extinction was due to a variety of causes, chiefly no doubt the decline of population in the later medieval period, but also the creation of larger numbers of markets than were economically necessary, and in some cases—as at Chipping Warden, near Banbury— deliberate suppression at the instance of a more powerful neighbour24. What is interesting to note, however, is that the primary towns seem on the whole to have been better able to weather the economic stresses of the times than the 'organic' towns or upgraded villages. Many of them, it is true, remained very small. In the mid-sixteenth century at least the thread of commercial life in places like Charlbury, Charing, and Wye was certainly exiguous. Yet the fact remains that it did not die out completely, and even today such places are essentially little towns rather than large villages. Some of them, of which Charlbury is an instructive example, took on a new lease of life in the seventeenth century, flourished in a surprising manner in the eighteenth, and did not finally surrender their marketing functions till well into the nineteenth century or even later. Of the organic towns, by contrast, some hundreds had certainly died out by the sixteenth century: places like Stapleford near Melton Mowbray, for instance, Newnham near Milton Regis, Boxley near Maidstone, Westwell near Charing, and Godmersham and Brabourne near Wye. In some cases, indeed, it is now difficult to be sure whether the market granted by royal charter was ever actually established. In many almost the only evidence of former trading life is the old market place. And in not a few, such as Godmersham and Brabourne, even this telling reminder from the past, if it ever existed, has entirely vanished from the landscape. One further tentative comment in this context may be permissible. The sixteenth to nineteenth centuries also witnessed a great increase of trade in the regional market centres of England as distinct from the purely local ones. The rise of these regional markets—places like Banbury and Melton Mowbray, for instance, or on a larger scale Maidstone and Northampton—and their ability to attract much of the expanding inland trade of England away from the smaller and more local centres, is one of the most striking urban developments of the period. Although it would be wrong to suggest that most primary towns developed into regional centres of this kind, it is remarkable how many of the regional markets of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were primary towns in origin. Once again a more extensive survey than the 23. See Alan Everitt, Ways and Means in Local History, 1971, pp. 24 sqq. 24- V.C.H., Oxon., X, p. 58. The market at Chipping Warden was twice suppressed in favour of Banbury, the second time in 1238. A third attempt to found a market here may for a time have had more success; but it was extinct by the sixteenth century.

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present would be necessary to prove this suggestion statistically, and certainly no black and white distinction can be drawn. Both Wye and Charing, for example, gradually gave place during these centuries to the 'organic' town of Ashford as the regional centre for a wide area of inland Kent. Yet the old primary towns like Banbury, Melton, and Maidstone, that gradually developed in their differing degrees of importance into genuinely regional markets, were highly characteristic features of the urban landscape from the Tudor period onwards. Obviously one of the chief reasons for the development of many primary towns into regional markets was the fact that they were often situated on ancient cross-country routes, whose importance was revived or increased with the great expansion of commercial traffic from the 15705 onwards, and the development of stage-coaching in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was thus no accident that at Banbury the number of inns for travellers appears to have increased from five in the sixteenth century to seventeen in the seventeenth, of which eleven are first recorded after i64o25. It was also no accident that whereas this town's first recorded stage-coach appears to have run in 1731, by 1830 there were no fewer than fifty-four coaches a week leaving the town: twenty for London, thirteen for Birmingham, six each for Leicester and Oxford, and others for Northampton, Cheltenham, and Leamington Spa26. (So much for the view that 'nothing happened' in English history between the Restoration and the Reform Bill.) And yet one wonders whether, in addition to their position on cross-country routes, there was not also some elusive characteristic in the social and economic structure of these primary towns that enabled them to develop into regional centres of this kind. This problem is one that would well repay a detailed survey of such places on a comparative basis. The interest of the primary towns and of what they represent in English history is not confined to their origins or to their development as regional markets. Quite as interesting is their industrial development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since in this too they were profoundly typical of an important phase of urban history. The evolution of manufactures in the old market towns of England that did not develop into factory cities is unfortunately one of the most neglected aspects of industrial history. The reasons are not far to seek. These towns have, perhaps not unnaturally, been completely overshadowed in the minds of historians by the Goliaths of the Industrial Revolution like Manchester and Birmingham. They rarely became seats of the great staple industries of England, such as cotton. Their manufactures were varied, small in scale, and perhaps lacking in the glamour of heavy industries like shipbuilding. And in many of the smaller market towns the industrial phase has not proved a 25. V.C.H., Oxon., X, pp. 15-16. 26. Ibid., p. 12.


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permanent development. The general impression therefore still obtains that in the industrial era the English market town was usually a mere backwater, a stagnant place necessarily living on its past, and out of touch with the realities of the contemporary world. It would obviously be nonsensical to bracket towns like Melton Mowbray or Banbury with Sheffield or Manchester, or even with places like Northampton and Derby, in speaking of their history as industrial towns. Yet what strikes the writer is the remarkably wide spectrum of small-scale industries which developed within the old economic structure of such places in these generations, co-existing alongside the historic retail trades and handicrafts, and in some cases simply growing out of them. Almost wherever one looks in towns of this kind in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in the old regional markets like Banbury, one finds this phenomenon taking place: in Newark or Grantham, for instance, in Kettering or Wellingborough, in Maidstone or Louth. Even a place as small as Charlbury, with a mere 2,000 inhabitants, situated in a county as rural as Oxfordshire, became a distinct industrial centre of a kind. By 1851, after a somewhat chequered history, the old local glove manufacture had expanded to employ more than eleven hundred people, including no less than 820 sewing women. The last glove factory in fact did not close down till 196827. In the larger town of Banbury (about 10,000 inhabitants in 1861) the pattern was naturally more varied, and included plush-weaving, cloth-weaving, printing, agricultural machinery-making, boat-building, blacking manufacture, brewing, shoemaking, and ironfounding: all of which coexisted alongside the old hand-made world of the lacemakers, basketmakers, carpenters, tailors, blacksmiths, whitesmiths, and the like. Only two or three of these industries, it is true, were on a considerable scale, notably that of plushweaving, of which Banbury was the principal centre in England. Yet the point to grasp is that in the aggregate, they constituted something considerable, something essential in the economy of the town28. Very much the same kind of development was taking place over the same period in Maidstone, a town about twice the size of Banbury, whose varied industries in the i86os included paper-manufacture, oil-milling, brewing, malting, distilling, tanning, iron-founding, agricultural implement manufacture, coachbuilding, rope- and twine-making, sack-manufacture, stone-quarrying, brickmaking, lime-burning, and pipe-making29. The truth is that the old market towns of Victorian England, particularly the regional centres like Banbury and Maidstone, need to be regarded as a distinct species in their own right. It is a mistake to think of them either as industrial towns that never quite made the grade, or as merely decaying 27. Ibid., p. 144. 28. Ibid., pp. 12, 64 sqq. 29. J. M. Wilson, The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, 1870, IV, p. 240.

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centres of pettifogging shopkeepers. Though some Victorian market towns were undoubtedly little more than that, places like Banbury were towns with a characteristic economy of their own: essentially a mixed, economy of trades, crafts, and manufactures: an economy that continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century, not dramatically, it is true, yet quite distinctly in its own individual way. The commercial function of such towns remained an essential one, of course, possibly in many cases the most important of all. In 1843 Banbury, for example, was typically described as a metropolis for 140 places within a circuit of ten miles30, while to judge from later Victorian directories Maidstone was the economic capital for a similar or probably somewhat larger region. Yet it is a mistake to think of this country commerce, though vital in itself, as the only essential characteristic of such towns, and to dismiss their industrial activity as merely an accidental accretion. In a mixed urban economy both were essential and both had grown up together. Without some understanding of this fact it seems to the writer that the origins of the Industrial Revolution itself and the whole shape and pattern of its development can hardly be understood. For that Revolution took place not only in the Manchesters and Birminghams of England — themselves market towns of this kind not so long since of course—but also, under a different and more modest guise, in its more numerous Maidstones and Banburys. It is in their economy that the origins of many of its minor industries must be sought, as well as a number of basic industries such as paper-making and brewing. It was they that helped to account for the surprisingly large 'industrial' population recorded in mid-Victorian censuses for the 'agricultural' counties. In Oxfordshire itself, for instance, out of a total occupied population in 1861 of some 93,000, more than 23,000, or about one quarter, were classified as 'industrial': a proportion that almost equalled the whole 'agricultural' population of the county. This situation was closely paralleled in other 'agricultural' counties, such as Berkshire, Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Sussex, extra-metropolitan Kent, and the North Riding, in all of which the 'industrial' population amounted to about a quarter of the community, and as a whole exceeded the agricultural population of these nine shires. In the two Midland counties adjoining Oxfordshire to the east the industrial percentage was a good deal higher: thirty-three per cent in Buckinghamshire and thirty-five per cent in Northamptonshire. These figures may profitably be compared with forty-six per cent for the two most indus30. V.C.H., Oxon., X, p. 13. The commercial importance of such towns as marketing, provisioning, and shopping centres in the nineteenth century cannot be traced here, but it is a subject of great interest, and one as yet very little explored by historians. The very wide network of village-carriers' routes centring on such places is one indication of it: cf. my essay, 'Town and Country in Victorian Leicestershire: the Role of the Village Carrier', in Alan Everitt, ed., Perspectives in English Urban History, 1973. I calculate that there were between 20,000 and 30,000 village carriers in England in the late nineteenth century.


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trialised counties of England, Lancashire and the West Riding . These remarks are not intended to suggest that the so-called agricultural counties should be placed in the same category as the industrial giants. After all, Lancashire and the West Riding were far more populous than they, so that mere percentages do not tell the whole truth. Nevertheless, by 1861, the industrial population of these nine 'farming' shires amounted to nearly 400,000 and exceeded not only their own agricultural population but also the whole industrial population of the West Riding. And this 'industrial revolution' in the farming shires had taken place predominantly in the old market towns like Banbury and Maidstone, and particularly in the regional markets which in so many cases had originated as primary towns in the earliest phases of urban development in this country. 31. The census figures are conveniently summarised, and juxtaposed with other statistics of great interest, in The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, 1868, XII, Appendix, pp. 4-5.

Sleaford, Lines. The town of New Sleaford was probably founded by the Bishop of Lincoln in the early twelfth century; Old Sleaford, the original settlement, eventually became deserted. Note the characteristic site of the Market Place, immediately west of the church of St Denis. (From an engraving by B. Hewlett [1802] after a drawing by W. Turner.)

Louth, Lines. Louth was probably the centre of an Anglo-Saxon estate. By 1086 it already had a market; it was also a borough with 80 burgesses, and thirty mills on the River Lud, which gave the town its name. Its superb church spire was completed in 1515. (From an engraving by W. Radclyffe [1829], after a drawing byJMW. Turner.)

6

THE LOST TOWNS OF ENGLAND1 The English landscape is scattered with scores and indeed hundreds of places which at one time in their history acquired the right, usually by a grant from the Crown, to hold markets and fairs. By the acquisition of these trading functions they became distinguished, in some degree, from the purely agricultural villages around them, although most of them still remained for many generations centres of farming as well as of trade. In some cases the commercial functions ultimately ousted agriculture completely, and this is how the majority of our modern English towns have originated, great cities like Birmingham, for example, as much as small towns like Market Harborough. But in very many cases, after a life-span varying from less than a century to as much as 600 hundred years, the market eventually died out and the trading activities came to an end. And yet, in spite of their decline, most of these lost markets of England retained certain peculiarities in their topography and their social structure, marking them off in some sense from purely farming villages, and continuing to shape their destinies until the nineteenth century and even today. It is predominantly with these 'lost towns' that the present paper is concerned, though reference will also be made to surviving towns, where necessary, for comparative purposes. Literally interpreted, the grant of a market generally gave the right to trade on one day of the week only. In many cases it was supplemented by burghal status, and the borough, as Professor Hilton reminds us, was intended to be something more: 'it represented an initiative, presumably by the lord or his advisers, aimed at encouraging not only a market but the growth of a stable and permanent body of resident craftsmen, food processors and providers of various services.'2 The thorny problem of borough status, and the burgage tenure associated with it, cannot be pursued here; but in law it marked an important distinction, and in some parts of England most of the surviving market towns and many vanished 1 This paper is based on my inaugural lecture as Hatton Professor of English Local History in the University of Leicester in February 1970. The opening and concluding paragraphs of the paper as originally published are here omitted; a new introduction and conclusion have been added, and other, minor alterations incorporated. 2 R. H. Hilton, 'Lords, Burgesses and Hucksters', Past and Present, No. 97,1982, p. 6.

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ones acquired burghal privileges. In Cornwall, for example, 30 boroughs have been traced, in Somerset 31, in the three West Midland counties of Warwick, Worcester, and Gloucester 47, and in Devonshire more than 70.3 It is one of the oddities of urban development, however, that in some of the more populous or 'advanced' counties, where markets were numerous, the number of identifiable boroughs was relatively insignificant. Only 15 have so far been definitely traced in Kent, for instance, only 11 in Suffolk, only 6 in Norfolk, and only three each in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.4 In such areas as these the question remains as to how important the distinction actually was, in economic as opposed to legal terms. The probability must be that in counties like Leicestershire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Kent many of the non-burghal markets early became genuine and permanent centres of craftsmen and tradesmen despite the formal absence of borough status. Where people meet regularly to buy and sell, week after week, the demand for ancillary crafts and services develops almost inevitably. Certainly by the sixteenth century the economy of places like Ashford and Sevenoaks in Kent and Loughborough and Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire was indistinguishable in this respect from that of 'boroughs' like Tonbridge and Hinckley: they had clearly established themselves long since as permanent towns. We cannot of course assume that this development took place at all the 'lost markets' which concern us in this paper. In most cases we know very little about the medieval economy of such places. It is sometimes suggested, indeed, that the charters granted by the Crown frequently remained a dead letter, and there can be very little doubt that some of the new markets were never effectively established. It is difficult to believe that Henry Ill's grant of a market and fair to Henry de Apulderfield at his manor of Otterpley in Challock, for example, ever became a reality;5 this obscure spot, on the Downs between Ashford and Faversham, was probably never more than a small hamlet and has long since disappeared from the landscape entirely. Nevertheless, the problem is not as simple as it may seem. The fact often cited that there is no direct record of market activity at many of these places in itself proves nothing; for little or no direct record of activity survives at 3

Ibid., p. 5; Maurice Beresford and H. P. R. Finberg, English Medieval Boroughs: a Hand-List, 1973, under the counties cited. 4 Ibid., under the counties cited; it should be added that the authors stress (p.32) that they would be 'the last to claim exhaustiveness' for their list. No doubt other boroughs remain to be discovered in these counties; but it seems improbable that they approached the numbers recorded for Devon and some other western counties. For Kent I have added Folkestone (a borough by prescription) and Gravesend (an incorporated borough) to the Hand-List; but I have excluded Brasted, Newenden, and Seasalter, none of which can be shewn to have functioned as markets; a questionmark must also be placed against their reality as 'boroughs', despite documentary support; they were certainly not 'towns' in any sense. 5 Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 1797-1801 (reprint of 1972), VII, p. 335.


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many markets which continued to function into the early modem period, and which are specifically mentioned in contemporary diaries and account books. This should not surprise us: it is due to the fact that there is rarely any historical source in which market trade is likely to be recorded. If toll books were ever kept for such places in the medieval period, they are unlikely to have survived the vicissitudes of time if the market itself died out; they very rarely exist even for towns that have survived until the present day, unless they also happen to have been incorporated.6 Over the past twenty years it has been my fortune to visit some hundreds of these 'lost markets' of England, and comparative study of their topography and subsequent history has gradually convinced me that in the great majority of cases the grant of a royal charter was not a dead letter. The status of such places may have been humble and the thread of economic activity exiguous; but at one time that was true of most of our towns and cities, apart from the old burhs and the county towns like Exeter, Norwich, and York. The success of those that have survived to become substantial urban centres today should not blind us to the modesty of their origins, or to the fact that medieval England was characterized by very large numbers of small and localized markets. One of the outstanding themes in English urban history has in fact been the gradual concentration of trade in a declining number of market towns. Though this is not an essay on urban topography as such, a few aspects of the subject are directly relevant in this context. There are numerous places, to begin with, like Market Stainton in Lincolnshire, Chipping Warden in Northamptonshire, and Chipstead in Kent, where the name itself indicates the actual existence of a former market: in the last case at a spot where no confirmatory charter was in fact ever issued.7 There are also several places where names of this kind are on record though they have subsequently fallen out of use, as at Kingston in Cambridgeshire, where the incumbent was described in 1465 as the rector of Market Kingston.8 There are many villages, moreover, where street-names like Marketstead, Market Place, Cheapside, Market Hill, Beasthill, Cornhill, Corn Chipping, and Cross Chipping still survive, though the market itself may have been discontinued for centuries. Finally, there are some hundreds of village settlements where the market place itself may still be distinguished: often surviving as an open space, as at Charing (Kent); sometimes infilled or partially built over, as at Hanslope (Bucks.); sometimes as a village green, as at Hallaton (Leics.); sometimes with the vestiges of a market cross, as at Bottesford (Leics.); and occasionally associated with a significant street-name like Newland, as at 6 And indeed only very rarely for markets (as distinct from fairs) in incorporated towns, though rentals of market stalls are common enough. 7 See note 13, below. The Chipstead referred to above is in the parish of Chevening; it means 'market place'. 8 V.C.H., County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, V, 1973, p. 117, citing Calendar of Papal Registers, XII, p. 441.

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Brixworth (Northants.), or The Cross, as at Walton-by-Kimcote (Leics.).9 The fascinations and complexities of market topography cannot be pursued further in the limits of this paper, and it must be stressed that the subject is beset with pitfalls for the unwary. But when the topography of places like these is systematically investigated, and compared with that of surviving market centres, there can be very little doubt that in most cases a living and active trading settlement, though often a small one, once existed. The medieval street plans of English towns have in fact shewn a far greater capacity to survive the vicissitudes of recent centuries than their medieval buildings, even in towns like Leicester and Northampton that were transformed by industrialization in the Victorian era. \When modern bureaucrats set out to remould such places, it is a major element in our medieval legacy that they are often unwittingly destroying. For these and other reasons we do not really know exactly how many market centres, surviving and decayed, there are in England. Not until every county has been intensively studied, both documentarily and topographically, will it be possible to estimate with any certainty how many actually functioned. At the peak period, in the early fourteenth century, there were certainly more than 1,200, and there may well have been nearly 2,000 of them.10 If we also include grants subsequent to the fourteenth century, possibly one in five or six of the 10,000 medieval parishes of England have at one time or another contained within their boundaries some kind of regular trading centre. For a number of counties more precise figures have been worked out. In Gloucestershire there were at least 52 medieval market centres, of which about 20 survive today, so that Gloucestershire now has

9

In market towns and villages 'Newland' frequently indicates land newly taken in for a market, or (as in Northampton) land laid out for a new (that is additional) market place. 'The Cross' does not always indicate a market cross, and sometimes refers only to a cross-roads; but at Walton a market cross is on record at the meeting place of three roads in the centre of the village. The statement sometimes loosely made that 'every village' had a market, often by implication a prescriptive one, cannot of course be substantiated. 10 The Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls, 1889,1, pp. 108-31, lists 2,713 grants between 1199 and 1483; but some of these were to places overseas, some were for the translation of the market to a new site, many were re-grants to places already possessed of market rights, and many were for fairs only. On the other hand the Royal Commission does not include 'prescriptive' or traditional markets. Dr Bryan E. Coates has calculated that there were grants of market rights to more than 1,200 places in England and Wales between 1227 and 1350 alone ('The Origin and Distribution of Markets and Fairs in Medieval Derbyshire', Derbyshire Archaeological Journal, LXXXV, 1965, p. 96). His figures are based on grants recorded in the Calendar of Charter Rolls, I-V, covering 1226-1417. Dr R. H. Britnell records 1,003 markets founded in 21 English counties between 1200 and 1349 in 'The Proliferation of Markets in England, 1200-1349', Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., XXXIV, 1981, p. 210; this important article, and others by Dr Britnell, have appeared since the above account was written.


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11

some 30 lost 'towns' within its borders. In Leicestershire and Northamptonshire there were at least 61 medieval markets, of which 16 or 17 may still be said to exist as towns; so that in these two counties there may be 40 vanished trading centres, and probably a number of others I have not been able to trace.12 In the two much larger counties of Kent and Suffolk the decline in numbers is still more remarkable. In medieval Kent as many as 96 places obtained the right to hold a weekly market, whilst in Suffolk the comparable figure was 102.13 Yet in each county only about 20 of these places have managed to survive as trading centres into our own time. In each of these two shires there are probably, therefore, somewhere about 70 lost market towns scattered up and down the countryside. I use the word 'town', of course, very much in the old-fashioned sense, simply as a settlement of some kind. Most of these places we should not nowadays recognize as truly 'urban' at any stage of their history. My point is merely that in the great majority of cases they were not farming villages pure and simple; they were centres of trade, for buying, selling, or exchanging the products of their region, rather than only producing agricultural goods. The case of Kent is a particularly interesting one. Kent is often thought of today as a county of picturesque villages; yet in fact probably none of these places in the county originated as villages. It is doubtful if there is a single truly nucleated village, in the Midland sense of the word, in the county. Places like Lenham, Goudhurst, Chilham, Elham, Groombridge - and there are many others - are all, as we know them today, really decayed 'towns', former centres of trade, not true villages. Gradually, over the centuries the trade of the county of Kent has become more and more concentrated in fewer and larger towns. This decline has also occurred, in varying degrees, in nearly every English county: in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Gloucestershire, Suffolk, and Yorkshire, for example, as well as in Kent. When exactly did these markets, of which so many have now vanished, 11 H. P. R. Finberg, 'The Genesis of the Gloucestershire Towns', Gloucestershire Studies, 1957, pp. 52-88, records 45 markets in the county in existence by 1465. By the sixteenth century seven further places had come to be recognised as markets: Bisley, Blockley, Falfield, Great Witcombe, Horton, Leonard Stanley, and Stroud. 12 On topographical grounds a number of other villages in both counties bear a close resemblence to former market centres, but I have not been able to trace definite evidence of a market and have excluded them from the figures in the text. 13 For a list of Suffolk markets I am much indebted to Miss Gwenyth Dyke, who generously placed her manuscript list at my disposal. For Kent I have relied on the grants recorded in Hasted, op. cit., I-X, passim, and individual parish articles and histories. A number of Kentish markets were prescriptive and have never had a grant. This must be the origin of the two or perhaps three Chipsteads in the county (in Chevening, Penshurst, and possibly also West Kingsdown parishes). But I have only included prescriptive or traditional centres when, as in the case of Sevenoaks, there is undoubted evidence of continuous market activity. Hasted is in general careful in recording grants, but he does not always mention the prescriptive markets.

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originate? In most counties a few existed at the time of Domesday Book, though as a rule these Domesday markets can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. There were certainly others established in the Anglo-Saxon period, though they are not recorded in Domesday, such as Dartford and Sevenoaks. A few more were founded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; but the golden age of the new market towns does not seem to begin till about 1180 and from then it continues at a rapid pace till about 1330 or 1340. The period varies somewhat from county to county; but three-quarters of the 102 markets of Suffolk, for instance, were granted between 1200 and 1330, and nearly 60 per cent of those in Kent. Sometimes, as in Kent, a second more limited phase of foundation occurs in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and occasionally, as in Lancashire, as late as the sixteenth.14 By and large, however, the great period of market foundation in England was the period of about 150 years from 1180 to 1330. It is to this period that the humble urban origins of perhaps two towns in three in England today may still be traced. Though most places did not acquire market rights before the late twelfth or thirteenth century, it is noteworthy, in Kent at least and evidently elsewhere, how many of the earliest centres of primary settlement in the county acquired market charters at some time during the medieval period. It is likely that many of these earlier communities had in fact always existed in some sense as local trading centres and were now merely seeking to safeguard their position at law. Places like Faversham, Chilham, Wingham, Reculver, Eastry, Milton Regis, and Minster-in-Thanet had probably all originated during the earliest phases of settlement in the county, and they all subsequently acquired market grants. A long line of similar settlements, stretching across the county beneath the scarp of the downs, were significantly sited close to the Pilgrims' Way, though few of them were directly on it. Amongst them were markets like Wrotham, Maidstone, Lenham, Charing, Wye, and Folkestone. Quite possibly these places had always retained a measure of control over the economy of their neighbouring daughter-settlements. Certainly Wye had been the regional centre of one of the original lathes of the county, and it must also have acted as some kind of economic centre of a regio from the earliest days of Jutish Kent. 14 It is interesting to note that the phasing of grants was appreciably later in Kent than in Suffolk. By 1300 there were 76 markets in Suffolk, but only 46 in Kent. The difference is partly due to the fact that some of the grants recorded by Hasted were in reality re-grants. Possibly, too, in the very large parishes of the Weald, with their weaker manorial control, more places existed as traditional markets before acquiring a grant. There are other grounds, however, for supposing a relatively late date for urban settlements in much of Kent, particularly on the Chartlands and in the Weald. The numerous markets on the northern side of the county tend to be earlier in origin; but it appears that Sittingbourne and Newington acquired a market only in the sixteenth century, Deal and Margate in the seventeenth, and Whitstable in the eighteenth. See Table 1 (p. 126).


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When and why did so many of the market towns of England decay? It is a frequent experience of the historian that the death of an institution or settlement is more difficult to track down than its birth, and we can rarely date with precision the death of these markets. What we do know is that, by about 1640, the 1,500 or 2,000 medieval markets of England had shrunk to fewer than 800. In Leicestershire they had dropped from at least 30 to a mere 13; in Northamptonshire from 31 to 15; in Gloucestershire from 52 to 34; and in Kent and Suffolk from about 100 to 33 or 34. There can be little doubt that many, perhaps most, of these places had died out as a result of the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century. Many of them must always have been small, and the drastic fall of population due to the Black Death must have spelt their total extinction as centres of trade.15 With the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries another factor operated to the detriment of the smaller markets. This was the rapid increase of travel and the gradual improvement of roads and transport. The turnpiking of scores of major roads in the eighteenth century tended to channel the growing volume of trade and traffic through the major towns on these routes, and hence away from the smaller places situated merely on country lanes. Whilst the larger towns, like Leicester and Northampton, thus became ever more frequented, because they offered greater variety of trade, better facilities, and more competition, many of the smaller towns slowly but surely began to die out as market centres. There can be no doubt that this was the reason for the decay of little towns like Hallaton in Leicestershire, for example, King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire, and Appledore in Kent, which had managed to survive into the seventeenth century, but by the 1830s were extinct as markets.16 The coming of the railways sometimes carried the same process a stage further. It was the completion of the London to Dover line through Ashford in 1844, for example, that led to the rise of Ashford as one of the largest livestock markets in southern England. A great new market area was laid out alongside the railway itself, outside the old town centre, and several little neighbouring towns, which had hitherto shared the expanding cattle and sheep trade of Kent, rapidly died out as agricultural markets. By 1870, after five or six centuries of life as centres of the livestock trade, we find that Elham, Marden, Charing, Lenham, Smarden, and Wye had all declined to the status of mere villages.17 They had not, of course, died out as human settlements; but if you visit them today, you will not find their streets 15 Alan Everitt, The Marketing of Agricultural Produce', in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500-1640,1967, pp. 467-76. 16 Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England, 1833 edn, indicates that the markets of Hallaton and King's Cliffe had by then been extinct for some time. That at Appledore had probably come to an end earlier and is not referred to at all by Lewis. 17 By 1870 there was no longer a market at any of these places, though there were still two annual fairs in the spring and autumn at Wye and Charing and one at Marden in October. - J. M. Wilson, The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, 1870.

116 Landscape and Community in England thronged with the sheep and cattle of Romney Marsh or the Weald, as you would have found them in the eighteenth century. The cattle and sheep are still being raised and fattened, but they are now sent to Ashford market or elsewhere. In what kind of situation may one expect to discover these lost medieval markets of England? In most cases the original grant was obtained through the initiative of some powerful local landowner or ecclesiastic, and for this reason one may find them in almost any kind of countryside. Nevertheless, markets tended to proliferate on some particular sites and terrains more than others. On certain main routes, for example, they became especially numerous. Along what we call the A6 in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire there were as many as 12 market centres within little more than 50 miles, including several, like Kegworth, Kibworth, and Great Glen with little or no urban character today, though each of these settlements still has its old market place.18 On the 60-mile stretch of road from London to Canterbury there were 11 market towns if you went by way of Watling Street, and 12 if you took the more usual route at the time by way of Gravesend.19 Amongst them was the tiny settlement of Singlewell, in the parish of Ifield, with a mere 40 inhabitants today. One particularly interesting and numerous group of markets were what may be called the boundary markets: those that sprang up at the junction of counties, of parishes, or of manors. Many of these places, though not all, originated after the Conquest, in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, on hitherto uninhabited sites. Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, a wellknown example, originated on the parish boundary of Wolverton and Calverton: one side of the High Street was in one parish, and the other side was in the other. When Stratford acquired two medieval churches of its own, the High Street - the great Roman road which gave its name to the little town - remained the boundary between the two tiny urban chapelries of St Mary Magdalene and St Giles. When these became independent parishes in the eighteenth century, by private Act of Parliament, they comprised only 153 acres between them, carved out of the edges of Wolverton and Calverton parishes on either side of the street.20 In Leicestershire the town of Mountsorrel developed in a somewhat similar way at the parish boundary of 18

The 12 were: Kegworth, Loughborough, Mountsorrel, Leicester, Great Glen, Kibworth, Market Harborough, Rothwell, Kettering, Finedon, Irthlingborough, and Higham Ferrers. 19 The 12 were: Canterbury, Faversham, Teynham, Sittingbourne, Milton Regis, Newington, Gillingham, Rochester, Gravesend and Milton, Northfleet, Dartford, Crayford. Gillingham, Milton Regis, and Faversham were strictly a short distance north of this road. 20 Maurice Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages, 1967, p. 398. The date of Stony Stratford's market grant is not known. Churches dedicated to St Giles are often associated with fairs; that at Stratford was the focus of the July fair and is typically sited next to the market place. Fenny Stratford had a similar origin to Stony Stratford, on either side of Watling Street. - Ibid., pp. 397-8.


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Rothley and Barrow-on-Soar. At the end of the nineteenth century, though it had several hundred years as a busy little market town behind it, Mountsorrel was still divided between its two parent parishes, for it had never acquired ecclesiastical independence. Although the town originated as a medieval borough, and has one of the finest Georgian parsonages in Leicestershire, the church itself was technically only a chapel-of-ease to Barrow-on-Soar, and the patron of the living was the vicar of Barrow himself.21 There are, indeed, many curious examples of these boundary markets. The little Kentish town of West Mailing was founded at the junction of two jurisdictions, the manor of Mailing in the hands of the abbess, and the liberty of Mailing in the hands of the Bishop of Rochester.22 Quite why this occurred is something of a mystery, though there are parallels elsewhere. The fact that in the thirteenth century there were two weekly market days, on Wednesday and Saturday, may suggest that there were originally two distinct grants, to the bishop and the abbess.23 At any rate, the consequence was that the boundary between manor and liberty actually ran down the middle of the market place, and a row of posts was erected to mark the division. If your market stall was on one side of the posts you paid your rent and your tolls to the bishop; if it was on the other side, you paid them to the abbess. In the seventeenth century, when the manor had come into lay hands, this situation led to angry disputes with the tenants of the bishop, and even before the dissolution of the abbey it can scarcely have been conducive to ecumenical relations.24 At Gravesend, the situation was equally curious. Like a number of other towns it originated as a double settlement. Its real name, as it was incorporated by Queen Elizabeth in the 1560s, was 'the Borough of Gravesend and Milton'; and it had developed on the boundary between 21 Wilson, op. cit., sub Mountsorrel; John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, III, i, 1800, p. 85. The boundary ran along Barn Lane, at the end of which stood the old market cross, on the site of the present market house built in 1793. 22 According to Hasted (op. cit., IV, pp. 523-4) the site of West Mailing, which before the abbey was founded and the market granted 'was plain fields, and almost without an inhabitant, became . . . exceedingly populous from the numbers who flocked to it from all parts, who building themselves houses here, increased the village to a large size, well suited for trade, to the no small emolument of the nuns.' Its original name of Mailing Parva was in consequence gradually superseded by Town Mailing or West Mailing. 23 Public Record Office, E.134, 15 Car. I, E.13; Hasted op. cit., IV, p. 523. The right to both market days was, however, claimed by the abbess in 1278. The abbey had been founded by Bishop Gundulf of Rochester in 1090, in his manor of [West] Mailing, and it remained subject to the see of Rochester throughout its history. The abbess claimed a grant of a market dating from Henry Ill's reign. 24 Public Record Office, E.134, 15 Car. I, E.13. When the posts were erected is not stated, but they seem to have been an old-established feature of the market place at the time of this commission.

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these two ancient parishes. The original grant of the market, in 1268, had in fact been to Milton, not to Gravesend itself, though it is possible that Gravesend then already existed as a traditional market centre, without any formal charter. The result was that East Street and the eastern part of Gravesend High Street were in the parish of Milton, whilst only West Street and the western side of the High Street were in Gravesend itself. Indeed, the whole of the Market Place, together with the town hall, the free school, and the Gravesend ferry across the Thames were actually not in Gravesend, but in Milton. Gravesend was always the more important partner, however, and in 1695, the corporation succeeded in purchasing the subordinate manor of Parrocks in Milton, in which the ferry, the free school, the market place, and half the High Street were situated. But neither municipality nor parliament could annul the facts of the parish boundary: the market place remained in Milton.25 There cannot be many parishes that have succeeded in creating two separate market towns within their borders; but there is one at least, and this is the parish of Speldhurst, also in Kent. For good measure both places appeared not only on the parish boundary, but on the county boundary with Sussex too. The first of the two to be founded was at Groombridge. In all probability Groombridge had originated before the Conquest as a military post or frontier station between the two territories of Kent and Sussex, for its name appears to mean 'guard's bridge' or 'watchman's bridge'. Its existence as a market, however, did not begin till the year 1286, when it was founded by charter of Edward I. At the foot of the market hill is the bridge whose predecessor gave its name to the settlement and which still marks the boundary with the county of Sussex. Groombridge, like Mountsorrel, did not become an independent parish. It is still in Speldhurst, and its life as a market was probably relatively short: almost certainly it was over before the year 1500, though the market place survives as a village green. But it has its own little chapel, first erected in the thirteenth century and dedicated to St John, and then rebuilt by the local squire in 1625, and re-dedicated to St Charles, as a thank offering for the safe return of Charles I from Spain without having married the Spanish Infanta.26 The second market to be founded in Speldhurst, at the other end of the parish, could scarcely be more different, and indeed one would not normally think of it as a market town at all. This is Tunbridge Wells, founded in the early seventeenth century at the junction of two counties and three 25 Hasted, op. cit., III, pp. 319-20, 339-41. As at West Mailing, there were two market days at Gravesend, on Wednesday and Saturday, and these may possibly have originated in different grants to the two parishes. Hasted does not record a market charter for Gravesend as distinct from Milton, but the two fairs were granted in 30 Edward III (ibid., p. 324). 26 J. K. Wallenberg, The Place-Names of Kent, 1934, p. 96. Hasted, op. cit.,Ill pp. 288,292. Like many decayed markets, Groombridge still retained its fairs till the late nineteenth century, though its population in 1851 was only 180. -Wilson, op. cit sub Groombridge.


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parishes, on the uninhabited manorial waste of Speldhurst, Tonbridge, and Frant. The origins of the town as a watering-place are more complex than that; yet as a boundary market it is an interesting example of history repeating itself in very different circumstances. The charm of The Wells, as it was simply called, to those who first frequented it for the waters was its remoteness. Situated as it then was several miles from any other settlement, it was blessedly free from the prying eyes of parish constables, country justices, and Cromwellian army officers. Like so many boundary communities it developed, as a consequence, a remarkably free kind of society. It began as a sort of squatters' settlement for jaded Carolean courtiers, many of whom camped in tents on the common; it then developed as a convenient centre for Cavalier and Republican plotters during the days of the Cromwellian Protectorate; and it continued its life, in the days of Charles II, as a mixture of Nonconformity, high-flying Anglicanism, and a rake's paradise.27 Each of these last features is reflected in the topography of Tunbridge Wells. The town really arose with the gradual fusion of the four or five hamlets or villages with which its existence began: Mount Sion, Mount Ephraim, Mount Pleasant, Bishop's Down, and The Wells. These were situated in the valley of the springs itself and on the hills surrounding it, and each settlement developed a distinctive character. Mount Ephraim, in Speldhurst parish, was the original Nonconformist village, both Baptists and Presbyterians having their earliest meeting-houses there. In George I's reign the Prebysterians, a wealthy section of the community, moved their chapel to the rival village of Mount Sion, on the opposite side of the valley in Tonbridge parish. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century there was also an Independent meeting-house near The Wells, and there were chapels for the followers of John Wesley and the Countess of Huntingdon. With an almost symbolic gesture, the Anglicans had built their chapel (in the year 1684) in the middle of the valley between the other settlements, next to the springs themselves, and on the exact spot where the two counties and three parishes met. The pulpit was in Speldhurst, the altar was in Tonbridge, and the vestry was in Frant. With a flourish of defiance to the Dissenters, the new chapel was dedicated to King Charles the Martyr. Almost adjoining King Charles's chapel was the famous Pantiles, the wide tree-lined promenade we still know today: and it was these walks that formed at once the rake's paradise and the market place. Like the chapel, the market and promenade were situated in two counties and two if not three parishes. They are now entirely in Kent, but one may still see the evidence of the old division in the 27

Hasted,op. cit. ,111,pp. 276sqq.; AlanEveritt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60, 1967, pp. 268, 287, 304-5; W. Jerrold, Highways and Byways in Kent, 1907, pp. 309 sqq.; Wilson, op. cit., sub Tunbridge Wells. The fullest account of the social history of Tunbridge Wells is to be found in Margaret Barton, Tunbridge Wells, 1937. For a valuable contemporary account see T. B. Burre, The History of Tunbridge Wells, 1766, chapters VI-VIII.

120 Landscape and Community in England name of the Royal Sussex Assembly Rooms, on the Frant side of The Pantiles, and once partly in Sussex.28 Though Tunbridge Wells is obviously in many ways unrepresentative of the market towns of England, its history points up a number of features characteristic of these places generally, both of those that survive and of those that have decayed. Like Tunbridge Wells, most of these places tended to remain throughout recent centuries relatively free communities. By that I mean that they rarely came to be dominated in the post-medieval period by a single local squire or a few large landowners. Through all their vicissitudes of fortune, the landed property within them tended instead to remain much split up, among many small freeholders, instead of, as in so rnany purely agricultural villages, becoming gradually engrossed by one or two landed magnates. In those that have remained urban centres throughout their long history, this freedom is no doubt to be expected; but it is remarkable how many of those that reverted to village status yet managed to retain their freedom from aristocratic domination. This is not invariably true, but in many counties the tendency seems to be striking. In the year 1860, an enquiry was held into the distribution of landed property in England, and from the resultant Returns we can deduce, in a rough and ready way, the structure of landownership in each county and parish. Simplifying a very complex situation, we find that in many parishes all the land was in one hand or a few hands; whilst in others it was subdivided or 'much subdivided' amongst many small proprietors. For convenience' sake we may christen the former 'estate parishes', since they appear to have been dominated by a single landed magnate or a few large proprietors, and the latter 'freeholders' parishes', since their society seems to have been composed of a large number of small independent freeholders.29 Now it is remarkable, in most counties, how many of these freeholders' communities turn out, on examination, to be not simply agricultural villages in origin, but decayed market towns. This is not the only origin of the freeholders' settlements, but it is the origin of a remarkable number. Though in 1860 28 The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, 1868, sub Tonbridge Wells; Hasted, op. cit., III, pp. 276 sqq.; Burre, op. cit., p. 104; Pelton's Illustrated Guide to Tunbridge Wells, 1879, pp. 104-5 and n. The present Congregational church on Mount Pleasant was not built till 1848, but the origins of the congregation go back to 1830, when it took over the then disused Presbyterian chapel, and it was evidently a revival or re-formation of an earlier Independent group. 29 See Wilson, op. cit., where brief details of landownership based on the Returns of 1860 are given under each parish entry. The following paragraphs are based on an analysis of this information for all known markets or former markets in the counties of Gloucestershire, Kent, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Suffolk. A few places in each county (21 in all) for which details are inadequate have had to be excluded. The analysis is given in tabular form on p. 24. It is obvious that a survey of this kind can only give a summary guide to landownership patterns in the 290 market centres covered. Each place really calls for minute local examination. I have not examined forms of landownership in other counties, except Lincolnshire, where the same pattern as that described in the text seems to obtain.


121

many of them had ceased to be markets for several centuries, they still retained a certain freedom in their society, a certain independence of the landed aristocracy around them. This might not have been very apparent to the casual traveller passing through them; but for the small freeholders themselves, who composed the community, it was one of the essential facts of their livelihood. In Suffolk, for example, nearly 70 per cent of the 95 markets for which information regarding landownership is available were still 'freeholders' communities' in the 1860s. In Gloucestershire, the figure was more than 70 per cent, and in Kent and Leicestershire it was almost 80 per cent.30 In each of these four counties, and particularly in Suffolk, there were some former markets that had decayed so completely that all the property in them had been engrossed by one or two landowners. But in all four shires, and especially in Leicestershire and Kent, the vast majority of former market centres had managed to survive as fairly populous communities, composed principally of small freeholders, and still retaining a certain independence. There was one county, however, in which it is interesting to find that this rule does not entirely hold good, and this was Northamptonshire. There may well have been others which I have not myself examined in detail. In Northamptonshire nearly half the medieval market towns of the county had not only ceased to be markets by 1860, but either had become very small, exclusive estate villages, entirely owned and controlled by some local magnate, or else in a few cases had virtually disappeared as settlements. One that had vanished completely was Fawsley, a few miles from Daventry. Nobody would guess, who did not already know it, that the grass-grown fields of Fawsley Park, sloping down to the lakes in the valley beneath the Hall - itself now derelict and half-ruinous - conceal the market place and the streets of a small medieval town.31 Though there are few market centres quite so decayed as Fawsley, there are many in Northamptonshire in which, by the nineteenth century, all the little freeholds appear to have been bought up by a single magnate or a few large landowners. Naseby, Culworth, Brington, Aynho, Rockingham, Fotheringhay, Helpston, and Graf ton Regis: all these and other former 'towns' in Northamptonshire had become mere estate villages by the nineteenth century. Their decay as freeholders' communities as well as towns bears witness to the quite exceptional power of the landed aristocracy in Northamptonshire; there was nothing quite parallel to it, on this scale, in the other four counties. By the eighteenth century there were said to be more resident peers in Northamptonshire than in any other shire of similar size, and there are still more grandiose country mansions than in any county of comparable extent. But in this respect the lost markets of Northamptonshire seem to be 30

See Table 2 (p. 127). The grant is said to have been in 8 Henry III in John Bridges, The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire, 1791,1, p. 64. The original grant was for a market on Sunday; it was subsequently changed to Thursday. 31

122 Landscape and Community in England something of an exception. The typical decayed market town appears to have remained throughout its history a community of small freeholders. In Leicestershire we have a classic example of one of these places in the village of Bottesford, at the far north-eastern tip of the county, in the lush centre of the Vale of Belvoir. I call it a village, and probably everyone does who knows it; but in fact it is a decayed town, and it still has a market place and a market cross, though it has had no market since at least the seventeenth century. Bottesford is in an area of Leicestershire which was much dominated by great landowners in the nineteenth century, of whom the greatest were the dukes of Rutland at Belvoir Castle. In 1860 nearly all the villages around Bottesford were simple estate villages, where all the property was in the hands of a single owner or a few large proprietors. Eaton and Eastwell, Plungar and Barkestone, Muston and Redmile: these and others all come within that category. But Bottesford was different. Though at the heart of the Rutland estates, its beautiful church almost overwhelmed by the superb tombs of the ducal family, it yet remained, in its own right, a community of small freeholders. Though its economic fortunes were in some sense dependent on arisocratic favour, its people were not entirely dependent in the same sense as those of the neighbouring villages of Eastwell, Plungar, or Redmile. They could not be turned out of their freeholds if they chose to snap their fingers at the Castle. There was one way in which a very large number of the inhabitants of decayed markets like Bottesford did choose to snap their fingers at the Establishment. For one of the most remarkable features about them was the vigour of their Nonconformity. There can be little doubt, I think, that this vigour stemmed in part from the relative freedom of their society. They were not tied, like the estate villages, to the squirearchy and the Church. They were not the only places in country districts where Nonconformity flourished, but from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth they were among the most prominent. In Leicestershire, for example, the two lost markets of Arnesby and Kibworth were noted centres of Nonconformist influence, certainly of more than local importance, at the beginning of the eighteenth century.32 In Northamptonshire the former town of Long Buckby is still dominated in its centre by the two great Dissenting chapels of the Baptists and the Congregationalists, each with its school and its own churchyard; while the parish church lies tucked away on the edge of the village, looking over the fields. By the year 1851, when we get the first and last complete census of religious allegiance ever taken in England, it is clear that the great majority 32

The Church Book of the Arnesby Baptist church (1690-1757) in Leicestershire County Record Office shows members living in Coventry, Northampton, Leicester, Rothwell, Fridaybridge (Cambs.), and Ramsey (Hunts.). These were evidently subsidiary or associated churches of Arnesby; the Coventry members at least later established their own church (1710).


123

of these decayed markets, in all parts of the country, have become centres of Nonconformity. There were few without at least one Dissenting chapel, and in many places there were two, three, four or even more.33 Bottesford itself was not untypical in 1851 in having four Dissenting chapels within it, as well as the large parish church, for a population of less than 1,500 souls. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of all in the nineteenth century was the decayed market town of Haxey, in Licolnshire. Here, to serve about 2,000 inhabitants, there were in 1851 no fewer than 12 Methodist churches. I forbear to describe the many subtle gradations and subdivisions of Methodism represented in these bodies. Another interesting characteristic of many former market towns was their development, during the nineteenth century, as small industrial centres. Once again there is little doubt that this was often in some way connected with the relative freedom of their society. The industrial village was one of the most characteristic forms of local community in England at this time, far more so than it is today. Even in southern counties like Kent, which are commonly thought of as agricultural in the nineteenth century, there was a fair sprinkling of semi-industrial villages.34 In Leicestershire and Northamptonshire one scarcely needs to emphasize their importance in the local landscape; for many of them are still so obviously with us. Yet there were once many more industrial villages in both these Midland counties than there are today: places like Somerby and Billesdon in the heart of east Leicestershire, for example, or Walton and Gilmorton near Lutterworth, or Brixworth and King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire: a century ago all these, and many other places now wholly rural or residential, were industrial as well as farming centres. Though certainly not all of these industrial villages had once been markets, it is remarkable how many, on close inspection, turn out to have been so. In Leicestershire a typical example is Kegworth, a few miles from Loughborough, where in the 1860s the inhabitants were employed not only in farming but in framework-knitting, basket-making, embroidery-work, malting, and brewing. In Northamptonshire, a typical decayed market which developed into an industrial village, and still remains one, is Irthlingborough. Here in the 1860s the inhabitants were engaged in lacemaking, parchment-making, and the manufacture of boots and shoes.35 In fact much of the Northamptonshire shoe industry and the Leicestershire hosiery industry was at this time concentrated in little decayed markets like Irthlingborough and Kegworth. It is unfortunate that at present we know very little about the economy of 33

See Table 3 (p. 125) for details of the distribution of chapels in market centres. For example, in the Wealden parish of High Halden there were in the 1830s 'many manufactories' of 'common eartheware', and a hone-making industry, whilst marble and 'crownstone' were also worked. - Lewis, op. cit., sub Halden, High. There were also many brewery villages, such as Hadlow and Wateringbury. 35 Wilson, op. cit., sub Kegworth and Irthlingborough. 34

124 Landscape and Community in England most of these settlements between their decay as market towns, usually before the seventeenth century, and their emergence as small industrial communities in the nineteenth. This is one of the many fields of historical study in which an enormous amount still remains to be discovered. What exactly did their inhabitants do for a living during this long hiatus in their history? Were they all engaged in farming, or was there throughout these centuries a variety of small crafts and local trades to occupy them? The answers to these questions must doubtless vary a good deal from place to place and county to county; but a fair number of them may have borne some resemblance to the little decayed town of Hanslope, a centre of both farming ar;d local industry in north Buckinghamshire.36 Hanslope had disappeared as a market certainly by the late seventeenth century, and by the end of the eighteenth much of its ancient market place may have already been filled in with shops and houses. With probably more than 1,000 inhabitants, however, it was still, in the 1790s, much the largest settlement in the neighbourhood. At that time two-thirds of its menfolk seem to have been principally engaged in farming; but the remaining third consisted of a wide variety of retailers and craftsmen, a few professional people, and a group of lace-dealers. It was these lace-dealers who organized the local industry of Hanslope. The making of lace was done chiefly by the women, in their cottages; but it was also undertaken by the boys and girls of the village, and possibly by the menfolk at certain seasons. The Hanslope children were sent to the lace-schools to learn the craft at the age of five years, and by the time they were 11 or 12 they were said to be sufficiently skilled to be able to support themselves. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hanslope, we thus find a former market town which had transformed itself into a kind of industrial centre, and yet still retained a good deal of its agrarian character. That transformation was evidently well under way by the end of the seventeenth century, when the Lacemakers' Petition to the House of Commons in 1698 claimed - no doubt with some exaggeration - that there were 830 lacemakers in the parish.37 These are a few of the features one might expect to find in the old market towns of England before about 1870, and more particularly in the decayed ones. Such places were only one of many different types of community in the English countryside. The features I have described, moreover, were not their only characteristics, and I have perforce discussed the markets of four 36

The following account is based on an analysis of the entries for Hanslope and neighbouring parishes in the Buckinghamshire Posse Comitatus of 1798, in the Buckinghamshire County Record Office, Aylesbury; and on Lewis, op. cit., sub Hanslope. The Posse Comitatus lists the names and occupations of male inhabitants liable for service in the county militia. Lacemaking was said to be still 'extensively carried on' in Hanslope in the 1860s, as it was in many places in north Buckinghamshire and west Northamptonshire. -Wilson, op. cit., sub Hanslope; cp. the entries for Moulton (Northants.), Towcester, Brixworth. 37 Case of the Lacemakers in Relation to the Importation of Foreign Lace, [1698], p. 3.


12 5

or five counties only. Yet it does seem that these places tended to form cells of a particular kind of life with a distinctive form of social organization, and often of topography, and sometimes a surprisingly independent existence. By and large they were freer communities than many of the purely agricultural villages around them; dominated rather by small freeholders than by powerful landlords; more varied in their society than mere farming villages, more diverse in their occupations, often more industrial during their later years, usually much more Nonconformist, and sometimes more given to lawless pursuits. The tendency to lawlessness I have not touched on, and it was not everywhere apparent amongst them. But it was a pronounced feature particularly of the boundary markets, and of a number of the later towns, such as Deal and Whitstable in Kent, that originated on extraparochial tracts or stretches of manorial waste.38 The comparative study of communities in different areas of the country in this way has become one of the basic tasks of English local history as we understand it at Leicester. Looking back over the past generation we can, I think, see the development of three distinct yet complementary trends in the historiography of provincial society. Some notable work has been devoted to whole regions or counties, as in the case of Joan Thirsk's study, English Peasant Farming: the Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times (1957). Other equally important work has been devoted to the detailed reconstruction of individual communities, such as W. G. Hoskins's study of Wigston Magna in The Midland Peasant: an Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (1957). A third approach has involved systematic investigation of specific types of local community, such as Maurice Beresford undertook in New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales and Gascony (1967). These three approaches do not cover all that has been published, and they are in no sense rivals or substitutes: each is needed to deepen our understanding of the past. Yet the recognition that there are distinct types or species of urban and rural community, and the value of studying them on a comparative basis whether they are market centres, planted towns, deserted villages, 38 This topic would repay further investigation. As a town Whitstable was a late boundary settlement and did not emerge till the eighteenth century. It developed along the shore, nearly a mile from the original centre, and was for long called 'Whitstable Street' in contradistinction to 'Church Street', the original settlement inland. Much of Whitstable Street was in fact not in Whitstable parish but in Seasalter, and was not under the jurisdiction of the local constables and J.P.s, but under the borough of Harwich in Essex. This peculiarity enabled a kind of 'free trade' community to develop, based on fishing, the coal trade, and smuggling. In Hasted's time most of the 80 houses in the Street had been built within living memory and Whitstable was rapidly expanding. The inhabitants were 'thriving, though of an inferior condition in life, and coarse trades, consisting mostly of those employed in the fishery and oyster dredging, the coal trade, the passage-hoys to and from London, and in the shops which supply the whole of them with the necessaries of life, and above all the illicit trade of smuggling.' - Hasted, op. cit., VlII, pp.506-7, 51314.

126 Landscape and Community in England squatters' settlements, woodland parishes, or the like - seems to me one of the more illuminating historical developments of recent years. I am not suggesting that it is wholly novel, or that it can ever supersede the study of individual places or entire regions; but it enables us to see individual places in perspective, and to identify some of those general themes in provincial society which transcended regional boundaries. Taken in isolation, many of the market towns discussed in this paper - surviving and decayed - may seem unimportant. The point to grasp is that, taken as a whole, they represented a kind of life which was once profoundly characteristic of the English economy, a kind of society which focussed the interests of the countryside, and moulded the mentality of generations of provincial people.

APPENDIX

Table 1: Market Origins in Kent and Suffolk

Total 1

Total 16

39 21 9 6 22 14

Suffolk 10 2 64 14 3 — 1 8

98

102

200

Kent 6 1

Before 1086 12th century 13th century 1300-1348 1349-1400 15th century 16th century Date not known1

3 103 35 12 6 3 22

Medieval or earlier; in several cases prescriptive. Sittingbourne and Newington-next-Milton. These two places are not included in the discussion in the text, where a total of 96 medieval markets is mentioned for Kent. Both were late-sixteenth-century grants. 2


127

1

Table 2: Markets and Property Patterns, I860 Gloucestershire

Kent

—

—

2

2

13

19

4

10

28

74

13

20

8

7

21

69

20

54

14

9

44

141

6

3

2

3

7

21

Total of III & IV

33

74

22

16

65

210

Grand total

52

96

30

31

102

311

I Property in one hand II Property in few hands III Property subdivided IV Property much subdivided Inadequate information

Leicester- Northampton- Suffolk shire shire

2

Total

6

1 The table is based on information derived from the Property Returns of 1860 as summarized, under each parish, in J. M. Wilson, The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, 6 vols., 1870. All known medieval markets, whether surviving or extinct in 1860, are included. In each county there are a number of places for which information about property is not conclusive, and which can only be categorized provisionally. For most of the sizable towns still existing in 1860, for example, no information is given; but it seems safe to assume that property was 'much subdivided' in places of this kind. For 21 places, however, I have not felt justified in making any categorization.

Table 3: Markets and Nonconformity, 18511

No chapel One chapel Two chapels Three or more chapels Inadequate information Total 1

Gloucestershire

Kent

Leicestershire

Northamptonshire

Suffolk

Total

11 9 6

22 33 10

3 7 3

6 6 9

40 29 9

82 84 37

20

21

16

10

17

84

6

10

1

—

7

24

52

96

30

31

102

311

The table is based on the 1851 census. All medieval market towns, whether surviving or extinct in 1851, are included. Of the 82 markets where there was no Nonconformist chapel, 56 (68 per cent) had become 'estate villages' by this date, with their land in the hands of a few large proprietors or a single proprietor. Of the 79 former market towns in the five counties which had become 'estate villages' by this time, 56 (71 per cent) had no organized Dissent of any kind.

NOTE TO CHAPTER 7

The reference numbers in the footnotes to chapter seven relate to the numbered documents printed in my Suffolk and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660, Suffolk Records Society, III, 1960, pp. 37-129.

ABBREVIATIONS Add. CCAM CCC CJ CSPD DNB E.88.15

Additional Manuscripts, British Museum. Calendar of the Committee for Advance of Money. Calendar of the Committee for Compounding. Commons' Journals. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic. Dictionary of National Biography. A Declaration and Ordinance of the Lords and Commons .. .for the associating of the severall Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, Isle of Ely, Hertford, and County of the City of Norwich ... Also a Declaration and Engagement of the said Counties . . ., February 1643. E.114.36 Speciall Passages . . ., 23-30 August 1642. E.202.39 An exact and true Diurnall . . ., 22-29 August 1642. E.301.3 A true Relation of the Araignment ofeighteene Witches ... at St Edmundsbury . . ., 1645. E.393.7 Four Petitions to his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax (from Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, Bucks., and Herts.), June 1647. E.444.7 Mercurius Britanicus . . ., 16-25 May 1648. E.448.13 For the Right Worshipful the Knights and Gentlemen Committees for the County of Suffolke, 1648. [The Committee's published accounts.] Egerton MS Egerton Manuscript, British Museum. ESRO Ipswich and East Suffolk Record Office. Everitt, Committee of Kent Alan Everitt, The County Committee of Kent in the Civil War, Leicester, Occasional Papers, No. 9, 1957. F &R C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 16421660,1911. GEC G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 1910-1959. HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports. ICR Ipswich Corporation Records, Ipswich and East Suffolk Record Office. Kingston A. Kingston, East Anglia and the Great Civil War, 1897. LJ Lords' Journals. PRO Manchester Papers, Public Record Office. Reyce Suffolk in the XVIIth Century: the Breviary of Suffolk by Robert Reyce, 1618, ed. Lord Francis Hervey, 1902. SP State Papers, Public Record Office.

7

SUFFOLK AND THE GREAT REBELLION 1640-1660 7. THE COMMUNITY OF SUFFOLK IN THE CIVIL

WAR

Few events in English history have gathered more legends than the Civil War, and in few regions is its traditional interpretation more distinct than in East Anglia. 'In these counties,' says the historian of the Eastern Association, 'arose the one man [Cromwell] whose acts were destined to colour all our subsequent history; and here arose, too, the ever-victorious Ironsides, who with the "Soldier's Pocket Bible" in their knapsacks, went forth with sturdy purpose and resistless valour . . . to carry the Parliamentary cause to victory at Marston Moor and Naseby. . . These men of the Fenlands . . . were prepared to judge the king, or rather his ministers, by principles of government; . . . the bulk of the people in these Eastern Counties were emphatically against the king and the bishops. . . Here, if anywhere, was to be found in a pre-eminent degree that "depository of the sacred fire of liberty" which history has justly credited to the old Puritan stock. . .n Similar sentiments were expressed by Thomas Carlyle and W. D. Macray; and they survive, in a modified form, in the more temperate pages of S. R. Gardiner and C. H. Firth. Historical legends are easier to ridicule than to reconstruct. In the present instance there is a good deal of truth in the traditional story. Probably in no other shire was support for Parliament more widespread than in Suffolk. The number of royalists and 'delinquents' in the county was extraordinarily small: a mere 75 families, or 98 individuals, in comparison with over 500 in a superficially similar county such as Kent. Less than 10 per cent of the gentry of Suffolk were sequestrated, in contrast with over 60 per cent in the latter county. In all degrees of society large numbers of people were animated by a genuine dread of royalism and episcopacy. When all allowance is made for the rigging of petitions, it remains significant that 13,000 Suffolk people are said to have signed a petition containing a clause against Bishop Wren.2 The incidents at Long Melford in 1642, when 'many thousands swarm'd to the pulling downe o f . . . a gallant seat belonging to the Countesse of Rivers . . .', and at Stoke-by-Nayland, when 'Sir Francis Mannocke's house was pillaged of all goods, and as is said not his writings spared . . . nor his dogs', bear witness to a dread of popery among Suffolk country folk of exceptional intensity. 'This Furie,' said the Earl of Warwick's steward concerning the former, 'was not only in the rabble, but many of the better sort behav'd themselves as if there had been a disolution of all government; no man could remaine in his owne house without feare, nor bee abroad with safetie.'3 1

2 3

Kingston, 2, 3.

CJ, II, 404.

Francis Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, 1779, II, xii, 23; Camden Society, LXVI, Diary of John Rons, Incumbent of Santon Downham, Suffolk, 1856, 122.2.

130


In the clamour for ecclesiastical reform, moreover, Suffolk was frequently in the lead: perhaps nowhere, except in London, did the dream of the New Jerusalem seem more vivid. Though we must beware of simplifying the causes behind the emigration to America, which were largely due to agricultural and industrial distress, there can be little doubt that a passionate desire to establish the divine commonwealth was also present.1 It was with similar enthusiasm that great families like the Barnardistons approached the issues of 1640; and the same spirit survived among Suffolk factors and merchants so late as 1660, when all hope of realizing such aspirations in England as a whole was extinguished. In describing the character of members returned to the Convention Parliament for London, a Suffolk merchant told his friends at home that 'the 3 first [are] very choyce men for godlyness and a good life . . . the last is not much noted about religion, but ever countenanced good ministers, was present at the proclaiming the Act for abolishing Kingly Government, and deeply ingaiged in Bishops' Lands. . .' 'It is verry much wisht and hoped,' wrote another, 'that the Countrys will every where take incouragment from this unanimous and joyfull election, to beesterr themselves for a sober and pious election, and that Ipswich will not bee the backwardest in there zeale in this particuler, both as to the towne and County choyce. . . ' * . . . I understood to my great content,' a Suffolk maltster wrote to his wife, 'that the City had chosen 4 principall men: 3 very pious and against Bishops and the 4th no Episcopall man... God grant that in the countreys honest men may unite and be couragious, and have successe after the manner of this City. . .'2 Yet the conventional account of the part played by East Anglia in the Civil War also calls for modification. The strength of puritanism and the influence of Cromwell have been exaggerated. Cromwell was not the architect, still less the builder, of the Association. In 1643 a minor gentleman of Huntingdon had little weight with the Barringtons, Bacons, and Barnardistons of Essex and East Anglia. His own county was not one of the original members of the Association.3 He never entirely overcame the suspicion of its leaders, and his proposals for the New Model were flatly opposed by them.4 We do not and cannot know, as Kingston asserts, that 'the bulk of the people in these Eastern Counties were emphatically against the king and the bishops.' There were limits to enthusiasm everywhere. Within the ranks of the New Model itself, according to Richard Baxter, 'the greatest part of the common soldiers, especially of the foot, were ignorant men of little religion. . .'5 In the county of Suffolk there were many occasions when 'the 1

The subject is treated in N. C. P. Tyack, Migration from East Anglia to New England before 1660, London Ph.D. thesis, 1951, and A. P. Newton, Colonizing activities of the English Puritans, New Haven, 1914. There is also much information to be found in the Winthrop Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society). 8 SP 29/32, Nos. 105,132, 110. 3 Huntingdon was originally associated with Derby, Rutland, Nottingham, Bedford, and Buckingham. F. & R., I, 49 (December 1642). 4 No. 88. 5 Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. M. Sylvester, 16%, 53.

Suffolk and the Great Rebellion

131

people' were not won over without a little compulsion or judicious flattery by the Committee of Both Kingdoms; there were many days 'apoynted a fast by the Parliament' which were 'not kept by all, but very few. . .n In 1643 the assessments for Manchester's army were 'in many parts of the County ... ill paied, to the great preiudice of the present service . . .' When soldiers fell 'sick and weake in the service, or beinge wounded returned home to there freinds in this County, . . . if there freinds be poore and not able to relieve them they usually meet with ill entertainment from there severall parishes to there greate discoragment . . .'2 Under the influence of knights and squires loyalty varied from parish to parish, in Suffolk as elsewhere: at Brome, for instance, under the Cornwallises, at Ickworth under the Herveys, at Stoke-by-Nayland under the Mannocks, or at Hintlesham under the Timperleys. In short, whenever we come in contact with 'the people' we find the same tangled web of local custom, feud, and prejudice as elsewhere, shot through with only an occasional thread of political principle or religious scruple.3 The same obstinate world of custom formed the basis of parties in Suffolk as in other counties: against its shores the good intentions of king, of Parliament, and of Cromwell too often beat in vain. It would also be misleading to suppose that the county was devoid of royalist sympathy: it is a striking fact that the yield from sequestrated estates in Suffolk between 1643 and 1649 was higher than anywhere else. It totalled £40,917, compared with £33,268 for London, £28,651 for Essex, £22,618 for Kent, and £21,750 for Norfolk.4 In retrospect, it is true, the adherence of the South and East to Parliament in 1642 seems inevitable. But contemporaries were less certain of its loyalty than we are. In June 1640 Sir Thomas Jermyn wrote to three Suffolk men, including two prominent members of the Civil War County Committee, that the king 'doubts not but you will be ready with all care and diligence to advance his service . . . his Majesty having ever had a very good opinion of the love and duty of that County . . .'6 There were always some in Suffolk who 'kept intelligence' with those in 'the king's quarters', and in 1648 there was reputed to be a 'considerable army of resolved men' in the county.6 In Bury, Aldeburgh, 1

Essex Record Office, B/7 B, 38. 1502, f. 80 r.; cf. if. 84 v., 98 v., 109 v., 130 r., 139 r. 1 am much indebted to Mr James Williams for lending me his transcript of this MS. 2 Nos. 23, 56. 3 Cf. Section III. 4 SP 28/216, Account Book of Samuel Avery and others. Figures here and elsewhere are generally given to the nearest pound. The figure for Colchester has been included in the Essex total, and for Canterbury in that for Kent; the Suffolk total given in the account book is wrongly added, and is here corrected. Figures for other counties include: Hunts. £16,628, Middlesex £10,650, Beds. £9,659, Herts. £6,952, Cambs. and Ely £6,901, Westminster £5,422, Surrey, £3,246. According to the accounts published by the Suffolk Committee in 1648, the yield from Sequestrations was £42,568 between October 1643 and September 1647; it may be that the figures quoted above relate only to the two-thirds paid into the central government. See also note 5, p. 132. 5 HMC, Reports, XIII, iv, 460. 6 Cf. CSPD, 1644-5, 624; HMC, Reports, XIII, i, 462. There is much evidence of royalism among Suffolk clergy in the Minute Book of Manchester's Committee for Scandalous Ministers for Suffolk, preserved in Lincoln Public Library. I am much indebted to Sir Francis Hill for lending me his transcript of this manuscript.

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and Lowestoft, not to mention towns in other eastern counties, such as Cambridge, Lynn, and Crowland, there was a powerful group in favour of the king throughout the years 1642-60. In August 1642 Bury St Edmunds had 'beene in great feares a long time by reason the magazine of this part of the County was in an inconveniente place', arid the key in untrustworthy hands.1 In the same month 'a great tumult [was] raised at Hadley and Ipswich of divers ill-affected and desperate persons, doing much mischiefe to the inhabitants of the said townes, pretending they were for the king and would not be governed by a few Puritans . . .'2 Despite its supposedly impregnable puritanism the port of Ipswich was still said in 1647 to 'desire the king'.3 During the summer of 1648 there were risings all over the eastern counties, at Bury, Linton, Newmarket, Colchester, Thetford, Norwich, Stowmarket, and Cambridge. In 1656 'the spiritts of people [were] most straingely heightened and moulded into a very great aptness to take the first hint for an insurrection . . .'4 There is little cause for surprise in the fact that Suffolk, like other counties, welcomed the Restoration in 1660. The really distinctive feature of Suffolk's attitude is not simply the strength of parliamentarianism or any supposed absence of royalism, but the almost complete absence of a middle party. There may well have been more sympathy with the via media than we know of: with the great nameless company of those who were neither royalist nor parliamentarian, neither Laudian nor puritan. It was a company which rarely defined its ideals in any political manifesto, and its evidence lies entombed in family letters and diaries, of which for Suffolk there are almost none. But the conclusion that it never organized itself into a party is inescapable. Essentially Suffolk was a shire of two parties only. In Kent more than nine out of ten delinquents were sequestrated for taking part in local rebellions: they were not sufficiently 'royalist' to leave the county for Oxford, and yet they did not sympathize with Parliament. In Suffolk, by contrast, almost half those sequestered were recusants, most of whom had left the county, and a further 40 per cent were in arms with the king.5 There were virtually no leaders left in the county desirous or capable of sparking off any incipient opposition to the Committee. The few recusants who remained were too busy devising means of saving their estates, and too deeply suspected of treachery by the common people (far more so than in Kent), to provide effective leadership. They clung to one another to support their tottering fortunes, but their only hope of survival lay in strict political quietism. There was therefore no real attempt by the king to influence Suffolk: there was no spontaneous local activity to build upon. It may have been 1 2 3

E. 114. 36. E. 202. 39.

Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, ed. 0. Ogle and W. H. Bliss, 1872,1, 358. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe .. ., ed. T. Birch, 1742, V, 328. 5 This fact, coupled with the comparative efficiency of administration in Suffolk, helps to explain the large yield from sequestrations: recusants were not allowed to compound in order to regain their estates. It was also because in Suffolk sequestrated property was 'let at so considerable a value as very few counties in England have the like ...:' where farming was efficient, rents were high. - CCC, 316. 4


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true, as a royalist claimed, that in 1648 'the commons of Suffolke were so dispos'd to our assistance that there were above foure thousand men readie at an houre's warning to march to our succour, with soe greate a sense of our sufferings and their owne succeeding miseries that . . . one of the most considerable gentlemen of their countrie . . . thought they would have forced him out of his house to have lead them.'1 But the fact is that, while the whole county of Kent was arming itself 'in defence of its liberties', and a large party in Sussex and elsewhere supported them, the corresponding rising at Bury woke no effective response in Suffolk. There were too many men like Thomas Staunton of Horringer, who 'after the warre was ended in [16]46 . . . returned back into Suffolke, which is my country,... in hopes of an opportunity of doing his Majesty further service. But then his affayres beeing reduced to that desperate lost condition, and the tyranny and oppression of the rebells growing furious and insupportable, I did . . . apply myselfe to merchant's affayres, and . . . setled myselfe in Spaine . . .'2 Neither was there at any time in Suffolk that hesitancy or procrastination which beset the gentry elsewhere. The obstinate questioning which produced the Kentish petition of 1642 and the appeals of Somerset and other counties on behalf of moderate episcopacy were not echoed in Suffolk. The new deputy lieutenants were active four months before those in Kent could be induced to accept a parliamentary commission. The anxious letters sent from one manor-house to another by families like the Oxindens, when fighting broke out, would have seemed an impious distrust in providence to the Barnardistons. During the war there was practically none of that 'ancient amity and good will', among 'men of different opinions in these dividing times', which characterized Kent.3 There was apparently little attempt on the part of committeemen to defend their delinquent relatives. The opposing parties were implacable from the outset.'. . . Let me tel you,' said Brampton Gurdon to John Winthrop when the Short Parliament was dissolved in 1640, 'it comforteth the hartes of the honest men of bothe housen that thay yelded not to geve a pene to help the k[ing] in his intended ware agenst the Skottes . . .'4 Or take the words of a Cavalier at the siege of Colchester in 1648. The royalists, he says, had now 'found by sad experience the ruine which had overtaken us in the former warrs by our lazines, which was called moderation, and indifference to the cause, which was stil'd a pious distrust in the arme of flesh; but though it pleased God sometimes to give success extraordinarily to the justice of the cause, yet ordinarily he sells it to the Industrie of men.'5 With the initial tendency of the county leaders to puritanism, the flight of the royalists to Oxford, and the absence of a middle party to divide loyalties, it was natural that the composition of the Suffolk county committee should remain remarkably stable between 1642 and 1660. The 1

HMC, Reports, XII, ix, 26. HMC, A. G. Finch, 1,164. 8 Add. MS.44846, f. 26 v. 4 Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, IV, 163&-1644, 1944, 243. 8 HMC, Reports, XII, ix, 26. z

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frequent fluctuations and the clear breach in continuity of membership which characterized such bodies in other counties were not altogether absent from Suffolk, but they were less remarkable. In Kent not more than a dozen of the committeemen of 1647 were still sitting three years later: in Suffolk no fewer than 52 of the 61 members of June 1647 continued to sit after the king's death. From the beginning of the war the leading group within the committee was composed of the principal county families, and they continued to dominate the committee until the Protectorate or even the Restoration. Among them, for instance, were Sir William Spring of Pakenham, Sir John Wentworth of Somerleyton, Sir Robert Crane of Chilton, Sir William Playters of Sotterley, Sir Simonds D'Ewes of Stowlangtoft, Sir John Rous of Henham, together with three members of the Bedingfield family, four of the Parkers, Brookes, Norths, Gurdons, and Barnardistons, and seven of the Bacons. Of these men, most of the Bacons, together with the Barnardistons, the Bedingfields, the Brookes, the Gurdons, the Norths, the Parkers, the Rouses, the Springs, and the Wentworths survived beyond 1650. They included some of the wealthiest men in the county. Sir Roger North, for instance, is reputed to have had an income of £2,000 p.a., John Gurdon an income of £1,400, Sir Simonds D'Ewes of £1,300-£1,500, Sir William Playters of £3,000, and Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston, perhaps the wealthiest man in Suffolk, of £4,000. Very few of the royalists were supported by estates on this scale; perhaps only the Jermyns of Rushbrooke, whose property, scattered over three counties, was reputedly worth £1,420-£1,500 p.a.1 Apart from the Jermyns, the Mannocks, and Sir John Pettus of Chediston, few Suffolk delinquents were of comparable social standing with the leading committeemen: only 14 of them were titled, in contrast with over 70 in Kent. The Committee of Suffolk was in fact a kind of exclusive county club comprising most of the brains and much of the wealth of the shire. Its leaders were often closely connected with the dominant group in Parliament, or like Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston, Sir Roger North, and Sir William Playters belonged to that phalanx of senior members who looked back nostalgically to the golden age of Queen Elizabeth, and forward to an age of solid, ordered, puritan piety.2 Such a club was exceptionally difficult to break up, and it is not surprising if it supplied much of the initiative behind the Eastern Association, and led its sister-counties to oppose the New Model reforms in 1645. It is the support which the Committee of Suffolk gave to the Eastern Association which provides its chief claim to remembrance. There are some indications that Suffolk was a leading partner in the Association; and if the victory of Parliament was in the last resort due to superior organization, Suffolk can claim a not negligible share in that achievement. The county gentry put at the service of the Association an administrative machine built up over the past three generations and a wealth of local precedent 1

M. F. Keeler, The Long Parliament, 1954, 96, 156, 200, 236, 287, 306. Barnardiston and North were born in 1588, Playters in 1590, Sir Robert Crane in 1586, John Gurdon in 1595, and Sir Simonds D'Ewes in 1602. Keeler, op. cit., 96, 145,156, 199, 286, 306. 2


13 5

and experience which perhaps few counties could rival. The strength of the Association was not built up overnight: it owed much to the hard-work, the commonsense, and the administrative capacities of its members. Otherwise there would have been no Committee at Cambridge, no voluntary submission of the counties to its authority, and no victory at Marston Moor or Naseby. It was the absence of such an organization which rendered the South-Eastern Association negligible in comparison.1 Such distinctive features of Suffolk and the Eastern Association constitute a difference of temperament from other counties and associations which in the last resort can no more be explained than differences of personality. Yet, given the initial tendencies of the county, there was much in the Suffolk economy to encourage the spread of parliamentarian sympathy, to preclude the development of a moderate party, to produce a capable administration, and broaden the outlook of the gentry. Like that of other eastern counties, the economy of Suffolk, both rural and urban, was exceptionally advanced. Ipswich was one of the largest towns in England, and its livelihood, unlike that of Exeter or Canterbury, was entirely based on trade. Perhaps seven or eight thousand people were gathered within its fourteen ancient parishes, governed by a corporation jealous of its privileges, sufficiently independent to develop a distinct burghal hierarchy of its own, and with an outlook as insular and puritanical as any in England. Families like the Daundys had been prominent members of the Ipswich corporation for over a century; they were less inclined to sever urban connexions and found minor landed families than in ecclesiastical cities like Exeter, and more inclined to impose their political views upon the county. There was, however, no fundamental antagonism between port and shire; for in few counties had the interpenetration of mercantile and agricultural enterprise gone so far. The covetous desire of factors and merchants, 'traversing all the countries and kingdomes of this inferiour world for gain', runs like a refrain through Reyce's Breviary of Suffolk. For 'such is the covetuousnesse of this world that, nott content with any moderate or large bounds of gaine it daily still desireth and labours for more.'2 Enterprise was not confined to mercantile families in the towns, however; it was hardly less prevalent among the gentry themselves. All five brothers of Sir Thomas Barnardiston of Kedington were merchants: Nathaniel, Samuel, and Arthur in London, and Pelatia and William in Turkey.3 There can have been few families without close commercial connexions, and in the agricultural exploitation of their estates Suffolk landowners were as ardent as any. The county was one of the most intensively farmed in England, and its traditional specialization in dairy produce had been stimulated during the preceding century, both by the Henrician wars and by the expansion of the export market. There were probably many families, like the Rouses of Henham, who owed their wealth to the export of Suffolk cheeses in scores and hundreds to Calais, 1 Cf. Alan Everitt, Kent and its Gentry, 1640-60: a Political Study, London Ph.D. thesis, 1957, chapter V. 2 Reyce, 33, 40. 3 Samuel Fairclough, The Saints' Worthinesse . . ., 1653, Address to Lady Barnardiston, etc.

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Boulogne, and Berwick for the royal armies, or to London and the Low Countries in time of peace. The gentry were neither absentees nor faineants: every week Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston or his son Sir Thomas might be seen in the market-place at Haverhill or Clare. Their purchases took them to fairs all over Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and to Bedford, Norfolk, Essex, Lincoln, and London.1 They were among the 'many which, with a very wise and wary foresight, do much yearely improve and increase their estate . . .'2 Other counties shared a similar prosperity in this period; but the East Anglian economy had perhaps come of age a generation earlier than others. It was ready to receive the first, and puritan, phase of the reformation while other parts of England still remained 'medieval'. By the time the true anglican tradition of Jewel and Hooker had been formed, puritanism was already deeply rooted in the soil of Suffolk, not only among factors and merchants, but among the gentry. The gentility which consists in learning, valour, and justice, said Reyce, is here 'crowned with the purity of true religion and godly life, which is heere entertayned and embraced among this sort [and] is the onely and principall cause why so many worthy familie have so long time remaned within so narrow a precinct.'3 'In few other counties,' says Dr Collinson, 'did the Puritan Movement own such wholehearted and powerful patrons.' It had 'much wider implications than the simple practice and protection of puritan religion. Puritanism infused their whole government [of the county] with something of the theocracy of Geneva . . .' When Queen Elizabeth attempted to obstruct its course by means of the judges at assizes, the gentry were 'greved in their harts to se the judges . . . so mutch to abuse and littel to esteme the persons of most valewe' in the shire.4 The opposition to the crown which in many counties became centred in a small clique thus became in Suffolk the normal tradition; and by 1640 that tradition was ineradicable. Norths, Waldegraves, Parkers, Heveninghams, Barnardistons, Bacons, Gurdons, Rouses, Barkers, Playters: by the time war broke out these and other puritan families had governed the county for three generations. In 1642 they came to form the backbone of the county committee; and they continued to dominate it until the Protectorate.5 Of these families the wealthiest and most important were the Barnardistons. Suffolk was not a county, like Wiltshire, dominated by a single great peer, nor, like Kent, by a knot of twenty or thirty families of comparable standing. It was an oligarchy: but one in which the Barnardistons stood out as unquestioned leaders, as much by their moral stature as Puritans as by their riches or antiquity. Originating at the Suffolk village whose name they bore, they had emerged into prominence at adjacent Kedington during the sixteenth century. By 1640 they were headed by Sir Nathaniel and his son 1

Essex Record Office, B/7 B. 38. 1502, passim. Reyce, 60. 3 Ibid., 59. 4 P. Collinson, The Puritan Classical Movement in the reign of Elizabeth I, London Ph.D. thesis, 1957, II, 868, 875, 917. I owe much in the above account to Dr Collinson's illuminating account of 'Puritanism and the Gentry in Suffolk, 1575-1585.' 5 Reyce, 90; F. & R., passim. 2


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Sir Thomas, and the reverence with which father and son were regarded was altogether extraordinary. 'Consider [Sir Nathaniel] as pater familias,' said Samuel Fairclough, 'the governour and master of a family: . . . he permitted no known profane person to stand before him, or wait upon him . . . He had at one time ten or more such servants of that eminency for piety and sincerity, that I never yet saw their like at one time, in any family in the nation . . . truely they made his house a spirituall church and temple, wherein were dayly offered up the spirituall sacrifices of reading the Word, and prayer, morning and evening, of singing psalmes constantly after every meal, before any servant did rise from the table . . .' Towards his children Sir Nathaniel 'executed the office of an heavenly father to their souls . . . and many times . . . he would take them into his closet, and there pray over them, and for them. If at any time they had offended him, so singular was his moderation and wisdome toward them, that he would never reprove them, much lesse correct them in his displeasure, but still waited the most convenient time, untill which time they seldome discerned that he was angry by any other effect but his silence.'1 But it was as a 'publick person ... for his countrey, and the defence of the just liberties thereof, that Sir Nathaniel was most renowned. '. . . He did not refuse voluntarily to expose himself to a gulph of hazard and sufferings: witnesse his suffering under the imposition of ship-money, coat and conductmoney, and the loan; for refusing whereof he was long time imprisoned in the gate-house ... Witnesse also his fidelity and integrity in the discharge of that greatest trust of all, I mean his service to his countrey as knight of the shire and member of the Parliament, unto which place he was constantly chosen on every occasion; not that he had a patent for the place, as some of his enemies . . . did cast out; but out of the experience and confidence they had of his resolution . . . whereby it came to passe that no sooner was one to be chosen . . . but presently the thoughts, eyes, and resolutions of all men were fixed upon him, and all cried for a Barnardiston, a Bardardiston. Which trust he received upon him, not out of any popular ambition to advance his own greatnesse, . . . nor . . . that he might dominear and trample upon his neighbours . . . but out of a mind and conscience devoted to the service of the Church and commonwealth therein: beyond which neither fear, favour, or flattery could draw him to act, or vote at all, absolutely refusing to be defiled with the king's portion . . .'2 Though allowance must be made for the flattery of a domestic chaplain, it yet remains true that Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston stood out as one of the finest patterns of English puritanism. High-minded, able, public-spirited - and a little intimidating - in character as in family 'he was one of the top-branches amongst our Suffolk-cedars.'3 His was a kind of personality, however, that was absolutely impervious to new ideas. It seems an irony that gentle Suffolk should have encouraged the growth of a religious ideal so little softened by the graces of Christianity 1

Fairclough, op, cit., 17-18. Ibid., 18-19. 3 Ibid., 12.

2

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or humane learning. The clergy were learned: according to Reyce there was 'never a bishop in this realme, nay in Europe' who could boast so many 'religious, grave, reverend, and learned ministers of God's holy Word' in his diocese. But among the laity there is comparatively little trace of that exuberant interest in history, heraldry, language, theology, philosophy, and political science which characterized the community of Kent.1 Men like Barnardiston were far from ignorant; but they seem to have contented themselves with the practical spheres of life, with politics, colonization, and commerce. Their puritanism lacked any questing interest in the past; it looked beyond merely human custom to discover the pattern of that divine commonwealth which they wished to see established. Except D'Ewes and Bacon, few of the leading Suffolk gentry of 1640-60 appear as authors in the Dictionary of National Biography. Reyce might ask 'what can bee more pleasing to the judicious understandinge than plainly to see before him the lively usage of elder times, the alteration of names clean worne outt, the revolution of families now wholly extinguished, the traces of antiquity, the memorials of our honorable ancestors . . .?'2 But Samuel Fairclough did not attach great importance to 'the ancient lines of [Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston's] pedigree, or the antiquity of the family'; the 'honour of his birth' consisted in the remarkable piety of his early childhood.3 There was thus little in the history of Suffolk to modify the uncompromising attitude of the gentry, or to connect them with the traditions of moderate anglicanism. Whereas in Kent there were few gentry without near kinsmen in the Close at Canterbury or Rochester, and more than 60 gentle families who themselves stemmed from clerical stock, in Suffolk there were no cathedral clergy to establish any link with episcopacy, or to propagate a rival tradition to that of Calvin. Except Lady Elizabeth Brooke, there were few who wrote in the pietistic vein of the disciples of Hooker; and Lady Elizabeth was herself a Kentish Culpeper. If there was much in the economy and traditions of Suffolk to promote sympathy with Parliament, there was also something in its social structure. Of the 99 leading families of the Suffolk County Committee, the origins of rather less than three-quarters are traceable with some certainty. Of these only 25, or 32 per cent, had been connected with Suffolk before the Tudor era; a further 25 had settled in the county by 1603, and 28 within the last forty years. Probably the majority of the remaining 21 should be added to the last group, since most of them were merchants. We shall probably not be far wrong in thinking that 70 per cent of the leading Suffolk gentry had arrived in the county since 1500; only three in ten were truly indigenous.4 In Kent, by contrast, nearly three-quarters of the gentry were indigenous 1

Cf. Everitt, op. cit., 22-4. Reyce, 2. 3 Fairclough, op. cit, 12. 4 Reyce, 62-6, cites a list of 60 knights of Henry Ill's reign, and adds: 'such is the injurious vicissitude of this world's revolution that scarce six att this day are heere to bee found in right line discended from any of these brave martiallists'. For information regarding Suffolk family history I am deeply indebted to Mr Norman Scarfe. 8


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to the county, and only one-eighth had settled there since 1603. Although any general hypothesis must remain tentative until a comprehensive survey of the origins of gentle society is undertaken for other counties, there seems a marked connexion between the relative 'antiquity' of the gentry and the political alignment of their county. In Suffolk, where the gentry were mainly comparative newcomers, support for Parliament was widespread and organized opposition to the County Committee was negligible: in Kent, where they were exceptionally static and inbred, opposition to Parliament and the Committee was intense. The connexion must not be pushed too far: there were a number of important exceptions like the Barnardistons. But there is nothing inherently improbable in the hypothesis suggested. It was natural, where families were long rooted in the same locality, that they should support what seemed the conservative side.2 They had seen less of the ways of other 'countries', and were more content with their native customs and traditions. Both from their origins and their far-flung mercantile and colonizing activities, many Suffolk gentry were thus better acquainted with the customs of neighbouring or distant shires than the bulk of the gentry elsewhere. There is still abundant evidence of local feeling; but there was also a considerable body of Suffolk people who were capable of thinking in terms, not only of their native village and county, but of East Anglia as a whole. There were few serious geographical barriers between the seven counties of the Eastern Association. During the past century the vast expansion in agricultural traffic, utilizing East Anglian waterways and serving London and the continent, had done much to further the incipient economic unity of the region.3 Families like the Barnardistons frequently visited other counties; and their estates were notably less confined to the one shire than those of the gentry in Kent. Of 114 Suffolk landowners whose estates have been traced in the 'forties and 'fifties, at least 37 per cent possessed property elsewhere in the eastern counties, a further 9 per cent in London or Middlesex, and 17 per cent in counties farther afield. The estates of not more than one landowner in three lay wholly within the county of Suffolk.4 There must still have been large numbers of minor gentry who rarely went 1

The figures are not exactly comparable, since they include delinquents as well as committeemen. But this does not account for the discrepancy, since Suffolk delinquents were so few. * I do not mean they necessarily supported the king: when he seemed to innovate they tended to oppose him, as in 1640; when Parliament or Cromwell innovated they opposed them. 3

Cf. N. Williams, The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports, 1550-1590, Oxford D.Phil. Thesis, 1952. I am indebted to Dr Williams for his kindness in allowing me to consult this valuable work. 4

This account is based on the records of the Committee for Advance of Money and the Committee for Compounding. Of those with property elsewhere in East Anglia, 16 per cent possessed estates in Norfolk and 13 per cent in Essex. The tendency to dispersal seems to be characteristic of the eastern counties: in a list of 21 Cambridge delinquents and papists, at least 12 apparently had land in other counties . In Kent at this time the estates of many gentry seem to have been confined not only to the one county but to a few adjacent parishes within it.

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beyond their parish or market town. But the success with which the Earl of Manchester welded the seven counties into one whole was not entirely fortuitous: there had been a genuine community of interest between them for at least a century, and probably much longer.

II. THE COUNTY COMMITTEE AND THE EASTERN ASSOCIATION, 1642-1648 (a) The County Committee In its broad outlines the County Committee of Suffolk closely resembled those established in other counties under parliamentary control.1 The first reference to it by name occurs early in September 1642, by which time it had been operating for nearly two months.2 But the striking fact in Suffolk is that a committee of the gentry had existed in all but name for upwards of fifty years before the Civil War; and it was from this body that the county committee itself developed. The deputy lieutenants and justices had been meeting at more or less regular intervals for the transaction of county business at least since the 1590s.3 There can be little doubt that committees in other counties had a similar origin; but the connexion is nowhere more distinct than in Suffolk. It is tempting to think that the idea of committee government may have suggested itself to Parliament from the example of Suffolk: though the evidence does not amount to proof, the suggestion is not improbable, since the county's members were prominent in the parliamentary opposition. The offices of 'committeeman' and 'deputy lieutenant' were in fact two aspects of one authority. Few men appointed to one position were not also appointed to the other. As committeemen they were responsible for the collection of revenue and the general government of the county; as deputy lieutenants they were responsible for military expenditure and for maintaining the 'peace of the county'. The traditions, forms, and precedents of the Committee of Suffolk had thus been worked out many years before the business of war, by necessitating regular meetings at short intervals, metamorphosed the lieutenants' ad hoc meetings into a more or less regular institution. Before the war they had usually met at Stowmarket, where the county musters were held; they had also met at Bury and Ipswich for the east and west divisions of the county. After the war began, the County Committee met only at Bury, and it continued to meet there until 1648. Ipswich was the largest town, and Stowmarket was the most accessible centre for the county as a whole, which like other south-eastern shires - Essex, Hampshire, Kent, and Sussex already possessed two sister 'capitals'. But there were several reasons why Bury should be selected, despite the claims of Ipswich and Stowmarket. It was nearer to the centre of fighting, and it was a protective bulwark to the 1

Cf. Everitt, Committee of Kent, 1957. See, for example, CJ, II, 753; LJ, V, 245. 8 Helmingham Hall MSS., Committee Book of D.L's. and J.P's. 2


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county. It was also open to the royalist influence of the Jermyns, which it was necessary to suppress. And it already bore many of the features of a county town: 'St Edmondsbury is a very beautiful inland town full of rich shops and tradesmen, the streets spacious and the houses well built,' many of them 'inhabited by the gentry, who resort thither from all parts of the country.'1 So early as 1615 there were complaints that the residence of 'knights and gentlemen' in Bury, away from 'their owne bowses, raised the price of victualls' in the town.2 Apart from the County Committee at Bury, there were separate committees, consisting of half-a-dozen or so members, appointed for Bury town, for Aldeburgh, and for Ipswich. Only the last was of much importance. There were also four subcommittees, as there had been before 1640, for the four county divisions of Beccles, Bury, Woodbridge, and Ipswich. Their work was concerned mainly with collecting assessments, and they were composed of the general committeemen resident in the four divisions. For the division of Bury there were occasional meetings at Botesdale and Thurlow, where Bacons and Soames lived; but there is no proof of regular meeting-places, and these subcommittees were less powerful than the similar 'lathal committees' of Kent. There was also, in theory at least, a Sequestration Committee, charged with the administration of estates confiscated from recusants and delinquents. In practice this body was identical with the general County Committee, which does not seem to have concerned itself greatly with the details of sequestration business. It was more efficient to entrust the task to the capable hands of John Base, the Solicitor-General for Sequestrations in Suffolk. Finally, there was the Accounts Committee, set up as in other counties in 1645. Personally, this body was distinct from the general Committee, since its function was to audit its accounts. In some counties a deep rift developed between the two bodies; but in Suffolk the Accounts Committee remained a valued and subservient assistant to the general Committee, charged with the principal task of collecting arrears. The primary function of the general County Committee was the raising of money and troops. If Suffolk had raised the full sum assessed under all ordinances between the outbreak of war and June 1648, it would have contributed upwards of £372,500 (or an average of £62,500 p.a.) to the parliamentary cause, plus an unknown amount due upon the Propositions, the Fifth and Twentieth Parts, and Sequestrations. Between June 1648 and the Restoration the sum due from the county would have been at least £398,333, or an average of £33,300 p.a.3 In fact, Suffolk is probably the only county for which we can estimate with any certainty the actual sum raised. In June 1648 the Accounts Committee published accounts covering the preceding six years, and these show total receipts of £337,971, including £42,568 upon Sequestrations, £37,849 upon the Propositions, and £28,645 1

HMC, Reports, XIII, ii, 265; P. Heylyn, A help to English History, 1709 (first published 1641), 504. 2 Helmingham Hall MSS., Committee Book of D.L's. and J.P's., f. 15. 3 Calculated from ordinances and orders in F. & R., CJ, LJ.

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upon the Fifth and Twentieth Parts.1 There was also a certain amount of revenue contributed in kind, including 20 ounces of plate, 120 quarters of malt, 211 cheeses, 51 firkins of butter, 17 bacon flitches, 3 packs of clothes, and 'some shoes, stockings, and other like necessaries' upon the 'second contribution to Ireland'.2 For Suffolk we are also fortunate in possessing several hundred orders illustrating the expenditure of the money thus raised, and the day-to-day administration of the Committee.3 Apart from the payment of troops, the raising of horses probably occupied more attention than any other single task. Horses were begged, borrowed, or requisitioned all over the countryside, and purchased in scores and hundreds at fairs and markets in Bedfordshire, Cahibridgeshire, Huntingdon, Lincoln, and Northampton. Both horses and troops were billeted in many East Anglian inns, particularly in Cambridge and Ipswich, and at the Christopher, the Wild Man, the Wrestlers, the Crosse Keyes, and 'Goodwife Glover's' in Bury St Edmunds. The carriers of Bury and the watermen on the Ouse and Cam were employed in transporting these troops and horses, and carts and wains were commandeered from Suffolk country folk to convey arms to Cambridge.4 Ammunition and accoutrements were purchased principally in London, but also on occasion from ironmongers who came from the Black Country, 'travelling in the associated counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and the like', and carrying 'such wares as are useful for the Parliament forces, as bits, stirrups, spurs, and other necessaries . . .'5 The care of the sick and wounded was a matter of much concern to the Committee. Injured troops were often unwelcome in their native villages, where they became a burden on the poor rates. There were frequent pleas to Parliament for a definite provision for them. The surgeons of Bury and Ipswich were hard-worked in curing the 'lame and maymed.' There were piteous petitions from orphans, and from widows and 'fatherlesse infants'; the pay of their deceased relatives was invariably in arrear. There were also several payments to distressed ladies from Ireland; and on one occasion the treasurer was ordered to pay £3 to Mr Bevill, 'being a gentleman and much wounded in the Parliament service, and Norffolk having shewed their charitie [to him] already . . .'6 The expenses of this administration are not easy to estimate; the few surviving account books for Suffolk are lacking in detail. In general the high collector was paid Id. in every pound received, and the parish collectors shared a further penny between them. The published accounts of the Committee include a total of £677 spent over a period of six years in collecting and convoying money to London, and in payment of salaries to the treasurer, collectors, receivers, clerks, and messengers. In all probability 1

Totals calculated from accounts in E. 448. 13. The above figures probably underestimate the sums received, since certain accounts (e.g. for Sequestrations) cover a rather shorter period than 1642-48. 2 E. 448. 13, 4. 3 A selection of these is printed in Nos. 62-79. 4 SP 28/243, orders of the Committee. 5 HMC, Earl of Denbigh's MSS., 79. 8 SP 28/243, orders of the Committee.


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there are a number of like payments concealed under other headings in the accounts. Even so it is clear that the administration was more efficient than in Kent, where over £500 was spent on salaries alone in a period of seventeen months.1 The comparative expenses of the committeemen in the two counties are also remarkable. In Kent the committee had spent £3,091 on their 'seraglio' at Knole between January 1644 and June 1645. In Suffolk, Peter Fisher, the 'register' of the Accounts Committee, was 'bold to affirm that I can find but £865 19s. Od. payd to you [the committeemen] for your attendance six yeares as Committees upon the service of the County: and that not out of any moneys raysed by tax upon the County, but payd out of the sequestred estates of delinquents.'2 The housekeeping of the committeemen was thus modest to a degree: the cook was allowed only Is. 6d. for providing 'diet' for each gentleman, 8d. for each of their servants, and 18d. for the ministers who occasionally 'sett att the Committee table . . .' Only at 'the tryall of the witches' in 1645 or at 'the entertainment of the Right Honourable the Earle of Warwicke' did the committee become more free-handed. On the latter occasion they expended 'the somme of five pounds, four shillings, six pence' - of course out of Sequestrations.3 The membership of the committee has already been alluded to.4 As in other counties, there was a considerable number of 'floating members', appointed for a year or two, or for only a few months. Altogether, between February 1643 and January 1660, a total of 219 men sat on the committee at some time or another, although at any one time there were rarely more than 55 committeemen before 1649, or 80 thereafter. It would be rash to assume that this brevity of tenure among the majority was in many cases due to political causes: committeemen were overworked and unpaid, and the office was not always coveted among the farming gentry who comprised the bulk of these 'floating members'. But the striking feature in Suffolk is that from the outset the leading county families formed the dominant group within the committee, and that many of them continued to sit without intermission until the Protectorate. The volte-face in the allegiance of such families between 1648 and 1650 in other counties is not entirely absent in Suffolk; but it is far less marked than elsewhere. There were a number of reasons why this should be so. Generally speaking, so far as we can judge, the puritanism of Suffolk was rather of the 'presbyterian' than the Independent cast. There were many noteworthy Independent families in the county, like the Brewsters of Wrentham; but the presbyterian classical system instituted in Suffolk was supported by almost all the leading committee families - Parkers, Bacons, Brookes, Rouses, Norths, Springs, Gurdons, and Barnardistons among them.5 That being so, one would have expected a clear breach of allegiance between 1

Everitt, Committee of Kent, 38. E. 448. 13,1. 8 SP 28/243, orders of the Committee. 4 See pp. 133-4. 5 Cf. The County ofSuffolke divided into fourteene Precincts for Classicall Presbyteries ... 1647, where these families are shown to be members of the presbyteries of East Bergholt, Ipswich, Halesworth, Beccles, Coddenham, Bury, Lavenham, and Clare. But it is doubtful 2

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1648 and 1650. But county politics rarely moved in exact alignment with those of Westminster; they were influenced by local factors not reflected in Parliament, and they were principally concerned with the paramount necessity of preserving the fabric of local society. Even in politically minded Suffolk the breath of abstract principle rarely disturbed the still air of the Committee Room. The loyalty of English counties tended to be determined as much by characteristics inherent in their own administrative and social structure as by political developments in London. This assertion is borne out by a comparison between the Committee of Suffolk and that of Kent. In 1642 the two counties had been faced with much the same administrative problem. They were similar in area and population; in some respects they were not dissimilar in social structure; they had a comparable number of gentry, perhaps 700 or 800 each; and both were economically advanced. How were two large counties to be efficiently governed on behalf of Parliament? Bury was nearly 60 miles from the extremity of Suffolk, and Knole over 70 miles from that of Kent. It was a thankless task for part-time officials with farms or shops to attend to, to travel such distances by foot or on horseback; it was impossible for many of the committeemen to attend regularly at Bury or Knole. It was partly because the two counties adopted a different solution to this problem in 1642 that they followed so different a course thereafter. In Kent there had for centuries been a tradition of self-government in the lathes, and this was taken over and extended in the Lathal Committees set up during the war. These subcommittees occupied more and more of the attention of magnates in remote parts of the county, like Sir Edward Scott and Sir James Oxinden, while the County Committee became the preserve of a small clique under the chairmanship of Sir Anthony Weldon. A cleavage thus developed between lathes and shire which ultimately led to the overthrow of committee rule in 1648. In Suffolk this antagonism did not develop. There was not so strong a tradition of regional government in the county divisions as in Kent. The committeemen adopted instead the simple expedient of dividing themselves into smaU groups sitting week and week about in rotation, while the six chairmen attended at Bury for one month only at a time, taking the chair in succession. Thus while the government of Kent developed into a dictatorship, and an intensely unpopular one, that of Suffolk remained, as before the war, an oligarchy of county how far the evidence can be pressed: the Brewsters and some other known Independents were also members. Perhaps many Suffolk families shared the same religious platform as the Barnardistons. Both Sir Nathaniel and Sir Thomas were Presbyterians, but, like Cromwell, they were not wedded to forms of ecclesiastical government. Like many other Englishmen, perhaps more than is realized, they were principally interested in the development of a particular kind of Christian piety.'. . . I acknowledge myselfe a presbyterion,' Sir Nathanie wrote to John Winthrop, *yet such a one as can an(i doe hartely love an humble and piou Independant. . .' He was a Presbyterian 'only in this regard, in that I conceave it consisteth best with the constitution of our government, and in that regard if I weare with you I should ioyne with you, for truly I cannot yet see any certayne and generall set forme of dysipline set downe in the word of God universally; if ther be the Lord discover yt to us in his good time.' - Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, V, 1645—1649, 1947, 145.


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families under the unofficial suzerainty of the Barnardistons. Few men anxious to serve the committee were excluded from county government, and everyone was satisfied. Within this peculiar form of local government in Suffolk the position held by Sir Nathaniel and Sir Thomas Barnardiston was unique.1 Neither son nor father played a really active part in the daily proceedings of the Committee. Neither of them ever seems to have taken the chair. Indeed the details of committee business were principally left in the hands of comparatively minor gentry. Of the members present at 85 meetings of the Committee between September 1643 and October 1646, Edmund Harvey attended 38 times, Thomas Chaplin 34 times, Nathaniel Bacon 25 times, Thomas Cole 20 times, and Henry North, Richard Pepys, Thomas Gippes, and Gibson Lucas 18 times. Of the greater gentry only Sir William Spring attended more than 18 meetings. Yet the control of the Barnardistons in all matters of county government was never relaxed. It is not without significance that letters from Parliament and the Committee of Both Kingdoms were generally addressed to "Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston and the rest of the Committees of Suffolk.' The designation symptomizes the relative ease with which Parliament retained control of a county like Suffolk, where a single family was paramount, in comparison with Kent, where county leadership was divided between twenty or thirty. There was thus much in the administration of the county of Suffolk to preclude the development of that antagonism between county and committee which became so fierce elsewhere. It would be erroneous to suggest that the committee provoked no opposition. Families like the Scriveners of Sibton Abbey were plundered and persecuted on very scant grounds, and they flouted committee authority accordingly.2 The estates of recusants were squeezed and wrung until the sequestration commissioners themselves could not 'see how any considerable increase of rent could be obtained . . .'3 The Beaumont letters show that John Base, the Solicitor, often meted out the same 'hard measure' as sequestrators elsewhere. When Edward Wenyeve 'tooke the best opertunitie to deale with him in his chamber alone, by his owne apoyntment . . . and claime his promise of all furtherance [of the Beaumonts' case], he violently flewe of, and denied that ever he promised me the least in that businesse . . .'4 There were doubtless many men like John Howe of Sudbury, who, when pressed for his Fifth and Twentieth Part, refused either to pay it or to divulge his name, 'sayeinge it was Croaker . . . all which time hee caused [the high collector's] men to bee beaten . . .'5 Yet in comparison with other counties, relations in Suffolk between shire 1

The Bacons might have claimed equality with the Barnardistons; but there are a number of indications that the chief members of the family concerned themselves at this time principally with affairs in London and with legal business, rather than county government. 2 MSS. of E. Levett-Scrivener, Esq., at Sibton Abbey. 3 CCC, 316. 4 ESRO, 50/1/189, letter of 9 March 1645-6. *SP 28/334, John Thrower's Account Book for the Franchise of Bury and Guildable of Ipswich.

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and committee were relatively harmonious. Not that the county was, as Kingston suggests, through and through parliamentarian. But, under the eye of the Barnardistons, the Committee was on the whole more efficient and more conscious of its responsibility to the county than many elsewhere. It never attained the arrogant ascendancy of some county committees, because it delegated a large part of its power to the Committee of the Eastern Association. It was less unscrupulous than the Committee of Kent in wielding the weapon of sequestration, because in a county more sharply divided it had less opportunity of doing so. It had inherited a fine tradition of conscientious administration, and the committeemen evidently held themselves bound by methods and precedents established before the war. They carefully compiled a volume containing the 'constitutional documents' governing their authority and procedure.1 Like their predecessors they took considerable care of their records: they paid their carpenter John Hart 12s for 'makeing of a waynescott box to keepe the evidences and writings of this Comitte . . .'2 Their accounts were audited and published in 1648 with the express intention 'that this County may receive satisfaction that the moneys raysed upon them hath been imployed for their own defence and use of the publick, not to any private interest, as rumored . . .'3 By the simple device of the rotational chairmanship they prevented the development of internal dissension; and they indulged in no ostentatious display to excite the envy of their enemies. (b) The Eastern Association A comprehensive history of the Eastern Association would require a volume to itself; only the barest summary of it can be given here. But it was primarily in terms of the Association that East Anglians thought, only secondarily in terms of the counties or the country at large. It was principally with the Committee at Cambridge, not the separate county committees, that the government corresponded. Whenever the expression 'the Association' or 'the Associated Counties' was employed - by Parliament or Army, at Oxford or in London - it was always the Eastern Association that was referred to. The charmed expression lingered on into the 'fifties,4 and it was revived, whenever danger threatened, years after the institution itself had disappeared. We have already seen something of the underlying social and economic factors which encouraged the formation of the Association. Yet the idea of a union of counties did not originate in East Anglia. Initially it met with many obstructions from its members, and the association never amounted to an amalgamation. The counties still retained many of their powers and were always jealous of their independence. According to Rushworth the 1

Cf. Section I. * SP 28/243, order of the Committee. The Committee Books of the D.L's. and J.P's. before 1640 are preserved in the muniments at Helmingham Hall and in the British Museum. 8 E. 448.13,1. « CSPD, 1656-7, 44, 50.


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plan was devised in November 1642 in answer to the association of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Durham, under the Earl of Newcastle.1 During the following weeks, declarations or ordinances associating the five eastern counties, eight Midland Counties, and four southeastern counties were promulgated. In fact only the first had any vital existence at this date. Its strength and popularity were shown by the fact that other shires were eager to join it. Hertfordshire was initially proposed as a member of the Midland Association, but was eventually linked with the eastern shires in December 1642.2 Buckinghamshire wrote to the Association vainly pleading to be admitted 'into your Society' in February 1643.3 Huntingdon was added in the summer of the same year, and Lincolnshire in the following autumn. The constitutional basis of the Association was of great importance. It was twofold. It did not consist solely in the Eastern Association Ordinance passed by Parliament, but also in the Resolution or Declaration of the Counties, in which they 'freely and most willingly for ourselves doe associate . . . and doe promise to doe our utmost indeavors . . . to further the effectuall associacion for the peace of the said Countyes.'4 Without this Declaration the Ordinance of Parliament - 'whereunto we do most willingly give our assents' - would not have sufficed to establish the Association. The eastern counties never retreated from this constitutional position, and they never ceased to regard the Association as existing solely 'for the peace of the said Countyes.' Each of them still paid its own troops and appointed its own officers. Initially each had its own treasurer at Cambridge, and all continued to levy their own assessments throughout the War. They regarded the Committee at Trinity College, set up by their own delegation of power, as their servant, not their master; and their forces were not to be 'carried out of the said several and respective Counties wherein they are or shall be raised' without their consent.5 The original motive behind the Eastern Association was entirely provincial and defensive. In consequence of this provincialism the Association ran into many difficulties during the course of its first year. The attendance of commissioners at Cambridge was anything but enthusiastic. The counties were 'far more willing to pay [assessments] to the country's [sc. county's] use than to be carried away by a stranger' to Cambridge.6 The pay of their troops was always in arrear. In May 1643 the men were said to be 'so mutinous that unless they can have after the rate of 12d. a day they will stay no longer.'7 In October Colonel Cromwell 'wept when he came to Boston and found no monyes for him from Essex and other Countyes . . .'8 1

John Rushworth, Historical Collections, 1721, V, 66; cf. CJ, II, 865. Ibid., 895, 897. 3 No. 13. *No. 12; cf. E. 88. 15. 5 LJ, VI, 615. 6 HMC, Reports, VII, 551. 2

7

Ibid., 550.

8

Egerton MS. 2647, f. 2%.

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The Committee's 'pressinge necessities' were then such that 'unles some speedyer course bee thought uppon to furnishe the Treasurie here accordinge to the rule of proporcion sett uppon each County within the Association,1 wee must not only discontynue this comission [of the Committee at Cambridge] but that army must totally disband, many of them beinge at that point already . . .'2 The Committee itself was 'in danger of dissolution through the non-appearance of Commissioners', and its Very subsistence ... questioned' by the recent Act of Parliament adding Lincolnshire to the Association.3 The same disgruntled group of men had been sitting at Cambridge since the spring, and in October, after repeated pleas by their chairman Sir William Rowe for relief, they refused to sit any longer. The town was 'full of malignants', and its defence against the approaching enemy seemed impossible. Sir William Rowe returned to his manor-house at Stansted Mountfitchet and wrote to Sir Thomas Barrington: 'what will now become off that or any thinge els at Cambridge I am afraide to coniecture, sine you have beene deafe to so many letters off advertisement for so much as conduceth to the preservation off it from you, by forbearing so long to send men, money, or commissioners. I was never such a trifler as to write or speake to wast; the issue will to soone shew you that I informed you truely . . .'4 But these difficulties were in reality the growing pains of a youthful institution. They were the result of an insufficiently firm grasp on the part of its commander Lord Grey of Warke. Within a few weeks of the appointment of Manchester as his successor in the late summer of 1643 matters began to mend. There had always been a powerful 'Committee of the Eastern Association' in London, composed mainly of East Anglian peers and Commons and charged with the general direction of its policy.5 The weakness of the Association lay in the laxity of administration at Cambridge: it was this which Manchester set out to revolutionize. The earl's reputation has suffered severely through comparison with that of Cromwell. He was neither an able politician nor an inspiring general. But it is questionable whether the victories of the New Model could have been achieved without the administrative system built up by Manchester in the Eastern Association during the eighteen months he was commanderin-chief. Counties like Suffolk willingly put at his disposal the administrative 1 1

Cf. No. 38.

Egerton MS. 2647, f. 231. 8 HMC, Reports, XIII, i, 135, 136. 4 Egerton MS. 2647, f. 359. 5 Very little is known of this body at this period, when it seems to have been meeting in the Exchequer Chamber. By 1645-8 (when it was meeting in the Duchy Chamber) its most active members were Miles Corbett, the chairman, who attended 32 out of the 34 recorded meetings, William Heveningham (16 meetings), Thomas Toll (13 meetings), Sir William Masham and Thomas Lister (11 meetings each). It is significant that these leaders were members of the extreme party in Parliament, and there is a probability that the London Committee supported Cromwell in 1644-5 just as the Cambridge Committee supported Manchester: the former on the side of 'Independency' and centralization, the latter on that of 'Presbyterianism' and devolution. But the evidence is not conclusive. - SP 28/251, orders of the Committee in London.


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experience which they had withheld from Sir William Rowe. After the autumn of 1643 the Committee at Cambridge began to command instead of plead. It ceased to be the servant and became the master. Its meetings were consistently attended by the earl when at Cambridge. Its orders were generally issued in his name. Two treasurers were appointed by 'the Right honourable the Earle of Manchester, Maior Generall of the associated Countyes . . .n The committeemen were granted an allowance of 35s. a week towards their expenses. The military purchasing hitherto kept in the hands of the counties was now largely taken over by the Committee at Cambridge. The many references in John Weaver's Account Book to payments large and small made 'by my Lord's order' bear witness to Manchester's detailed control of its proceedings.2 The earl's control over the county committees themselves was equally vigilant. In October 1643 he was empowered to appoint such commissioners 'as his lordship shall hold fitting' to assess and levy the 'money to be raised within the said severall counties', who were 'to have the same power . . . as the Committees . . .'3 In February 1644 he issued 'Instructions' to the Committee of Suffolk 'to the intent the Committe . . . may for the time to come regulate there proceedinges in such manner as may . . . be answerable to my expectacion .. ,'4 In the following month he issued further 'Instructions', and appointed committees in each county to execute the ordinance for 'removing scandalous ministers', adding: 'For my part I ame resolved to imploye the utmost of that power given unto me by the ordinance for the procuringe a gennerall reformacion in all the Associated Countyes . . . expectinge your forwardnes and hertie joyninge with me herein . . .'5 The ministers ejected in the Eastern Association were in consequence more numerous than in any other area: there were 152 of them in Suffolk, 152 in Essex, 132 in Norfolk, 80 in Lincolnshire.6 It is not difficult to imagine the reaction Sir William Waller would have provoked if he had issued such commands to the Committee of Kent. But Manchester succeeded in a task in which both Waller and Cromwell failed that of winning the full confidence of the Association he commanded. He always regarded himself as 'imployed in [their] service', and told them that he held it 'a respect due unto you to give you an account of my proceedings . . .'7 As he informed the Committee of Both Kingdoms in 1644, 'your Lordships very well know the obligacion I have to those countyes who have, as farre as in them lay put this trust upon mee;'8 'it is expected from 1 2

SP 28/139.

For Weaver's Account Book, see No. 89. F. & R., I, 309. 4 No. 52. 5 No. 47; F. & R., I, 371. 6 A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised, 1948, xiv. But Matthews' sources vary considerably in completeness from one county to another. 7 Egerton MS. 2647, f. 319. 8 Camden Society, N.S., XII, 1875, The Quarrel between the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell, ed. D. Masson, 33. 8

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mee that I should serve those Countyes to their protection who did both raise these forces and doe still pay them to this intent.'1 The counties themselves regarded his commands as 'a large measure of your Lordshipp's confidence of us, which, though some have laboured to begett to diffidence and distrust, but prevented by a more noble speritt which dwell in your Lordshipp of wisdome and constancie, have the more confirmed us in our not new taken up resolutions to serve yow, and more and more inflames them to confirm your Lordshipp's commaunds . . .'2 Manchester thus won the counties' reverence because he commanded it. He was a great territorial magnate whose power they could not fail to recognize. He held to what were perhaps already antique notions df 'hospitality'. He put his household and his 'retainers' at the service of the Association, from his domestic chaplains down to 'my Lord's watermen' on the River Ouse. It may be that his patriarchal outlook was one which has little appeal for our own day, and with which in the exigencies of the time Cromwell was naturally impatient. But when Cromwell himself was faced with the problem of governing the country ten years later, he found that the crusty prejudices of those who thought like Manchester were not altogether mistaken. It was principally the patriarchal attitude of the Barnardistons, together with their personal loyalty to the Protector, that prevented the unrest of the county in the 'fifties from developing into organized opposition to his re'gime. Elsewhere Cromwell was then forced to rely upon minor gentry, and in seventeenth-century conditions they were unable to provide a settled polity. The sword by which their rule was upheld could transform society, but it could not sustain it. It was in such conditions as these, barely eighteen months after Manchester's appointment, that his quarrel with Cromwell and the crisis concerning the New Model arose. Contrary to the impression given by Kingston, Cromwell had not been the principal figure in the Eastern Association. It had needed other qualities than his brilliant insight and military determination to weld reluctant counties into a united body, and form an efficient institution to control them. In that task Cromwell himself played only a minor part: he was too busy campaigning to devote much thought to the thankless labours of local administration. But disturbing rumours of Cromwell's methods and ideals were rife; and his occasional electric letters to the Committee at Cambridge were not reassuring. He had been heard to say that he would depopulate the Isle of Ely of its 'wretches and ungodly men' and 'place in it godly and precious peopell, and he would make it a place for God to dwell in . . .' 'Wretches and ungodly men' were unhappily numerous in that anglican stronghold, and 'whole famalyes' of Independents had been brought 'into that He from London and other places' to supplant them. Captains had been appointed from 'such as have filld dung carts,' and Cromwell was said to have commanded the Committee of the Isle 'that they should not release any prisoner committed by his 1

SP 21/17, Letter Book of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, f. 139. No. 85. The letter is from the Committee of Norfolk, but it is also typical of the attitude of other counties. 2


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offecers, so that the hole lie is soe awde that they dare not seeke for their libertyes.'1 It is easy to ridicule Manchester and his supporters and accuse them of snobbery in objecting to the advancement of 'such as have filld dung carts'. The accusation is facile, because the particular objection was merely symptomatic of a deeper concern. Cromwell's ruthless methods and meteoric career had opened up vistas of distracted worlds wherein the whole fabric of civilization, as the leaders of the Eastern Association understood it, seemed to crumble. On the wings of overmastering faith, Cromwell eagerly rode the whirlwind. But if he himself was unable to perceive where faith would lead him, there is surely little to surprise us if ordinary human beings were more timid. The New Jerusalem reputedly established in the Isle of Ely did not bear much resemblance to that which families like the Barnardistons had envisaged in 1640. Not till they realized, years later, that Cromwell too was at bottom anxious to preserve the old order of society, did they come to support him with any enthusiasm, or trust his intentions. In the autumn of 1644, despite the victory at Marston Moor, there seemed little security beyond the bounds of the Eastern Association. It was not unnatural that the seven counties should support Manchester, whom they were sure of, and oppose Oliver Cromwell.2 In January 1645, therefore, a great conference met at Bury St Edmunds with the intention of opposing the formation of the New Model.3 Representatives were summoned from each of the seven counties, and the chair was taken by a member of the Committee of Suffolk. With the exception of certain objections tentatively offered by Hertfordshire, the solidarity of the Eastern Association on this occasion was complete. It came down firmly on the side of those who advocated a purely defensive war. It was held that the New Model would impair 'the mutuall succour of the Counties' and abrogate 'the ends and purposes of the Association'. The counties reasserted their claim to control their own forces and pay their own men: and, since well over half the monthly sum required to support the New Model was assessed upon them,4 their claim was perhaps not altogether unreasonable. The issues raised at the Bury Conference, however, ran deeper than control of forces or convictions as to how the war should be conducted. A question of sovereignty was also involved. During the past century-and-ahalf the power of the 'county community', as a unit of English local society, 1

Camden Society, N.S., XII, The Quarrel between the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell, ed. D. Masson, 1875, 73, 74. 2 Cf. Nos. 86, 87. It is interesting that in these circumstances Cromwell is said by Sir Samuel Luke, on 21 November 1644, to be making 'all the means he can to reconcile himself to the Earl of Manchester, and his faction intend this winter to have their wills of Crawford. I believe his chiefest aim in the reconciliation is to that purpose also, though his wisdom may conceal it. He has sent Mr Dell home and said if the Synod would not think he jeered them, he would send to them for a minister, and any should be acceptable so he was learned and pious . . .' I am much indebted to Mr H. G. Tibbutt for this reference from Stowe MS 190, and for other information from his forthcoming Calendar of the Letter Books of Sir Samuel Luke (Beds. Historical Record Society). 3 No. 88. 4 Nearly £30,000 out of rather less than £54,000.

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had been gradually gaining ground at the expense of other local groups and of the state. The gentry, who headed that society, were never more powerful than during the Civil War, and nowhere more conscious of their power than in the counties controlled by Parliament. The Conference at Bury opened with the reading of the 'Resolution of the Counties' by which the Association had been set up, as well as the 'Declaration of the Parliament'. The chairman 'craved leave to observe . . . that there must be a body of an armye by joyning together of the Counties', and that 'this body must serve for the mutuall defence of the said Counties.' The 'safety of the kingdome . . . was not our worke,' it was said. The 'way of the Parliamen was to be studiously observed, but reference to its authority was avoided. It is difficult not to detect in the Association's demands, 'debates', and 'conclusions' a veiled claim to some share in sovereignty along with that of Lords and Commons. It is doubtful if the claims of the 'county community' ever reached a higher point. Their danger lay precisely in the fact that they were made by the friends, not the enemies, of Parliament. In the last resort there could be no question as to the outcome of the challenge. The Association would not have actively opposed Parliament as the county of Kent did in 1648. As Cromwell foresaw, if its demands had been granted, local warfare might have become endemic, and the issues of 1640-42 would have remained unsettled. But the fact that the claims were made at all is of profound significance. During the 1640's English society everywhere came to a distinct turning-point. In the event of dispute, was the House of Commons or the local society it purported to represent ultimately supreme? Men like Sir Roger Twysden in Kent felt no doubt that, in law, members of Parliament had 'absolute dependence' upon their constituents. There were evidently some in East Anglia who shared similar convictions. But the course of historical logic was too strong for them. The passing of the New Model Ordinance shortly after the Bury Conference gave a decisive answer in favour of the Commons.

///. THE NEW MODEL AND AFTER With the formation of the New Model Army, offensive warfare became a reality. Manchester was replaced by Fairfax and Cromwell, and the Association was compelled to get on with its new commanders as best it could. The following months, however, were not without their difficulties in the eastern counties. There were complaints that the treasurers of 'the Earl of Manchester's Association' kept back the soldiers' pay; at the end of March the matter was referred to 'the Committee where Mr Scawen has the chair, to call the several Counties of that Association to account, where the obstruction is, that those arrears come not in . . .'* In April and May there were 'distractions in Suffolk' among some of the 'old soldiers' from Manchester's army. In June the Committee of Both Kingdoms reported to the Commons 1

CJ, IV. 85.


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how difficult it would be to get the counties of the Association to join with Sir Thomas Fairfax, 'unless care be taken for providing money for them . . .n For some time the Earl of Manchetser, not Cromwell, continued to be thought of as head of the Association, and the county of Norfolk gratefully wrote to him 'to returne that tribute of acknowledgments and thankes which wee confesse your honour may not onely expect but is iustly due to your Lordshipp for your greate care and respect unto this Associacion . . .'2 In ecclesiastical matters the Earl continued to dominate the Association until it virtually came to an end in 1647.3 But with the victory of Naseby dangers began to recede, doubts were dispelled, and the position of Cromwell was confirmed. His own outlook and that of the Eastern Association became for the time identified, if never identical. As well as commanding the forces of the Association, Cromwell now assumed the leadership of the Committee at Cambridge, which henceforth became more vigorously controlled by the Committee in London.4 The two bodies continued to meet almost daily until 1646. With the end of the war the eastern counties realized for a brief period their full triumph. It would be but a slight rhetorical exaggeration to say that London and the Eastern Association had conquered England: and there were many in Suffolk and other counties who now saw in their triumph the justification for imposing their will on the rest of the country. There were repeated pleas that the Association should now receive favoured treatment in assessments, and that counties which had supported the king should be penalized. There were also demands that the religious settlement already partially established in Suffolk should be extended to England as a whole. And in June 1647 a petition was presented to Fairfax from Hertfordshire demanding the complete disfranchisement of Devon, Cornwall, Wales, and other counties 'wholly disaffected to the proceeds of Parliament . . . until such time as it shall appear that their former enmity and rancor against the Parliament be laid aside'.5 In these conditions it was not to be wondered at if cavaliers returning from Oxford found little foothold in counties like Suffolk: their estates remained under sequestration, and they were sometimes compelled to travel overseas in the guise of merchants. Despite extravagant rumours in the summer of 1648 that 'the beacons should have been fyred soe that ten thowsand men might have risen up in armes', the rebellions in East Anglia in 1648 were suppressed with comparatively little difficulty. 6 There was probably widespread sentiment in their favour; but it had been successfully divested of potential leadership by the Sequestration Committees. In Suffolk, at least, 1

CSPD, 1644-5, 387, 496, 570. * PRO 30/15/3, No. 569. 3 Suffolk was divided into classical presbyteries under Manchester's authority in 1645-7. The County of Suffolke divided into fourteene Precincts for Classicall Presbyteries . . ., 1647. 4 There is a probability that the crisis between Manchester and Cromwell had been paralleled by a crisis between the Cambridge and London Committees. - Cf. note 5, p. 148. 5 E. 393. 7. 8 Cf. Nos. 91, 95.

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royalism remained a largely underground movement of which, in the absence of family papers, we know almost nothing until the Restoration. But the mood of victory did not last. It was rapidly succeeded by one of disillusionment. With the death of Charles I, the flight of the cavaliers, and exile of the Court, the emphasis shifted from domestic matters to events at sea. With the naval warfare and mercantile troubles of the 'fifties, Suffolk, and particularly Ipswich, were closely connected. There was much piracy, by both cavaliers and foreigners. Impressment during the wars with Holland and Spain became a dreaded burden; it was evaded by every kind of ingenious expedient.1 That only two men on one occasion, and none on another, could be pressed into service in one of the largest and most puritan towns in England bears witness to the changing temper of the county. The days of ardent volunteering were over. The vision of the New Jerusalem was fading. The whole Suffolk coast was in a state of weariness and unrest. Through all these changes of outlook and fortune the county continued to be guided by the same group of families as in 1640, Several members of the committee had now seceded; others had died. As its membership expanded in the 'fifties there was the same influx of minor gentry as in other counties. But the Suffolk Committee was never swamped by its newcomers as were others. Bacons, Bedingfields, Brewsters, Gurdons, Heveninghams, Hobarts, Norths, and Soames: these and other county families continued to dominate it until the Protectorate and the Restoration. They were themselves still headed by the Barnardistons of Kedington. Sir Thomas had succeeded to the position formerly held by his father, who died in 1653, lamented in a volume of elegies entitled Suffolk's Tears. Neither son nor father was the kind of man capable of giving a lead to the country at large. Their puritanism was too rigid either to accept new ideas or to sympathize with old ones: the ways of other regions, south or north or west, were strange to them. But if after years of change and decay there was still truth in the idyllicized portrait of the community of Suffolk depicted by Robert Reyce in 1618, it owed much to the influence of the Barnardistons. It was characteristic of the gentry of Suffolk, said Reyce, to 'meett often, conversing most familyarly together, which so winneth the good will one of another with all reverent regard of the meaner sort, true love and unfeyned affection of their neighbours, that if differences doe arise, which are very seldome, such is the great discretion ever tempered with love and kindnes among them, that these devisions are soon smothered and appeased . . . Such is the religious unitie wherewith in all good actions they doe concurre, that whatsoever offendeth one displeaseth all, and whosoever sattisfieth one contenteth all'.2 1

Cf. Nos. 121-128.

2

Reyce, 60.

8 THE ENGLISH URBAN INN 1560-1760

I. THE P A T T E R N OF U R B A N INNS

(a) Introductory THE English inn has given rise to a very considerable literature over the past century and more, but it is no paradox to say that its history has never been written.1 There are any number of books and articles on the Romance of the Road, in which a few precious facts may at times be found embedded among a mass of popular sentiment and Pickwickian nonsense. There are a few worthy if rather superficial general works about inns, dealing chiefly with their physical appearance, usually from the picturesque angle. There are a number of local studies of inns and inn signs, some of them quite useful as far as they go, and there is Larwood and Hotten's monumental History of Sign-Boards, published as long ago as 1867. There are also one or two useful works, like Joan Parkes's Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century (1925), containing a good deal of miscellaneous information, culled from contemporary tracts and the like. And there is a handful of scholarly monographs dealing either with particular aspects of the subject, like Dr W. A. Pantin's seminal essay on the structures of medieval inns in E. M. Jope's Studies in Building History (1961); or with the inns of particular towns, like Robert Dymond's 'The Old Inns and Taverns of Exeter' in the Devonshire Association's Transactions (xii, 1880). Apart from these and similar works, the historian will find the literature of the English inn for the most part a wretched farrago of romantic legends, facetious humour and irritating errors. There is no serious, systematic study of the junctions of inns, of what exactly went on within them, and of why, in the days before railways and reform movements, they became the centres of so much of the social, political and economic life of the nation. The present essay is no more than an attempt to indicate some of the very varied functions of the urban inn generally in the seventeenth and

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Landscape and Com munity in England

eighteenth centuries, and in particular some of the salient features of the innkeeping fraternity in a not untypical provincial borough during this period, the Midland town of Northampton. It is hoped that this essay may encourage local historians elsewhere to undertake similar studies of inns and innkeepers in other provincial towns in more detail than is possible here. In doing so other students will find certain parallels with Northampton, and no doubt many differences too: in short, all the variety of human experience that makes the history of provincial society so absorbing a study. The golden age of the English inn may be said to have lasted from the reign of Queen Elizabeth to that of Queen Victoria. Of course it neither began nor ended during these years and the period of efflorescence varied a good deal in different parts of the country. There were many extensive and important inns in medieval England, like the George at Glastonbury and the Angel at Grantham. One of the largest was the Chequers at Canterbury, built as a hostelry for pilgrims and containing a dormitory with 100 beds.2 It was later converted into nine distinct premises, but it still survives, strung out along the length of Mercery Lane. In Queen Victoria's reign, similarly, there is no precise moment at which it is possible to say that the golden age of the English inn has come to an end. There is no doubt, however, that many of the historic inns of England rapidly declined in importance with the coming of the railways and with the building of public halls, corn exchanges, auction rooms, banks, town halls and county halls, which transferred much of the traditional business of provincial inns to these and other specialist buildings. By the middle of Queen Victoria's reign or thereabouts it may be said that the age of the inn has given way to the age of the hotel. The hotel is a kind of building often of course much larger and more elaborate than its predecessor, but essentially more limited in its functions. The origins of the word 'hotel' in England and its gradual spread through the provinces are themselves interesting social phenomena which need a few comments in passing. In its modern connotation the word 'hotel' did not come into use until about 1770 and was still very rare in 1800. The first hotel in England was built in Exeter in 1768 and was simply called 'The Hotel': it still survives, though altered in 1827, as the Royal Clarence Hotel. A few years later, by the summer of 1774 or before, a hotel had also appeared in the rising watering-place of Margate. The Margate Hotel was described in the Kentish Gazette of the following year as the 'New Inn, Tavern, and Hotel' on the Parade:

The English Urban Inn, 1560-1760

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the fact that it was described as an inn and tavern as well as a hotel shows that the new word was as yet scarcely naturalised.3 In the Midlands it would probably not have been understood at all at this date. The first hotel in Leicester did not appear until the year 1792, and was unsuccessful in establishing itself. Within a few years it had gone out of business, though happily its remarkably sophisticated assembly room, designed by the local architect John Johnson, still survives in Hotel Street. Even as late as 1884, when Leicester was a town of nearly 130,000 inhabitants, there were still only nine hotels in the whole borough out of more than 450 licensed establishments. The fact that in 1970 there were at least in establishments in Leicester describing themselves as 'hotels' is a nice comment on provincial attitudes in the twentieth century.4 (&) Distribution How many inns, taverns and alehouses were there in fact in England in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries - this golden age of the inn? There are no really reliable figures for the country as a whole, though with patience it is sometimes possible to reconstruct figures for particular towns or districts. The most complete survey is a census of inns drawn" up in 1577 in connection with musters. This census is in the State Papers in the Public Record Office and lists more than 14,000 alehouses, 2,000 inns and 300 taverns. It covers only twenty-seven counties, but another document in the State Papers reckons that there were nearly 3,600 inns, alehouses and taverns in the remaining thirteen shires. The total of about 20,000 hostelries of all kinds in England must of course be regarded with a good deal of caution. The figures were collected locally and in consequence, like all statistics of the time, probably varied a good deal in their basis from place to place. It is hard to believe that there were only five inns in the whole of Nottinghamshire, yet nearly 600 alehouses; still harder to accept that there were no taverns yet many more hostelries in this small Midland county (593 ) than in a large and populous shire like Essex (493).5 Nevertheless the figures in the census of 1577 are of great interest. Yorkshire, not surprisingly, comes easily at the top of the table with nearly 3,700 alehouses and 239 inns. The city of York itself, as an important legal and ecclesiastical capital and headquarters of the Council of the North, may well have contained more inns than any other provincial town at this date. As early as 1537 there were more than 1,000 beds in the city inns and stables for more than 1,700 horses. In 1596 the

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corporation licensed as many as 64 innholders and more than 100 tipplers in the city.6 Also high in the county list was Middlesex, with 720 alehouses in 1577 and 132 inns. Rather more surprisingly, the two small inland shires of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire contained between them nearly as many inns as the whole of Yorkshire: 152 in Hertfordshire and 72 in Buckinghamshire. The fact that the former shire, though one of the smallest in England, contained within its borders more inns than any county but Yorkshire is indicative of its importance in the 'thoroughfare trade'. On many of the roads northwards out of London the first night's stage was in Hertfordshire. In the small town of St Albans alone there were at this date as many as 27 inns - one of the highest figures for any town in England at this time. Two later censuses of inns, drawn up for military purposes in 1686 and 1756, may be found in the War Office Miscellanea in the Public Record Office (wo 30/48; wo 30/49). These are not precisely comparable with the Elizabethan list, for they do not give the number of inns but the number of beds and the extent of stabling available in each town and village. Nevertheless these and other sources indicate the remarkable expansion of innkeeping between Queen Elizabeth's reign and George Ill's. By the end of the seventeenth century in the county of Wiltshire alone nearly 200 towns and villages boasted at least one inn. There were nearly 100 beds in the inns of the little town of Devizes, 143 in the inns of Marlborough, 163 in those of Chippenham and 548 in Salisbury. Altogether these four Wiltshire towns alone could probably accommodate well over 1,000 guests and 2,000 horses at this date. In the town of Derby a local enumeration of about the same period (1693) records that no fewer than 120 of the 684 houses in the town were alehouses. This figure seems incredible and is certainly hard to accept; but in the town of Northampton, where the census of 1577 had listed only 17 inns, there were by George II's reign at least 62 inns and an undiscoverable number of alehouses. In Canterbury at about this period there were 98 inns; and in Loughborough during George Ill's reign - a town of fewer than 4,000 inhabitants about this period - there were 43 inns in the year 1770 and 50 in 17837 The number of provincial inns and alehouses continued to increase, moreover, with the rapid growth of population during the following decades. In Northampton in 1845 there were 74 inns, 53 smaller public houses and nearly 40 beersellers. And in 1870 a directory of Kent listed nearly 4,000 inns and beerhouses in the county, or one to every 185 inhabitants.8 The growth of provincial hostelries between Queen Elizabeth's days


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and Queen Victoria's was particularly striking in 'thoroughfare towns', that is, those situated on the principal roads of England. As more roads became turnpiked and as traffic in goods and people increased, these towns were placed at an advantage over those on minor routes and gradually absorbed a good deal of their trade. Hanoverian travellers like Dr Pococke, absentee bishop of an Irish see whose Travels around the year 1750 were published by the Camden Society in 1888-9, frequently remarked upon the importance of the inn trade in thoroughfare towns. Tamworth in Staffordshire, said Pococke, is 'a pretty large town, with a good market, and abounds in inns'. At Blandford in Dorset, on the 'great thoroughfare to the West', there were 'many good inns and shops in the town'. Llandilo in Carmarthenshire was a little town but 'as it is the high road from many parts to Brecknock, Hereford, and many great towns on the Severn, there are good inns in it'. Very similar remarks were made by Pococke about places like Warwick, Gloucester, Cardiff, Machynlleth, Lambourne, Fairford and Kington.9 The growth of inns in thoroughfare towns was particularly evident on routes like the Great North Road and the roads to Dover, Bath, Chester, Exeter and Manchester. Until the second quarter of the eighteenth century (on some roads the third quarter) the usual 'stage' coaches could accomplish daily was about 25-35 miles, so that the chief coaching centres often tended to be spaced out about this distance apart.10 There was often a smaller intermediate town half-way between them, partly for the midday stop and a change of horses, and partly for the sake of the slower stage-wagons and carriers' carts which often travelled no more than about half the daily distance of the passenger coaches. On the Manchester road the chief coaching centres were normally Dunstable, Northampton, Leicester, Derby, and Ashbourne or Buxton, all of them between 25 and 35 miles apart; while intermediate stops were made in such towns as Loughborough and Market Harborough^All these towns had of course been established market centres for several centuries before the age of the stage-coach; but stage travel tended increasingly to concentrate traffic in these towns and draw it away from places less conveniently situated. On the Great North Road some of the most impressive inns iri England were to be found in towns like Stamford, Grantham and Newark, and even in small coaching centres like Wansford and Stilton. A number of these great inns, like the Haycock at Wansford, the George at Stamford and the Angel at Grantham, still survive. On the Chester

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road both Towcester and Stony Stratford depended heavily on their inn traffic during the eighteenth century: there are still eleven hostelries strung out along the High Street of the latter town. A few miles north of Towcester, where the same road is crossed by the prehistoric droveway called Banbury Lane, the village of Foster's Booth owed its very existence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to innkeeping. In origin it was no more than a 'forester's booth' in the wooded country bordering Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, and it never developed into an independent parish. It sprang into prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the boundary of Pattishall and Cold Higham parishes, very much as Stony Stratford had originated, four centuries earlier, at the junction of Calverton and Wolverton further down the same road. By Queen Anne's reign Foster's Booth had become 'a fair street of inns', according to the Northamptonshire historian John Morton. At this time there were as many as twelve or thirteen hostelries along either side of Watling Street, and the place continued to exist by its road traffic until it was by-passed by the railway early in Queen Victoria's reign. After the railway Foster's Booth rapidly declined in importance, and nowadays only two of the original inns, the George (built in 1637) and the Red Lion, survive to commemorate its heyday.12 On the Dover road the most remarkable example of an innkeeping town, though few people would now suspect it, was Sittingbourne. Like most of the settlements along the Kentish section of Watling Street, apart from Rochester and Canterbury, Sittingbourne was a late one. It is not mentioned in Domesday, and the first documentary reference to it in J. K. Wallenberg's Place-Names of Kent relates to the year 1200. In all probability it originated as a street-migration from the much older settlement of Milton Regis, and its early fortunes no doubt owed something to its position as a halting-place for Canterbury pilgrims. At the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign it was still little more than a village, however, with a mere 88 houses and a population of perhaps 400 souls. Then in 1566 it acquired the right to hold a market, and in 1599 the queen actually granted it a charter of incorporation with the privileges of electing a mayor and jurats and of returning two members to Parliament. Strangely enough this charter never appears to have been implemented, no doubt because of the insignificance of the new town. During the following two centuries, however, Sittingbourne rapidly developed as one of the most important coaching centres in the south-eastern counties, owing to its convenient position


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midway between Dover and London. Its fortunes were also stimulated, no doubt, by the fact that it became the favourite resting-place of George I and George II on their way to Hanover.13 Chief among the numerous coaching inns of Sittingbourne in the Hanoverian era were the Red Lion, the Bull, the George and the Rose. The Red Lion was a medieval establishment, once visited by Henry V on his return from France, and it remained the principal hostelry of the town until it was eclipsed in the eighteenth century by the Rose. The origin of the Rose Inn at Sittingbourne is an interesting one. It had been built as a rather grand private house in the town in the year 1708, by one Robert Jeffs, and called Rose Place. Its life as a private dwelling, however, was brief. Within a few years it had been converted into an inn and it rapidly became celebrated for its lavish hospitality. In the 1790s Edward Hasted remarked that the 'principal support of [Sittingbourne] has always been from the inns and houses of refreshment in it for travellers', and 'the principal inn now in it, called the Rose, is perhaps the most superb of any throughout the kingdom, and the entertainment afforded in it equally so ...'. Perhaps the supreme moment in the history of the Rose came in 1825 when the future Queen Victoria and her mother stayed there, and it was renamed the Royal Victoria Hotel. By that date Sittingbourne was a small but busy market town of about 2,000 inhabitants. Within a generation, however, its principal industry, the coaching trade, had come to a sudden end with the building of the railway. Most of the grand old inns of the town were either split up into shops and tenements, or converted to other uses. Only one, the Bull Hotel, still retains its original function.14 Yet, to quote The Buildings of England for Kent, 'in spite of the mutilation of nearly every house by modern shopfronts, one can still sense the prosperity of the Georgian town'. (c) Siting The precise topographical situation of an inn was often an important factor in its fortunes. One of the commonest sites was in the market place, a situation which enabled many hostelries during the seventeenth century to attract urban commerce to themselves, so that in effect they became covered or private market places, often of a rather specialised kind. There were at least six inns round the market place of Hanoverian Northampton, including one of the largest in the town, the Peacock, whose frontage extended for eleven bays along the eastern side of the square, and whose yard extended for more than 200 ft behind the inn.

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There were seven inns round the market place of Jacobean Shaftesbury in Dorset: the Raven, the Lamb, the George, the Bush, the New Inn, the Lion and the Star.15 In Warwick, Newark, Leicester and many other towns something of the same concentration can be traced. The market place was not always an ideal site for a large inn, however, once the coaching era had begun. With the growth of the coaching and carrying trades in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the chief requirement was a long site with room to build extra chambers and warehouses, and a back entrance so that wagons and coaches could enter the yard and leave it without turning or backing - always an awkward problem for a horse-drawn vehicle. The topography of a town like Stony Stratford, with back lanes running parallel to the High Street on either side, was ideally suited to this requirement. Several of the Stratford inns have or had very long yards, with back entrances: that of the White Horse extended for 260 ft from the High Street to the Market Place, and that of the Cock for nearly 400 ft to Vicarage Lane. In Exeter three of the major inns in the High Street - the Green Dragon, the Half Moon and the New Inn - had entrances also in Catherine Street.16 In Grantham the stable yard of the Angel runs back for some hundreds of feet from the High Street to Swinegate. In Maidstone the yard of the Star extends for more than 400 ft from the High Street to its back entrance in Earl Street. In some towns, for a variety of reasons, groups of hostelries also came to be established, particularly from Queen Elizabeth's reign onwards, outside the old town centre, in extra-mural suburbs. Sometimes, where urban streets were narrow and tortuous, as in Leicester and Canterbury, this development enabled coaches to avoid passing through the centre of the town. In other places, as in the extra-mural suburbs of Cotton End and St James's End outside Northampton, these inns developed in connection with the droving trade; for innkeepers on the edge of a town were able to provide meadow grounds where drovers might pasture their sheep and cattle overnight before selling them next day to the stock-dealers. In many cases these suburbs had probably originated in the medieval period. It is interesting to note that in several cases - for example at Leicester, Northampton, Godstone and Billesdon - they were associated with an inn called the White Hart, a name that may derive its origin from the medieval White Hart society. Though often medieval in origin, however, inn-suburbs of this kind developed principally with the growth of carrying and coaching during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Speenhamland in Berkshire


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seems to have originated in this way, as an extra-mural suburb of Newbury linking the town with the Bath road. As a chapelry of the independent Speen parish, Speenhamland was outside the jurisdiction of the borough of Newbury, and as late as 1906 it was still described as 'a kind of suburb of inns and posting houses'. In Essex a striking example of the same kind of phenomenon was Moulsham, a suburb immediately outside Chelmsford. Like Speenhamland, Moulsham never became a parish in its own right and it was not made a separate chapelry until 1838. It seems to have come into existence as a characteristic commonland settlement, composed of squatters' cottages and hedgealehouses, and it developed rapidly with the growth of Chelmsford itself as a coaching centre and as the county town of Essex during the seventeenth century. By 1628 there were as many as 7 inns and 22 alehouses in Moulsham. Like extra-mural hostelries elsewhere, these were a frequent source of trouble to the local constables and J.P.s and ultimately all but five of them were declared 'superfluous'. According to the Stuart justices, the Moulsham inns and alehouses had encouraged gaming, dicing, dancing and brawling, and were veritable nests of pickpockets and highwaymen. They were also accused of increasing the problems of local poor-relief because they offered pawn facilities to poor people who then became a charge upon the parish. Obviously the justices' evidence was tendentiously expressed; but it does point up the more shady and dubious characteristics of some of these extra-mural alehouse settlements.17 Another example of an innkeeping suburb very similar to Moulsham developed at Leicester, in the area known as the Bishop's Fee, outside the medieval walls of the borough, along Gallowtreegate and Humberstonegate. The jurisdiction over this area had long been a matter of dispute between the corporation and the bishop of Lincoln (and his successors) and was not finally settled until the nineteenth century. It was doubtless for this reason that part of the area came to be called No Man's Land. Very much as the unappropriated commonland outside Chelmsford had facilitated the development of Moulsham, so the disputed jurisdiction in the Bishop's Fee facilitated the growth of a cluster of suburban inns in No Man's Land outside Leicester. In this case, however, the reasons for the development were rather more complex than at Moulsham. Most of the earliest inns of Leicester had in fact been situated well within the walls, particularly along Highcross Street, the original route from London by way of Northampton and Welford. With the growth of the coaching and carrying trades in the

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seventeenth century this route proved impracticable for wheeled traffic owing to the narrowness of the town gates. Instead more and more traffic through Leicester came to use the alternative London road by way of Market Harborough and Gallowtreegate, which passed immediately outside the walls. The old inns in Highcross Street gradually declined as a consequence, while the new extra-mural ones in Gallowtreegate, Humberstonegate and Granby Street rose in importance until the celebrated Three Crowns and Three Cranes became two of the largest coaching inns in the Midlands. Eventually, for these and other reasons, the commercial heart of Leicester itself gradually moved outside the walls, and the removal of the town gates in 1774 was unable to halt this development. Thereafter Highcross Street subsided (until recent years) into a comparatively quiet backwater, whilst the extramural Gallowtreegate has remained ever since the principal trading street of the borough. In the early seventeenth century, before this move had taken place, the numerous inns and alehouses in the Bishop's Fee at Leicester were a frequent source of trouble to the corporation, very much as those at Moulsham were to the justices of Essex. They were accused of encouraging illicit trading, immorality, nonconformity and political subversion.18 One final point regarding extra-mural or extra-parochial inns is worth noting. There is some reason to think that they played a part in the growth of illegitimacy in the early nineteenth century. Many of the illegitimate births recorded in the parish registers of Ringwood and Fordingbridge in Hampshire are said to have been associated with two extra-parochial inns, the Fighting Cocks at Godshill and the inn at Picket Post outside Ringwood.19 It would be interesting to know whether this association occurred in other towns.

(d) Scale and status In size and status the inns of Stuart and Hanoverian England must not be thought of as mere village pubs. Many of them were no larger than this, of course; but at the top of the hierarchy, in the great coaching towns particularly, a number of hostelries were remarkable for their scale and splendour. This is evident both from surviving buildings and from documentary sources such as probate inventories and newspaper advertisements. The frontage of the Bath Arms at Warminster, for example, extends to eight bays of building; that of the Crown at Salisbury and the George and Dragon at Marlow to nine bays. The Three Tuns at Thirsk, originally built as a manor house, also extends to nine


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bays; the Peacock at Northampton (until its destruction in 1958) to eleven bays; and the Lansdowne Arms at Calne (Wilts.) to thirteen. In the seventeenth century the Rose and Crown at Northampton extended to thirteen bays in width and three storeys in height. The Castle Inn at Marlborougji, originally built as a private house for the duke of Somerset and now forming part of the College, is a splendid brick mansion fifteen bays in width. One of the largest of provincial inns was probably the George at Sittingbourne, which at its fullest extent appears to have stretched for no fewer than twenty-one bays along the south side of the High Street. Probably as large as the George at Sittingbourne was the Three Crowns at Leicester. This building no longer survives it was replaced by the National Provincial Bank building in 1870 - but its facade is said to have been three storeys high and to have contained fifty windows. In Northampton the three greatest inns of the town the George, the Red Lion and the Peacock - all seem to have contained about forty rooms. The most celebrated of the three, the George, was described by Defoe in his Tour as 'more like a palace than an inn', and is said to have cost more than £2,000 to rebuild in 1675, or perhaps something like £70,000 in modern terms. No wonder Thomas Baskerville, visiting Northampton about this time, remarked that its leading inns were 'such gallant and stately structures the like is scarcely elsewhere to be seen'.20 The extent of the stabling in many English inns affords a further indication of their scale at this time. Many of them in the eighteenth century could accommodate 40 or 50 horses and some a good many more. The Clinton Arms at Newark is said to have had stabling for 90 horses in 1800. The Angel at Stilton, in the days of the notable Miss Worthington (the famous eighteenth-century innkeeper who first introduced Stilton cheese to the world), accommodated more than 300 horses for coaching and posting. Some of the London coaching inns were still larger. One of the most famous, the Bull and Mouth, is said to have had underground stabling for no fewer than 400 horses. The inns on Hounslow Heath, the first stage out of London on the Great West Road, were capable of accommodating between them as many as 2,500 horses at this period.21 In the case of Northampton, figures have survived in advertisements in the local newspaper, the Northampton Mercury, for the stable accommodation of eight of the 62 Hanoverian inns in the town. These range from standings for 20 horses in the smallest of the eight to standings for 150 in the largest, the Saracen's Head in Abington Street, which was

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the town's posting-house. The total number of horses that could be accommodated in these eight inns amounted to more than 450. None of the three chief hostelries in the town - the George, the Peacock and the Red Lion - is included in these figures; but if the sample is otherwise typical, it is possible that about 3,500 horses could be stabled in the inns of Northampton by the beginning of George IFs reign. In addition to the facilities offered by inns, many alehouses and commercial premises in the town had converted their backyards into stable accommodation by this date. A local glazier, for instance, had erected standings for 18 horses behind his premises, and a baker for as many as 4o.22 Altogether it is probable that there was stabling for between 4,000 and 5,000 horses in Hanoverian Northampton. As these figures will suggest, it is quite a delusion to imagine that traffic problems are an essentially modern phenomenon. They were very acute indeed in towns like Northampton at this date. It was with a view to alleviating them that the western arm of All Saints' church was demolished and several of the main streets were widened and straightened after the fire of 1675, which destroyed four-fifths of the town. Some further idea of the scale of activities in which the landlord of an important inn might be called upon to engage may be gathered from the accounts of feasts and banquets occasionally to be found in eighteenth-century newspapers. When Frederick Montagu, on his election in 1759 as M.P. for Northampton, gave the town 'a present of a new lock' on the river Nene, 119 people sat down to a great banquet in his honour at the George Inn. At Leicester in 1770, after a concert at the Assembly Rooms, as many as 200 gentlemen adjourned to dine at the White Hart Inn. On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary in Leicester of William Ill's landing in England, as many as 627 people are said to have sat down to the Revolution Club's dinner in the Lion and Lamb and two other inns in the town. Even more remarkable were the great Venison Meetings of the Leicester Constitutional Society. These were held at the two principal Whig inns, the Three Cranes and the Three Crowns, and on one occasion it is said that 900 people sat down to the Venison Feast at these hostelries.23 Probably the most lavish and ambitious celebration ever organised by a provincial innkeeper in the eighteenth century took place in connection with the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford upon Avon in 1768. John Payton, the innkeeper of the Red Lion, was entrusted with supervising the catering for this event, and for this purpose he is said to have employed 300 waiters and ordered 300 dozen plates, 300 dozen knives


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and forks, 100 dozen spoons, 50 dozen stewpans and kettles, and ten pipes of wine, or probably more than 1,000 gallons.24 The fact that these arrangements were organised by the innkeeper of a town of fewer than 3,000 inhabitants may give the student of provincial society in the eighteenth century pause for thought. The position of landlord in one of the greater trading inns of Hanoverian England was in fact one that required a degree of flair and an organising ability of no mean order. It is therefore not surprising that in inland entrepots like Northampton the principal innkeepers often became aldermen and mayors and were among the richest men in the town. This is evident from some of their wills and probate inventories. One of the richest Northampton innkeepers was probably James Bordrigge of the Red Lion. When he died in the year 1743, the personal property listed in his probate inventory was valued at more than £1,045 and the goods and furniture in the inn itself at more than £600, or perhaps something like £20,000 in modern values. With the growth in scale of inns in this era the social status as well as the wealth of the leading innkeepers was enhanced. James Bordrigge was not untypical of his class in stemming from a family of minor gentry, in his case probably originating from Yorkshire. Other innkeeping dynasties, like the Lyons and Peaches in Northampton, either originated as sons of wealthy local tradesmen or married into a wealthy urban dynasty, and successfully pushed their way up into the lower levels of the urban gentry. The same phenomenon may be observed in many provincial towns, sometimes even in quite small ones. When Thomas Baskerville, a Berkshire squire, visited Daventry in 1673, he remarked that 'we lay at the Sign of the Swan, near the church, Mrs Bostock, a widow, a proper gentlewoman, the landlady of it ... and formerly the wife of a handsome tall gentleman of that name ...'. When Daniel Defoe visited Doncaster in the early eighteenth century he found that his 'landlord at the Post House was mayor of the town as well as postmaster, that he kept a pack of hounds, was company for the besi gentlemen in the town or in the neighbourhood, and lived as great as ai 7 gentlemen ordinarily did'. When Fanny Burney, the diarist, visited the Bear Inn at Devizes with Mrs Thrale she noted that the landlord's wife, Mrs Lawrence, was a ladylike woman, that her two handsome daughters were accomplished pianists, and that the house itself was full of books, paintings, drawings and music. It was not altogether inappropriate that such a household should give birth to the Regency portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence - the celebrated

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brother of the two pianists.25 Some of the leading innkeepers of the eighteenth century were in fact men of considerable substance and sophistication as well as force of character. II. THE FUNCTIONS OF URBAN INNS

(a) Trading functions From Queen Elizabeth's reign onwards the inns of England developed many new functions in society, so that by the eighteenth century they had come to perform a whole range of services in addition to the basic one of providing lodging and refreshment. One of the most important of these new functions was their development as trading centres. With the growth of inland trade from the 15708 onwards, with the development of wholesale commerce and dealing by sample, and especially with the rapidly growing numbers of travelling factors and merchants, a great deal of market activity migrated during this period from the open market place to the provincial inn. In some branches of commerce, particularly in the wool and cloth trades, this activity in some areas probably began a good deal earlier than 1570. In 1389 the York corporation forbade 'foreign' poulterers to sell their goods in the inns of the city, and in 1492 'foreign' cloth was being sold in York inns. Nevertheless it was chiefly from Queen Elizabeth's reign onwards, so far as most products were concerned, that trading inns became particularly widespread.26 The advertisement pages in many early provincial newspapers show that during the eighteenth century it was a very common practice. By this time, for example, much of the hop trade had come to be centred in inns. Hop factors travelled extensively, purchasing in all the principal hop-growing regions - Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Worcestershire - and selling to the public through the inns they frequented. In Northampton the hop trade was associated in the eighteenth century with the Woolpack Inn. In October 1751 a hop merchant from Market Harborough annouriced in the Northampton Mercury that he had 'bought a large quantity of Kentish hops of the right Canterbury growth [reputedly the best], at the lowest market that has been this season, and proposes to be at the Woolpack Inn in Bridge Street, Northampton, for several market days, where he will sell... as cheap as in London and in any quantity above 20 Ibs. weight', for ready money or three or six months' credit.27


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Much of the trade in agricultural seed was also centred in inns at this time. By the end of the seventeenth century sales of wheat, barley, potato and turnip seed were taking place in the courtyard of the Cock Inn at Stony Stratford. In 1758 one of the numerous nurserymen of Northampton was selling his seed not only in local inns but in those of Towcester, Daventry and Stony Stratford. In Northampton itself, which was the principal centre for the distribution of seed in this part of the Midlands, the Hind Inn in the Market Square and the Woolpack became marts for turnip seed, the Old Goat in Gold Street for clover seed, and the Chequer in the Market Square for clover, trefoil and grass seed.28 Products like these may seem trivial in themselves, but they played a decisive part in the agricultural developments of the time. Much of the trade in corn and malt was also commonly centred in inns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the river Soar was made navigable to Loughborough in the eighteenth century, the town rapidly developed as the chief centre of the grain and malt trades in Leicestershire - trades which always followed in the wake of navigational improvements - and by 1770 much of this commerce was taking place in Loughborough inns. An angry contemporary described the development as due to the 'artful management and iniquitous combinations of avaricious farmers'. More probably it was chiefly due to the greater convenience of dealing in an inn than in a windy market place, and to the provision of corn-chambers by the innkeepers. Certainly the bakers and traders of Leicester who frequented Loughborough for their supplies of corn and malt must have found it more convenient than purchasing in the traditional way, and it had the additional advantage of enabling them to avoid payment of market tolls.29 The provision of corn-chambers was a service frequently offered by innkeepers at this period. In early nineteenth-century Preston, the principal market of north and central Lancashire, great quantities of grain are said to have been stored in the corn-houses attached to local inns, particularly the Castle, the Boar's Head, the King's Head, the White Horse and the George. In Hanoverian Northampton there were cornchambers attached to several of the inns, such as the Fleece in Bridge Street and the Chequer in the Market Square. In Croydon there were corn-chambers at several inns in the seventeenth century, and in the early nineteenth century local farmers brought their corn into town on other days than market days, stored it in rooms hired for the purpose in the inns round the market, and then sold it to their customers, either in or outside the market, by samples carried in their pockets.30

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The cloth trade was another branch of inland commerce associated with provincial inns. At Exeter the great seventeenth-century cloth fair was held at the New Inn, and that at Norton St Philip at the George. In London the lace markets were held at the George in Aldersgate and the Bull and Mouth in St Martin's by Aldersgate. At Halifax a French traveller in 1788 remarked that on market day he saw cloth displayed for sale not only in the streets and squares but in every inn in the town, so that 'the whole town on Saturdays becomes one huge white cloth hall'. In Leicester much of the cloth trade at this date was centred in the Old White Hart Inn in Humberstonegate. According to an advertisement in the Northampton Mercury in 1758, this inn was 'much frequented by Yorkshire, Manchester, and West Country gentlemen and traders . . . particularly dealers in the woollen manufactory'. The new landlord announced that 'as I have served an apprenticeship in a branch of the wool trade, and been a sorter of wool some years, I shall be willing to do any business in that way by commission. All commands of this kind will be most carefully and faithfully executed.'31 This is a nice example of how the landlord of an urban inn might himself foster the trade with which his house had come to be associated. In the case of a cloth-merchants' inn at Putloe in Gloucestershire, a tract of 1675 affords an interesting account of how the connection with the cloth trade had come about. A soldier from Cromwell's army had married a Scottish wife while stationed in Scotland during the Interregnum, and on his return to England after the Restoration he took a small house in Putloe 'and therein sold drink and entertained passengers and travellers that had occasion to lie there as a little inn; and particularly, his wife being a Scot as aforesaid, divers persons of that nation who usually travel from thence into England with Scotch cloth and other commodities resorted thither, and chose rather to lodge there than elsewhere for her sake, as being their countrywoman'. Personal connections of this kind often determined the channels of trade at inns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this instance the inn at Putloe seems to have become a centre for the gathering of Scottish cloth merchants in Gloucestershire.32 In Northampton, owing to the survival of an unbroken run of the Northampton Mercury from its foundation in 1720, there is a good deal of information about these trading inns. When an inn came up for sale or to let, it was customary to insert an advertisement in the Mercury, and these often afford details of the speciality for which the inn was noted. In other cases the travelling factors themselves inserted an


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announcement informing the public when they would be in Northampton and which inn they would frequent. From this information it is clear, for example, that by George II's reign the Dolphin Inn had become a cheese mart, attended by dealers in Cheshire and Warwickshire cheese and no doubt other varieties. The principal trade in Northampton at this period was the horse trade - in Defoe's phrase it was 'the centre of all the horse-markets and horse-fairs in England' - and this too, for obvious reasons, came to be associated with local inns. Most of the horse-dealers' inns in Northampton were situated either in Bridge Street (the London road) or in Marefair and the Horsemarket. One of these, the Blue Boar, was in fact run by a 'horse-courser' during Charles II's reign. Probably the most important horse-dealers' inn in the town was the King's Head, which had standings for 60 or 70 horses and was described in 1751 as 'the most commodious house for the reception of [horse] dealers, etc., at any time'.33 The other staple industries in the town were connected with the leather trades, particularly shoemaking, and until 1723 the Star Inn in Abington Street was the centre of the Northampton leather market. In that year the inn was sold and, after an abortive attempt to move it to the Talbot, the shoemakers and curriers, most of whom were at that time small craftsmen, endeavoured to get the market moved back again to its traditional site in the Market Square. But the tanners and leather-dealers, who were among the wealthier section of the community, evidently refused to agree, and on ii May 1724 at a general meeting 'of all the dealers in leather it was unanimously agreed that the fairs and markets [for leather] be for the time to come kept at the Peacock Inn in Northampton, where all tanners are desired to repair and meet their chapmen'.34 By this date several inns in Northampton were also providing accommodation for travelling surgeons and oculists, for auctions of house property and market gardens, and for sales of jewellery, silverware, glass, books, pictures, furniture, carpets, upholsteryware, linen and drapery goods. It was chiefly the larger inns, like the Peacock, the Red Lion, the Unicorn and the Saracen's Head, that afforded these facilities.35 At the Unicorn in Bridge Street in 1758 a typical drapery sale included muslins, men's neck-cloths, pelong satins, flowered silks for waistcoats, cotton and thread stockings, printed and bordered silks, soo-soo handkerchiefs, scarlet cloaks, women's plain, flowered, leghorn and chip (straw) hats, and 'clear, quarter, checked, striped, spotted, flowered and mignonetted lawns'. Another centre for the visits of travelling mercers was the Toll House Inn in St James's End, where,

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for a sale in 1737, an advertisement of two merchants lists more than forty different varieties of cloth, from rich brocades to Dutch velvets and Italian mantuas. The Northampton furniture sales were held on market days, by Jasper Haworth Quenby, a local 'appraiser' or valuer, at his sale-room at the Angel and Star in the Drapery. These sales consisted of a great variety of furniture, including beds, curtains, tables, chairs, mirrors, bureaux and chests of drawers.36 Finally, there were the numerous drovers' and carriers' inns of Northampton. For obvious reasons many of the former were situated on the edge of the town, either in Cotton End, where the London road crossed the river Nene, or in St James's End, where the routes from Wales and the west entered the town. On both routes the water-meadows by the river afforded the pasturage necessary for the drovers' flocks and herds. A hostelry like the Bull's Head in St James's End made a point of providing ample grass 'for all sorts of cattle in several pasture grounds'.37 Many of the carriers' inns were to be found, also for obvious reasons, either in Bridge Street and the South Quarter (the London road) or else in Sheep Street, the route to Leicester and the north. In a typical advertisement of 1749 the Fleece in Bridge Street was described as 'a very good, commodious, and accustomed carriers' inn, with good granaries, a large yard, and convenient stabling . . .' The granaries, of course, were for the use of corn-carriers, for the Fleece was one of the centres of the grain trade of the town. Later in the same year a neighbouring inn to the Fleece, the Lion and Lamb, was advertising as 'an old-accustomed carriers' inn, with convenient stabling, brewhouse, . . . and rickyard'. The rickyard with its stacks was an important adjunct to an inn of this kind, for when a train of carriers' wagons arrived of an evening, after a tiring day's journey, there might well be thirty or forty horses to feed. The wagons were normally drawn by up to six or eight horses, and the carriers usually travelled together in trains of half a dozen or more for mutual protection on the road. In 1739, for example, six Northampton wagons were travelling together with three others on the London road when they were stopped by highwaymen near St Albans and robbed of £4o.38 In an inland entrepot like Northampton the carrying trade was one of great importance to the community. For provincial towns generally it is very difficult to track down the origin of this carrying trade. It certainly goes back before the early seventeenth century, when it is clear from John Taylor's Carriers' Cosmography (1637) t^at London at least was linked by carrier's wagon with virtually every substantial town in


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the kingdom. It is not until the days of country newspapers, however, that it is possible to obtain much idea of the network of long-distance carriers' routes around provincial towns. By the 17508, when detailed information first becomes available for Northampton, the pattern was so intricate and extensive that it was obviously no innovation but must have been gradually built up over a long period, no doubt during the preceding century and more. An advertisement inserted in the Mercury by the landlord of one of the carriers' inns in 1754 - William Dodd of the Bull's Head in Sheep Street - makes it clear that the town was then linked by carriers' wagon with Cambridge, St Neots, Wellingborough, Oxford, Daventry, Coventry, Birmingham, Warwick, Nottingham, Derby, Lancaster, Kendal, Carlisle, Newcastle and Durham, 'or any part of those counties'. There were also indirect services, by way of Cambridge, to Newmarket, Bury St Edmunds, Yarmouth, Norwich 'or any part of that side of the country'. If we had similar advertisements for other carriers' inns in the town the network of routes would of course be a good deal more extensive.39 One important concomitant of the growth of trading activities at provincial inns was that, before country banking developed towards the end of the eighteenth century, innkeepers themselves sometimes acted in a rudimentary banking capacity. The problem of conveying money safely about the countryside was a very real one. Sometimes it was conveyed by drovers, carriers and travelling factors, and it was partly no doubt to protect themselves when carrying money that these travellers usually journeyed in groups rather than alone. Sometimes, however, it seems that travelling traders preferred to deposit their money with an innkeeper rather than face the risk of attack by highwaymen. In this case the factor and innkeeper entered into bipartite bonds with each other, or some similar sort of agreement, and when the factor returned to the same inn for further trading activities during the following year he would utilise his credit with the innkeeper for transactions in the town. This kind of arrangement was doubtless an important reason for the growing association of certain types of trade with certain inns during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As these specialist factors returned to the same inn year by year and there met others like themselves from different parts of the kingdom, they developed insensibly into a distinct and self-conscious community in their own right. The innkeeper played an important role in bringing them together, in imparting local commercial information to them, and in opening up the channels of trade.40

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(&) Administrative and political functions Quite a different function performed by the urban inn was its development from Queen Elizabeth's reign onwards as the principal centre of local administration, county business and provincial politics. The place of the inn in parliamentary elections in the days before the Reform Bill is too well known to call for comment here.41 But elections were merely the occasional highlights in the day-to-day political life of the shires. What is not so well realised, though in a sense it was more significant, was the use of inns as the regular meeting-places of political clubs and the centres of county administration. In part this development was due to the rapid expansion in the duties and activities of country justices; in part to the growing political self-consciousness of the country gentry; and in part to the development of the armigerous class in some shires, through increasing wealth and frequent intermarriage, into a single great 'county cousinage', or 'county commonwealth' in Namier's memorable phrase. The centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth were, for good and ill, the great age of county society, and in a very real sense this society was centred not only in the manor houses of the gentry (though the manor house was its chief centre, of course) but in a group of great inns in each of the forty or so county towns of England. It is rather surprising, in a sense, that the 'county inns' of England have never been seriously studied by historians from the political viewpoint. They were the centres of much of the social and political development of this country from the early seventeenth century to the Napoleonic wars. Until the building of county halls in the nineteenth century it was inevitable that a good deal of county business should be transacted in inns: they were usually the only places where it was possible for considerable numbers of people to congregate on secular matters. True, there are some fine examples of late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury 'county halls' still surviving in England, for example at Warwick, Aylesbury, Derby and Northampton. But these county halls were generally assize courts rather than administrative centres. By the early seventeenth century, however, one finds that in many county towns one or two leading inns have become the recognised meeting-places of the justices and deputy lieutenants upon county business. At Chelmsford, for example, the justices' inn in the seventeenth century was the Black Boy. At Nottingham the principal meeting-place of the county aristocracy until well into the nineteenth century was the Blackamoore's


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Head, owned by the duke of Newcastle, and the largest inn in the town. At Maidstone it was the Star Inn in the High Street - still the principal hotel in the town - where the great county room called the Justice Chamber had come into existence before 1640. Whenever the Kentish assizes were held, this room became a kind of 'parliament chamber' for the shire, and it was there that the Kentish petition of 1642 which sparked off the Civil War was organised. At Exeter the great inn of the county community, from Queen Elizabeth's reign until the rySos, was the New London Inn. There too the meetings of the gentry on the business of the shire were held in the County Chamber, and when this room was redecorated after the Restoration, the arms of the leading families of Devon were incorporated in the new plasterwork.42 In Northampton very much the same function in the mid-seventeenth century was fulfilled by the Swan Inn in the Drapery. It was from here that the Northamptonshire petition of 1642 was launched, approving the Grand Remonstrance and attacking the 'malignant party' and the 'popish lords and bishops' in Parliament. Throughout the later seventeenth century until about 1690 the Swan Inn remained the principal stronghold of the powerful Whig party in Northamptonshire. Here the London newsletters were regularly received and discussed, and every Saturday in the early i68os up to fifty or so Whig leaders, 'under pretence of dining together', held their 'meetings, clubs and cabals' for the 'alteration of the succession to the crown'.43 This, at least, was how the Tory gentry represented the facts, adding that Friend's Coffee House was another forum of the local Whig cabal. The Tories themselves appear to have organised a rival political club, meeting probably at the Goat Inn in Gold Street. Both inns and coffee-houses played a prominent part in the political troubles of the time, chiefly because they were places where the London newspapers and letters were received and discussed. In 1683 the Grand Jury of Northamptonshire had presented all 'unlicensed coffee-houses or places where false and seditious news is invented and spread', and demanded stricter regulation of inns and alehouses because of their 'great temptation in spreading seditious news'.44 By the end of the seventeenth century the Goat and the Swan had lost ground in Northampton as the principal meeting-places of the country gentry, and had been succeeded by the George, the Red Lion, the Peacock, or occasionally one of the coffee-houses of the town. The county meetings of the gentry at assize time or on militia business, for example, were normally held at one of these three inns. The great meeting of the gentry under the earl of Halifax in 1745, galvanising the

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county to defend itself against the Young Pretender, was held not at the Swan but at the George. The Goat Inn appears to have remained a centre of Jacobite activity, however, and certainly it was still running its long-established news-room. These news-rooms at provincial inns played an important role at this time in the dissemination of political news, the growth of political clubs and the development of party consciousness. When Sloswick Carr, the landlord of the Red Lion, opened a coffee-room and news-room at his inn in 1748, he specifically announced that it was established there 'at the desire and by the encouragement of the gentlemen of the town of Northampton and parts adjacent .. ,'.45 It is not difficult to envisage how these news-rooms led to debates and discussions and to the formation of local political clubs. At Leicester, as in Northampton, there was a succession of different 'county inns' from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. In this case each change reflected the gradual movement in the topographical centre of the town as well as a change in the scale of county requirements. In the sixteenth century the gentry appear to have been content to meet generally in the Talbot or the Blue Boar in Highcross Street. These were both very ancient inns, but comparatively modest in scale, and as Highcross Street gradually ceased to be the principal thoroughfare of the town during the seventeenth century they declined in status and the gentry began to meet instead at the Angel or the White Lion in Cheapside. In the eighteenth century a further move took place, when these inns were in their turn eclipsed by the palatial Three Cranes and Three Crowns, both of which were situated in Gallowtreegate, the principal thoroughfare from the north and from London. These two latter inns were also centres of political organisation in the county, particularly of course during parliamentary elections.46 As well as the more formal business of the county, important business meetings of all kinds were commonly held in inns. In Northampton they usually took place in either the George or the Peacock. In 1743, for instance, the gentry and clergy of the town and county were meeting at the George to organise the foundation of the new County Infirmary; the Annual General Meeting and Infirmary Feast continued to be held either there or at the Peacock or Red Lion in subsequent years. In the 17405 to 17605 the George was also the scene of numerous meetings for extending the navigation of the river Nene, first to Oundle, then to Thrapston, and eventually to Northampton itself. These and other inns, such as the Angel and the Bull, were utilised for meetings of the Puritan classis in Queen Elizabeth's reign, for the election of the Verderers of


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Rockingham Forest, for the business meetings of the Charity School Trustees, for the celebration of royal birthdays, for the gatherings of freemasons and for meetings to organise a new water supply: in short, for almost any of the countless business events that took place in the town between 1570 and i8oo.47 The holding of business meetings at inns was not of course a peculiarity of Northampton. In 1791, for example, the scheme for the building of the Ellesmere Canal in Shropshire was launched at a public meeting at the Royal Oak at Ellesmere, and the Canal Company Committee continued to hold its meetings in the same place for the next fifteen years, until Telford's Canal Office building was completed. At Leicester the meetings of the corporation about the navigation of the river Soar and regarding problems of the woollen manufacture in the town during the eighteenth century were held at the old Angel Inn. The foundation of the Leicester Infirmary in 1766 and of the Leicester Literary Society in 1791 were both inaugurated by public meetings at the Three Cranes. When the Infirmary was eventually opened, in 1771, a great public banquet was held, at the Three Cranes for the gentlemen who had promoted the scheme and at the Three Crowns for their ladies.48 (c) Social and cultural functions The efflorescence of cultural and social life in provincial towns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is an interesting and strangely neglected aspect of English history. It was due to many complex causes, but put in the simplest terms its origins may be said to be twofold. On the one hand it was associated with the rise of the gentry to a dominating position in county society, and hence with the expansion of a leisured class and their increasing sense of solidarity. In some shires a vigorous intellectual life among the country gentry had sprung up as early as Queen Elizabeth's reign: in Kent, certainly, from the time of William Lambarde in the 15708. In some parts of England the development came later, but probably in all it was in some degree apparent by the time of the Civil War. In this development the county towns played an influential role as the forums of county society; and their influence was very much increased with the establishment, particularly during the second half of the seventeenth century, of a regular annual social season, when for several weeks the country gentry migrated to their town houses or to the great county inns in the shire capitals. On the other hand the efflorescence of cultural life was closely asso-

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dated with the growth of the leisured and professional classes in the towns themselves, particularly from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The underlying reasons for the rise of what may loosely be termed the 'pseudo-gentry' in provincial towns - a class of people supported by independent sources of income but unsupported by a country estate - lie beyond the scope of this essay. It must suffice to say that by 1700 there was usually a sizeable and expanding group of leisured urban gentry and partly leisured professional families permanently resident in most considerable provincial towns, particularly in cathedral cities like Canterbury and county towns like Derby, Preston and Northampton. These families formed a perfectly well-recognised social group in the eyes of their contemporaries. In Northampton and other towns they were referred to as 'the town gentry' or 'our town gentlemen', in contradistinction to 'the country gentry' from the surrounding county. During the Hanoverian period the numbers of the urban gentry rapidly increased. The social life of almost every Georgian town of any size, except the new industrial centres, came to be headed by its own local nexus of leisured families. There is any amount of architectural evidence for the existence of these families in the many Georgian and Regency houses of provincial towns, even of places as small as Ashford and West Mailing in Kent, Blandford in Dorset, and Louth in Lincolnshire. And it was usually this class who played the dominant role in the social and cultural life of the urban community. In George Ill's reign even the most pedestrian little towns, such as Loughborough in Leicestershire, with its 3,000 or so inhabitants, maintained an elaborate annual round of balls, assemblies, concerts, lectures, card-parties and florists' feasts, not to mention cockfights, anti-slavery meetings and other excitements. Nearly all these activities in Loughborough itself were based on the inns of the town and were organised by its innkeepers, with the gentry principally, though of course not exclusively, in mind. There are many references to these events in the Leicester and Nottingham Journal of the time.49 One of the most usual ways of facilitating the development of social and cultural activities was to build an assembly room. Except in a few of the largest towns, most of the early assembly rooms were built by innkeepers and formed part of the inn itself. The first of them were probably erected towards the end of the seventeenth century; by the end of the eighteenth there were few towns of any size without them. It is indeed astonishing to find how small were some of the places in which


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they were built. One of the earliest surviving examples, dating from the first years of the eighteenth century, is to be found in the tiny Kentish borough of New Romney, a town with no more than 755 inhabitants at the time of the first census in 1801 and probably barely 500 a century earlier. In the Weald of Kent, Viscount Torrington found in 1788 that new assembly rooms had recently been built by the landlord of the Queen's Head Inn at Hawkhurst, a market 'town' with probably fewer than 1,000 inhabitants at this time. Seven miles north-west of Hawkhurst there were also assembly rooms at about this time in the market village of Lamberhurst, whose population then probably numbered no more than 750 inhabitants. Nine or ten miles east of Hawkhurst, at Tenterden, a town with about 1,500 inhabitants at this date, assemblies were held in the new town hall (rebuilt in 1792) adjoining the Woolpack Inn. (Tenterden must also have been one of the smallest towns in England to have a theatre of its own at this period.)50 About ten miles east of Tenterden a flourishing social life came to be centred during the eighteenth century on the inns and assembly rooms of Ashford. In the 17905 Ashford was described by the Kentish historian Edward Hasted as 'a small but neat and cheerful town', the houses 'mostly modern and well built', the High Street wide and newly paved, and 'many of the inhabitants of a genteel rank in life'. The numerous tombs of the local urban gentry in the parish church and churchyard bear out Hasted's description. The town had already given birth to several well-known physicians, one of whom, Dr Rowzee, had made a name for himself by writing a treatise on spa waters. Ashford was also something of an educational centre at this time, with 'an exceeding good English academy', a boarding school for young ladies, a writing school for the sons of poor townsmen, and a grammar school at which 'most of the sons of the neighbouring gentry' received their early education. In short, with a population of no more than 2,151 at the first census in 1801, Ashford was already on the way to becoming a kind of miniature social capital for the Weald of Kent. The balls and supper-parties organised by the innkeepers of the town figure amusingly in the letters of Mrs Montagu, the celebrated bluestocking (1720-1800), when visiting her relatives a few miles away at Mount Morris.51 Several of the inns and 'genteel houses' of her period still survive, together with the assembly rooms above the market hall (rebuilt before 1808), though these have now been mutilated and debased to other uses. Although the extent of social and cultural life in minor towns like Ashford was sometimes surprising, it was naturally in county towns like

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Preston and Northampton that such activities principally flourished. From the advertisement pages of the Northampton Mercury a good deal can be discovered about this aspect of the history of a provincial town.52 In the eighteenth century the social life of the county gentry when in Northampton centred principally on the triumvirate of inns at the top of the local hierarchy, the George, the Red Lion and the Peacock, though until the 17305 the last sometimes gave place to the Rose and Crown. There seems to have been a kind of 'gentlemen's agreement' between these three to share out the spoils between them. The first great event of the season was the horse-races held in about the third week in September. The races were not entirely a county affair: the County Plate (given by the country gentry) was open only to the county gentry and the Town Plate (given by the corporation) to inhabitants of town and county; but the Earl's Plate (given by Lord Northampton) and probably others seem to have had no restriction on entry, so that peers and squires from all over the kingdom flocked into the town and put up at its leading inns. The Northampton races were in fact a great public occasion, as were the races at other towns. 'I much wonder Mrs Tate should choose to come to Northampton at so public a time as the horse-races', wrote Lady Jane Compton somewhat tartly, from Studley Royal in Yorkshire, to the countess of Northampton at Castle Ashby in 1737. 'I hear a great deal of her in this country not much to her advantage.*53 The Northampton races lasted for three days and each day they were followed by a great banquet and a ball. On the first day the gentlemen dined at the Peacock, the ladies at the George, and the ball was held at the Red Lion; while on subsequent days the order of arrangement was carefully reversed. On special occasions this great gathering of the aristocracy in the town could be conveniently turned to other than merely social uses. In 1745, for example, the Gentleman's Magazine recorded that on 'the first day of the horse-race here we were honoured with the presence of that true friend and bright ornament of this country the E[arl] of H[alifa]x, who dined at the George with a great number of gentlemen of distinction, and immediately after dinner made a speech to them . . .'. The earl warned them of the 'unnatural rebellion now raised against his Majesty's person and government, and the infamous attempt which our enemies are making to ruin our happy constitution both in church and state and to reduce us to superstition and bondage under a popish pretender supported by the power of France'.54 Normally, however, horse-race week in Northampton was peaceable


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enough and it must have brought a good deal of money into the coffers of the tradesmen as well as the innkeepers of the borough. In all probability the social life of many of the local gentry then continued without a break throughout the autumn and winter months. During October 'public breakfasts', followed by balls and card-parties, were held at each of the three great inns. These were followed by the Northampton Assemblies, held every week during the succeeding months: in December at the George, in January at the Red Lion and in February at the Peacock. The gentlemen's tickets were sold for ys. 6d. and the ladies' for 55., and this entitled the holder 'to dance and play at cards from six in the evening till twelve'.55 Another very popular pastime among the Northamptonshire gentry during the annual season was cockfighting. This was organised by the landlords of a number of inns - for example the Fleece, the Old Goat, the Black Lion, the Wheatsheaf and the George, all of which seem to have had their own cockpits - and the prizes ranged from 2 guineas a battle to as much as 50 guineas for the final battle. Sometimes the antagonists were the rival gentry from two neighbouring places, such as Northampton and Daventry; sometimes they were supporters of two rival county families, such as the Sam wells and Montagues; sometimes they consisted of the town gentry versus the county gentry; and sometimes the Northamptonshire gentry versus those of Buckinghamshire or some other neighbouring shire. These occasions always provided an excuse, of course, for convivial banquets. In the summer months, among the most frequent events organised by the Northampton innkeepers were the Florists' Feasts, Carnation Feasts and Gardeners' Society meetings. Exactly when these events originated it is impossible to say. Certainly they had become fairly usual by the 17308, but they may well have been in existence for many years before the Mercury was founded in 1720. The most usual venues were the George, the Red Lion, the Angel and the Peacock inns. The prizes were moderate - £2 or £3 was a common figure offered - and clearly they too afforded the usual excuse for conviviality as well as genuinely encouraging horticulture. In one other respect the Florists' Feasts of the time were of interest, in that they were often open to all kinds of gardeners, of whatever social status. Normally distinctions of class were inflexibly observed in Hanoverian and Stuart Northampton, more so perhaps than at any time before or since. But the Florists' Feasts were among the few occasions in the year when these barriers were temporarily lowered, and the market gardeners and trades-

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men of the town exhibited side by side with the county gentry. Then, as now, the Englishman's love of gardening formed a curious bond between all social ranks and degrees, and no doubt provided as fertile a topic of conversation as it does in a modern village. There were a number of events in Northampton every year designed to appeal to the popular passion for prize-fighting and the delight in marvels. Trials of skill between pugilists, wrestlers, swordsmen and the like were regularly put on at Northampton inns. In December 1721, for instance, a trial of skill at the quarterstaff, sword and dagger, and backsword was staged at the Hind Inn between Robert Blake, the Irish 'master of the Noble Science of Defence', who claimed to have fought 'most of the best masters in the three kingdoms', and William Flanders, the Northamptonshire prize-fighter, 'who never did refuse the best of masters that did appear in London'. In October 1731 'Mr Joseph Johnson the renowned Yorkshire champion' mounted the stage at the Goat Inn with 'the famous Mr Edward Sutton, the Kentish Hero . . . the only man in England having fought 225 battles with the greatest applause and always come off conqueror'.56 Then in 1752 there was much excitement in the town over the visit of the great fire-eater, Mr Powell. Mr Powell claimed to have exhibited before several members of the royal family, and 'most of the nobility and quality of the first rank in London: especially . . . before that learned body the Royal Society, who in testimony of their highest approbation made him a present of a purse of gold and a large silver medal which he wears in honour of them . . .'. After a few days spent at the Saracen's Head in Northampton Mr Powell announced that he was proceeding to Warwick, Coventry, Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby, York, Scarborough and other towns.57 During the following year the town was greatly entertained by the performances of the Learned English Dog. 'Of all the extraordinary curiosities that have ever been exhibited to the inspection of the curious/ the Mercury announced in November 1753, 'none have met with such a general approbation and esteem as the learned English Dog, now at the Angel Inn in this town: for he actually reads, writes, and casts accounts; answers various questions in Ovid's Metamorphoses, geography, the Roman, English, and sacred history; knows the Greek alphabet; . . . tells, by looking on any common watch of the company, what is the hour and minute;... shews the impenetrable secret or tells any person's thoughts in company; and distinguishes all sorts of colours.'58 In meeting the more serious cultural interests of the townsmen, inn-


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holders also played a prominent part. Lectures, concerts, plays, exhibitions and literary gatherings formed regular features of the activities they sponsored and were evidently well patronised by the town and country gentry. In November 1737, soon after the opening of the gentry season, the Mercury announced that there was to be a concert at the Peacock Inn 'by the best masters from London'. It was to be followed by 'several antique and French dances and a ball, after the performances are ended'. In December 1752 (also during the gentry season) an exhibition was held at the Ram Inn of Mr Motet, the French sculptor's, 'six inimitable pieces of marble sculpture', representing 'our Saviour's life from the institution of his last supper to his resurrection, in upwards of 400 fine figures in relievo'.59 In January 1755 a well-known scientific lecturer, Mr Griffis, began his course of public lectures, at the Hind Inn in the Market Square, on experimental philosophy and chemistry. In the summer of the same year a committee was formed which met from time to time at the Red Lion Inn for promoting the publication of Bridges's History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire. This was a venture of widespread interest to the gentry of both town and shire, though it was many years before publication of the project was in fact accomplished. At a public literary gathering at the Chequer Inn in October 1758, among a series of papers read were 'an essay on the standard of taste and judgement', 'a critical dissertation on the Roman and English Histories', a comparison of English and French courage, and (to lighten the diet) a 'whimsical impromptu on the Brussels, London, and Amsterdam gazetteers*. So far as drama was concerned, there was a theatre in the town by the end of George IPs reign, and before that date public performances were taking place at some of the leading Northampton inns, particularly the Hind. In January 1724, for example, Dryden's comedy The Spanish Friar, or The Double Discovery was put on at the Hind, and this was followed in February by Hamlet. Both were probably performed by travelling groups, though the part of Torrismond in the former play was taken by an anonymous gentleman 'for his own diversion'.60 These examples of cultural activity in Hanoverian Northampton represent only a few among many which might be cited. Of course by no means all the intellectual activity of the town was centred on its inns. Nothing can be said here of more serious ventures like Philip Doddridge's celebrated Academy (1729-51); of the activities of the Northampton Philosophical Society, an early scientific body founded in I743;61 or of the many educational establishments in the town at this

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period - boarding schools, writing schools, finishing schools, riding schools and private academies. Virtually all of these have long since disappeared, and they owed little or nothing to the initiative of innkeepers in the town. But in the more general cultural awareness of both town and county, Northampton innkeepers played an enterprising and decisive role between the Restoration and the Reform Bill. In this they were probably not untypical of landlords in many other towns in the provinces. III. URBAN INNKEEPERS

What kind of men were the innholders who organised these highly diverse activities? It is by no means easy to generalise about so amorphous a group of people, but by examining the innkeeping fraternity of a single provincial town in detail it is possible to detect certain outstanding characteristics. In the following pages Northampton is once again taken as a case study. Though in some respects unique, its general experience was probably not untypical of other inland entrepots, such as Worcester, Salisbury or Shrewsbury, or of county towns like Exeter, Chester and Canterbury. (a) The mobility of innkeepers The first point to note is that the innkeepers of Northampton were among the most mobile elements in the community. It was not unusual for an innkeeper to migrate from one town to another at least once during his working life, and occasionally two or three times. There is abundant evidence of this fact in the advertisement pages of provincial newspapers like the Northampton Mercury. It is not really surprising, since the communications system of the country was essentially based on its inns and operated principally by its innkeepers. Well before Queen Anne's reign a widespread network of coaching, posting and carrying services had come into existence, channelling all kinds of news and information as well as goods and passengers through provincial hostelries. Naturally included in this news was information about profitable openings in the innkeeping world; and these openings the victualling fraternity was not slow to follow up. Migration was especially frequent in important thoroughfare towns like Northampton, where inns were large and landlords numerous. The influx of new innkeepers into the town was a matter of grave concern to the Northampton corporation from the late sixteenth century on-


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wards. In 1629 the constables and headboroughs of every ward were instructed to report to the mayor every month the names of all newcomers who were tapsters, chamberlains or ostlers, while a strict watch was kept on new innkeepers.62 These regulations do not appear to have been very effective, and several attempts to limit the number of landlords to those of the twelve recognised 'ancient inns' proved equally abortive. Gradually, it seems, the corporation had to reconcile itself to merely levying a freedom fine on 'foreign' innkeepers, usually of £10 or more, and acquiescing in their increasing numbers. In 1642, for example, Thomas Holland, the influential landlord of the George, was 'questioned' by the corporation for keeping an inn without permission. Their questioning, however, had no effect and two years later the corporation declared that Holland had 'much intruded the liberty of this town by keeping of an inn, he being not a freeman of the same town, and hath . . . kept a tavern . . . without consent of the corporation'. On his submitting himself to them and paying a fine of £10, however, the corporation was perforce content to let him continue his house.63 By that date alien innkeepers must have been recognised as a source of considerable profit to the community. Innkeeping was a trade, moreover, in which opportunism and mobility were essential, and by the middle years of the seventeenth century the innholders of Northampton were too wealthy and numerous a body to antagonise. Many of them in fact were now becoming members of the corporation themselves. During the eighteenth century it is evident that a considerable number of innkeepers had originated outside the borough.64 In the smaller inns some of them had been servants in a great house, like John Day of the Three Tuns who had formerly been a servant of the earl of Rockingham and groom to Viscount Cobham. In the larger inns they had more usually graduated from another hostelry, either in Northampton or in some other place. John Stoughton, the landlord of the George in 1732, had formerly kept the Swan at Kettering; Robert Atkins, of the Elephant and Castle, had formerly kept an inn in Coventry; Hugh Curtis, of the Black Boy, came from the White Hart in Wellingborough; and William Davis, of the Angel, from the Crown at Dunstable. A number of other Northampton innkeepers at this time came from much further afield. James Bordrigge of the Red Lion, for example, seems to have stemmed from a family of minor gentry in Yorkshire. Several, like Obrien Alliston, may have been of Irish extraction and a few, like Rene Laforce, were of European origin. After the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1707 a considerable number came from

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north of the border. Among these were Neil McNeill, who at one time kept the Plume of Feathers and later moved to the Unicorn; and probably Sloswick Carr, one of the best known of Northampton's innholders during George II's reign, who eventually became landlord of the Red Lion. Though most of the 'foreign' innkeepers in Georgian Northampton came to stay, a number moved on after a few years to other towns. John Hitchcock of the Peacock, for example, moved on in 1735 to the Swan at Newport Pagnell; Josiah Key of the George moved in 1736 to the White Horse at Dunstable; Daniel Dowell of the Angel moved in 1749 to the Angel at Kitts End near Barnet. A number of inn-servants from Northampton eventually became landlords in other towns too. George Winckles, a servant at the George Inn, in 1733 became innkeeper of the Peacock at St Albans. John Earle, the drawer at the Peacock in Northampton, moved first to the Ship Inn at Wellingborough and in 1759 became innkeeper of the Swan Inn in the same town. This kind of mobility among the innkeeping fraternity was not peculiar to Northampton. It was probably found in most thoroughfare towns. During George II's reign the landlord of the Ram Inn in Smithfield moved to the Bull at St Albans; Robert Matthews of the Crown at St Albans moved to the Crown at Dunstable; Francis Hall (originally a Northampton inn-servant) moved from the Rose and Crown in St John's Street, London, to the White Swan at Redbourn; Philip Thompson of the Chequer at London Colney moved to the Saracen's Head at Newport Pagnell; and John Wise, an innkeeper from Liverpool, took on the George at Markyate, near Dunstable. Two common characteristics mark most of these examples of migration. In the first place virtually all movement took place between places connected with each other by major coaching and carrying routes. Wellingborough, Kettering, Coventry and Newport Pagnell were all on much-frequented roads radiating from Northampton. Barnet, London Colney, St Albans, Redbourn, Markyate, Dunstable, Newport Pagnell and Northampton were all stages on the road from London to Chester and Liverpool. The more distant connections between Northampton and Yorkshire, Scotland and Ireland may also be explained in this way; for most of the principal routes from London to Ireland, to the west of Scotland and to west Yorkshire also passed through Northampton at this time. The second point to observe is that these migrations evidently marked a step upwards, as a rule, in the innkeeping hierarchy. When moving


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to a new inn in the same town the landlord sometimes stressed that he was doing so 'for the more commodious reception of his guests', and 'at the desire and by the encouragement of the gentlemen of the town'. When moving to another town he emphasised that his new hostelry had been 'wholly new fitted up and made much more commodious than formerly'. This does not mean, of course, that the upward movement was a universal phenomenon. There must have been many stories of failure and misfortune of which we know little or nothing. As a rule it is only the pushing and successful landlords that we hear about, either through their advertisements or from their wills and inventories. Nevertheless, when all allowance is made, there were a good many forceful and enterprising characters in the innkeeping world at this time, and success stories in the Stuart and Hanoverian era were not infrequent. (b) The innkeeping hierarchy In Northampton, and probably in many places like it, these successes operated within a distinct and clearly defined hierarchy of prestige. This hierarchy was not wholly inflexible, of course, in a town with so many inns and so flourishing an entrepot trade. It was certainly possible for a gifted and enterprising landlord to raise the status of his inn in the scale of respect. And yet the scale of respect was felt to be a reality, and each inn occupied a more or less settled place in the hierarchy. Urban communities at this time, it must be remembered, were as concerned with questions of status and degree as the landed gentry in the countryside around them. At the top of the scale in eighteenth-century Northampton were the three 'county' inns already mentioned. These were particularly patronised by the gentry of the shire, by titled magnates on their travels from one part of the kingdom to another, and by the corporation or other public bodies on festive occasions. The George was always regarded as the first among equals, and after its rebuilding following the great fire of 1675 was described by Defoe as 'more like a palace than an inn'. Defoe's remarks were echoed by many of his contemporaries, and in 1739 it was described as 'the best and most commodious inn for noblemen, gentlemen, and travellers between London and West Chester'.65 Among the many important visitors to the George around this period were the duke of Tuscany, the duke of Devonshire, the earl and countess of Egmont, the earl of Chesterfield on his way into Ireland as lord lieutenant, and General Wade on his way to Scotland in I745-66 Some idea of the scale and splendour of the George around this period

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can be gained from the probate inventory of one of its landlords, Henry Lyon.67 When Lyon died in September 1698 his personal estate alone was valued at nearly £800, or perhaps £30,000 in modern terms. The George then contained forty-one rooms, most of them with names like the Globe, the Mitre, the Rose and the Mermaid. (The numbering of rooms in hotels was of course a much later development.) The total value of the furnishings in the inn then amounted to more than £500, or perhaps £i5,ooo-£2o,ooo in current values. The linen and the brass and pewterware were each worth more than £80, or possibly more than £3,000 in modern figures. The contents of the principal bedroom, the Queen's Head Chamber, were assessed at about £30 (say £1,200) and of the King's Head, the Mermaid, the Crown and the Two-Bedded Chamber at £i6-£2o each (£600-800). The value of the goods in the woodyard, probably consisting chiefly of fuel for the coming winter, was estimated at £67 (£2,500 or so), and that of hay in store for visitors' horses at more than £100 (say £3,ooo-£4,ooo worth). It is not surprising to find that the landlords of inns like the George were described as 'gentlemen' by their contemporaries. In scale and status the George was closely rivalled in Northampton by the Red Lion in the Horsemarket. It is evident from James Bordrigge's inventory (June 1743) that this also contained forty-one rooms, and though not quite so lavishly appointed as the George, its furnishings were valued in 1743 at nearly £450 (or perhaps about £14,000 in modern terms), and its stock of wine and spirits at more than £90 (£3,000). The silverware in the inn was assessed at more than £100 and there was a splendid collection of kitchen goods valued at nearly £35 (say £ 1,000 in current values). Among these kitchen goods were 16 dozen plates, 13 dozen soup plates, 160 dishes and 10 roasting spits, together with all the usual kitchenware of the time such as tea kettles, cauldrons, fish kettles, frying pans, saucepans, chafing dishes, warming pans, plate-warmers and coffee pots. Many of the rooms in the Red Lion were lined with hangings and pictures, and in the Dragon Chamber, the dining-room and the Queen's Head Chamber there were nearly 90 yds of tapestry. Among the more interesting items of furniture were a mahogany dining-table, several Japanese tea-tables, Chinese wallpapers, Virginia chairs, gilded sconces and the family coat of arms over the drawing-room chimney-piece. Of the innkeepers of the Red Lion in the Stuart and Hanoverian era more is known than of those of any other Northampton inn.68 In William Ill's reign the inn was run by one William Burt, whose family gave at


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least three innkeepers to the town about this period. Burt had probably died by 1704 when the inn had evidently been taken over by one of the Lyon family, who also provided at least three innkeepers in Northampton during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is possible that Charles Lyon managed the inn in association with Burt's widow Elizabeth; for in her will of 1706 Elizabeth Burt was still described as dwelling at the Red Lion. After his death in 1704 or 1705 it was continued by his widow, Mary Lyon. It is clear that Mary Lyon was a woman of some character, for in addition to running the Red Lion for more than twenty years she seems to have been the first innkeeper in Northampton to run a daily stage-coach service to London (most ran only on alternate days). This was a service which she founded in 1724 and continued to operate after her retirement from the inn in the following year. She was succeeded at the Red Lion by Mr Pratt, a member of another long-standing victualling dynasty in the town, one of whom had been an innkeeper as far back as 1519. The next innkeeper we hear of at the Red Lion (probably Pratt's immediate successor) was the Yorkshireman James Bordrigge. When he died in 1743 he was one of the richest innholders in the town. He did not own his inn (very few Northampton innkeepers did) and his will has not survived, so that we have no knowledge of any real property he may have possessed. But his personal estate was valued at £1,045 an NM, 31 July 1749, 5 Dec 1737; T. M. James, 'The Inns of Croydon, 1640-

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Landscape and Community

1830' (Leicester M.A. thesis, 1969), pp. 40-1; Clarence G. Paget, By-Ways in the History of Croydon (1929), p. 13. 31. Everitt, 'Marketing', p. 560 and n.; R. B. Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business, particularly between 1660 and 1760 (Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, xix, 1915), 318; Paul Mantoux The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (1961 edn), quoting account of French tour of 1788; NM, 17 Apr 1758. 32. The Bloody Innkeeper, or Sad and Barbarous News from Gloucestershire . • • (1675). 33. NM, 30 Apr 1739, 30 June 1740, 5 Aug 1751, 2 Sept 1751, 31 July 1749, 12 Aug 1754; Defoe, Tour, ii, 486. 34. NM, 16 Nov 1723, 3 Feb 1723-4, n May 1724; VCH, Northants., ii, 313, incorrectly attributes the removal to Peacock to 1726. 35. NM, 1721-60, passim. 36. NM, 13 Nov 1758, 6 June 1737, 29 Jan 1759. 37. NM, 19 July 1736. 38. NM, 31 July 1739,18 Dec 1749, 26 Feb 1738-9. 39. NM, 6 May 1754. The Bull's Head in Sheep Street was a different inn from the Bull's Head in St James's End referred to earlier. 40. Cf. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965), pp. 511-13; Everitt, 'Marketing', pp. 559-63. 41. See, for example, E. G. Forrester, Northamptonshire County Elections and Electioneering 1695-1837 (1941), p. 18, where Thomas Cartwright spent £1,216 on 55 inn and alehouse bills in the election of 1695. G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (1963), pp. 124, 126, refers to inn bills totalling over £5,000 spent during elections in Denbighshire in 1741. 42. Quintrell, 'Government of Essex', p. 134; R. A. Church, Economic and Social Change in a Midland Town: Victorian Nottingham 1815—1900 (1966), p. 19; Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640-60 (1966), pp. 95-6 and n., 131, 313; Robert Dymond, 'The Old Inns and Taverns of Exeter', Devonshire Association Transactions, xii (1880), 402-4. 43. CSPD, 1641-3, p. 279; CSPD, 1666-7, p. 555; CSPD, i68o-i,pp. 543, 643 et passim; A True Account of the Presentment of the Grand Jury for the last General Assizes held for the County of Northampton . . . (1683). The last item gives the names of the Northamptonshire 'cabal'. 44. CSPD, 1680-1, p. 535; CSPD, 1683 (Jan-June), p. 86. For the Tories and the Goat Inn, cf. HMC, Finch ii, 184, 439, and CSPD, 1680-1, p. 644. 45. HMC, Finch, ii, 184, 439; Thomas Arnold and J. J. Cooper, The History of the Church of Doddridge (n.d.), pp. 122-3; NM, 10 Sep 1744, 28 Dec 1747. 46. Billson, Medieval Leicester, ch. in, 'The Inns'; for the White Lion, see John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, ii (1795), 6on. 47. NM, advertisements 1720-70, passim', R. M. Serjeantson, A History of the Church of AH Saints, Northampton (1901), p. 115. 48. L. T. C. Rolt, Thomas Telford (1958), pp. 38, 56; Billson, Medieval Leicester, p. 35. 49. Green, Loughborough Markets, pp. 38-41. 50. The Buildings of England: John Newman, West Kent and the Weald (1969), p. 417; John Byng, Viscount Torrington, The Torrington Diaries, i (1934), 350; Hasted, History of Kent, vii, 201; Richard Church, Kent (1948), pp. 270-1. 51. Hasted, History of Kent, vii, 534, 539; The Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montague (4 vols, 1809-13), passim.

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52. Except where other references are given, this and the following paragraphs are based primarily on advertisements in the Northampton Mercury between 1720 and 1760. 53. HMC Reports, xi, iv, 253 (my italics). 54. Gentleman's Magazine, xv (1745), 501. 55. NM, 3 Dec 1753. 56. NM, ii Dec 1721, 26 Oct 1731. 57. NM, 29 June 1752. 58. NM, 5 Nov 1753. 59. NM, 21 Nov 1737, 4 Dec 1752. After its visit to Northampton, the exhibition moved on to Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Warwick (NM, 11 Dec 1752). I have not been able to identify 'Mr Motet'. It seems very unlikely that the sixteenth-century sculptor of that name can be referred to, who in any case carved in wood, not marble. 60. NM, 6 Jan 1755, 23 June 1755, 16 Oct 1758, 3 Dec 1759,10 Jan 1723/4, 27 Feb 1723/4. 61. Gentleman's Magazine, xvi (1746), 475. 62. Northampton Borough Records, Assembly Book 1627-1744, f.8. 63. Ibid., ff. 67, 82. 64. Except where other references are given, this and the following paragraphs are based primarily on scattered references in the advertisement pages of the Northampton Mercury, 1720—60. 65. Defoe, Tour, p. 486; NM, 30 Apr 1739. 66. Serjeantson, All Saints, Northampton, p. 160; NM, 22 Feb 1741/2, 5 May 1746,14 Oct 1745; HMC, Egmont, Diary, iii, 297. 67. The probate inventories mentioned in this and later paragraphs are in the Northants. County Record Office. The modern estimates suggested, here and elsewhere in this essay, of contemporary values given in the inventories must be regarded only as the roughest of guides: there is no way of arriving at accurate modern equivalents of the value of goods like furniture and kitchenware. 68. Except where other sources are given, this and the following paragraphs in this section are based on miscellaneous references in the Northampton Borough Records (chiefly Mayors' and Chamberlains' Accounts and Assembly Books), in the Northampton Mercury advertisements, and on wills and inventories. 69. NM, 28 Dec 1747. 'Mountain' is a Spanish wine from the Malaga area. 70. NM, 6 May 1751. 71. NM, 17 Aug 1752. Another service by berlin started in June 1752 from the Lion and Lamb (NM, 22 June 1752). 72. NM, 9 Apr 1733,10 Jan 1736/7, 7 Feb 1736/7. 73. Northampton Borough Library, Tobias Coldwell's MS history of Northampton, under the year 1692. 74. NM, advertisements 1720-60, passim. 75. The family histories in this section are based on many scattered references in contemporary wills, inventories and related probate records; in the Assembly Books, Apprenticeship Registers, and Mayors' and Chamberlains' Accounts in the Borough Records; in the advertisement pages of the Northampton Mercury; in the parliamentary poll-books for Northampton of 1768 and 1784; and on family monuments in Northampton's four ancient churches and in those of some neighbouring villages. 76. Pococke, Travels (Camden Soc., new series, xlii, 1888), 167. 77. Cf. NM, 26 Apr 1736, 27 Feb 1748-9, 29 Apr 1745 (General Wade disperses a gang operating in the Whittlewood Forest and Whaddon Chase

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areas), 22 Aug 1737 (a lace-dealer is set upon between Northampton and Newport Pagnell). 78. NM, 28 Feb 1731/2, 24 Apr 1731/2. 79. John Conant, The Life of the Reverend and Venerable John Conant D.D. . . . (1823), p. 77. The author was Conant's son, who died in 1723. The biography was evidently written after his father's death in 1694. I have not been able to discover the exact date of its composition. The father was vicar of All Saints', Northampton.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Typical of the many popular general works on inns are: G. C. Harper, Historic and Picturesque Inns of Old England (1906); A. E. Richardson, Old Inns of England (1934); A. E. Richardson and H. D. Eberlin, The English Inn (1925); H. P. Maskell, Taverns of Old England (1927); Thomas Burke, The English Inn (1930). More scholarly but brief is R. F. Bretherton, 'Country Inns and Alehouses', in R. Lennard (ed.) Englishmen at Rest and Play (1931). Of many local studies, varying greatly in quality, the following may be cited as examples: A. Groom, Old London Coaching Inns and their Successors (1928); N. Tiptaft, Inns of the Midlands (1951); D. C. Maynard, Old Inns of Kent (1925); H. W. Hart, 'Sherman of the Bull and Mouth', Journal of Transport History, v (1961-2), 12—21 (one of the chief London coaching inns); Robert Dymond, 'The Old Inns and Taverns of Exeter', Devonshire Association Transactions, xii (1880), 387-416; C. J. Billson, Medieval Leicester (1920), in 'The Inns' (not confined to medieval period); T. P. Cooper, 'Some Old York Inns', Associated Architectural Soc., Report and Papers, xxix (2), 273—318; T. P. Cooper, Old Inns and Inn Signs of York (1897); G. Benson, The Taverns, Hotels, and Inns of York (1913; privately printed). (Other local studies are listed in W. E. Tate's useful 'Public House Bibliography', in The Local Historian, vii, 1968). The best of these, such as the articles by Hart, Dymond and Billson, are works of scholarship. The same certainty cannot be said for most of the effusions in this field, either local or general. For a catalogue of the inns of England, or even of London, there is nothing to compare with Bryant Lillywhite's meticulous and monumental volume on London Coffee Houses (1963). The local historian of inns will obviously want to consult any available histories on his area, and also the relevant sections of the Victoria County History, some of the more recent volumes of which contain useful information about urban inns. A great deal has also been written on English roads and coaching bearing on the history of the inn. As a rule, in fact, this is the one aspect in their history that normally receives much attention. Typical of what might most charitably be called the 'romantic school' are G. C. Harper, Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore (1903); and W. Outram Tristram, Coaching Days and Coaching Ways (1906). These are the kind of works that sometimes contain useful facts buried in a farrago of Pickwickian nonsense; the species is not yet extinct. More scholarly and wider in scope are, for example, Joan Parkes, Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century (1925) (sometimes gushing but a standard work of its kind and valuable for its references to printed sources); Virginia A. LaMar, Travel and Roads in England (1960) (one of the Folger booklets on Tudor and Stuart Civilisation; short but excellent, with a very helpful bibliography); J. Crofts, Packhorse, Wagon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications

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under the Tudors and Stuarts (1967); John Copeland, Roads and their Traffic, 1750-1850 (1968); Edmund Vale, The Mail-Coach Men of the Late Eighteenth Century (1960). With the growth in travel from Queen Elizabeth onwards, 'road books' began to appear, many of which give the names of some of the principal coaching and carrying inns. The standard guide to these is Sir Herbert Fordham, The Road Books and Itineraries of Great Britain, 1570 to 1850: A Catalogue with an Introduction and a Bibliography (1924). Of the many well-known travellers who used these roads in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and whose tours, diaries or letters have been published and shed incidental light on the history of inns, among the most useful (apart from the obvious Pepys and Evelyn) are: Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1727) (relates to late seventeenth century and early eighteenth; many editions); The Travels through England of Dr Richard Pococke . . . during 1750, 1757 and Later Years (Camden Soc., new series, xlii, xliv, 1888-9); J°hn Byng, Viscount Torrington, The Torrington Diaries containing the Tours, through England and Wales . . . between the years 1781 and 1794 (4 vols, 1934-8). This field is very extensive, however, and for others the reader must be referred to the standard guide: E. G. Cox, A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel . . . (University of Washington Publications in Language and Literature, xii, 1949), iii: Great Britain (exhaustive but contains no index of places and subjects). For some special aspects of the subject the following may be mentioned: J. Larwood and J. C. Hotten, History of Sign-Boards from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1867 and subsequent editions, the last in 1951 under the title English Inn Signs') (old-fashioned and out of date, but still a monumental work); S. and B. Webb, The History of Liquor Licensing in England (1903) (the standard text); W. Branch Johnson, 'The Inn as a Community Centre', Amateur Historian, ii (1954-6), 134-7 (brief but useful introduction to this important subject, and helpful on sources). Though outside the period of the present study, Brian Harrison and Barrie Trinder's 'Drink and Sobriety in an Early Victorian Country Town: Banbury 1830-1860', English Historical Review, supplement 4 (1969), should be mentioned here as an excellent and seminal study in this field, one of great importance in the nineteenth century. On the use of inns as trading centres there is incidental and background information in several works, in particular R. B. Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business, particularly between 1660 and 1760 (Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, xix, 1915); N. S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market . . . (1926); Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England 1700-1830 (1959); Alan Everitt, 'The Marketing of Agricultural Produce', in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, iv: 1500-1640 (1967). Primary sources So far as primary sources for the history of inns are concerned, many will be apparent from the text of the essay. In the Public Record Office, the 'census of inns' of 1577 *s to De found in SP 12/96; SP 12/116-19; SP 12/122; SP 12/141/55. The returns of 1686 and 1756 relating to beds and stabling are in the War Office Miscellanea (wo 3 0/48 and w o 30/49). For James I's reign there are Victuallers' Recognisances (i.e. licences granted to maintain an inn, etc.) in E 180/145, 146,147. Many of the cases in Proceedings in the Court of Requests and in Chancery Proceedings refer to trading disputes arising in inns, though the hostelries are usually mentioned only incidentally so that the cases are tedious to use if one is seeking information about a particular town. The Requests Proceedings do not, of course, go beyond the 16403 when the court

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was abolished. There are said to be many cases of a similar kind in local ecclesiastical courts relating to breach of contract and referring to trading in inns, though the present writer has rarely utilised these. In local record offices Innkeepers' Recognisances down to the year 1828 may be found. There are also the Magistrates' Registers of Licensed Premises (usually for the nineteenth century). Matters relating to the regulation and licensing of inns and disputes involving innkeepers frequently came before the county J.P.s at quarter sessions, or in the boroughs before local corporations, so that they are recorded in quarter sessions records, Hall Books, Assembly Books or similar records. (It is a tedious task working through the mass of other matter to find these, however, unless the records are printed or well indexed.) For reconstructing the history of innkeeping families, wills, probate inventories, parish registers and church monuments are obvious sources, together with miscellaneous facts in such borough records as apprenticeship registers, freemen's lists and mayors' and chamberlains' accounts. Leases and title deeds may also obviously yield some precious facts. Inventories will also of course tell one a good deal about the scale and furnishings of different inns and the wealth and status of the landlord. So far as printed sources are concerned, by far the most important is the newspaper advertisement. These will not of course be found before the eighteenth century in the provinces, and for many towns not until late in the century. But there is nothing quite like them for telling one of all the multifarious activities that took place in inns and for reconstructing the innkeeping pattern in any given town. In the Print Room of the British Museum is the important Heal Collection of contemporary billheads (well indexed). For the plays put on in assembly rooms attached to inns, the local historian should consult the Gabrielle Enthoven Collection of Playbills in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

9 SPRINGS OF SENSIBILITY: PHILIP DODDRIDGE OF NORTHAMPTON AND THE EVANGELICAL TRADITION

1. Prologue There comes a time in the history of many human movements when they are faced with a new challenge, and their capacity for further development is called in question. Are they able in the unfamiliar world arising round them to take events at the flood, or will their mentality prove too rigid to seize the initiative, and their traditions come to be superseded or submerged? It was a challenge of this kind that faced English Nonconformity as it moved, a little reluctantly, from the limited, introspective world of the late seventeenth century into the more expansive yet alien culture of the eighteenth. The older Dissenting tradition had possessed many virtues, of courage, tenacity, and integrity; in the provinces there were many places where it was stirring with a new life at this time, a life but little suspected by contemporaries. From its Puritan ancestry, however, it had also inherited a mentality which precluded sympathy with other ways of thought, and a theological stance which over the past century had sometimes shewn itself unduly eager to shut the gates of mercy on mankind. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in short, the Old Dissent seemed temperamentally ill-equipped for a phase of expansion; it lacked the imagination for it. Nobody could have foreseen that by 1851 Nonconformity would account for nearly half the church-going population of this country.1 In a time of changing thought there are always those who advocate radical reappraisal of tradition, and substantial sections of Dissent turned to the quasi-rationalist response of Unitarianism. By the end of the eighteenth century Unitarians had become a major force in provincial society, particularly in Midland and north-country towns like Birmingham, Leicester, and Manchester; during the following period their influence was 1

Earlier versions of this paper were written some years ago for conferences in Edinburgh and Lancaster; parts of sections 3 and 4 were published under the title 'Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition' in Philip Doddridge Nonconformity, and Northampton, ed. R. L. Greenall, 1981; they have been revised for this paper.

210 Landscape and Community in England deeply imprinted on movements for political, municipal, and social reform. But Unitarianism was the response of an elite; it did not generally appeal to the mass of ordinary people; and it was not the only response of Dissent to changing circumstances. More gradual, more complex, more far-reaching, for long more hesitant, and at first sight more traditional was the elusive, nameless response of those whom later generations came to call 'evangelicals': a word that was not novel, but which in its specifically modern or Victorian sense was unknown to the early eighteenth century.2 There can be no doubt that those who reacted in this way regarded themselves as traditionalists; they were merely preserving the sacred fire of Protestant faith, the 'faith which w&s once delivered unto the saints'.3 The cleavage which thus developed between Unitarians and Trinitarians was in some ways as deep as that between Dissenters and Anglicans; it was a factor of the first importance in the origins of the Evangelical Revival itself, which remained Trinitarian throughout its history. Nevertheless, the rise of 'Evangelical' thought and feeling was not so simple as the traditionalists supposed. Like most historical movements which claim to be based on a return to the past - the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Puritan Movement, the Tractarian Movement, the Gothic Revival are others - it was really a revival with a new vision of the past, so that the return was in fact a reinterpretation, a new departure. Because it opened up new depths of thought and feeling, at times alarming and unsuspected depths, and because it ultimately affected more extensive sections of society, there was a sense in which the Evangelical response was more revolutionary than that of Unitarianism. It marked a change in the pietistic ideal; the deepening sensibility it gave rise to was destined in all kinds of ways to unlock new reservoirs of human energy. It is not the purpose of this paper to elucidate the course of the Revival as such, but to explore the distinctive contribution of one of its earliest

2

It dates back to the Reformation, and was used by Philip Doddridge (e.g., in The Family Expositor: or a Paraphrase and Version of the New Testament, I, 1739, Preface, p. 5; hereafter cited as Doddridge, FE), but not in the sense 'Evangelical Revival'. The earliest English usage cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1531; the subtly changing meaning over the succeeding 450 years would repay investigation. 3 The phrase is from the Epistle ofJude, v. 3.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 211 4 apostles, Philip Doddridge of Northampton. If Doddridge's name is still familiar, it is probably as a hymn-writer and as the author of one of the minor classics of English devotion, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), that he is remembered. His contribution to Evangelicalism was a major one, however, and his impact on English society more substantial than is generally recognized. He was a leading figure in many of the educational and humanitarian movements of the period: particularly in the education of young children,5 in the championship of inoculation,6 in the foundation of county hospitals for the poor, in the development of Dissenting academies, and in the origins of overseas missionary eitdeavour. In the infirmary movement, which was so characteristic of the time, he was one of the dominant personalities, the originator of the Northampton Infirmary in 1743, whose carefully devised statutes became the model for

4 I owe a deep debt to Dr G. F. Nuttall's writings on Doddridge, particularly to the following: Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge: a Study in a Tradition (Friends of Dr Williams's Library, 5th Lecture), 1951; Philip Doddridge, 1702-51: his Contribution to English Religion,.ed. G. F. Nuttall, 1951 (hereafter cited as Nuttall, PD); 'Northamptonshire and The Modern Question: a Turning-Point in EighteenthCentury Dissent', Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., XVI, i, 1965; 'Philip Doddridge and "The Care of All the Churches": a Study in Oversight', Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XX, No. 4, 1966; 'Philip Doddridge's Library', Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XVII, No. 1,1952.1 also owe much to Dr John Walsh's essay, 'Origins of the Evangelical Revival' in Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes, ed. G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh, 1966; and to Malcolm Deacon, Philip Doddridge of Northampton, 1702-51, 1980. Dr Nuttall's Calendar of the Correspondence of Philip Doddridge D.D. (17021751) (Northamptonshire Record Society, XXIX, 1979) has appeared since most of my research for this paper was undertaken, when the bulk of the correspondence was still in New College, London. 5 New College, London, Doddridge Correspondence, MS L171/45 (now in Dr Williams's Library); Charles Stanford, Philip Doddridge, D. D., 1880, p. 115; T. Gasquoine, J. J. Cooper, et al, A History of Northampton Castle Hill Church, now Doddridge, and its Pastorate, 1674-1895, 1896, p. 102; Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XIV, 1940-44, pp. 217, 240. 6 He edited for posthumous publication David Some's The Case of Receiving the Small-pox by Inoculation, 1750. 'Oh, when shall we see the Importance of inoculating Children,' he wrote to Samuel Wood in that year. Behind this attitude was his grief at the loss of five of his own children, though not from that cause. - Deacon, op. cit., pp. 119-20, 144, 182-4; Nuttall, Correspondence, p. 345.

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several other institutions to follow.7 In the education of young children he might more appropriately than Robert Raikes be regarded as the founder of the Sunday School movement, since his own school at Northampton antedated Raikes's at Gloucester by more than fifty years.8 In several of his publications he also developed the idea that the household should be a sphere of education, and on those who were master-tradesmen he constantly urged the duty of teaching their apprentices to read and write in the evenings at home.9 These practical activities, however, do not exhaust the sum of his achievements. He also played a major part in initiating that exploration of the interior world which was so remarkable and unexpected a development of the Hanoverian period. It is this aspect of his work rather than his more pragmatic concerns that forms the subject of this paper. The main facts of Doddridge's biography are simply related. He was born in 1702, and became minister of the Independent or Congregational church at Castle Hill in Northampton in 1729, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was also principal of the Northampton Academy, which he had himself established at Market Harborough a few months earlier, and which under his leadership became one of the celebrated Nonconformist seminaries of the time. In 1730 he married Mercy Maris of Worcester, an orphan from a Dissenting background like himself; it was an ideally happy marriage, and their surviving correspondence, with its mixture of devotion, affection, and innocent fun, is a delight. Mercy bore Philip nine children, of whom four survived to maturity, before his death from consumption at the age of 49 in 1751. The male line of the family terminated with the death of 7 In particular those at Salisbury and Worcester, and the Radcliffe at Oxford. Stanford, op. cit., pp. 116-21; Courtney Dainton, The Story of England's Hospitals, 1961, Chapters IV and V; Nuttall, PD, pp. 27-8. Doddridge was the leading spirit, with his friend and convert Sir James Stonhouse, behind the Northampton institution. -Deacon, op. cit., pp. 121 sqq., 144. The Statutes, Rules, and Orders for the Government of the County Hospital for Sick and Lame Poor established in the Town of Northampton, 1743, extended to more than 50 pages. The county infirmary at Winchester was the first (1736), followed by Bristol (1737), York (1740), Exeter (1741), Aberdeen (1742), Bath (1742), Northampton (1743-4), Gloucester (1745), Shrewsbury (1745), Liverpool (1745), and Worcester (1746). Doddridge's Compassion to the Sick Recommended and Urged in a Sermon Preached at Northampton, September 4, 1743, was instrumental in the foundation of the infirmary; the annual Infirmary Sermon at All Saints was for long an important county event. There was a connexion here with Doddridge's image of Christ as 'the great Physician', referred to above. The idea behind such infirmaries had first been adumbrated by a Northampton physician, John Rushworth, in 1731. 8 See Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XIV, 1940-44, p. 240, and IX, 1924-26, pp. 15-16. 9 Philip Doddridge, Sermons on the Religious Education of Children, 1732; A Plain and Serious Address to the Master of a Family on the Important Subject of Family Religion, 1761 edn, pp. 10-11. In contemporary usage the word 'family' often included apprentices and servants as well as parents and children; Doddridge himself included the members of his academy in this term. - Cf. Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XVI, 1949-51, p. 80.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 213 their son Philip in 1785; but there were many descendants of their second daughter, Mary, among them Richard Doddridge Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doom (1869) .10 It was Doddridge's association with Northampton and the localized origins of his activities rather than any interest in Nonconformity or Evangelicalism as such that first attracted my attention.11 In this country the Revival may be said to have begun in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and its impact on English society did not altogether expend itself until the last quarter of the nineteenth, if indeed we can assign it any precise termination.12 Although that impact was fundamental in shaping English habits of thought, it is not a popular subject with historians of the present day. There is little in print to compare with the major contributions which English and American scholars have devoted in recent years to the reassessment of Puritanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To some extent this neglect is no doubt due to the fact that nowadays most of us find the exploration of religious sensibility of any kind somewhat embarrassing, not least because of the debasement to which it was often subjected in the nineteenth century. At this distance of time it ought to be possible to view the Revival dispassionately; but the consequence is that we are too ignorant of many aspects of it to assess its general effect on English society. There are four characteristics in its development, however, which are of direct concern in connexion with the subject in hand. In the first place, it was not a denominational movement; it was never confined to any one sect. It originated in Dissent; it created Methodism; it transformed extensive sections of the Church; it affected virtually every other Christian body except the Unitarians; it gave rise to many new denominations, such as the Bible Christians and the Plymouth Brethren; and it imparted a certain timbre to Victorian society at large. Secondly, though it is often thought of as a middle- and lower-class movement, there is plenty of evidence, especially in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, that it was not a class movement but extended right across the social spectrum. Thirdly, it was predominantly a provincial movement, inasmuch as London never held the same central place in its development as it had in the development of Puritanism, so that the rise of Evangelical thought and feeling symbolized, up to a point, the relative decline of the capital and the rise of the provinces in English religious life. Finally, although theologically it was a lineal descendant of seventeenth-century Puritanism, or at least of English Protestantism, there was something in its temperament that involved a distinct departure from the older Puritan 10

Deacon, op. cit., pp. 64-6, 176-7 etpassim. Earlier publications on Dissent likewise arose from an interest in Northamptonshire and its county town, sometimes described in the nineteenth century as 'the mecca of English Nonconformity'. 12 But a distinction should no doubt be drawn between contemporary 'Evangelicalism' and the 'Evangelical Revival' of Doddridge's day. 11

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tradition. In this respect it is no accident that some of Philip Doddridge's most bitter antagonists were to be found, not in the Church, but among the old Dissenting establishment in London.14 In all these matters the position which Philip Doddridge took, and the breadth of his appeal at the outset of the Revival, were crucial to its subsequent fortunes. His influence was not the only one involved; neither was his stand part of a concerted plan of campaign; to describe him as taking a 'stand', indeed, is misleading if it implies a deliberately adopted position. He was not a conscious revolutionary, and one must doubt if he realized the far-reaching implications of the movement of which he was a herald; its greatest triumphs, after all, came only after his death in 1751. Yet because 'the good Doctor' became a kind of father-figure for early Evangelical leaders, and because he was appealed to by people of every rank and degree, within the Church as well as within Dissent, his influence was in some respects decisive. It is not easy to assess because it was felt gradually, and felt through many different channels: through his academy,15 through his hymns, through his summer preaching-tours,16 though his wide circle of correspondents and friends,17 and above all through his publications, to which we shall return later in this paper. It is for these and other reasons that his impact on English ecclesiastical history has probably been underestimated. No revolutionary movement is solely the work of its leaders. That was as true of the Evangelical Revival as it was of the English Revolution. Its success was dependent on two further circumstances: first, a widespread though diffuse and unfocussed sense of moral disquiet in English society at large; and secondly, the existence of a rudimentary form of organization by which the new movement was able to spread. The sense of disquiet at this time was apparent in many quarters. There seemed much to indicate a general state of religious apathy, and there were many ecclesiastical leaders who deplored the progress of society towards a more rationalist frame of mind. In publishing the first volume of his Family Expositor in 1739, 13 In Nuttall, PD, p. 34, A. T. S. James comments aptly that the 'shift of the pole of religion towards an inner life meant the discovery again of spiritual regions which had been partly lost or forgotten,' i. e., by the Hoadlys and Tolands of the day. My argument in this paper is that it was in part a rediscovery, in part a new discovery. 14 Cf. Nuttall, PD, pp. 94-5; Deacon, op. cit., pp. 86-9. For the attacks of John Gill and John Brine upon him, see Nuttall, 'Northamptonshire and The Modern Question', loc. cit., pp. 115, 117, 119; both were London ministers of Northamptonshire origin. 15 Cf. Deacon, op. cit., Chapter 5; A. V. Murray, 'Doddridge and Education', in Nuttall, PD. 16 He sometimes travelled 40 miles in a day; his tour into Devon, Dorset, and Hampshire in 1742 apparently involved a total distance of about 740 miles. -Nuttall, Correspondence, p. 153. 17 On one occasion, having written 50 or 60 letters in his own hand in a fortnight, he found he still had 106 to answer. - Nuttall, PD, p. 28. His capacity for work was equal to that of any Victorian, despite his frail health.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 215 Doddridge himself remarked that the Evangelical strain of thought 'is not much in the present taste, and I think it at once a sad instance, and cause, of our degeneracy that it is not.'18 Three years earlier Bishop Butler had observed that 'It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.' In an important essay on the 'Origins of the Evangelical Revival', Dr John Walsh has emphasized the 'feeling of grave crisis among orthodox divines, unnerved by Deism,' pointing out that the word 'crisis' makes a frequent appearance in the religious publications of the 1730's.19 The kind of misgiving I refer to was not confined, however, to the ranks of ecclesiastical leaders. There was also a more general sense of malaise, and it was Doddridge's ability to recognize it, and to canalize the shifting currents of thought and feeling behind it, that harnessed a potentially incalculable force to the new movement. If the general state of religion at this time was indeed one of apathy, it must nevertheless also be recognized that the old piety had been able to survive, and indeed to flourish, in certain neighbourhoods, certain communities, and certain family connexions, outside the main current of the age. It was the existence of these neighbourhoods and connexions and their ramification over the preceding century that provided the kind of informal, flexible organization which the new movement needed if it was to establish a foothold in provincial society. The very feelings of disquiet expressed by men like Butler and Doddridge only served to intensify the conviction of groups like these and to strengthen their sense of cohesion. At a later stage of Evangelical development John Wesley was driven to create his own form of ecclesiastical organization in order to facilitate the spread of Methodism; but in the Old Dissenting denominations of Doddridge's day that was not really necessary; the basic network of local cells and contacts was already there, available for expansion. In places it was centred on prominent towns, such as Hull, Taunton, Exeter, Bury St Edmunds, Shrewsbury, and Coventry; in places it extended over a whole tract of countryside, like the Weald of Kent and East Sussex, the Airedale district of Yorkshire, and the north Devon countryside around Barnstaple and Bideford; in places it consisted rather of regional kinship-groups, sometimes of landed or clerical families, sometimes of more diverse social composition. Whatever its local character, however, it was everywhere based on those devout households which Doddridge himself described, in a vivid phrase, as 'nurseries of piety'.20 In the voluminous correspondence of Philip Doddridge we are given an intimate picture of this kind of society. It depicts for us, with all the domestic detail of a Dutch interior, the Nonconformist world of the time. It shews 18

Doddridge, FE, I, Preface, p. v. Nuttall, PD, p. 34 (quoting Bishop Butler's Analogy); Walsh, 'Origins of the Evangelical Revival', loc. cit., p. 148. 20 Doddridge, Plain and Serious Address, p. 15. 19

216 Landscape and Community in England how much it was still a family world: a limited society where certain solid dynasties formed a natural focus of stability; where personal links between church and church in different parts of the country were still influential; where particular individuals and news of their welfare still formed the topic of everyday conversation; where the welcome extended to a pastor like Doddridge on his frequent journeys was surprisingly personal and affectionate; and where there was still a real inner life, a life by no means in decay, but gradually changing and extending the range of its mental and emotional experience. Such circumstances as these necessarily had a profound effect on the new movement. They not only ensured its dissemination; they also moulded its character. They played an important part in anchoring it to the devotional life of the home and the communal experience of the local church as well as the personal trauma of 'conversion'. They help to account for the fact that in the booksellers' advertisements of a typical provincial newspaper like the Nothampton Mercury religious works figure far more prominently than any other form of publication.21 There can have been few parts of England, indeed, where the Old Dissenting tradition was more deeply entrenched than in Northamptonshire. Even when Nonconformist fortunes were at a relatively low ebb, before Doddridge was appointed to Castle Hill, the 'flourishing state of the Dissenting interest' in the county was still regarded as 'the glory of our cause in England.'22 At one level, indeed, it would not be wholly extravagant to claim that it was the fusion of the Northamptonshire tradition with the illuminism of Philip Doddridge that initiated the Revival in England.23 As the new movement developed, however, Doddridge's influence rapidly extended beyond his own county and denomination. His extraordinary gift for transcending local and denominational frontiers, and for appealing to all sorts and conditions of men, was one of the outstanding characteristics of his contribution to English religion. It helped to ensure not only that the new movement should spread beyond Congregationalism, but 21 The unsuspected prominence of religious works among publications of this time is highlighted in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 1982; see especially Thomas Preston's essay on 'Biblical Criticism, Literature, and the Eighteenth-Century Reader', and Dr Rivers's on 'Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity'; the latter discusses Doddridge's impact on reading-habits, inter alia. 22 Qu. in Nuttall, PD, p. 17; the date of the quotation is not given. 23 The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'illuminism' as 'a theory, doctrine, or practice which involves belief in or claim to extraordinary spiritual or intellectual enlightenment;' I do not mean that, and Doddridge certainly would have made no such claim. Under 'illumine' the Dictionary gives the sense 'To brighten as with light, to make radiant;' that is perhaps as near as it comes to what I mean; but this paper should make my meaning plainer. Doddridge seems to me an 'illuminist' in religion in somewhat the same way as Maitland (for example) was as an historian: both men had vision, imaginative insight, the ability to see beyond contemporaries yet to carry contemporaries with them.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 217 that its offshoots should ultimately reach out beyond the bounds of religion itself, and bear fruit in many unsuspected places in English culture and English society. Those who are versed in the Evangelical literature of the time will recognize the origin of many of the attitudes, and occasionally the very phrases, of authors apparently as little sympathetic to it as Jane Austen and George Eliot. 2. Philip Doddridge and Castle Hill By ancestry Philip Doddridge, like the great Anglican Richard Hooker, with whom he had something in common, was a Devonian. His forebears came from an old family of medieval freeholders and minor gentry, originating at Dodderidge in Sandford, near Crediton. Their most notable member was the Jacobean judge, Sir John Doddridge - the judge who had refused Hampden bail - and another member of the family had been Recorder of Bristol. When Philip himself visited the parts of Devon around Mount Radford, the old centre of the family estates near Exeter, he was feted by the local gentry as the last male representative of the line, though the ancestral property had long since been alienated, and his own branch of the family had left Devonshire some generations earlier. His grandfather had been a parson, a graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, and rector of Shepperton in Middlesex, a living from which he was ejected in 1662. His father, Daniel Doddridge, was an oil and colour merchant in London, where Philip was born, the youngest child of a family of twenty. Probably quite as important in his upbringing as his father's influence was that of his mother, Monica Bauman, who was not of English extraction but a Czech, the daughter of a Lutheran family exiled from Prague during the Thirty Years' War. Philip and his sister Elizabeth were the only two of her children to survive, and both their parents died when they were young; but it was from his mother that Philip received his earliest religious instruction. It was probably from her that he inherited a certain temperamental kinship, up to a point, with German pietism, which later bore fruit in his friendship with the Moravian Count Zinzendorf; it may have been from her side of the family that he also derived a certain impressionable, questing cast of mind that was not particularly common in the Nonconformity of the period.24 For a time Philip was educated at a grammar school at Kingston upon Thames, which was run by the son of an ejected Nonconformist, Daniel 24

Nuttall, PD, pp. 12, 92-3; Stanford, op. tit., 1880, pp. 11 sqq.; Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., p. 15; Deacon, op. cit., pp. 27 sqq. The friendship with Zinzendorf and the Moravians came to an unhappy end when the latter made a serious breach in the church at Castle Hill, a circumstance which caused Doddridge much distress (see Nuttall, PD, pp. 95-6). Like most orthodox Dissenters, he also disagreed with some of the Moravian doctrines at this period, particularly their exaltation of the infallibility of the church, described in one of their hymns as 'Christess', 'sister of Jehovah', etc.

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Mayo. His vacations were frequently spent with his father's brother Philip, who was a solicitor and steward to the Duke of Bedford, at Woburn. After the death of both his father and his uncle in 1715, he was committed to the guardianship of a Mr Downes of St Albans; but it was through his connexion with Woburn that the Duchess of Bedford heard of his great desire to enter the ministry, and promised to send him to Cambridge and promote his career if he would conform to the Church of England. The offer must have been a temptation to the impoverished youth, since his modest patrimony had been dissipated by the bankruptcy of Mr Downes. But the tradition of Nonconformity in the family was strong; his sister had married a Dissenting minister, John Nettleton; he himself never wavered in his conviction that the Dissenting interest was 'the interest of Jesus Christ'; and he was in fact educated at the Nonconformist school of Dr Nathaniel Wood at St Albans, and then at the new academy of John Jennings at Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire.25 While at St Albans Philip had been deeply affected by the life and character of the local Presbyterian minister, Samuel Clark, and it was Clark who saw his promise and generously paid for his education at Kibworth.26 Equally important was the influence of John Jennings upon him, and it was probably Jennings who introduced him to the works of Richard Baxter. For Baxter's part in Doddridge's development, the reader must be referred to Dr G. F. Nuttall's luminous study, Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge: a Study in a Tradition (1951). 'Baxter is my particular favourite,' he said, after reading The Reformed Pastor, 'and it is impossible to tell you how much I am charmed with the devotion, good sense, and pathos, which are everywhere to be found in that writer.'27 Both men rejected the extreme forms of Calvinism, especially the doctrine of predestined reprobation; both were set on 'comprehension', 'catholic unity', and 'loving that which is good in all;' both disliked and suspected some of the older Puritan divines, such as John Owen; and both laid great stress on the piety of the heart, for (to quote Baxter) The transcript of the heart hath the greatest force in the hearts of others.' And both men, it is worth noting in this respect, were affected by the writings of George Herbert: 'Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth in God,' said Baxter 'and whose business in the world is most with God. Heartwork and Heavenwork make up his books.'28 Yet despite the Dissenting background, a number of important threads in the fabric of Doddridge's education, in addition to Herbert's, were derived directly or indirectly from beyond Dissent. In a series of comments on John Calvin, Matthew Henry, Archbishop Leighton, and the revered Watts and 25

Nuttall, PD, pp. 12-13; Stanford, op. cit., pp. 17-20; Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., pp.15-16; Deacon, op. cit., p. 31. 26 Ibid., p. 33; Stanford, op. cit., p. 20; Nuttall, PD, p. 13. 27 Qu. in Nuttall, Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge, p. 18. This was in 1724, when Doddridge was 22. 28

Ibid., pp. 3-6,10,13,15.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 219 Baxter, it was only to the archbishop that he gave unqualified praise. To him Robert Leighton (1611-84) was 'one of the most eminently devout and pious writers his age has produced . . . His works ought to be reckoned among the greatest treasures of the English tongue. They continually overflow with love to God.'29 Equally admired by him were the writings of John Howe, a Dissenter whose mind had been deeply permeated by the mysticism of his friend the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More. Howe was one of the small group of late seventeenth-century leaders who, like Richard Baxter on the Nonconformist side and Edward Reynolds of Norwich on the Anglican side, worked for 'comprehension' and mutual forbearance between Dissenters and Anglicans.30 The words with which Doddridge prefaced his first volume of The Family Expositor, covering the four gospels, clearly echoed the ideals which John Howe expressed in such works as The Carnality of Christian Contention (1693): 'I cannot flatter myself so far as to imagine that I have fallen into no mistakes in a work of so great compass and difficulty; but my own conscience acquits me ... of having written one line with the purpose of inflaming the hearts of Christians against each other. I should esteem it one of the most aggravated crimes to make the life of the gentle and benevolent Jesus a vehicle to convey such poison. Would to God that all the party names, and unscriptural phrases and forms, which have divided the Christian world were forgot, and that we might agree to sit down together as humble loving disciples at the feet of our common Master, to hear his word, to imbibe his Spirit, and to transcribe his life in our own. I hope it is some token of such growing candour . . . that so many of the reverend clergy of the Establishment, as well as other persons of distinction in it, have favoured this undertaking with their encouragement.'31 It is interesting to note that in London, the chief stronghold of reactionary Puritanism, the only Nonconformist society to support him with any prominence was that of which John Howe had been minister, near Cheapside.32 In view of the diversity of influences in Doddridge's education and experience, it is not surprising that his sympathies should have reached out beyond the bounds of the Old Dissent, both towards Anglicans and towards the early Methodists: and it is perhaps not altogether surprising if this catholicity of outlook antagonized more conservative Nonconformists. Among the Anglican clergy and squirearchy his circle of supporters became extensive; several of the bishops of the day had themselves been educated at Dissenting academies, including Bishop Butler, and this fact may have eased the path of friendship. Seeker certainly was on cordial terms with 29

Qu. in Nuttall, PD, p. 116. Compare his remarks on Calvin: 'he has a multitude of judicious thoughts, but they are generally intermingled with a great many that are little to the purpose:' qu. ibid. 30 Ibid., pp. 159-60; D. N. B., s. v. John Howe (1630-1705). 31 Doddridge, FE, I, p. vii. 32 This was his friend Isaac Watts's church; several of its members subscribed to the Family Expositor, cf. D. N. B., s. v. John Howe (1630-1705).

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Doddridge; Herring invited him to Lambeth for private conversations; Maddox of Worcester befriended him when he was ill at Bath shortly before his death; and Warburton, later bishop of Gloucester, was an admirer and promoter of his works.33 In Oxford his influence seems to have been more readily welcomed than in Cambridge: among his friends there were several dons at Wadham, Trinity, and Christ Church; and when Hart Hall was refounded as Hertford College, Richard Newton, the first principal, submitted the new statutes to Doddridge, as an educational authority, before publishing them. A common interest in the education of the American Indians brought Doddridge into touch with Francis Ayscough, the Dean of Bristol and Clerk of the Closet to the Prince of Wales; it was probably through this connexion that The Family Expositor was dedicated to the Princess of Wales.34 On the other hand Doddridge was the first Dissenting leader to befriend the early Methodists and to support the work of George Whitefield, Benjamin Ingham, and John Wesley. He did not do so without reservations; but Whitefield he invited to preach in his pulpit at Castle Hill, and Wesley to expound a portion of the Bible to his students when he called upon him in passing through Northampton in 1745. It was these friendships rather than his associations with deans and bishops that angered the Nonconformist establishment of the day. Even Dodddridge's great friend, the gentle and fatherly Isaac Watts, was distressed to find him 'sinking the character of a Minister, and especially of a Tutor, among the dissenters so low' as to take part in services at Whitefield's Tabernacle.35 Doddridge was tried by the storm of abuse that greeted this action of his; but his attitude of restrained support remained unaffected. 'I shall always be ready to weigh whatever can be said against Mr Whitefield. . .' he wrote in a letter to Nathaniel Neal, son of the historian of the Puritans; 'and though I must have actual demonstration before I can admit him to be a dishonest man, and though I shall never be able to think all he has written, and all I have heard from him, nonsense, yet I am not so zealously attached to him as to be disposed to celebrate him as one of the greatest men of the age, or to think that he is the pillar that bears up the whole interest of religion among us. And if this moderation of sentiment towards him will not appease my angry brethren, as I am sensible it will not abate the enmity which some have, for many years, entertained towards me, I must acquiesce and be patient till the day of

33

Nuttall, PD, pp. 117-18, 107-8, 25-6. Among his students were several Anglicans, including sons of clergy: Deacon, op. cit., p. 96. 3 * Nuttall, PD, pp. 27, 98; Doddridge, FE, I, Dedication. George III as a child learned by heart Doddridge's Principles of the Christian Religion, Expressed in Plain and Easy Verse. . . for the Use of Little Children (1743): Stanford, op. cit., p. 111. 35 Nuttall, PD, pp. 24-5, 41, 83-5, 91-4, 96; Deacon, op. cit., pp. 86-9.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 221 the Lord . . . I am sure,' he added, with a characteristic touch of humour, 'I see no danger that any of my pupils will prove methodists.'36 His angry brethren are not likely to have been appeased by these remarks; the last thing they wanted was moderation of sentiment. Some of them had already tried to make out that he was a Latitudinarian; and some now seemed to insinuate that he was an 'enthusiast'. In fact his attitude, like that of Baxter before him, was the expression of that catholicity of heart which sought to transcend party boundaries, and which stemmed from one of the most deeply-rooted elements in his personality. In 1729, when he was hesitating whether to accept the invitation to Castle Hill, Samuel Clark of St Albans had written to him urging him to accept it specifically 'because it would give you the prospect of being of great service there, and by that means in all that county, where you might be an instrument of promoting a more catholic spirit. . ,'37 In his 'confession of faith' to the church at Castle Hill, he concluded by claiming that 'it is one very important article of my faith that I am bound in duty affectionately to esteem and embrace all who practically comply with the design of the revelation and love of our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, how much soever they may differ from myself in their language or their conceptions about any speculative points.'38 Four years later, looking back on his experiences at Northampton, he wrote: 'it was never the design of any sermon, or sentence, or clause, or word delivered by me from the pulpit, to influence the passions of my auditors against their fellow-Christians on account of any difference of opinion, discipline, or form of worship consistent with real, practical religion. On the contrary, I have sincerely endeavoured, by the whole strain of my preaching and prayers, to promote the most candid and generous sentiments, and to recommend and cultivate peace and love to all who, under the most different forms of profession, do in any place call upon the name of Jesus, our Lord and theirs.'39 Those who disagreed with him would no doubt have argued that the questions at issue were far from 'speculative points' or 'differences of opinion'; but in the circumstances of the time Doddridge's attitude was as notable for its courage as it was pregnant for the future of the new movement. The mind of Philip Doddridge was not formed only by the writings of other divines. In his development as a Nonconformist leader, his congregation at Castle Hill necessarily came to occupy a very special and intimate place. The church still exists, though much altered in the nineteenth century, and now forlorn among the charmless tower-blocks of the late36

Qu. in Nuttall, PD, pp. 94-5; cf. Deacon, op. cit., p. 88. But it should be added that Doddridge also wrote that 'many things have occurred among them [the Methodists and Moravians] which have been quite unjustifiable.' 37 Qu. in Thomas Coleman, Memorials of the Independent Churches in Northamptonshire, 1853, p. 15. 38 Qu. in Nuttall, PD, p. 146. 39 Qu. in Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., p. 20.

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twentieth. It was erected in 1695 from the ruins of the castle and town-walls nearby. A square plain box of a building, of slate and ironstone, there is little in its outward appearance to awaken interest, and nothing to suggest its decisive place in Congregational history, though it still hints at the domestic origins of contemporary Dissent.40 Yet the story of Doddridge's 'call' to Castle Hill affords a vivid insight into its inner vitality. Though Northampton was then a town of considerable sophistication, a county capital of some 5,000 people noted for its classical buildings, its lavish inns, and numerous gentry, Castle Hill itself was essentially a community within a community, a world apart from all that we normally associate with the early eighteenth century. Though by no means isolated from the fashionable currents of the age, it represented a different kind of life. Doddridge had already refused invitations to several other influential chapels, including those at Nottingham and Pershore, when the summons from Northampton reached him. Initially he had considerable misgivings about venturing into a neighbourhood where the Dissenting tradition was reputedly, indeed notoriously , conservative. He was unwilling, moreover, to leave the newly established academy at Market Harborough, and the joint congregations at Harborough and Kibworth where for the past few years he had been assistant to the Independent minister, David Some.41 At first Some also tried to dissuade him; but on visiting the town he was so impressed by the vitality of Castle Hill that he changed his mind. 'The hearts of the people,' he wrote to Doddridge, 'are moved altogether as the trees of a wood when bent by the wind; and they are under such strong impressions about your coming to them that it is impossible for a man to converse with them without feeling something for them. The mention of your name diffuseth life and spirit through the whole body, and nothing can be heard of but Mr Doddridge.' Still unconvinced, and feeling he lacked the strength for so great a responsibility - though immensely active he was never robust Doddridge went and preached at Northampton on a verse from the Acts of the Apostles: 'And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, "The will of the Lord be done.'" The implication was obvious; but his lodging was in one of those devout households which later came to mean so much to him. Returning thither after his sermon, he is said to have overheard a child reading to its mother the words from the Old Testament, 'As thy days, so shall thy strength be.' To a man of Doddridge's upbringing the phrase seems to have come with the illumination of a divine command; his difficulties gradually resolved themselves, and on 6 December 1729 he

40 41

Ibid., pp. 7-8; Deacon, op. cit., p. 51. Stanford, op. cit., pp. 32-4; Deacon, op. cit., pp. 44-5.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 223 accepted the 'call'.42 From that time onwards there began a relationship of mutual intimacy with his people at Castle Hill which, though sometimes tried, lasted without intermission till his death twenty-two years later. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this relationship in the development of Doddridge's life and thought. Several of his publications and all his hymns were specifically written for the congregation at Castle Hill; the warmth of his regard for it and the depth of its devotion are themes which recur repeatedly in his letters and writings and in those of his friends. In his Address to the Master of a Family on the Important Subject of Family Religion, he remarked that many of the Northampton people for whom he wrote had 'long been exemplary for their diligence and zeal in the duties I am recommending.'43 When his old pastor Samuel Clark visited the church, he was much struck by the 'lively sense of religion' he found there, the diligent attendance of its members upon the public worship of God, their 'frequent meetings in prayer for mutual edification,' and the 'religious order of [their] families.'44 When, during a period of discouragement in 1747, he considered the possibility of a move, what held him back was the recollection that 'I am dearer than e v e r . . . to the main body of my people; and the influence which I plainly see I have among my brethren here, and the flourishing state of the interest of religion all around me, for almost all the congregations are in an advancing state, is a further encouragement to continue.'45 In their letters to one another when absent from Northampton, both Doddridge and his wife, moreover, refer again and again to the 'dear Northampton friends,' the 'many kind friends at Northampton,' the 'dear charge at Northampton.'46 'Give my hearty service to my friends at Northampton,' he wrote when on one of his travels in 1731; 'assure them I long to see them.' 'Give my most kind affectionate grateful services to my friends at Northampton,' he wrote again in 1734; 'tell them 'tis fit I should sometimes go to London that I may know how happy I am in them.' Or again, in 1738, 'I long to see all my Northampton friends. Give my hearty service to them, and assure them that the longer I stay at London, the more I am weary of it, and the more I wish to be with them.' Always, on these annual evangelistic tours of his, Doddridge's thoughts seemed to revert to 42

Stanford, op. cit., pp. 39-40; Coleman, op. cit., pp. 15-16. Coleman's account differs in some details from Stanford's, which, however, is based partly on Coleman's. For another picture of these devout Northampton households, see the letter of Doddridge's student, Samuel Mercer, to his father at Allerton, near Liverpool, printed in Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., pp. 72-3. 43 Doddridge, Plain and Serious Address, p. 5. 44 Qu. in Stanford, op. cit., p. 131. 45 Qu. ibid., p. 177. The main cause of discouragement was the Moravian problem. 46 See, for example, Mercy Doddridge's letter of 1751 in The Protestant Dissenter's Magazine, II, 1795, pp. 133-4; Doddridge's letter of 1742 in Stanford, op. cit., p. 63.

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the circle at Castle Hill with a kind of homing instinct. 'Lymington is the politest and most agreeable little town I ever saw in all my travels,' he wrote from Hampshire in 1742. "Tis quite a group of gentlemen's houses, and the chief of them are Mr Pearson's [the Congregational pastor's] people. Yet I greatly prefer dear Northampton. When shall I be there?'47 Nowhere is this relationship between pastor and people more clearly delineated than in Doddridge's will. He desired, he said, to be buried in the meeting-place at Northampton, 'where I have spent the most delightful hours of my life, in assisting the devotions of as serious, as grateful, and as deserving a people as perhaps any minister had ever the honour and happiness to serve.'48 There can be no doubt that these conditions lent a remarkable depth and reality to Doddridge's teaching, with its emphasis on the communal life of the church, on the local congregation as the family of God, as well as on the 'rise and progress of religion in the soul'. They coloured his whole understanding of the church as a circle of affection, a sphere of security essential to the true Christian life. They enabled him to recapture something of those insights into the mystical nature of the Body of Christ which had figured so prominently in the writings of St Paul. With Doddridge, in short, we seem to move onward in Dissenting experience by one decisive step from Bunyan's solitary self-communing pilgrim, resolute to abandon both church and family in pursuit of individual salvation. To those experiencing the 'dark night of the soul', or 'the hidings of God's face' as he termed it, Doddridge was quite unequivocal: 'Follow the footsteps of his flock; you may perhaps meet the Shepherd of souls in doing it. Place yourself at least in his way . . . Go to the table of the Lord . . . and you may find, to your surprise, that he hath been near you, when you imagined he was at the greatest distance from you . . .'49 The 'social joys' of Christian experience, as he called them, thus figured with a redoubled emphasis in his writings. They were eloquently expressed in some of his hymns, moreover, which have much to tell us as a consequence about the inner life of the church for which they were written, and which were to strike a dominant chord in the rise of Evangelicalism.50 Though Doddridge was an able scholar and a man of unusually wide learning, in touch with many of the intellectual currents of the age,

47 New College, London, Doddridge Correspondence, MS Ll/1/2, 3,13,34 (now in Dr Williams's Library). 48 The will is printed in The Protestant Dissenter's Magazine, II, 1795, pp. 129-32. 49 Philip Doddridge, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, 1812 edn, pp. 211-12, 50 As in the following: Thy saints on earth and those above Here join in sweet accord; One body all in mutual love, And thou our common Lord.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 225 scientific51 as well as theological, he was thus no mere academic; he was first and foremost a devoted pastor. The human experience which shines through his pages was not only rooted in the intimate circle at Castle Hill, moreover, but in the realities of everyday life in an early-eighteenth century Midland county: often harsh realities among the sick and the poor in the back-streets of the town, and among the farms and cottages of the surrounding countryside.52 Wherever he went preaching and visiting in this way he made a practice of taking a group of his students with him; for they too must learn, he believed, in the same unwelcome school of experience as their future people; they too must acquire 'those peculiar advantages which nothing but an acquaintance with cases and an observation of facts can give.'53 'Cultivate a tender love to souls,' he told them, in his Lectures on Pneumatology, Ethics and Divinity. 'This will make you eloquent. Therefore guard against everything that tends to alienate your affections. Cultivate an extensive and candid acquaintance with the world. Take heed of immuring yourselves too much in your studies. Think not the time lost which is spent out of them. Despise not common Christians - free converse with them may be attended with many good consequences.'54 It was thus no accident that many of the Dissenting congregations of Northamptonshire owed their vitality, and some of them their existence, to these missionary activities of Doddridge and his students.55 Neither is it surprising if many of their pastors were trained in the Northampton Academy: John Hextal of Creaton, for example, where the 68 members of the church came from a circuit often villages in the vicinity; or John West of Ashley near Harborough, where the congregation came from 13 neighbouring villages, several of which later established churches of their own; or Thomas Strange of Kilsby and Crick, who after preaching at both places each Sunday, used to walk eight miles to preach at Barby or

51 He was a founder-member of the Northampton Philosophical Society in 1743, one of the earliest scientific bodies in the provinces, to which he contributed two papers in 1744, on The Doctrine of Pendulums' and The Laws of the Communication of Motion as well in elastic as in non-elastic Bodies'. He also contributed three papers to the Transactions of the Royal Society: Stanford, op. cit., p. 108; Deacon, op. cit., pp. 116-19. But Doddridge also shared the contemporary interest in weird and horrific phenomena, as Mr Deacon points out. For the teaching of science in his academy see Deacon, op. cit., p. 98. 52 Cf. ibid., p. 80. In Job Orion's words he had 'great compassion for the industrious poor, visited their families, enquired into their circumstances and . . . gave away a great number of his smaller pieces, among the poor of the town and neighbourhood . . .': qu. ibid., p. 115. 5 * Ibid., pp. 99-100; Nuttall, PD, p. 115; Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., p. 72; Stanford, op. cit., pp. 85-6. 54 Qu. in Nuttall, PD, p. 102. 55 As at Brigstock: Coleman, op. cit., pp. 315 sq.

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Hillmorton also.56 It was often in humble ways like these, and in places like these unknown to fame, that the 'new life' of the time was born. How was it that this quality of devotional life in Northampton and its county had arisen? Like all religious leaders, Philip Doddridge was necessarily building on other men's foundations. Those 'nurseries of piety' which formed the seedbed of the 'new life' did not develop overnight. At once gentle yet immovable, unassuming yet rich in individual experience, they often had generations of tradition behind them. They were not, of course, a peculiarity of Northamptonshire; their presence in other areas, indeed, is part of the argument of this paper. Yet the ecclesiastical history of the county is unusually rich in well-authenticated evidences of them, amongst Anglicans as well as amongst Dissenters: at Welford, for instance, under John Shuttlewood (d. 1689) and the saintly John Norris (16981738);57 at Castle Hill under Samuel Blower (1675-94) and Doddridge's devoted predecessor Thomas Tingey (1709-28) ;58 and at All Saints under John Conant (1671-94) - the George Herbert of Northampton - who left such an abiding imprint on the religious life of the town, and whose ideals and phrases so frequently foreshadowed those of Doddridge himself.59 The history of churches such as these, and of many others like them, though often of interest in its own right, cannot be pursued in detail here. What needs to be stressed, however, is the gradual development, in place after place, of a deepening sensibility in the local devotional tradition, the signs of a new humanity slowly gaining ground over the sterner, more embattled spirit of the Puritan past. It was not a universal development; in some places there was a strong, even violent, reaction against it; yet wherever it 56

Ibid., pp. 180-81,146-9,307-8. Similarly at Rothwell some members came from villages 20 miles away: ibid., p. 57. 57 Cf. ibid., pp. 155-8, 162-5. The congregation came from 14 villages in the Welford area. 58 Cf. Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., pp. 7-8,13-14; Alexander Gordon, Philip Doddridge and the Catholicity of the Old Dissent, 1951, p. 25; Deacon, op. cit., p. 51. Tingey moved to London early in 1729 but died in the following November, perhaps partly as a result of over-taxing himself in preaching among 'villages destitute of the gospel' in Northamptonshire, a favourite occupation of his while at Castle Hill. 59Cf. John Conant, The Life of the Reverend and Venerable John Conant, D. D., by his Son, 1823, pp. 1-37 et passim; D. N. B., s. v. John Conant (1608-1694); Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., p. 85. After Conant's death it was said that what 'he contributed to the begetting a lively sense of religion in this large town . . . is hardly to be imagined:' Conant, op. cit., p. 47. One striking contrast with Doddridge was (ibid., pp. 69, 77) that he wanted 'but a few friends on the road to heaven;' to the former such friendship was vital. Conant was essentially a seventeenth-century figure; yet it is remarkable how frequently his characteristic phrases foreshadowed those of Doddridge; home, love, the heart, the affections, tenderness, gentleness, benevolence, reason and sweetness, universal charity, a lively sense of religion these were among the favourite expressions of both men. What one misses in Conant is Doddridge's overflowing sense of joy. His son's biography of him, though hagiographical in tone, is interesting for the vivid picture it gives of family life in a devout Northampton household of the Restoration era.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 221 occurred, it facilitated the reception of Doddridge's teaching, and encouraged the new movement in its pronounced humanitarian interest. To a student of provincial society the extent to which religious movements in the eighteenth century thus came to be centred in a county which, to those who know it, must seem the epitome of English reticence is a phenomenon of the deepest interest. Only a single aspect of it can be explored in the limits of this essay; but a number of others of equally farreaching import have been investigated by Dr Nuttall, particularly in his article 'Northamptonshire and The Modern Question'. It was the solution of the 'Modern Question' which undermined the apparently impregnable walls of High Calvinism, and which facilitated as a consequence the massive expansion of Evangelical preaching throughout England and Wales.60 It also underlay the development of overseas missionary enterprise, and it was in Northamptonshire again that the missionary movement itself was born with the foundation of the Baptist Missionary Society by William Carey at Kettering in 1792.61 On the Anglican side that supreme classic of eighteenthcentury devotion, William Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), likewise originated in Northamptonshire, at King's Cliffe, where Law established a kind of Little Gidding, and where his school and library of devotional works still exist. It is one of the ironies characteristic of English religious history that it should be this work of a High Churchman that 'contributed more than any other book to the spread of Evangelicalism.'62 60

Journal of Theological Studies, N. S., XVI, i, 1965. The question at issue was whether the unconverted have a duty to believe the Gospel. The High Calvinist belief that Christ died only for the elect implied that only the elect have the power, and hence the duty, to believe; yet the Bible exhorted Christians to preach to the unconverted. The lengthy debate began in the 1730's with the publication of A Modern Question Modestly Answered (1737) by Matthias Maurice, minister of the Congregational church at Rothwell, who abandoned the High Calvinist position he had formerly adhered to. Complete victory went to the 'Moderate Calvinist' and ' Arminian' forces in 1785 with the publication in Northampton of The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, by Andrew Fuller, minister of the Baptist church at Kettering. With the latter publication, says Dr Nuttall, 'the walls of High Calvinism fell flat;' in consequence of the doctrine of 'Fullerism', the Gospel was to be preached to all, not only the 'elect'. Dr Nuttall points out that 'almost all those who contributed to the controversy were associated, either by birth or domicile,' with Northamptonshire, particularly with Kettering, Rothwell, Brigstock, Wellingborough, and Northampton itself. For another aspect of the place of Northamptonshire in eighteenth-century religious life, see Nuttall, 'Philip Doddridge . . . a Study in Oversight', loc. cit. 61 Deacon, op. cit., p. 134. Carey was baptized from Castle Hill in the River Nene in 1783. In the missionary movement Doddridge was again a pioneering figure, with his celebrated sermon at Kettering in 1741, The Evil and Danger of Neglecting the Souls of Men (1742), and his formation of a missionary society or association at Castle Hill: see E. A. Payne, 'Doddridge and the Missionary Enterprise', in Nuttall, PD; Alexander Gordon, Philip Doddridge and the Catholicity of the Old Dissent, 1951, p. 37; Deacon, op. cit., pp. 132-4. 62 George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 1941, p. 494, echoing a remark of Canon J. H. Overton.

228 Landscape and Community in England Discussion of these matters, and of others like them, such as the association of 'mortuary poets' like the Evangelical James Hervey with Northamptonshire,63 or the establishment of Newton and Cowper at Olney across the Buckinghamshire border, lie beyond the scope of this paper. In the context of Doddridge's impact upon English society, however, it is well to recall them; for the fact that so many ecclesiastical developments of the time took their rise in his adopted county was no accident. In exploring the religious history of the area, it is impossible not to be struck by the unsuspected depth of feeling to be found amongst its unpretending congregations and communities.64

3. The Extent of his Impact Doddridge's impact upon English religion and society is not easy to measure because it was felt, as already remarked, through so many different channels. Some idea of its extent may be gauged, however, from the remarkable story of his publications. During the twenty-one years he spent at Northampton he published no fewer than 53 works, 25 of them more or less substantial, the rest mainly sermons and pamphlets. Some of these works went into edition after edition during the succeeding century, and by 1880 more than 209 editions of his works had been published in England alone, as well as many in America, and many in other languages, such as French, Dutch, Danish, and Welsh.65 Of these works, two of the most important were The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745) and The 63

There was a clear connexion between Doddridge and the 'mortuary poets'. He was instrumental in the publication of Robert Blair's The Grave in 1743 (Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XIV, 1940-44, p. 238), and James Hervey, rector of Weston Favell, was a friend of his. There is a literary link between Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs (1746-7) and Doddridge's Meditations on the Tears of Jesus over the Grave of Lazarus (1751); but the latter has none of Hervey's gloom. 64 One thinks of Elizabeth Ridgly of Haselbech, for example, who had joined the church at Welford in 1687, shortly before the death of John Shuttlewood left it for 10 years without a pastor: 'She was a diligent saint,' the Church Book of Bedworth recorded after her death, 'who came to our church-meetings seventeen [in fact 27] long miles, twelve times in a year, and that on foot.' - Coleman, op. cit., pp. 159-62. Such tales are more eloquent than any statistics of the depth of conviction to be found among the Independents of the area. One of the indirect consequences of the circumstances described in the above paragraph was the remarkable expansion of the Old Dissent generally in Northamptonshire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In most parts of England Methodists substantially outnumbered other Nonconformist groups by 1851; but in Northamptonshire Congregationalists and Baptists were thrice as numerous in relation to the total population as in a 'Methodist' county like Lincolnshire. - See Alan Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the Nineteenth Century, Dept. of English Local History (Leicester), Occasional Papers, 2nd Ser., No. 4,1972, pp. 51 sqq., 69, 75. 65 Stanford, op. cit., p. 159.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 229 Family Expositor (1739-56). Next to William Law's Serious Call, Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul was probably the most influential work of devotion written in the first half of the eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth it had gone through nearly one hundred recorded editions, and had been translated into nearly every European language as well as such unlikely tongues as Tamil and Syriac.66 The Family Expositor was a work of a very different kind, a detailed biblical commentary arranged in five great volumes, so that it naturally did not sell in such numbers as the Rise and Progress. Nevertheless, after a first edition of nearly 3,000 copies, it went into three further editions by 1756, at least ten by 1811, and twenty-one in London alone by 1880.67 Since it was specifically designed to be read aloud in the family circle, it must in fact have reached a wider audience than these figures suggest. In both cases what needs to be noted is not simply the number of editions but the fact that these books continued to be published, time and time again, for the best part of one hundred and fifty years. That is some measure of the enduring character of Doddridge's impact upon English religious life. It is through the Family Expositor that we can see something of Doddridge's role in the gradual spread of Evangelical ideas through every rank and denomination of society. This is evident from the subscribers' lists to the first edition. It was a common practice in the eighteenth century to publish major works of this kind by subscription, especially works of scholarship, and in this case, as in many others, the names of the subscribers were printed at the beginning of the book. Subsequent editions were not usually issued in this way, so that we cannot trace the full impact of the Family Expositor; but the names of those who subscribed to the first edition nevertheless provide a remarkable cross-section of society at the time. The point may best be illustrated by statistical analysis of the subscribers' names. Of the total of 2,800 about 1,600 subscribed when the first volume appeared in 1739, a further 150 or so on publication of the second volume in 1740, and another 1,053 in 1753 and 1756, when the last two volumes were issued after Doddridge's death. These figures raise a number of technical problems that need not be discussed here in detail;68 they also raise many points of interest about the family history and devotional habits of the time. For the purposes of this paper, attention will be concentrated on the geographical distribution of the subscribers and their social composition. For the 1,600 subscribers to the first volume a place of residence may be 66 Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., p. 108, refers to at least 86 editions; but the list is unlikely to be complete, since The Rise and Progress was a small work easily pirated in pocket editions by local printers. 67 Based on Stanford, op. cit., p. 161, and editions formerly in New College, London. 68 The subscription lists to the later volumes are difficult to interpret, since many people were evidently excluded who had apparently subscribed to the whole set before publication, though presumably they received each volume as it appeared.

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traced in 999 cases. Of these 999, as many as 80 lived in Northampton itself and a further 114 in other parts of Northamptonshire, giving a total of 194 for the county as a whole, or nearly 20 per cent of the total. In a block of six adjacent counties a further 246 subscribers were to be found, 77 of them in Warwickshire and 70 in Leicestershire. The Midland heart of England around Northampton thus accounted for 44 per cent of the total for which a place of residence is known. The remaining 559, or 56 per cent, were very unevenly distributed over the country. From Devonshire, an area with which Doddridge had many links, there were 101 subscriptions, or 10 per cent of the total, and from Yorkshire 94, or 9.5 per cent, mainly from the western half of the West Riding; apart from the region around Northampton itself, these two districts provided much the largest numbers. Next below them in the scale, but a long way below, were the five eastern counties between the Thames and the Wash, with a total of 77 subscribers, or nearly eight per cent between them. Elsewhere, the whole of Wales and the four marcher counties provided fewer than nine per cent of the total; the whole of England south of the Thames only five per cent; and the teeming myriads of London and Middlesex a mere two per cent. The rest of the subscribers consisted of scattered groups in most English counties, and a few in Scotland, chiefly in the university towns, one of which, Aberdeen, conferred on Doddridge his honorary D.D.; there were also a few subscriptions from overseas, principally from New England, the Netherlands, and Lisbon. By and large, therefore, the vast bulk of support for Doddridge's work at this stage came from three unconnected areas: Northamptonshire and the countryside adjacent; Yorkshire, particularly the western half of the West Riding; and Devonshire, particularly Exeter, but also the north of the county together with part of west Somerset. These regions comprised less than a quarter of the total area of England but supplied about 64 per cent of the 999 subscriptions for which a place of residence may be traced. By the time the two last volumes of the Family Expositor were published the geographical pattern had changed in two significant respects. The subscription-lists to these later volumes are not easy to interpret, since many people seem to have been excluded from them who had subscribed for the whole set before publication, though presumably they received each volume as it appeared. It is this peculiarity no doubt that chiefly accounts for the apparently drastic decline in subscriptions from the three dominant areas of 1739, from some 64 per cent of the total to only 37 per cent. More genuinely significant is the notable increase from the eastern counties, from 8 per cent to 16 per cent, nearly half of them from Suffolk; together with an equally striking rise from the Marcher counties - particularly Worcestershire and Shropshire - which now provided 10 per cent of the total. In both these areas, it should be noted, particularly in Worcestershire, Shropshire, and Suffolk, Doddridge's personal connexions were intimate: at Shrewsbury, for example, through the Orton family, whose son Job Orton had been one of his pupils at Northampton and was an influential follower of his.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 231 Elsewhere there had been few significant changes since 1739, except for a slight increase in subscriptions from London and a noticeable rise in those from Scotland. At both dates the overwhelming preponderance of provincial support as against that of London underlines the point made earlier regarding the relative decline of the capital as a focus of religious life.69 Quite as interesting as the regional distribution of subscribers is their distribution as between town and countryside. In view of the great interest taken by Doddridge and his friends in itinerant village preaching, it is worth observing the preponderance of rural subscriptions. In some of the larger towns, such as Exeter and Coventry, subscribers were naturally numerous, and in the obviously special case of Northampton itself notably so when the size and expense of the Family Expositor are remembered. Yet in England as a whole only 35 per cent of all subscriptions derived from major urban settlements of this kind, whereas 29 per cent came from wholly rural parishes and 34 per cent from small market towns, such as Oundle and Cullompton. In all probability these figures underestimate the real strength of rural support, since many 'urban' orders were placed with booksellers, amongst whose customers there must have been numbers of country people. It is clear, therefore, that there was nothing distinctively urban in the support for Philip Doddridge's work or in the appeal of the new movement. The point is worth stressing because of the belief still widely held that 'puritanism', 'nonconformity', and 'evangelicalism' were in some way essentially urban developments. In reality that was no more true in the mideighteenth century than it was in the mid-seventeenth or at the time of the ecclesiastical Census of 1851.70 In analyzing the social composition of the subscribers' lists we are faced with one major difficulty which cannot be wholly circumvented. This is the fact that they include many ordinary folk who are difficult to identify without intensive research into local family history. Such research as has been undertaken suggests that many of these people were tradesmen, craftsmen, farmers, or the like, as we should expect, but that by no means all were, while some were certainly of gentle or leisured status. The problem relates particularly to the large numbers described simply as 'Mr', the great

69

The scanty representation of Wales, Cornwall, the southern counties, the north Midlands, and all the northern counties except Yorkshire is remarkable. The point is worth stressing because of the nonsensical notion sometimes advanced that Nonconformity was essentially a 'north-country' or even a 'Highland Zone' phenomenon. 70 So far as the extent of rural Nonconformity in 1851 is concerned, see Everitt, Pattern of Rural Dissent. Of course, as the proportion of the population living in towns increased, the urban element in Nonconformity and Evangelicalism increased with it.

232 Landscape and Community in England majority of whom cannot at present be systematically classified.71 If these unidentifiable people are excluded, we have definite information about the identity, the family, and the social status of some 60 per cent of the subscribers as a whole - 52 per cent for the first volume and 70 per cent for the last two - or nearly 1,600 people altogether. There are four main conclusions which analysis of these figures indicates, though in the following account it should be remembered that the lower levels of society are underrepresented. The first conclusion relates to the social range involved. Since denominational adherence was already sharply divided in most areas along lines of social class, we might have expected Doddridge's supporters to be drawn largely from the ranks of tradesmen and Dissenters; in fact the range of support was much wider than that. Of those who subscribed in 1739, 17 per cent were aristocrats or squires, 52 per cent were ministers or clergy, 7 per cent professional people, 5 per cent merchants or aldermen, 8 per cent booksellers, and 11 per cent women.72 If the upper levels of society are grouped together- aristocrats, squires, cathedral clergy, college heads, and the like - we find that they comprised exactly a quarter of all the identifiable subscribers. When these figures are compared with those for the last two volumes, moreover, it becomes clear that support among the upper levels of society was increasing. In the seventeen years since the appearance of the first volume in 1739, support at this level rose from 25 per cent of the identifiable total to 36 per cent; among aristocrats and squires from 17 to 20 per cent, among the higher clergy from 0.5 to 3 per cent, among professional men from 7 to 9 per cent, and among titled women from 0.7 to 4 per cent. The second point that may be noted is this. In comparing the 1739 list with those for 1753 and 1756, we find a notable increase in support among women. In 1739 they accounted for 11 per cent of the subscribers, but by 1756 for 22 per cent; it should also be remembered that many others must have contributed in effect through their husbands. Prominent among these women was Doddridge's close friend, the famous Methodist Countess of Huntingdon; but alongside her aristocratic name there were also those of her friend the Duchess of Somerset, together with five other countesses - of Coventry, Harborough, Halifax, Leven, and Northumberland - and a score of other titled women, besides many lesser lights in the feminine religious firmament. Women have always played a major part in English religious movements, and in this respect the Evangelical Revival was typical of others, both before and since. But in this case, coupled with the prominence of women in the success of the movement, we must also place the 71 The following account is based on extensive family research on many of the identifiable subscribers; it is only a preliminary resume of my findings. Subscribers mentioned in the Doddridge ocrrespondence are marked with an asterisk in Nuttall, Correspondence. I owe many references to Dr Nuttall. 72 That is of the identifiable total, which, for reasons explained in the previous paragraph, under-represents tradesmen, farmers, craftsmen, etc.

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prominence of a substantial section of the aristocracy, the gentry, and the professional classes. That is one indication of the way in which the new movement spread across the social spectrum: the influence of Philip Doddridge was plainly instrumental in facilitating the breadth of its appeal. The third point to note is the presence of a number of dominant and extensive kinship-groups among the subscribers. Dynastic connexion, like feminine influence, has generally played an important role in the spread of religious movements in this country, and this was very marked in the Evangelical Revival. One of the largest of these groups was that of the Cromwells, Hartopps, Fleet woods, Abneys, and Dukinfields, all of whom were more or less closely related, and whose influence, though primarily centred on Stoke Newington near London, by this date also reached out into Leicestershire, Hertfordshire, and Cheshire, and to Birmingham, Derby, and Northampton. Its links with Doddridge arose partly through his intimate friendship with Isaac Watts, who had been tutor to Sir John Hartopp's family at Stoke Newington, and partly no doubt through the Fleetwoods of St Sepulchre's parish in Northampton. Among the many members of this great Dissenting connexion were Sir Thomas Abney, Lady Abney, Parnell Abney, and Elizabeth Abney; Lady Dukinfield and Robert Dukinfield; Sir John Hartopp, Mrs Elizabeth Cooke, and Lady Dolings; Elizabeth Fleetwood of Stoke Newington and Mrs Fleetwood of Northampton. Like a number of other dynastic connexions, this one stemmed mainly from a prominent group of old Puritan families, and it included three direct descendants of Oliver Cromwell: Henry, Richard, and William Cromwell, who subscribed for eleven sets of the Family Expositor between them. Yet in a sense the most interesting point to note about these kinship-groups is that by no means all of them stemmed from a Puritan ancestry. Others were predominantly Anglican in origin and included both laymen and clerics, among whom there were at least six members of the episcopal bench and eighteen other cathedral clergy. Others again included an influential section of the Scottish nobility and gentry: Erskines, Campbells, Gardiners, Nicolsons, Cadogans, Whitefoords, and so on. One further point of some interest is that, when the descendants of these families are followed up, many of them are found to be among the pillars of the Evangelical establishment of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this respect too, therefore, the impact of Philip Doddridge seems to have been considerable. The fourth point to note is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the subscribers were laymen, not clerics. Although ministers and clergymen were naturally also prominent among them, altogether nearly threequarters of the total of 2,800 were laymen, or to be exact 73 per cent. At first sight this may not seem to be a matter of any great moment; but in reality it points to the vital fact that, in its origins, the Evangelical Revival was never a purely, or even predominantly, clerical movement. It represented something at once more spontaneous and more fundamental than an

234 Landscape and Community in England organized campaign of any kind. It betokened a movement of the human spirit, a development of feeling which transcended all barriers, of locality, denomination, and class. It was here that the teaching and the personality of Philip Doddridge were so important. For although, as it subsequently developed, there was much in Evangelicalism that was rigid and intolerant, there was also an element of sensitivity and humanity within it: and it was this tradition that owed its origins perhaps as much to Philip Doddridge as to any single individual. 4. The Secret of his Appeal What, then, was the real secret of Doddridge's appeal? To follow out this subject in all its bearings would be a task far beyond the scope of the present writer. It would take us into the realms of medicine and education, of psychology and the reform of manners, of literature,73 of music, and of art, as well as into social and ecclesiastical history. At one level it was part of that great exploration of the interior world which, in its way, was as notable a development of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the exploration of the world overseas. For the present paper, however, attention will be principally concentrated on some of the specifically devotional or religious aspects of the subject. For this purpose we need to consider a number of the more prominent theological concepts and images which appear in Doddridge's writings, and which point up the shift of sensibility. In doing so I can only speak as an historian, and historians are not noted for their expertise in discussing matters of theology. Yet as literary scholars have shewn us, there is often something to be learned about the mentalite of past societies from an examination of their language and imagery, and something about their attitudes and assumptions which can rarely be obtained from any other kind of evidence. In approaching the subject it is important to stress at the outset that none of the generally received dogmas of English Protestantism were abandoned by Doddridge: for example, belief in the Trinity,74 in the inerrancy of Scripture, in heaven and hell, in justification by faith, in the rejection of purgatory, the rejection of transubstantiation, and so on. If we look to Doddridge as an early apostle of the liberal theology of the nineteenth 73 There are marked evidences of it, for example, in the novels of Jane Austen (especially Mansfield Park), Mrs Gaskell, and George Eliot (especially A dam Bede). But the temptation to expand on this theme must be resisted. 74 In view of Doddridge's refusal to subscribe to any form of words not specifically authorized by Scripture (cf. Deacon, op. cit., pp. 43, 86, 154), his unqualified Trinitarianism is worth emphasizing: 'No puzzling texts shall rob me of this rest to my heart, that Christ is the exact counterpart of him in whom we live and move and have our being. I say boldly, if the doctrine of the Trinity be not in the Bible it ought to be, for the whole spiritual nature of man cries out for it.' - Qu. in Stanford, op. cit., p. 54.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 235 75 century, we are likely to be disappointed. Neither can it seriously be claimed that he had any real sympathy with Catholicism or with Unitarianism, though to both he was ready to be more tolerant than many of his contemporaries.76 Possibly his only fundamental departure from the stricter Protestant tradition was his abandonment of High Calvinism. Though he was no Arminian, and once described himself as 'in all the most important points a Calvinist,' he in fact rejected, as already remarked, the doctrine of predestined reprobation.77 This was an important departure; but although it symptomized a more humane emphasis in his thought, and afforded a doctrinal basis for the immense subsequent expansion of Evangelical endeavour, as Dr Nuttall has shewn us, it was not in itself a new departure.78 The novelty in Doddridge's position arose rather from shifts of emphasis in his thought than from any novel theological stance. These shifts of emphasis, however, were of the utmost importance in the development of the new tradition. In what, then, did they consist? In the first place, although his teaching was based quite as much on the Bible as Puritanism, it rested rather more on the New Testament and rather less on the Old, and within the New it rested particularly - though of course not exclusively - on the Gospels with their presentation of the human Christ. Though God was still clearly envisaged as judge, it was rather the human nature and compassions of Christ than the remoteness and transcendence of God that occupied the central place in his thought. In the Family Expositor he deliberately placed the four gospels first, devoting the whole of the first volume to them. That in itself was not new; but the motive behind it marked a significant departure. T have long been convinced,' Doddridge said,'. . . that if anything can ally-those animosities which (unnatural as they are) have so long inflamed us, and pained the heart of every generous Christian; in a word, that if anything can establish the purity and order, the peace and glory of the Church, or spread the triumphs of personal and domestic religion 75

This view has several times been advanced, and Dr Roger Thomas made out an interesting case for it in 'Philip Doddridge and Liberalism in Religion', in Nuttall, PD. I do not myself find the case convincing and the argument itself seems to me anachronistic. Too much can be made of Doddridge's allowance of relative freedom of debate among his students, and the fact that some of them later abandoned 'orthodox' views. It is risky to credit or discredit a teacher on the latter grounds, and the former attitude did not arise from doubts of his own but rather from depth of conviction. Ultimately Dr Thomas himself admitted that Doddridge 'was, maybe, not a wayfarer very far on the liberal road himself . . . ' - Ibid., p. 153. His real strength and popularity arose from a consistent stand against latitudinarianism. 76 In consequence of his championship of the cause of Bryan Connell, an Irish Catholic in Northamptom Gaol convicted of murder, he was accused of being a 'secret Papist': a fact that tells us much about what Doddridge was up against. - Deacon, op. cit.,p. 116. 77 Nuttall, Correspondence, p. 25; this was in 1724, when he was 22, but his view did not change. 78 Nuttall, 'Northamptonshire and The Modern Question', loc. cit.

236 Landscape and Community in England among us, it must be an attentive study of the Word of God, and especially of the New Testament.' For the New Testament 'is a book written with the most consummate knowledge of human nature, and though there are a thousand latent beauties in it. . . the general sense and design of it is plain to every honest reader, even at the very first perusal.'79 For Doddridge the New Testament Jesus thus in some sense replaced the Old Testament Jehovah as the dominant figure, and as the object and pattern of piety. What he particularly remarked in the Moravian Count Zinzendorf, who at one time deeply impressed him, was that he had 'an exceeding great regard for Christ, and thinks our business is much more with him than with the Father: that he is our God; and that his Father has given him this world as his property.'80 Characteristically, we find him often speaking of Christ in such terms as the 'Friend of Sinners', the 'Immortal Friend', the 'Divine Master', the 'gentle and benevolent Jesus', the 'gentle Shepherd', the 'gracious Shepherd', the 'great and good Shepherd', the 'great Physician', and the 'compassionate Saviour'. Or to quote from the Family Expositor once more: 'the New Testament teaches us to conceive of Christ, not as a generous benefactor only, who having performed some actions of heroic virtue and benevolence, is now retired from all intercourse with our world . . . but that he is to be considered as an ever-living and everpresent Friend, with whom we are to maintain a daily commerce by faith and prayer . . .' Or to quote from another work of his, Meditations on the Tears of Jesus over the Grave of Lazarus: 'the thoughts of those agonies through which [Lazarus] had passed . . . might all contribute to melt the compassionate Heart of the blessed Jesus . . . While he was amongst them with a majesty beyond that of a king even in his army, he tempered that majesty with the gentlest sympathy.'81 Now these expressions of Doddridge's are worth pondering. Though they were not entirely novel,82 they were not the kind of phrases that were particularly prominent in the older Calvinistic tradition. They betokened an emphasis on human feeling which in its intensity was peculiarly characteristic of Doddridge, and which ultimately went far to open up a new 79

Doddridge, FE, I, pp. i, v. Qu. in Nuttall, PD, p. 92. Doddridge would probably not have accepted the theological implications of this view, and he did not follow Zinzendorf s later ideas; see also n. 24, supra. But 'the exceeding great regard for Christ' is frequently echoed in 81 his writings. Nuttall, PD, p. 156; Stanford, op. cit., p. 101; Doddridge, FE, I, pp. v, vii; Doddridge, Meditations on the Tears of Jesus, pp. 11-20, passim. The Meditations was his funeral sermon on the death of his friend, Dr Samuel Clark of St Albans. It was published shortly before his own death in 1751, and in its intense sensibility he seems to be burning himself out in a flame of tenderness and compassion. It was on his way to Clark's funeral in 1750 that he caught the cold which led eventually to consumption. - Nuttall, PD, p. 13. 82 The phrase 'gracious Shepherd', for example, occurs in a sonnet of the Roman Catholic poet, Henry Constable (1562-1631): Lord David Cecil, ed., The Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 1951, p. 73. 80

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 237 emotional world. Although he by no means equated religion with mere religious feeling, and would have distrusted some of the emotional techniques of latter-day 'revivalism', he gave new rein in the devotional life of his day to the deeper human feelings of joy and sorrow. His writings are strewn with such words as 'tender', 'endearing', 'affectionate', 'adorable', 'impressible', 'charming'.83 'Visit those more frequently who are under serious impressions or distress', he instructed the elders at Castle Hill; 'remember there are tender times and work with the Holy Spirit. . .' When children hear their parents 'earnestly pleading for the divine blessing upon them,' he wrote, 'it may very probably be a means of moving their impressible Hearts; as it may powerfully convince them of your deep and tender Concern for their Good.'84 He once spoke of human emotion as 'the sails of the soul', whose power must indeed be controlled, but without which there could be no movement of the spirit.85 In this respect he seems to have aroused the suspicion of some among the older Dissenting tradition; but his instinctive response to their doubts was profoundly typical of the man. 'The fierceness of some minds . . .,' he wrote in Meditations on the Tears of Jesus, 'leads them to despise those whom they frequently see under the impression of tender passions. But wherefore should they despise them? Surely when God implanted in our nature those melting emotions of soul, he intended them for some valuable purpose; and not that we should look upon them as weeds, to be rooted out of every cultivated soil. I am sure we cannot learn any such stoical maxims from the Word of God; for there not only the most eminent saints, but many of the bravest heroes are described with the softest sentiments of humanity about them, and are frequently painted in Tears . . . Surely in this respect as well as every other, the disciple is not above his Master; nor can those marks of tenderness be a reproach to us which were not unbecoming to him . . . and he has taken care that while they testify to our passions, they should also ease them and unload the heart when almost ready to sink under its pressure.'86 If his attitude to human emotion thus marked something of a departure from an older tradition which at times had tended to regard it as suspect, as essentially tainted by our fallen nature, his own sensibilities and his personal 83 Dr Nuttall has pointed out the frequent occurrence in his works of 'charming' and 'charmed': PD, pp. 155-6. This was a stronger word in his day than now, a intense form of 'entrancing' or 'enchanting'. 84 Arnold and Cooper, op. cit., p. 113; Doddridge, Plain and Serious Address, p. 14 (the capitals are Doddridge's). 85Qu. in Nuttall, PD, p. 118: 'It is a wild scheme to pretend to root out the passions, and a foolish thing to pretend to lay them to sleep. They are the sails of the soul. The preacher must endeavour to fill them with a prosperous wind. Have some pathetic strokes even while explaining . . . However . . . be cautious. Do not attempt to raise the passions of the people to immoderate transports nor suffer your own to master you . . . In the greatest emotions "ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm".' 86 Doddridge, Meditations, pp. 14-16.

238 Landscape and Community in England acquaintance with tragedy forbade him to modify it. Throughout his correspondence, as a consequence, something of this same depth of feeling recurs again and again. Regarding his master Isaac Watts, for example, he wrote of 'those tears and embraces with which he has often dismissed me;' of 'good Mr Barker' of Walthamstow that 'he is as full of sweet, tender, endearing friendship as ever a man can be;' of the Moravian Benjamin Ingham, after a visit to Northampton in 1737, that he 'expressed such a sense of divine things in his own heart. . . that it was almost unparalleled. . . . I hardly know any conversation or any occurrence that has brought my soul nearer to God, or has made me more fit for my everlasting rest.' To Samuel Wood of Rendham in Suffolk he wrote thanking him for 'two such letters as I am sure I never deserved to receive nor ever shall deserve, so full of cordial love expressed in all the most pathetic and endearing language, such indeed as hardly anyone but yourself could write . . . My dear brother, I am ashamed and confounded . . . ashamed I have not long since told you how I was overwhelmed even to tears with that abundant goodness which every line discovers . . . ' And when his old pupil Risdon Darracott, the 'Apostle of the West', was seriously ill in Somerset and thought to be dying, he wrote to him: 'Oh what a wound was it to my heart, to mine which loves you as a tender parent, and more than a parent if that can be possible, to me who look upon you as eminently my joy and my crown. Must the residue of your days, my dear friend, be cut short in the midst? Must the world and the Church lose you? Alas! it is almost like a sword in my heart. Tis what I hardly know how to bring my mind to submit to ... '87 By means of his students and his circle of friends, as a consequence, and by countless other channels, this kind of sensibility spread far and wide like an irresistible flame through the religious world of the time. It might to some people seem suspect, and certainly at times it was a little hectic; yet for many it carried its own inward conviction, its own authenticity, its own divine vision of the church as a circle of affection. It was to this same Risdon Darracott that an Anglican parson, the Vicar of Truro, once wrote, not without a certain yearning: 'I have not your warm heart. Doddridge was not my tutor. Dear man! I love him more since I have known you.' It was another friend who said 'that I never remember to have spent an hour in his company, but it was my own fault, if I went not from him something wiser or better. Nor have I ever known a Christian, concerning whom I could more deliberately say, may my soul have its eternal lot with that follower of Jesus, more than of Dr Doddridge.' Some sixty years later, as his last surviving pupil lay on his own deathbed, he is reported to have said: 'I shall soon see the blessed, blessed Redeemer, and the dear Doctor Doddridge.'88 Such 87

New College, London, Doddridge Correspondence, MS Ll/1/82,69 (now in Dr Williams's Library); Stanford, op. cit., pp. 90, 105; cf. also 'New Light on Philip Doddridge', Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XVII, 1952, p. 11. 88 Stanford, op. cit., pp. 104-5; Nuttall, PD, pp. 7-8.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 239 comments may make us smile; but it would be a mistake to disregard them or to discount their validity. What then, we may ask, were the origins of this deepening tenderness in the devotional life of the time? They were, of course, highly complex; they were not unconnected with that wider movement of sensibility which was affecting the literature of the period; and perhaps in the last resort they cannot be altogether explained. In Doddridge's own circle, however, they were particularly associated with an increasing preoccupation with human weakness as distinct from human sin: with the tragic, inescapable subjection of human beings to suffering, ignorance, disease, and death: and with that conception of divine grace which a later theologian defined as 'the love of God adapting itself to the need of man.' It was this shift of emphasis that lay behind some of Doddridge's favourite images of Christ as the 'great Physician', the 'gracious Shepherd', the 'Immortal Friend', and the 'compassionate Saviour'. It must at once be stressed that it was no more than a shift of emphasis; Doddridge certainly did not abandon the traditional doctrine of human depravity, as The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul makes quite plain. And yet the shift of emphasis was surely a real and a fundamental one, pregnant with future possibilities.89 For his generation Doddridge went remarkably far, for example, in recognizing the medical problem behind the Christian experience of the 'dark night of the soul': 'here I would first advise you,' he wrote in the Rise and Progress, 'most carefully to enquire whether your present distress does indeed arise from causes which are truly spiritual; or whether it may not rather have its foundation in some disorder of the body . . . which may break your spirits and deject your mind? . . . When this is the case, the help of the physician is to be sought rather than that of the divine . . . '90 Among the many manifestations of the new movement one that particularly commands attention in the present context was the intensified sensibility towards family bereavement, especially as regards the loss of children. This in its turn was connected with a renewed stress on domestic pietism on one hand, and on

89 In the Rise and Progress, for example, there are such chapter-headings as The sinner arraigned and condemned', 'The sinner stripped of his vain pleas', etc. Yet the concern with sin, though still very apparent, seems to me to have been tempered with so much fuller a recognition of the problems of weakness and inadequacy as to open up a new dimension in the study of the human condition. It was not one, however, that was appreciated by all Evangelicals, as Doddridge himself hints: 'The influence of the inferior part of our nature on the nobler, the immortal spirit. . . is so evident that no attentive person can, in the general, fail to have observed it; and yet there are cases in which it seems not to be sufficiently considered . . . The state of the blood is often such as necessarily to suggest gloomy ideas even in dreams . . . and when it is so, why should it be imagined to proceed from any peculiar divine displeasure. . . ?' Rise and Progress, p. 206. 90 Ibid., pp. 205-6.

240


the other with an increase of material comfort in the home. These are both points to which we might briefly direct our attention. Doddridge's repeated stress on domestic pietism, which is so apparent in works like his Family Expositor and his Plain and Serious Address to the Master of a Family on the Important Subject of Family Religion, was in itself nothing new.91 Its prominence in the Puritan tradition is well known, and its continuing vitality among Dissenters has already been commented on.92 The point to note here, however, is that it was by no means confined to the godly Puritan household. During the seventeenth century it had also come to characterize many specifically Anglican families, like the Sondeses, Twysdens, and Peytons in Kent; the Ferrars of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire; and the Shirleys of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, forebears of the Countess of Huntingdon. Amongst Anglicans of a devout cast of mind the political troubles of the mid-seventeenth century had often deepened this tradition; their growing despair of any real public solution to the religious question drove many of them to find their solace in domestic piety, or in 'the privacy of their own thoughts' as one of them expressed it. There is a good deal of evidence for this development in contemporary letters and diaries, and in manuals of private devotion, some published, some circulated in manuscript, some compiled for the use of a single household. With the long proscription of Anglicanism during the Civil War and Interregnum, there was thus a widespread withdrawal of piety, so to speak, to the private chapels and prayer-closets of rural manor houses, particularly in strongly Anglican counties like Kent. Many of the ejected clergy of the time became domestic chaplains in households like these, moreover, which as a consequence came to resemble churches in miniature. Although the proscription of Anglicanism proved temporary, it thus left behind it an abiding habit of mind, a conviction that in a sense the family was a church, a centre of private worship with a life of its own.93 It was this tradition that explained much of the appeal of William Law's Serious Call, and when allied with that of men like John Conant of Northampton, it certainly facilitated the reception of Doddridge's teachings in Anglican as well as Dissenting circles. Among those teachings his emphasis on the family as a sphere of education, and his special interest in the religious education of young children, thus woke a direct response among Anglicans and Dissenters alike. Despite the profound cleavages between them, on this one vital point there was a fundamental community of interest: and it was to that interest that Doddridge specifically appealed.94 Alongside this renewed stress on domestic piety, we should also take note 91

See, for example, Plain and Serious Address, pp. 11-13. See pp. 226-7 supra; cf. also Stanford, op. cit., pp. 131,177. For the background to these topics in Kent, see Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60, 1966, pp. 49-54, 226-7, 299-300. 94 Such households were among those 'nurseries of piety' that he referred to in his Plain and Serious Address, p. 15. 92 93

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 241 of that contemporaneous increase of domestic comfort which was so marked a feature of provincial society between 1660 and 1760. In the probate inventories of the period, amongst other sources, it is plain that not only were the value and variety of domestic goods increasing, but a growing proportion of wealth was being invested in the home, as compared with capital goods and stock.95 In their very different ways, both these social developments thus tended to centre contemporary interest in the domestic sphere of life: and this is the essential point to grasp. On the one hand we find an increasing idealization of domestic life, as a consequence, and an increasing emphasis on the home as a circle of comfort and security. On the other hand, as the word 'home' itself in this sense comes into more frequent use, we also find it increasingly employed as a synonym for heaven, the 'home' of the exiled human spirit. It was not until this period that the identification of 'heaven' with 'home' became one of the great commonplaces of English religion: it can be found in earlier generations,96 but it was less prominently developed. If the home was becoming idealized in this way, if it was becoming a place of increasing comfort and security, it was not unnatural if personal loss and bereavement should often come to be more acutely felt within it. Nowadays, medical advance has so far transformed our lives in this respect, especially as regards the illnesses of children, that it is difficult to realize how closely eighteenth-century people, rich and poor alike, still lived to illness and death. There was nothing novel in their vulnerability; but there is a good deal of evidence, in letters, in diaries, and in monumental inscriptions,97 that the bereavement arising from it was in many quarters becoming more intensely felt, or being given greater place. The very fact that medical advance was beginning to improve the chances of recovery, indeed, and so beginning to awaken hope, only tended to accentuate distress when that hope was disappointed. This deepening sensitivity to bereavement seems to me to have been a major factor in the reception of Philip Doddridge's teaching. It is a theme that recurs again and again both in his writings and in his correspondence.98 Among his friends and subscribers there were numbers of families who had suffered loss of relatives, especially of children, in circumstances that seem 95 Absolutely, more was also being invested in capital goods and stock; but the domestic proportion increased more substantially. These remarks are based on an analysis of all the surviving Northampton inventories; but the developments referred to were in no way peculiar to that town. 96 As in the poem of Samuel Grossman (1624-83), 'Jerusalem on high . . . My home whene'er I die.' 97 Questionable evidence, it may be said; but systematic examination of the changing imagery and expression of monumental inscriptions in this period is revealing. 98 ' ... These things must wound me in a very tender part,' he wrote in 1744 regarding the death or 'hopeless illness' of four of his students. - Qu. in Deacon, op. cit.,p. 96.

242 Landscape and Community in England to betoken acute religious feeling: and in these circumstances they found in his writings an answering experience to their own." 'Even tender and innocent infancy is not excepted [from death],' he wrote in The Tears of Jesus: 'those little helpless strangers in life . . . what numbers of them are brought into the world only to smart, and weep, and die. And in other instances, when the human blossom begins to open, and beautiful colours discover themselves in the bud, how does it wither before it be fully grown! Children, who have all the charms and all the hopes their early age can admit, seem to have been spared for a few years only to take a deeper root in a parent's heart, that it might ache and bleed the more, when they are plucked up, sometimes by a sudden stroke, and sometimes by a slow progress which prolongs to weeks and months that dreadful operation by which we are losing part of ourselves.'100 With Doddridge such remarks as these were not the mere platitudes of an academic divine. As his correspondence regarding the Sunday School at Castle Hill often shews, his affection for children was peculiarly intense.101 In the loss of their own eldest little girl, Elizabeth, moreover, at the age of four, both Doddridge and his wife Mercy had themselves endured acute distress of mind. She was a beautiful child, and they had both loved her intensely; Philip called her his 'lovely Betsy' and 'the delight of his eyes'; 'indeed I doted upon her,' he said. But about June 1736 she was taken ill with consumption, and in the following October she died. This day,' Philip wrote simply in his diary, 'my heart hath been almost torn in pieces by sorrow, but sorrow so softened and sweetened that I number it among the best days of my life. Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? God knows I am not angry;

99 See ibid., p. 85, for Doddridge's letter regarding friends of his at Olney who, having already lost 10 children, 'have now lost by a fever the only surviving child, a beautiful and lovely daughter of about nine years old, for whose life they have been trembling ever since she was born. It touches me very tenderly.' Cf. also his advice to the elders at Castle Hill, quoted in Arnold and Cooper, op. cit., p. 113, 'remember there are tender times, and work with the Holy Spirit.' 100 Doddridge, Meditations, pp. 17-18. The italics are his. 101 Through Isaac Watts he besought the Coward Trustees, in a typical phrase, to 'shew as tender a regard of the dear Lambs of my flock as convenience will admit.' Trans, of the Congregational Historical Society, XIV, 1940-44, p. 240. 'Some of them are indeed Most delightful children,' he said,'. . . I have been once a week praying over them, and talking with them on religious subjects in their own way, and many a tear has [sic] I seen dropped from their dear little eyes while they have stood with an air of attention and pleasure which it gives me inexpressible delight to recollect.' Ibid., p. 217.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Traditionn 243 102 but sorrowful he surely allows me to be.' Betsy was buried beneath the communion table at Castle Hill, where her father used often to visit her grave in secret. At one time he even reproached himself 'for the too great tenderness with which I have viewed and adored that image.' But in his will he left a legacy to Betsy's old nurse, Elizabeth Bagnal, for 'the affectionate care she took of my dear eldest child during her last illness, a tender circumstance which it is not possible for me ever to forget.'103 This sensibility in respect of bereavement was not without important practical consequences. ' . . . Let not personal and domestic calamities engross all the tenderness of our souls,' he wrote, in The Tears of Jesus. 'Let our compassions spread themselves all abroad, and take in every proper object which may fall under their notice. Let us endeavour to pass through the world as Friends of God, and of mankind.'104 It was this masculine emphasis on outgoing activity that, at this stage of the Revival at least, prevented the new sensibility from lapsing into mere self-indulgence or sentimentality. With Doddridge himself, as already remarked, it found an outlet in many kinds of educational and humanitarian activity: in his academy, in Sunday Schools, in Charity Schools, in household education, in medical enterprise, in county infirmaries, in village preaching, in cottagevisiting, in missionary activity, and so on. But behind all these practical consequences - and this is my present point - what we see is something of that movement of sensibility, that deepening of humanitarian compassion, which Doddridge was one of the first to encourage, and which at the hands of his successors was in some ways destined to transform English society. 5. The Irresistible Flame This paper has taken us into some unfamiliar byways of English society in the eighteenth century. It may seem strange to claim that a movement of 102

Arnold and Cooper, op. cit., p. 115; Stanford, op. cit., p. 60. The allusion is to the story of Jonah and the gourd, in Jonah, v. 4; it was the text of Betsy's funeral sermon. The bereavement lent point to his own sermon, published a few months later, Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children, 1737. His own and his wife's letters bear witness to their deep affection for their children; see also Mercy's letter to her children from Lisbon after her husband's death, in The Protestant Dissenter's Magazine, II, 1795, p. 133. When the smallpox was at Northampton, Philip was offered a retreat for his wife and children by his friends the Colliers at Delapre Abbey, in whom he 'found a tender mother and four of the most affectionate sisters a man could have.' - Stanford, op. cit., pp. 61-2; cf. Deacon, op. cit., pp. 158-9. 103Arnold and Cooper, op. cit., pp. 115-16; Gasquoine and Cooper, op. cit., p. 104; The Protestant Dissenter's Magazine, II, 1795, p. 131. It is perhaps worth noting John Bunyan's intense affection for his blind daughter, who likewise died young (see D.N.B., s.v. John Bunyan). 104 Doddridge, Meditations, p. 17. This quotation continues from that on p. 237, n. 86,supra.

244 Landscape and Community in England sensibility should owe something in its origins to the humble Dissenting chapels of the Midlands. Yet in reality it is no stranger than the fact that Bach derived inspiration from the traditional chorales of Germany; or Haydn from the folk-music of his native Austria; or Walter Scott from the vivid idioms of the Scottish peasantry; or George Eliot from the weavers and farmers of Warwickshire. It was the ability of the new movement to draw in this way on traditions untouched by fashion, and to lodge in the deepest recesses of the provincial mentality, that ensured its success. In an illuminating phrase John Betjeman once described the Dissenting chapels of this country as the 'folk-architecture' of England; there was a sense in which Nonconformity was the 'folk-religion' of the eighteenth century. If it seems strange to suggest that the new sensibility owed something to Dissent, it may seem equally strange to attribute anything in its origins to Evangelicalism. Nowadays it seems difficult to envisage the Revival apart from its repressive Victorian aspect: its relentless moralism, its dismissive attitude to literature and art, its refusal to come to terms with science, psychology, and biblical criticism, its inability to accept that 'God fulfils himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' Yet there was a sense in which it was a movement of liberation as well as repression. Its impact upon social and educational reform, its achievements in medical enterprise105 and missionary endeavour,106 its part in that exploration of the interior world which lay behind the development of the domestic novel, are alone sufficient to suggest that. In its early phases considered here, moreover, we must also remember that it was a movement of the utmost complexity, an uneasy amalgam of many diverse and often conflicting elements rather than a single united tradition. Temperamentally, it was a combination of the dogmatic, the moralistic, and the illuministic; but 105

The impact of the new movement in its initial stages on medical care would repay further investigation. Under the impulse of men like Doddridge numbers of minor gentry and younger sons of baronets became country doctors, sometimes on very modest incomes. Doddridge's friend Sir James Stonhouse (1716-95) was a doctor in Northampton from 1743 to 1763; he took holy orders in 1749, but for long remained in medical practice; among his publications was, characteristically, Every Man's Assistant and the Sick Man's Friend (1788). - D.N.B., s.v. Sir James Stonhouse. When Richard Kay, a young Lancashire doctor, died in 1751, his obituary commented, in phrases reminiscent of Doddridge: 'The tenderness and humanity wherewith he treated his patients, the concern he showed for their welfare . . . shows how useful and serviceable he was.' - Quoted in Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680-1730, 1982, p. 205; this whole chapter on The Coming of "the Doctor'" and the revolution in medical provision that entailed is relevant here. All these developments lay behind the widespread association of missionary activity with medical enterprise in the following century. 106 For Doddridge's interest in missionary enterprise, see n. 61, supra. The role of missionary activity in freeing the West Indian slaves, which has been questioned by many recent historians, has now been reinstated by Mary Turner in Slaves and Missionaries: the Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834,1983.

Philip Doddridge and the Evangelical Tradition 245 individuals and denominations varied greatly in the relative emphasis which they placed on these different strains, and in the way they interpreted them. Among those who thought like Philip Doddridge, both dogma and morality were certainly important; yet in many ways it was the illuminist experience, the unfolding vision of God in the heart, as they understood it, that was paramount.107 This was the irresistible flame that lit up Doddridge's own writings, and that gave such burning power to his call to contemporaries to 'pass through the world as Friends of God, and of mankind.' And it was this that transformed the Revival into a humanitarian movement, a movement of sensibility. To claim that Doddridge was the dominant figure behind all these developments would be claiming too much. Yet because his influence was quiet and unobtrusive, it should not be underestimated. Since it was felt at the inception of the Revival, and since it gradually came, by many unsuspected channels, to extend beyond it, it was in some respects decisive. If he had lived to the goodly old age of many later leaders, his impact on the English scene would no doubt have been more widely felt, and more generally recognized than it is now. It might also perhaps have saved Evangelicalism from that harsh and narrow spirit that subsequently disfigured it. Yet something of his genius surely lived on, both inside and outside the church. Though he was not a man of any great originality of thought, his mind was like a new lamp shining on an old tapestry: a lamp that not only brought fresh details and forgotten figures to light, but also shewed that in some respects the emphasis behind the original design was different. Perhaps, when all is said, we still owe more to Philip Doddridge than we know.

107

For the illuminist element in Doddridge's own religious experiences, during his last illness in particular, see Deacon, op. cit., pp. 138 and 171, n. 17.


10

KENTISH FAMILY PORTRAIT

To a student of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England, one of the most remarkable features of Victorian society is the enormous size of the leisured and professional classes. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I or James I the social order still consisted predominantly of peers, knights and squires; merchants, tradesmen and craftsmen; yeomen, husbandmen and labourers. There had always been some professional people, of course - clerics, notaries, lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters - and there is plenty of evidence for the expansion of their numbers during the seventeenth century, or in a city like York in the sixteenth. Yet before the Civil War there was very little that was truly comparable with the thousands of 'private residents' recorded in the 'Court Lists' of mid-Victorian directories. These 'Court Lists' or 'Court Directories' consisted largely of the leisured classes and the upper echelons of the professions. In the county of Kent alone the 'Court Directory' in Kelly's Post Office Directory of 1870 lists more than 16,000 'private residents'. 1 Of these about 7,000 lived in the Greater London area, in such parishes as Greenwich, Woolwich, Lewisham, and Plumstead, and these must more properly be regarded as belonging to the metropolis. Yet in the county proper, in the towns and villages of the genuine countryside, there were at least 9,000 families who were carefully distinguished in the directory of 1870 from the manufacturing, commercial, and farming classes of the shire.

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Of these 9,000, about 400 or 450 were titled magnates or landed gentry living on the rents from their estates. The remainder, or more than 8,500 consisted predominantly of professional people and families evidently living in the style of gentry, supported by their own private means, although not possessing any considerable landed property. Most of them do not appear in the Return of Owners of Land, 1873, which lists all the 7,800 proprietors in Kent possessing more than an acre of land, and few of them appear with any property to speak of. Of course the compiler of the directory of 1870 drew his net as widely as possible so as to avoid giving offence. We need not believe that everyone in his Court List was, in any recognisable sense, a 'gentleman'. Yet, when all allowance is made, it is clear that there was a very large class of families of independent means in the county; and this class of'pseudo-gentry', as the present writer has ventured to call them, was very largely a creation of the two centuries or so before Queen Victoria. The 9,000 families must have represented about 50,000 people in the county as a whole out of a total population (outside Greater London) of 550,000 inhabitants. 2 It is true that this class of persons was exceptionally numerous in Kent. Quite apart from the strictly 'leisured' class, the professional classes in the county were more numerous than in any other part of England - to wit 30,000 in 1861 - though the figures for Lancashire Hampshire, Yorkshire, and Devon (with 24,000 - 29,000 each) came close to those tor Kent. Yet the rise of the pseudo-gentry was by no means a peculiarity of Kent or of southern England. It was also very striking in counties such as Devon and Northamptonshire, for example, and it was to be found in greater or less degree in every part of the kingdom. There is no space in these pages to pursue the history of this class as a whole; but it is arguable that their social rise between Charles I's reign and Queen Victoria's formed as important a development in English history as the more frequently discussed rise of the landed gentry in the generations before the Civil War. It was during their period of emergence, in the eighteenth century, that the word class itself came to acquire its modern connotation of a division of society according to status. It was not used in this sense in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and according to the Oxford Dictionary its current meaning did not come into literary use till about 1770. In the present writer's opinion this semantic development was intimately connected with the emergence of the pseudo-gentry in this period as a distinct and self-conscious social order. Broadly speaking the origins of the pseudo-gentry may be


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grouped under two headings. A large number derived from entirely new families who had risen from the ranks of local husbandmen, yeomen and tradesmen, often during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such families rarely at any time in their history possessed much landed property: they often rose into the lower echelons of the armigerous class, but they were not closely allied, in Kent at least, with the major historic gentry of the county like the Derings, Twysdens and Knatchbulls. By no means all the pseudo-gentry stemmed from yeomen and tradesmen, however. A very large number, possibly the majority, were landless descendants of the old county families of Kent. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many of these ancient dynasties - Boyses, Dennes and Filmers, for example - had proved remarkably prolific. As their numbers increased, their comparatively modest estates proved incapable of supporting their younger sons as well as the eldest in the style of gentry. These landless scions of the old stock were thus driven to augment their fortunes by some other source of wealth — trade, church, law, navy, army, or the like - in order to maintain their port as gentlemen. This essay traces the history of a single example of a pseudogentry family, that of the Kentish historian Edward Hasted (1732— 1812). Owing to the historian's own passion for recording facts and to the magpie habits of his descendants, it is possible to reconstruct a more intimate and telling picture of the Hasteds than is normally possible with families of this standing. They were not, it is true, in all respects typical of their class, since for a short period in the eighteenth century, unlike most of the pseudo-gentry, they held considerable landed property. Yet in their changing social attitudes and their varying economic fortunes between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth they reflected many characteristic developments of their period and their class. The Hasteds were not an ancient family in the sense of deriving from one of the great county dynasties of Kent. They were typical, rather, of those newly leisured families who stemmed from the ranks of yeomen and tradesmen. Neither were they an ancient family in the sense of remaining rooted for centuries in a single spot, like the Cholwiches and Sokespitches of Devon, whose history has been recounted by Professor Hoskins with such insight and illumination.4 They were, however, a profoundly local family in the sense that they originated in the county at a very remote period and remained throughout their history rooted in the same area. The surname itself is still found in Kent and the adjoining parts of Sussex, beyond which

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even today it is rarely met with. In its varying forms it occurs twentyfour times in the current telephone directories for the Canterbury and Tunbridge Wells areas, which between them cover Kent and East Sussex. There are grounds for believing that all those who now bear the surname in Kent, and possibly some scores of others bearing another local surname, that of Isted, may be descended from a single common ancestor in the early medieval period. None of those who bear the surname of Hasted today, however, can be closely related to the branch of the family described in these pages. Though the historian had a large family, his descendants died out in both the male and the female line in the 1850s. With their extinction the historian's branch of the family itself came to an end. Despite the fact that Edward Hasted and his great History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, with its 7,000 pages and three million words, have been household words in Kent for nearly two centuries, there is no biography of the author and no history of the family in print. Until recently the only serious account of the historian was the brief and not entirely accurate notice in the Dictionary of National Biography. So far as the History and its author are concerned, the present writer attempted to compile a more complete account for the Introduction to the new edition of the History and Topographical Survey, published in 1972.6 The present essay attempts to bring together the available evidence for the history of the family as a whole. Although there is no history of the Hasteds, the surviving evidence, if scattered and amorphous, is in fact considerable. Neither of the two collections of family papers proper is particularly extensive, but almost every document they contain is of some significance. The Hasted manuscripts in the Eastgate House Museum at Rochester consist principally of rentals, estate documents, and legal papers; correspondence relating to the historian and his descendants; and a diary and account book of his son, the Rev. Edward Hasted of Hollingbourne.7 This collection is particularly interesting for the light it sheds on the economic vicissitudes of the family between 1750 and 1850: the vast expenditure on the History, the eventual loss of the family estates, the imprisonment of the historian for debt, and the ruses his children were driven to adopt in order to maintain their standing as gentlemen. The Hasted papers in the Maidstone Museum are more extensive than those at Rochester and contain two items of particular interest.8 The first is a collection of letters of Edward Hasted to Thomas Astle of the British Museum between 1763 and 1801. These provide a


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remarkable picture of the English antiquarian world of the time, with its delightful camaraderie of learning and pleasure. Many contemporary scholars appear in the letters, including Bryan Faussett, Sir Joseph Ayloffe and Andrew Ducarel.9 The second item at Maidstone is the 'Anecdotes of the Hasted Family', compiled by the historian himself in 1800, whilst imprisoned for debt in the King's Bench. Of all the family papers the 'Anecdotes' are certainly the most interesting. Indeed, although they are incomplete, breaking off after the first few pages of 'Book the Second', about the year 1770, they form an extraordinarily revealing record of a family of minor gentry during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They run to about 12,000 words, and their artless yet graphic phrasing sheds a vivid light not only on the personalities of the Hasteds but on the subtle nuances of contemporary class distinctions and the niceties of domestic manners. They record in remarkable detail the changing social habits of a family that hovered uneasily, during these generations, between wealth and poverty, between 1O gentility and trade. FAMILY FOREBEARS

In the family's own account of its history, the Hasteds of Kent derived from a family of Hampshire gentry named Hausted. Accordto this version the Rev. John Hausted of Hampshire, an Elizabethan divine who died in 1596, married a sister of Sir Coniers Clifford by whom he had a son John, whose son Laurence, of Sonning in Berkshire, was the historian's great-great-grandfather. 11 These family claims to a genteel ancestry of some antiquity were accepted by Edward Hasted the historian, but they were dismissed with scorn by the editor of the 'Anecdotes' in 1904. It has generally been assumed . . . that Edward Hasted was a man of position in the county. . . . This can hardly be accepted as a correct account. Joseph Hasted, the historian's grandfather, was born in the city of Canterbury in the year 1662, of a respectable yeoman stock which had been settled in or near Canterbury for at least a hundred years previously, and there seems no ground whatever for assuming any connexion with the Hausteds of Hampshire or elsewhere. 12

These strictures are too positive. Hasted was certainly a man of some position in Kent, both as a landowner and as an unusually active JP: and the inaccuracy of many of the editor's statements and references does not inspire confidence in his version of the story generally. The truth, as we might expect, is both more complex and more interesting.

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The historian can probably be acquitted of conscious dishonesty in accepting the family tradition, but it is practically certain that his paternal ancestry was entirely Kentish in origin. One cannot be absolutely sure on this point because it is just possible that he himself was in possession of evidence proving his descent from Laurence Ha(u)sted of Sonning which has since disappeared. 13 The historian's ancestry is definitely traceable only as far back as his great-grandfather, Moses Hasted of St Peter's parish in Canterbury, who married Mary Goslin, of the same parish, in St Alphege's church in 1657.14 Thus far there is no dispute, and Hasted himself gives the facts quite correctly. Unfortunately it is impossible to say positively who was the father of Moses Hasted. According to the family tradition repeated by the historian, as already remarked, he was Laurence Ha(u)sted of Sonning. The editor of the 'Anecdotes' talks vaguely of 'respectable yeoman stock', but he cites no precise evidence for this assertion and so far as Moses Hasted's immediate forebears are concerned it is probably wrong. Moses Hasted himself was certainly not a yeoman; he was a tailor in Canterbury and most likely a native of the city, though he may possibly have come from outside it since he acquired his freedom in 1671 by purchase, not by apprenticeship or inheritance.15 The fact that he was a tailor (not usually at all a wealthy occupation at this date) makes it unlikely, though not absolutely impossible, that he came of an armigerous family of some standing in Hampshire and Berkshire. The fact that it was only with his son Joseph that the family assumed the coat of arms that Hasted himself bore reinforces these doubts, although Joseph was permitted by the Heralds to adopt the coat of the Hampshire Hausteds. The most interesting piece of evidence in favour of a local origin, however, is the fact that the family surname of Hasted is found in Canterbury at least as early as 1544, when George Haysted, son of John Haysted, was baptised in the church of St George.16 It is possible that these Haysteds were not ancestors of the historian; the connection cannot at present be absolutely proved; but with so unusual and localised a surname it is difficult not to think that there was a definite link with Moses Hasted. What in fact is the origin of the historian's surname? There can be very little doubt that the Canterbury family was in fact simply one branch of a fairly numerous clan of Kentish husbandmen and small yeomen in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, whose surname was spelt in a bewildering variety of ways: Hasted, Haisted, Heighsted, Heysted, Haysted, Hoysted, Hysted, Hyested, Histed, Highsted.17 Despite this variation in spelling, it is virtually certain that all these


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forms represent the same patronymic and ultimately the same family. Rural dialects could still be highly localised in this period, and it is of some significance in this connection that the historian's own family evidently pronounced their name as Hay-sted, a form that in Kentish speech might well be assimilated with that of Hoysted and Hysted. The common modern pronunciation of the name as Hassted is simply a vulgarism with no historical validity. 18 Certainly the Hasteds, Heysteds, Heighsteds, and Hysteds were related: occasionally, indeed, these different spellings occur in the same will. It is just possible that the Hoysteds were of a different family, but it does not seem at all probable. As has already been remarked, another characteristically Kentish surname, that of Isted, may well stem from the same root. Although the family of Hasted and its variants was fairly widespread in Kent, it was particularly associated, outside Canterbury, with a small group of eight or nine parishes in the centre of the county, lying between Faversham, Sittingbourne, Hollingbourne, and Lenham. This suggests that it most probably originated at a farm settlement in this area, a mile or so south of Sittingbourne, called Highsted or Highsted Forstal. 19 The suggestion is confirmed by the appearance of Highsted in medieval records in such forms as Heystede and Heghstede. The historian of Kent, one suspects, might not have been entirely gratified to find that he had so many lowly relations; but it would undoubtedly have appealed to his sense of local patriotism to learn that he was far more completely Kentish than he thought. Today Highsted Forstal is a pleasant but unpretentious red brick farmhouse, probably dating from about the end of the eighteenth century, and lying in a hollow of the downs. The name itself is an ancient one, however, originating soon after the Conquest if not earlier and recorded in feet of fines in the late twelfth century. Originally Highsted (the 'high place') must have referred to the settlement on the hilltop above the present farm, whilst the 'forstal' in the valley beneath it, like most places bearing this local suffix (= 'fore-stall', or enclosure in front [of a house]) was doubtless a subsequent settlement formed from it. Though it cannot be proved conclusively, there is presumptive evidence that all those bearing the surname of Highsted and its many variant forms may have derived from a single common ancestor of this name who held Highsted in the late twelfth century. There are many hundreds of Kentish families with precisely this kind of origin. Like their counterparts in Devonshire, as Professor Hoskins has described them, they fre-

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quently assumed their surnames from the farm settlements they carved out of the woodland, often during the two centuries or so following the Conquest. This was the ultimate origin not only of families of pseudo-gentry like the Hasteds, but of great county dynasties like the Twysdens of Twysden, of families who throughout their history remained obscure village gentry like the Blaxlands of Blaxland, and of many more who never rose above the rank of yeoman or husbandman, like the Wickendens of Wickenden. The Highsteds, Heighsteds, and Hasteds could thus have hardly had a more characteristically and completely Kentish origin. So far as the present writer knows, the family surname has remained thoughout its history an entirely local one. The name of Hasted does occur, it is true, in Suffolk, particularly in the neighbourhood of Bury St Edmunds; but the Suffolk Hasteds had a different origin, probably deriving from the village of Hawstead near Bury. 2 0 It is curious to note that one of the earliest instances of the name Hasted or Hysted in a Kentish will refers to the parish of Hollingbourne, where the last representative of the historian's family in England, his eldest son Edward, died as vicar 330 years later in 1855. Equally curious is the fact that in 1851 this vicar was employing as a gardener or odd-job man a villager of the name of Hysted, who must have been his own very distant kinsman and who was possibly a descendant of the original Hysteds or Heysteds of Hollingbourne in Henry VIII's reign. 21 From Moses Hasted onwards the pedigree of the historian's branch of the family is minutely and correctly recorded in the 'Anecdotes'. Of Moses himself little is known except his remarkable marital persistence in wedding three successive wives bearing the name of Mary, by all of whom he had children. 22 The portrait supposedly of him in the Maidstone Museum, in which he is represented as a splendidly bewigged Cavalier of the Restoration period, must be incorrectly attributed, though it came from the Hasted family collection. Despite what the family later came to believe about its origins, and what the Heralds were induced to believe about them, there is no reason to think that Moses was ever anything more than a moderately well-to-do tailor in Canterbury, though his second wife was the daughter of a minor armigerous family at Faversham. The Hasteds thus represented the kind of pseudogentry who thrust upwards from below rather than those - like the historian's own antiquarian friends William Boys and William Boteler - who were landless descendants of medieval knights and Tudor squires.


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It was Moses's son Joseph, by his first wife Mary Goslin of Canterbury, who was the real founder of the family fortunes. Joseph was clearly a man of remarkable character, though whence he derived his surprising gifts it is impossible to say. He was born in 1662 and died in 1732. He was apprenticed first to his father in Canterbury and then to a painter stainer, probably in the dockyard at Chatham. The painter stainer eventually became Chief Painter to the Royal Navy at Chatham, and Joseph Hasted not only succeeded him in this employment but married his kinswoman Katherine, daughter of Richard Yardley of Abchurch Lane, London, whose wife, a Miss Walker, was the sister of Joseph's master. Although Richard Yardley and his wife's family were themselves London tradesmen, they both came of minor armigerous families who had many kinsmen in the Chatham and Rochester area of Kent, who were of the same social standing as themselves. The marriage marked, therefore, a definite social advance for the Canterbury tailor's son, who as already remarked signalled his progress by assuming a coat of arms of his own, derived from that of the Hausteds of Hampshire. 23 His advance was more than social. By some means which is not altogether obvious he also managed to acquire very considerable wealth. According to the historian it was acquired by means of his office as Chief Painter to the navy. The great emoluments of this employment arose from the vast cost which the gilding of the sterns and other carved work of the Men of Wars [sic] occasioned, the expense of which, as the navy increased, was so enormous that it was wholly left off at the end of that or at the beginning of the next reign of King George I, and common paint was instituted in the room of it. On this change Mr Joseph H[asted] resigned his place as not worth the keeping, and at first he was partner with his [wife's] uncle, and on his death succeeded solely to it. 24

However his wealth was acquired, and whether honestly or not, Joseph Hasted was certainly a very shrewd man of business. After leaving the royal service he began gradually to amass the landed property in Kent which formed the basis of his son's and his grandson's inheritance. This consisted chiefly of scattered farms and small parcels of land in a dozen different parishes, mostly near Rochester, whose value by the time of his death amounted to nearly ^1,000 per annum. He also speculated to some extent in the financial world of the time, though he lost heavily in the South Sea Bubble. In acquiring landed property in this way Joseph Hasted was in a sense not entirely

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typical of the new pseudo-gentry class of his time. But his farmlands in fact constituted a form of investment rather than the basis of a manorial estate. About half the land was rented, principally on long leases from All Souls College, and it consisted of no solid block of freehold property to root the family in the countryside, but a number of widely separated farms. 25 Joseph himself continued to live in Rochester till his death and neither his son nor his grandson seems to have lived on their rural properties. Though very conscious of their armigerous status, they were never genuine country squires in the traditional sense of the word. Neither did they ever intermarry with the greater landed families of the county such as the Oxindens, Derings, Twysdens, and Honywoods. Their world always remained that of the urban gentry, the professional classes, and the small parochial squires of the county. Joseph's character comes out vividly in his grandson's account in the 'Anecdotes'. After his coming into possession of the above estates, he retained a parlour in each of his principal farms, both at Newington and Halstow, to which he used frequently to ride and pass a day . . . to see after his workmen and repairs, and see after the management of his estates. It is remarkable that he generally chewed rhubarb whilst he was on these excursions, which he found an excellent preventive medicine against agues and bad airs and fogs. [Several of his farms were in marshland parishes.] Being looked on at Chatham as very kind, [he and his wife] were looked on accordingly with much respect. Their housekeeping was exceeding plentiful, but their visitors who partook of it were in general their relations. 26

By his wife Katherine Yardley, who was clearly as great a character as her husband - she was furious when she found, at the age of nearly seventy, that her life-interest in his estates was dependent on her not remarrying - Joseph Hasted was brought into touch with a whole circle of little gentry and pseudo-gentry families around Rochester and Chatham. It was a purely local and highly inbred connection. Amongst them, besides the Yardleys, were the Chicheleys, Austens, Ayersts, and Bryants, 'who all called cousins and kept up an intimacy as such and were nearly related'. Hasted gives an attractive picture of the housekeeping of his grandparents, who might have stepped out of the pages of The Mill on the Floss. According to the fashion of the times their hours were early; they rose in the morning at 5 o'clock and played together at backgammon till breakfast at 8 o'clock; they had at morning [?] some thick cake and


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mead; they dined at 12, drank tea at 4, and supped at 8. He brewed his own beer, which he prided himself much in, especially his strong beer, which he kept to the age of several years. Their beverage after dinner was elder wine, which as well as several other sorts [Mrs Hasted] made herself, being an excellent housewife. 27

Their only child, Edward, was born in 1702 and was the father of the historian. Both his father and his mother were nearly forty when he was born. With him we leave behind the homely gentility of his mother and her country cousins around Rochester, and the newly made wealth of his strong-minded father, riding about to his Kentish farms chewing rhubarb. With the new generation a certain metropolitan sophistication seems to characterise the family. Edward was bred up to the law in London and became a barrister. He went into partnership with the comptroller of the City, of which he became a freeman, and his wife, too, was a thorough Londoner. She was Anne, daughter and coheir of Joseph Tyler, a London goldsmith, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter and heir of John Dingley, another goldsmith in the city. Through the Dingleys, who came of an ancient Hampshire family, the Hasteds were connected with one of the wealthiest families in England, the Hoares of Stourhead in Wiltshire; for Richard Hoare, the banker, had married a daughter of Robert Dingley of Lamorbey Park in Kent, who was Anne Hasted's first cousin. 28 Anne was in fact the only character in the Hasted family history who was not of Kentish origin. Despite their rise in the social scale and their London habits, Edward and Anne Hasted by no means cut themselves off from their kinsmen in Kent. Every summer during his father's lifetime they went down to Chatham to spend a few weeks with Edward's parents. [But] the early hours of the old folks no more than the method of passing their time by no means agreed with the young ones used to the modern fashions of London; and my grandfather used frequently to say, in joke, That there was no knowing what to do with these young Londoners, their late hours and their new-fangled fashions. 29

Soon after his father's death in 1732, Edward Hasted retired from his practice of the law and left London. He rented a hodse at Hawley, in the parish of Sutton-at-Hone, where he lived as a country gentleman, respected and beloved by all for his good nature, affability, and constant readiness to oblige and render himself serviceable to all his neighbours. . . . Byj his knowledge o o in the law he became exceedingly useful at all meetings of the gentry of the county on the business of the county.

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He was a jovial, generous-hearted man and the pleasures of his life consisted in entertaining his neighbours, in cultivating his garden, and in music. He promoted cheerfulness and good neighbourhood on every occasion, for which purpose he established a monthly concert, of which he was steward and treasurer, in the adjoining market-town of Dartford, which flourished with much celebrity till his death, when, losing its chief director, it soon declined. At the same time his wife set forward a Public Breakfast weekly on a Saturday, being the market day, for the Ladies of that town and its neighbourhood, of which she was patroness.30 Quite clearly there was a pronounced contrast between the social habits and ideals of this generation of the family and those of Edward's prudent and provincial parents. 'My father's little establishment,' the historian wrote of his youthful days at Hawley, in the countryside of the Darent valley, consisted of a coachman and footman, livery servants, 3 maidservants, and a housekeeper, a person they had long known in friendship in a better state of life, but who by misfortunes had come to decay. To these I may add an upper and under-gardener. He had a coach and chariot, 3 coach horses, a riding horse for himself and one for his servant, and 3 cows. His table was plentiful without ostentation, accompanied with a cheerful welcome to all his friends, of whom he had generally one or perhaps two, being his old cronies and schoolfellows, in the house as visitors to him. . . . The livery he gave his servants, however preposterous they would be looked on now [in 1800], were quite congenial to that time: a light blue suit with small gilt buttons down to the bottom of the skirt, a pair of scarlet stockings, a blue and gold shoulder knot with gilt tassels, and a very broad gold lace on a square cocked hat. 31 By his wife Anne, Edward Hasted had six sons, of whom the historian was the youngest, and one daughter. He died suddenly from apoplexy at the age of thirty-eight in 1740. His wife survived him for more than fifty years, dying at the age of ninety in 1791. 2 Ann Hasted figures prominently in the 'Anecdotes', and she strikes one in a sense as rather a lonely and tragic character. 'My mother, poor woman,' says the historian, 'had an excessive pride, which predominated on every occasion and made most people rather disgusted with her acquaintance, which they of course in future rather avoided than otherwise.'33 Her pride consisted in an inordinate regard (to some extent shared by her son) for her connection with the


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Dingleys. The ancestral Dingley knighthood of which she made so much was in fact a long way back in her pedigree, and it is not hard to understand the disgust of her Kentish neighbours, who tended to be rather free and easy, and had probably never heard of the Hampshire Dingleys. This lofty and not very sensible woman had many sorrows and humiliations to bear in her lengthy life. When her husband died she was still in her thirties, and her youth and total inexperience in business left her an easy prey to unscrupulous lawyers and misguided acquaintances, who between them succeeded in dissipating much of her substance. She soon had to part with her country house at Hawley, and for a few years she lived at Rome House, on the outskirts of Chatham, which her husband had inherited from his grandmother's family, the Walkers. Nevertheless, she still maintained a considerable establishment, consisting of 'a coachman, footman, a gardener paid by the'week and lodged abroad, and three maidservants. She kept her coach and pair of horses. Her table was genteel and she had frequent company at it. ... Their behaviour and conversation was gentleman-like, with much respect at all times, and much friendship subsisted between them.' Amongst these friends were some of the town gentry of Rochester and Chatham, professional families like that of Pelham Johnson, a well-known local doctor, and Rochester cathedral families like the Soans. 34 This pleasant interlude in Mrs Hasted's life was a brief one, however, and was rudely shattered in 1742. At her husband's death in 1740, only two of her seven children were still living, five of her six sons having died in infancy. Anne, her elder child, was only twelve years of age and Edward, the future historian, no more than eight. Two years later, at the tender age of fourteen, Anne suddenly eloped with a marine named James Archer, whom she had met at Chatham and who came of a poor family in or near Kettering, 'little above common labourers'. The two were married in Exeter and eventually Mrs Hasted purchased a commission for Archer in the army. He turned out a thoroughly bad lot, however, and in the end his wretched wife had to separate from him, returning to live obscurely with her mother in London, and dying in her thirty-fifth year, without issue, in 1762. 35 The elopement was a terrible blow to anyone of Mrs Hasted's pride. The historian's account graphically describes the social humiliation that such a solecism brought upon families like the Hasteds in the eighteenth century. The famous elopement scene of Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice was evidently by no means overdrawn. 'The distress of sorrow it brought upon [Mrs Hasted],

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and the uproar of scandal which the knowledge of her [daughter's] elopement caused throughout the neighbourhood, determined her to quit Chatham immediately.' 36 Thereafter she lived in or near London until about 1770, when she moved to Canterbury to be nearer her son and his family, who by that time were also living there. THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FAMILY211

The tragedies regarding her daughter can have been slight compared with those of her son Edward to a woman of Mrs Hasted's temperament. The historian's life has been described elsewhere by the present author and only a summary of the facts can be given here. After an early childhood spent at Hawley, he was educated at the King's School, Rochester, at Eton, and at a private school in Surrey. The Eton education was a characteristic idea of his mother's. It took him well beyond the limited circle of his Kentish forebears, all of whom, like the vast majority of Kentish gentry, were educated locally. More important than his formal education, however, were the links he formed as a young man with the antiquaries of his time. Eton left no permanent impression on him and he remained completely Kentish throughout his life. Characteristically, he showed no interest at all in the history and antiquities of other areas when he visited them in the 1790s. His work on the history of Kent began in the 1750s and continued almost without intermission for nearly fifty years. It was in every sense a life work, and the whole of the monumental task was undertaken by the historian himself. The first edition was published in four folio volumes between 1778 and 1799; the second, a heavily revised version, was published in twelve octavo volumes between 1797 and 1801. The research behind it was enormous: by 1774 his manuscript notes already extended to more than 100 volumes and a further twenty-five years' research stretched in front of him before the work was completed. On this work, between about 1755 and 1790, Hasted expended much of his family fortune. At his father's death in 1740 this had amounted to nearly .£1,000 a year in freehold and leasehold property. The History itself records from time to time how the scattered properties acquired by his frugal grandfather were gradually sold off to meet his mounting embarrassments. The History, it is true, was not the only cause of his difficulties. Like many antiquaries he was devoid of business sense and in his early married life he clearly lived well beyond his means. Then about the year 1760 he first resorted to the unwise expedient of borrowing money from his lawyer friend, Thomas Williams of Dartford. Little by little the debts and the


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mortgages mounted up. Eventually, by 1791, the plausible attorney had involved the unsuspecting antiquary in such legal entanglements that he was compelled to sell the whole of his remaining property at a considerable undervaluation. The estates were then worth _£! 1,500, but Williams forced Hasted into a position where he had to sell them to him for no more than .£8,685. The Hasteds were not the only local family whom Thomas Williams ruined in this way. The collapse of Hasted's fortunes was accompanied by the equally tragic breakdown of his marriage. In 1755, at the age of twenty-three, he had married a local girl, Anne Dorman, the daughter of his friends and neighbours John and Dorothy Dorman of Sutton-at-Hone. The Dormans were a substantial family at Sutton, where many of them lie buried beneath a fine series of eighteenthcentury tombstones. They belonged broadly speaking to the same class of pseudo-gentry as the Hasteds themselves; but they were not of armigerous descent, and they were perhaps a degree or two below Edward in the social scale. Anne Dorman, moreover, brought her husband no dowry, and the marriage was deeply resented by his ambitious mother. Old Mrs Hasted's tiresome sensibility where class distinctions of this kind were concerned was in part a merely personal peculiarity; but it was also rather more than that. It was an indication of the ambiguous social position still occupied by the new pseudo-gentry. In the class-ridden world of Hanoverian England families like the Hasteds could not afford to lose caste: their origins were too recent for them to live down a mesalliance. Despite the rift with his mother, however, Hasted's marriage seems for many years to have been a happy one. Between 1760 and 1774 Anne Dorman bore him six sons and three daughters, all but two of whom - the two youngest - reached maturity. The bonds of affection clearly ran deep in this large family and the breach that eventually developed, after thirty years of married life, is not altogether easy to account for. Basically, however, it was due to a certain strain of weakness in the historian's character. In 1785 he 'unfortunately became acquainted with Mary Jane Town', and in the following year Miss Town became his mistress. Nothing is known of her origins, though to judge from her surname she must have been a local girl. For the next eleven years, through every conceivable vicissitude, she and Hasted remained together: in rented houses at Sheldwich and Boughton-under-Blean, in obscure lodgings in London, and then at Dover and Canterbury. In 1791, when Hasted was forced to fly to France to escape his creditors, Mary Jane Town

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accompanied him. The outbreak of war in 1793 compelled them to return to England incognito and eventually, after many wanderings, they settled in Camden Town in 1795. A few months later they were discovered, and the historian was imprisoned for debt in the King's Bench. Extraordinary thought it may seem, Mary Jane Town accompanied him to jail, and they remained together, in virtual destitution, for the next two years. It was not until 1797 that their liaison came to an end, when Hasted 'parted with her for infamy and wickedness' - a phrase whose meaning it is not difficult to interpret. In the following year he was reconciled with his wife, but he himself remained in prison for another five years, until 1802. It was during this period, when his only source of livelihood was the charity of a few friends, that the whole of the second edition of his History was revised and rewritten. After Hasted's release, the suit in Chancery which had been instituted on his behalf against Thomas Williams' heir was concluded, and eventually the historian regained what little was left of his family property. It was several years before his financial worries were over; but the last five years of his life were passed in more genial circumstances, when his old friend, Lord Radnor, presented him to the mastership of Lady Hungerford's Hospital at Corsham in Wiltshire. It was there that he died, in 1812, in his eightieth year. As far as the present writer can discover he had never revisited the county which owed him so much, and which he loved so deeply, since he left it twenty years earlier in 1791. Quite as revealing -as the historian's own response to these adversities was that of his family. At the time when he left his wife, in 1785 or 1786, the eldest of his seven surviving children, Edward, was only twenty-five years of age and the youngest, John Septimus, no more than seventeen. There were three other sons, Francis Dingley, George, and Charles, and two daughters, Anne and Katherine, all aged between nineteen and twenty-three.38 For the next few years the whole family must have lived in very straitened circumstance and virtually nothing is known about them. The care of the younger children as well as Hasted's wife and mother, who was then aged eighty-three or eighty-four, seems to have fallen on the unfortunate Edward, the eldest son. Edward had been educated at Oriel College, Oxford, and was the only member of the family to receive a university education; but at this time he had no benefice and apparently no curacy, though in 1786 he was officiating occasionally in various churches in (Canterbury. 39 Owing to the obscurity that enveloped the family at this time, the only fact generally known


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about the historian's descendants is that in 1790 this son, Edward, became vicar of Hollingbourne with Hucking, a joint living which he held from 1790 until his death sixty-five years later, at the age of ninety-four, in 1855.40 It was one of the longest incumbencies in Kentish history, and during this period Edward was also a local magistrate for upwards of fifty years. Some further information about the historian's descendants is to be found in the Hasted papers in the Eastgate House Museum at Rochester. As already explained, these papers consist chiefly of legal and estate documents, a diary and account book for the year 1851, and letters to the vicar at Hollingbourne. Three general points of interest mark this concluding phase in the history of the Hasteds: first, their intense sense of family pride and their dread of losing caste, a dread that was highly characteristic of decayed gentlefolk in this period; secondly, the means which they adopted to earn a respectable livelihood without compromising their social standing; and thirdly, the association of several of them with the Evangelical Movement of the period. This Movement powerfully affected the whole of England, of course, but it was exceptionally strong in Kent, where many of the leading families of the county, such as the Earls of Darnley at Cobham Hall, as well as the local gentry, became strong Evangelicals. Of the historian's sons apart from the vicar of Hollingbourne, George, the third, was educated at King's, Canterbury, where he shewed 'great talents' and was considered the most able member of the family. He was destined for the law and put into a London attorney's office, but he died in 1787 at the age of twenty-four and was buried in the family vault at Newington near Sittingbourne.41 John Septimus, the youngest son to survive childhood, was born in 1768 and became a naval surgeon, probably about the year 1794 when his brother Francis spoke of his recent 'good fortune'. 42 He married a Miss Notley, who died in 1834 leaving him a small property which she had inherited from her mother and which he invested in an annuity which added ,£150 a year to his meagre naval pension. Like his father and grandmother before him, and like his eldest brother, John lived to a great age, dying in 1853 in his eighty-fifth or eighty.sixth year. (Nearly all the Hasteds either died young, like George, or lived to a great age.) Charles, the fourth son, was born in 1764 and became a brewer, first' apparently at Sheerness and then near Chatham. 43 From a letter of his to his brother Edward in 1828, one suspects that he inherited something of his father's fatal incapacity for business. At any rate he had by then had to give up the Chatham

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brewery and had moved with his wife to Shadwell in east London, where he became a seller of 'intermediate beer in Johnson Street, St George-in-the-East'. The date of his death is not known; he may have lived on into the 1840s, but he certainly died before 1851 and so predeceased both Edward and John Septimus. Of the two daughters, Anne, the elder, was bom in 1765 and was certainly still living in 1834, when she was left a legacy of £20 a year in the will of her brother John. Anne seems to have been her father's favourite child, for in his will he left her, amongst other bequests, five guineas for a ring or locket to keep 'in remembrance of her father, whose affection is great towards her': a touching little comment since it was possibly more than ten years since he had seen her.44 The second daughter, Katherine, was a year younger than Anne and spent most of her life with her brother Edward, for whom she apparently kept house at Hollingbourne, where she died unmarried in 1842 in her seventy-seventh year. 45 Of these six children of the historian, only two, Charles and John Septimus, married, and neither of them had any children. The historian's only grandchildren were the sons and daughters of the remaining son, Francis Dingley Hasted, who was a year younger than Edward. It is of Francis and his family that the Hasted papers at Rochester are most informative, and with him the family history takes its most surprising turn. Francis had been bom in 1762 and at some time before 1794 he left England and sailed to India in the hope of making his fortune as an indigo merchant. One wonders what suggested the idea of an Indian fortune to him; but his was a sanguine, expansive temperament like his grandfather's, and in December 1794 he wrote back in high hopes to his brother Edward. Although Edward had now been presented to the living of Hollingbourne, he and his mother were still living in very straitened circumstances. The two sisters, Anne and Katherine, had been taken under the wing of their mother's sister, Mary Dorman of Banning, near Maidstone; but this Aunt Dorman, who was now an old lady of seventy, was seriously ill and their future was uncertain. It must have seemed a cruel world to these unhappy girls, brought up to a leisured upperclass existence but now no longer youthful and no longer wanted. Their father was living with a mistress, a fugitive from justice, about to be arrested and imprisoned; they themselves had no money of their own, and no one was likely to court them. Their aunt, who had given them a home, was thought to be dying; 46 and now, at the age of nearly thirty, it seemed they might have to go out to work, presumably as governesses or companions.


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It was this humiliating necessity that Francis wrote about, from Malda in Bengal. His letter is an interesting document in several respects.47 It illustrates the social prejudices of a family of impoverished gentlefolk in the late eighteenth century. Its strain of sensibility reveals the intense affections of a family to whom the sorrows and separations they were called upon to bear seemed peculiarly bitter. (It was during this same decade that their distant kinswoman, Jane Austen, was writing her first draft of Sense and Sensibility.) The letter also illustrates the influence of the new Evangelical piety of the period: not the masculine, militant Evangelicalism of a Wilberforce, but rather that of the tender, submissive, quietist tradition of Philip Doddridge and John Newton. 'You write, my dear Ned, very despondingly,' Francis wrote; wait but a little and I will help you all in my power. I would earlier have remitted you and our dear mother some money but really it has not been attainable; it will now very soon, and be assured I will not let slip the very earliest opportunity. You are already acquainted with the concern I am engaged in with two gentlemen residing near Malda. This is the second year and it has been productive beyond all expectation. We have this year, by moderate computation, cleared a net profit of thirty thousand rupees, or three thousand pounds sterling, one third of which is mine. I have great hopes of doing still better this coming year. What he dreaded, however, was their dear sisters' being forced to go abroad into the world to seek their living. I shall do everything in my power to prevent so sad a calamity befalling them. Men may bustle through life, but women, brought up too as they have been, with far better prospects, are hardly capable of bearing up against the trouble and contumely usually attendant upon menial stations. I entreat therefore, my dearest brother, your best interest and exertions with our friends, if any we have, in the behalf of our dear sisters, only for a while, perhaps a very short time, when they might either live comfortably at home, or if they approve it better, one or both come out to me. I never can consent to their being sent out into a wide, uncertain, and unfeeling world to make their own way through it, a task to which, it seems to me, on many accounts they are so very incompetent. I am persuaded they have a father in you, poor dear girls! How I lament their case, but I forebear; there is a ruling providence, and those words 'it is the Lord' should . . . silence our complaints. The plight of his father, now living in obscurity with Mary Jane Town near Tottenham Court Road, was Francis's other worry.

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Our poor father, I am always fearing will fall into distress, besides should his person remain unmolested, yet having, as I suppose, no certain or annual subsistence, the source must at length fail. You have not hitherto said anything particular on that head; it is undoubtedly, should such an hour come, our duty to render him necessary help; pray tell me more about this in your next letter.

The rest of Francis's long letter was more cheerful: it announced his recent marriage to Miss Sarah Powell. The Evangelical proclivities of this generation of the family, which Edward as well as Francis seems to have shared, were also reflected in this marriage; for Sarah Powell was a Baptist with missionary connections. Her father, Benjamin Powell, was a well-off London cabinetmaker of St John's Street, Clerkenwell. The family was a well-known one in Baptist circles and friendly with Dr William Carey, the celebrated orientalist and founder of the Baptist Missionary Society. Sarah apparently went out to India with her brother Samuel, who, like his mother's brother the Rev. Thomas of Fairford, was probably a missionary. She was clearly a woman of charm and character, and the marriage seems to have been an ideally happy one. Between 1795 and 1808 she bore her husband five sons and one daughter - the historian's only grandchildren. Whether Francis was ever able to afford his mother and sisters the financial relief he promised is not recorded, but on the face of it it seems unlikely. He was not the kind of man that Indian nabobs were made of, and with his rapidly growing family and his lavish mode of life he can never have had much to spare. His mother died in 1803, within a few months of her husband's release from the King's Bench.48 Katherine, as we have seen, eventually found a home with her brother at Hollingbourne, presumably after her Aunt Dorman's death in 1800. Anne may have had to earn her own living and certainly in her later years she was living at Lambeth, possibly as a companion or governess. By the time the historian died in 1812, however, there had at last been some improvement in the family fortunes of those in England. In the codicil to his will of 1812, the historian had left virtually the whole of his property to his eldest son, the vicar, 'knowing that he will of his goodness assist his brothers and sisters with as much as he sees necessary of it from time to time'. 49 Accordingly, what remained of the family property was sold, after Edward died, apparently for a little more than £7,000.50 With this modest patrimony to fall back on, and with their occupation in the church, in the medical profession, and in wholesale trade, the three sons and two daughters in England were able to maintain


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their standing as gentlefolk with respectability at least, if in somewhat uninspiring circumstances and certainly without any eclat. Meanwhile the history of the Indian branch of the family, if more colourful, had also been more chequered. Though they clearly lived in considerable style, Francis's sanguine hopes of a rapid fortune proved ill-founded, and one by one his family was struck down by disease in the cruel climate of Bengal. His deeply-loved wife Sarah died in 1809, leaving six young children between one and fourteen years of age. In 1815 the third son Jonathan died, apparently of fever, at the age of seventeen, and in 1818 the fifth son Edward at the same age. In the following summer of 1819 Francis himself died, aged fifty-seven, and exactly a month later, on 22 June, his only daughter, Sarah Anne, at the age of twenty-three. The three remaining sons were left alone and practically destitute in the vast subcontinent. Their father's business enterprises had been on an extensive scale, but must have been insecurely based, and at his death he was found to be insolvent. Of the three orphans, Francis, the eldest son was only twenty-four, George was twenty, and John, poor boy, no more than eleven. They had never been out of India and had never seen any of their English relatives; but their Aunt Anne had kept in touch with them, and they had recently received a letter from their uncle the vicar. They knew that their grandfather's estates had been sold and that their father might have looked for some share in the proceeds from them. Accordingly, although the posts from India were notoriously unreliable, all their hopes, they said, were for help from England. On 26 July 1819 Francis therefore sent a desperate appeal to his Uncle Edward at Hollingbourne. His letter, written with all his father's sensibility and enthusiasm, and in a racy copperplate hand that curiously parodied his father's, must speak for itself.51 It was an emotional kind of letter that his grandfather the historian could never have written and his rather frigid uncle probably did not appreciate. 'My dear Uncle,' Francis wrote, My mind shudders at taking up my pen for the first time that I am writing to you, it should be to communicate the most melancholy and afflicting of news, the deaths of my very dear Father, sister, and brother!!! Oh how shall I explain to you the heavy afflictions that have fallen upon us, and of our forlorn state, my poor Father's insolvency has left us penniless in the world, the factories are entirely at the agent's disposal, and will certainly be put up to sale soon, when we shall be cast upon the wide world without the means of support: finding employment in this country is become a matter of the

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greatest difficulty. I beg, my dear Uncle, you will take our state into consideration and have compassion upon us; any sum that you may be able to remit from what might have fallen to my poor Father's share, from the sale of the estate, or otherwise, will prove of the utmost consequence . . . I beg to be kindly remembered to my uncles and aunts in England. Will providence ever grant that we shall meet? I see no likelihood of it, God's will be done. My mind is in a very confused state at present, and I hope you will forgive the shortness of this, I have just got over a severe attack of fever.

The fever had been caused by a hunting accident, when his servant's gun had accidentally gone off and the contents lodged in his leg, leaving him lame for life. This letter was succeeded by an enigmatic silence on Edward Hasted's part, and in March 1820 his nephew wrote again, in much the same vein.52 The three young men had now been turned out of their home; and although George Hasted had been taken on as a clerk by Messrs Palmer and Co. at Calcutta, his salary was barely sufficient to provide them with the necessities of life. Edward Hasted received this letter in the following September; he did not reply to it till the last day of March 1821. Possibly he did not quite believe in his nephews' 'indefatigable exertions' to try and support themselves; but surely he might have been a little more prompt in responding to the orphans' appeal. Whether he sent them anything from the ,£7,000 arising from the estates it is impossible to say; but his reply does not seem to have encouraged them to maintain the correspondence. It is possible that they wrote and their letters were lost at sea; but certainly Edward received no letters from them and there was no further communication with them till 1828. The correspondence of 1828 between the two branches of the family arose indirectly out of the terms of the will of Benjamin Powell, the maternal grandfather of the three young men in India. 53 Powell had died in 1819, leaving his estate to his surviving children and, after their death, to his Hasted grandchildren. By 1828 the death of the last surviving son was imminently expected and Powell's executor set himself to discover the whereabouts of the grandchildren. The task did not prove an easy one owing to the complete obscurity in which the Hasted family had shrouded itself since their father's misfortunes. Eventually, however, and quite by chance, a friend of the executor's came across Charles Hasted, the former brewer, at his business premises in St George-in-the-East. Charles got in touch with his brother at Hollingbourne, and after various legal delays, the Indian nephews were informed of their


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good fortune. Belated though it was, and modest in scale, the bequest of the Powell estate - which amounted to about £2,500 - must have played its part in the success of Francis and George in eventually establishing themselves as indigo planters. (The third nephew, John, had died in 1823.) When their uncle Edward Hasted enquired after them in 1831, through his friend Henry Lushington of Boxley, whose brother Colonel James Lushington was in the India Office, they were reported to be 'respectable and worthy men', deserving of their uncle's countenance, and carrying on their own business in the Benares district. 54 Perhaps, one may hope, a little of the business acumen of their great-grandfather Joseph Hasted, the founder of the family fortunes, had reappeared in them. Beyond this date it is impossible to trace anything further about them except the year of their death. Neither of them appears to have married or at any rate to have left any descendants, so that with the death of Francis at Goruckpore in 1844 and George at Doolepore in 1850 the India branch of the family apparently came to an end. 55 THE LAST YEARS AT HOLLINGBOURNE

Meanwhile, far away across the world, the rest of the family still lived on in Kent within a few miles of Highsted, where their forebears had originated nearly 700 years earlier. Despite the circumstances that had separated them since the 1790s, the sense of kinship they had inherited was still powerful amongst them. Nowhere is this feeling more clearly expressed than in their father's will. The will was drawn up at Corsham in 1808, with a codicil added in 1810; it was written in Edward Hasted's own hand and couched in his homely yet telling language. It was nearly twenty years since he had left Kent and nearly twenty-five since he had lived with his family. Yet the will demonstrated that the welfare of his children, the credit of the Hasted family, and the history of the county were still the only matters that interested him.56 His abiding preoccupation with the history of Kent is illustrated in the bequest of his historical collections to a fellow-antiquary in the county. These had originally been left to the British Museum; but in the event this bequest was cancelled and they were left instead to his 'much respected friend William Boteler of Eastry, Esquire, as a small mark, the only one in my power, of my grateful remembrance of the many favours I have received from him.' The British Museum, the historian seems to have thought, was no longer sufficiently private. The bequest to

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Boteler was virtually the only one in the will outside the family circle. Almost everything else was left to 'the eldest son Edward. What survived of the family property was to be sold and the proceeds retained by Edward as a kind- of trustee for his brothers and sisters. His father believed that he would assist his brothers and sisters from it, and entreated 'that he will at his death consider his brother Francis's children by giving and leaving them a good portion of it, my other children being all independently provided for and having none of them issue'. Edward was also left all the family furniture, plate and books in his possession at Hollingbourne Vicarage; the pedigrees his father had compiled of the Hasteds, Dormans, and Dingleys; the 'large folio Bible, printed in Henry the Sth's time, in which are inserted the births, marriages, and deaths of my family and children'; the 'Anecdotes of the Hasted Family' which his father had written in 1800; the historian's portrait, which was 'to continue with my family pictures now in [Edward's] possession at Hollingbourne'; and finally 'my old-fashioned gold ring set with pearls, being the wedding ring of my great-grandmother Walker [of Chatham], and my late wife's gold wedding ring, my steel seal with my arms on it and my silver seal ring with my crest on it, all which are now in my possession'. In all these bequests there was a clear determination on the part of the historian to maintain inviolable the sacred privacy of the family. Above all, its frailties must not be exposed to the world. The increasing emphasis on the sanctity of the home and the growing tendency of gentlefolk to draw further apart from the common run of mankind were pronounced developments in provincial society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: it was a time when divisions between class and class were clearly becoming deeper. In the original will of 1808 the executor had been instructed to examine Hasted's historical collections very thoroughly, to remove the pedigrees of Hasted, Dingley, and Dorman, and such of the rest 'as shall be judged by him improper to be made public [shall be] taken from them and destroyed'. All the historian's private papers were also to be scrutinised by the executor; those that were judged unnecessary to be retained were to be destroyed, and the rest were to 'remain in his possession and not to be inspected or given up to any one else'. If, after Edward's death, Francis and Charles Hasted should refuse to accept the bequest of the family portraits, these also were to be 'destroyed to prevent their coming into the hands of brokers and exposed to sale for a few shillings'.


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What kind of a man was Edward Hasted, the vicar of Hollingbourne, who figured so prominently in his father's will and who succeeded him as the family head? His character is an enigmatic one. There are few personal records relating to him apart from his diary and account book for the year 1851. We know him almost solely through the letters he received, and it is possible that the impression these convey of a rather limited man, careful to the verge of meanness in money matters, may be a somewhat unjust one.57 Yet the impression cannot be altogether gainsaid. His only surviving personal letter, relating to a tithe dispute with his parishioners in which he promised to take no further services in the church and to 'interfere in no parish business whatsoever', certainly shews him in rather an odd light.58 His apparent lack of energy in coming to his unfortunate father's aid when in prison in the 1790s and to his young nephews' in the 1820s is also, to say the least, difficult to understand. And surely, since he inherited most of the family property, he might have fulfilled his father's modest request that a monument should be erected to his memory in Corsham church. As it was, there was no monument at all to the historian, in Wiltshire or Kent, until 1929, when Dr F. W. Cock of Appledore placed a memorial tablet to him in Corsham church: a graceful act of homage by a fellow-antiquary to a faulty yet remarkable man. 59 These lapses of Edward's were perhaps due to a dislike of disturbance and a dilatory habit of mind rather than to conscious unkindness. Yet the impression of a certain nearness in money matters is more difficult to discount.60 In 1851, when his total income amounted to nearly p£650 a year, or probably as much as his father ever received from the family estates in the eighteenth century, 61 he was spending less than half of it and devoting very little to charity. When the village girls came round a-maying he gave them a mere eighteen pence when they called at the vicarage. At the annual tithe feast, after receiving more than ;£200 from the Hollingbourne farmers, he spent less than £3 on dinner for them and gave his servants a miserly two shillings. His curate Mr Spurgin, who performed nearly all the aged vicar's duties, in both Hollingbourne and Hucking, received the pitiful stipend of ^75 a year. What does the vicar's solitary personal record, his diary for 1851, tell us about the man? The most obvious fact is that it tells us so little. It is the dull, laconic record of an unimaginative man. Yet for the local historian it has one real point of interest. Day by day throughout the year it faithfully records his visitors. During the course of 1851 there were about forty families in the neighbourhood who called on

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him at more or less regular intervals, so that the diary precisely describes the social circle of a Victorian country parson. Nearly all these families came from parishes within six or seven miles of Hollingbourne: a distance, no doubt, that marked the limit for afternoon calls by the local 'carriage families' of the period, particularly if they had to negotiate the narrow lanes and wooded, broken countryside of the Kentish downs and chartlands. Who, then, were these visitors? Several were parsons of nearby parishes, like Mr Burney of Thurnham and Mr Riddell of Harrietsham. Quite a number were town gentry from Maidstone, like the Readers and Beales, and a few were local military men like Major Waytts. A further group, perhaps the most numerous, comprised the landless village gentry and the gentleman farmers of the area, like the Cobbs of Bredgar and the Robinses of Borden. Then there were the numerous local squires of the parishes around Hollingbourne : the Bests of Boxley Lodge, the Baldwins of Stede Hill, the Thomases of Eyhorne House, the Duppas of Hollingbourne House, the Wykeham-Martins of Leeds Castle, the Savages of St Leonards in Mailing, and the Crofts of Doddington Place. All of these were well-established local gentry, but none of them, except the Wykeham-Martins, were important county families. Their estates ranged in scale from the Savages' very modest 550 acres and the Thomases' 710 acres to the Bests' 1,830, the Baldwins' 2,120, the Duppas' 2,300, and the Wykeham-Martins' 3,320.62 Twice in the year, in July and September, the aged vicar was visited by a more august neighbour, when the Earl of Romney came to see him from Mote Park. There was only one other visitor, throughout the period covered by the diary, with a handle to his name - Sir John Croft. Yet there was no one in the list, on the other hand, who would not have been quite definitely thought of as a 'gentleman'. By 1851 the social barrier between gentry and commonalty in rural England was distinct and inflexible: and this barrier is as clearly evidenced in the pedestrian pages of Edward Hasted's diary as in the Court List of a contemporary directory. By 1850 Hollingbourne Vicarage had been regarded as the family home of the Hasteds for nearly sixty years. Thither in the summertime the other branches of the family sometimes used to come and spend their vacations with the vicar and his sister. Charles used to drive over from Chatham, and on fine afternoons he and his wife sat out on the vicarage lawn with Edward and Katherine, underneath the great quince tree, in the shadow of the downs. '[I] should very much like to be sitting under your quince tree,' Charles wrote with a


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touch of nostalgia in 1828, after he had parted with his Chatham business and moved to London; 'but that cannot be this summer.'6 3 Hollingbourne with its vicarage is still a lovely, peaceful spot, girdled with trees, watered with springs, the great Elizabethan manor house on one hand, on the other the church where Edward ministered so long, with its noble Culpeper tombs. As we have seen, Katherine remained with her brother at Hollingbourne till her death in 1842 at the age of seventy-six. Charles and Anne appear to have predeceased her, and John Septimus died in 1853. Edward, the eldest of the family, lived on alone in the vicarage for another thirteen years after Katherine's death, dying in 1855 at the age of ninety-four, the last of the line. 'They were son and daughter of Edward Hasted, esquire, Historian of Kent,' says the simple memorial to him and his sister in Hollingbourne church: 'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours, and their works do follow them.' 64

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. They are listed as 'Private Residents' under the town and village entries. The 'Court Directory' is a cumulative list of all the 'private residents' in the county. It follows the village and town entries and precedes the 'Trades Directory', which comprises all occupational categories in the county. There are minor discrepancies between the Court Directory and the Private Residents listed under villages and towns, but these do not affect the general picture. 2. The average household size in Kent in 1861 was 5-8 persons, i.e. 734,000 inhabitants (including those in the Greater London parishes of Kent) in 126,221 inhabited houses. 3. The figure for Kent excludes the Greater London parishes in the county. 4. See 'Three Devon families', in Old Devon (David and Charles, 1966) reprinted from W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, Devonshire Studies (Jonathan Cape, 1952)., The third family in this study, the Galsworthys, is a good example in its later generations of a 'pseudo-gentry' family: see pp. 118-20. 5. All but four of these 24 are in Kent. The four Sussex examples occur close to the Kentish border, in Hastings and St. Leonards. 6. Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey oj the County oj Kent (2nd edn, Canterbury ,1797-1801; facsimile reprint, 1972), i, 'Introduction', pp. v-xlix. 7. I am much indebted to Mr Michael Moad, the curator, for drawing my attention to this collection and facilitating the use of it.

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8. I am much indebted to Mr L. R. A. Grove, the curator, for drawing my attention to this collection and facilitating the use of it. 9. This correspondence was printed in Archaeologia Cantianz [AC], xxvii (1905). 10. Apart from these records, the principal sources for the history of the family include the following: ten or eleven wills and an administration amongst the probate records of the dioceses of Canterbury and Rochester, in the Kent Archives Office; the historian's own will in the Public Record Office [PRO] (Prob. ll/ 1530/2682); the baptismal registers of several Canterbury churches, particularly those of St Alphege, St Dunstan, St George, St Peter, and the Cathedral; Canterbury Marriage Licences, 2nd and 3rd series, ed. J. M. Cowper (Canterbury, 1894 and 1896); and The Roll of the Freemen of the City of Canterbury, from A.D. 1392 to 1800, ed. J. M. Cowper (Canterbury, 1903). 11. Hasted, op. cit.,v\, 430-31; AC, xxvii (1905), 139. The editorial footnote to the latter page is incorrect in stating that Hasted's great grandfather, Moses Hasted, was a yeoman in the neighbourhood of Canterbury in or about 1628. Moses was a tailor in Canterbury, not a yeoman. The date of his birth is not known, but since he did not marry his first wife till 1657 ('Anecdotes' of the Hasted family', AC, xxvi (1904) (hereafter cited as 'Anecdotes'), 271) and married his third after May 1679 (see note 22 below), he is unlikely to have been born much earlier than 1628. 12. 'Anecdotes', 267-8. The original manuscript of these 'Anecdotes' is in the Maidstone Museum. The printed version is the one usually cited in this essay, except where errors of transcription have been noted, when the original is cited. 13. Cf. AC, xxvii (1905), 139. At an earlier period the Hampshire Hausteds were connected with Kent. Their arms appeared in the medieval armorial glass of Mereworth church, and Humphrey de Hausted held lands in Pluckley which in 8 Edward II came to the important medieval Kentish family of Malmain of Mereworth (AC, Ixxvii (1962) 61, 62). Their surname may therefore be of Kentish origin, but philologically the invariable spelling of it with a 'u' suggests a connection with Halstead rather than Highsted, from which the Hasteds derived. 14. The historian and the anonymous editor of the 'Anecdotes ' (271n) incorrectly state that the marriage took place in St Peter's; it is recorded in the St Alphege register- The Regyster Booke . . .of the Parish of St Alphage . . . 1558-1800, ed. J. M. CowpeT (Canterbury, 1889), 124. Both parties were resident in St Peter's parish, however. 15. The Roll of the Freemen of the City of Canterbury . . ., ed. J. M. Cowper (1903), col. 274. 16. The Register Booke of the Parish of St George the Martyr. . ., ed. J. M. Cowp'er (Canterbury, 1891), 4. 17. The anonymous editor of the 'Anecdotes' (268n) says the name was sometimes spelt Harsted, but I have not myself seen this form; in the only case he actually cites (ibid., 271n) he has mistaken the spelling. The name Harste occurs in Canterbury wills, but philologically it is unlikely to have been a variant of Hasted. If the surname Harsted in fact occurs, it is more likely to have been a variant of Horsted, the name of another Kentish family quite distinct from the Hasteds. Another local surname, Hal(l)ste(a)d, is found chiefly in West Kent and


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probably derives from the parish of Halstead in that part of the county. 18. AC, Ixvi (1953), 174. 19. There is another place named Highsted in Kent, in Chislet parish; but the early distribution of the surname suggests that Highsted near Sittingbourne is the more likely place of origin for the family. 20. I am much indebted to Mr Norman Scarfe for this information. Curiously enough one of the Suffolk family, Rev. Henry Hasted (1771-1852), was also an antiquarian and took a leading part in the founding of the Bury and West Suffolk Archaeological Institute in 1848. 21. Hasted MSS, Eastgate House Museum, Rochester: MS entries in Rev. Edward Hasted's copy of The Kentish Companion and Almanack for 1851. 22. His first wife, Mary Goslin, was buried in May 1678 (The Register Books oj the Parish ofSt George the Martyr, 195). His second wife Mary Edwards, buried in May 1679 (ibid.), was the daughter of a minor gentleman of Faversham, and left a son Nathaniel whose descendants were the historian's only known relatives on his father's side. Moses' third wife, Mary —, is recorded in the St. George's registers as bearing him a son Thomas in 1680 (loc. cit., 47). I have not been able to discover her maiden name, and Edward Hasted the historian does not mention her in the 'Anecdotes'. Of her son nothing further is known, unless he was the Thomas Hasted who in 1709 was in the navy at Chatham and made his will leaving his goods to his wife Elizabeth (Kent Archives Office [KAO], DRb/Pw 52). Since this Thomas was illiterate (he signed his will with a mark), it seems unlikely he was a brother of Joseph Hasted and a son of Moses. 23. 'Anecdotes ', 271-2 and n. 24. Ibid., 272n. 25. Ibid., 272-3 and n; Hasted MSS, rentals and miscellaneous estate documents. 26. 'Anecdotes', 273n. 27. Ibid., 272n, 273n. Elderberry wine was a common drink in Kent in the eighteenth century amongst the .yeomen and gentry. 28. Ibid., 278 and n. 29. Ibid., 282n. 30. Ibid., 276 and n. 31. Ibid., 281. The historian also gives a minute description of his father's dress and of the family coach. 32. Ibid., 276; Hasted, History, xi, 514. Hasted here says his mother died in 1792, but her burial is recorded under 10 March 1791 in The Register Book . . . of the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christe of Canterbury, ed. R. Hovenden (1878), 151. 33. 'Anecdotes', 289. 34. Ibid., 282-4. 35. Ibid., 277-9. 36. Ibid., 284. 37. The following account of the historian's life is a summary of the present author's 'Introduction' to Hasted, History, i, pp. v-xlix. The reader is referred to this Introduction for further details and references.

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38. 'Anecdotes', 293-4. 39. The Booke of Regester oj the Parish oj St Peter in Canterbury . . ., ed. J. M. Cowper (Canterbury. 1888), ix; The Register Booke of Christeninges . . . in St Dunstan's, Canterbury..., ed. J. M. Cowper (Canterbury, 1887), vii. Cowper incorrectly identifies the Edward Hasted referred to as the historian. 40. Monumental inscription in Hollingbourne church. 41. Hasted, History, vi, 65; Sir Egerton Brydges, The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries . . . (1834), i, 51. Unless otherwise stated, the biographical facts in this and the following paragraphs are based on scattered references in uncatalogued letters and papers in Hasted MSS. The dates of birth of the historian's children are given in 'Anecdotes', 293-4. 42. Hasted MSS, letter of Francis Dingley Hasted, 16 December 1794. 43. Cf. also AC, xv (1883), 375. 44. PRO, Prob. 11/1530/2682. 45. Monumental inscription in Hollingbourne church. 46. In fact she lived till 1800, when she died in her seventy-sixth year and was buried at Sutton-at-Hone (monumental inscription in Sutton churchyard). 47. Hasted MSS, letter of Francis Dingley Hasted, 16 December 1794. 48. The Gentleman's Magazine, Ixxxii, pt i (1812), 190. 49. PRO, Prob. 11/1530/2682. 50. A note of Charles Hasted of 26 September 1812 (in Hasted MSS) appears to relate to this sale and records the disposal of fifteen lots for a total of ^7,155. 51. Hasted MSS, letter of Francis Hasted, jr, from Serasing, 26 July 1819. The punctuation in the above quotation is mainly Francis Hasted's. 52. Hasted MSS, letter of Francis Hasted, jr, from Calcutta, 1 March 1820. 53. This correspondence and other papers relating to this matter are in Hasted MSS. This and the two following paragraphs are based upon these documents. 54. Hasted MSS, letter of J. S. Brownrigg to Colonel J. L. Lushington, 12 November 1831. 55. Hasted MSS, copies of two newspaper advertisements of 8 August 1856, pursuant to an order in the High Court of Chancery requiring the next of kin and creditors of John, Francis, and George Hasted to prove their claims before the Master of the Rolls. 56. PRO. Prob. 11/1530/2682. 57. These documents are principally in Hasted MSS. 58. KAO, U.1142.C.1. 59. AC, xlii (1930), xlv; AC, xliii (1931), 295. Curiously enough, the historian's age is incorrectly given as eighty in both the monumental inscription and the parish register. Since he was born on the last day of December 1732, he was only just seventy-nine when he died in January 1812. 60. This and the following paragraphs are based on entries in his copy of The Kentish Companion and Almanack for 1851 in Hasted MSS. This publication was a kind of annual diary or pocket book, containing a good deal of information for the clergy, for whom it was principally intended, together with blank spaces for memoranda and accounts. The volume for 1851 is the only one of the vicar's diaries to have survived.


211

61. The family property at the death of the historian's father in 1740 had been worth nearly £950 a year. But the father had died intestate, so that his estate became subject to the Kentish law of gavelkind. The freehold land (worth about £650 a year) was therefore equally divided between the son and his mother during her life; the leasehold land (about £270 a year) was shared between the son, his mother, and his sister. (See 'Anecdotes', 278. The details as described by the historian on this page are broadly confirmed by the legal and estate papers in EHM.) The sister died in 1762 but old Mrs Hasted lived on till 1791. She and her son should in theory have then been receiving half the income each, or about £460 a year. In fact the historian admitted that he rarely paid his mother her full share. Moreover the estate had not been well-managed by the historian, and by 1791 had mostly been mortgaged or sold. 62. Return of Owners of Land, 1873 (1875), i, Kent. 63. Hasted MSS, letter to Charles Hasted from Shadwell, 2 July 1828. 64. Monumental inscription to Edward and Katherine Hasted in Hollingbourne church. The verse is quoted from the Apocalypse; it was a favourite text amongst Victorian Evangelicals.


11 COUNTRY CARRIERS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

T

HE country carrier of the nineteenth century figures in the pages of a number of contemporary authors, such as Thomas Hardy and W. H. Hudson. He cannot be said to occupy a prominent place in English literature, although R. D. Blackmore once wrote a novel entitled Cripps, the Carrier: a Woodland Tale (i&j6).1 But his lowly status should not obscure his important part in linking town and country, farm and market, and village and railhead together. In a period of such rapid industrial expansion as the nineteenth century he may seem on a superficial view to be something of an anachronism, an untimely survival from an older order, doomed to extinction as cities expanded and railways proliferated in every corner of the kingdom. In fact, like a number of other seemingly traditional figures, the country carriers ot England were never more numerous than at the end of the Victorian period. For although the peasant economy of this country had by and large disintegrated before the century began, many of the old crafts and occupations which had grown up alongside it not only survived but found a new role for themselves in the world of steam-power. The wheelwrights and the blacksmiths, for example, like the village carriers, never flourished more abundantly than during the last decades of Queen Victoria's reign. There were then 3^ million horses in England, and in the single county of Kent there were more than 3 50 wheelwrights' shops and some 600 smithies.2 The country or village carrier needs to be clearly distinguished at the outset from the long-distance carrier. His function was a different one. The network of long-distance routes had grown up during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its essential purpose was to link one town with another, one area with another, and above all the provinces generally with London. The long-haul wagons were usually big, heavy vehicles, often drawn by several horses and travelling in small convoys for the sake of protection and mutual help on dangerous or difficult roads. The long-distance men themselves were usually based in towns rather than in the countryside; their loads were heavy; their services were chiefly geared to the needs of farming production, wholesale trade, and manufactures, though they also conveyed, more cheaply than the stage-coaches', the poorer class of passenger; and some of them were clearly men of some substance.3 The purpose of the village carrier, by contrast, was to unite a market town with the villages of its hinterland, with the local area dependent upon it, and not town with town. He was almost invariably a villager himself, usually operating on quite a humble scale, setting out in the morning and returning home at night, and

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running a comparatively light vehicle - a cart or van rather than a wagon. The local networks of village carriers' routes, moreover, almost certainly came into existence at a later date than those of the long-distance men, perhaps not till the late eighteenth century: and whereas the latter were by and large brought to an end with the building of railways, the former were not, since they complemented rather than rivalled the railways' services. In an essay written four years ago I endeavoured to reconstruct the network of country carriers' routes around Leicester in the i88os.4 My interest in the subject arose partly from a general acquaintance with the literature of the period and partly from the chance discovery of a carrier's notebook dating from about 1900 in my own parish, near the borders of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire. This book belonged to Frederick William Palmer, who was the village carrier of Walton-by-Kimcote and a group of three or four neighbouring villages, linking them on market days with Leicester, 14 miles to the north. He was the first of his family to work the route, which he had taken over from a neighbour, John Butlin, about 1890 and which probably originated earlier in the nineteenth century. The Palmers were a family of modest standing, never important enough to be farmers, and apparently first recorded in Kimcote and Walton in the late eighteenth century. In the i88os one of them was humbly described in Wright's Directory as a 'cottager', another was a butcher, and two women members of the family were village grocers and shopkeepers. Their descendants still live in the parish and once ran the village newspaper round. Their story is probably typical of many hundreds of carriers in all parts of England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When I first saw Palmer's notebook I did not realize what an unusual document it was. Over the past few years about 40 of my students and I have been undertaking local projects in connexion with village carriers in many parts of England during the nineteenth century.5 It is part of the purpose of this article to report our general findings hitherto, and one of the first points to come to light was the almost total disappearance of records like Palmer's. We have not made exhaustive surveys of all archive offices; but enquiries so far have failed to bring to light more than one or two further examples. There is one in the Derbyshire County Record Office at Matlock. There is also a number in the extensive collection of Insolvent Debtors' records in the Kent Archives Office at Maidstone, though these latter appear to relate rather to general carters or jobmen, and to carriers from Kentish towns to London, than to village carriers in the strict sense of the term.6 The rarity of records like Palmer's is no doubt partly due to the fact that many carriers kept no record of their activities. They are often said to have had such excellent memories that they did not need to do so. As late as 1914, so Gwen Raverat tells us in Period Piece: a Cambridge Childhood, the carrier from Croydon-cum-Clopton "could neither read nor write; but he took commissions all along the road - a packet of needles for Mrs This, and a new teapot for Mrs That - and delivered them all correctly on the way back."7 This kind of statement is one that is often heard and there is no reason to


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question its veracity. Yet we must remember that people generally notice the exceptional rather than the typical, and it seems unlikely that most carriers were in fact illiterate in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. More probably their notebooks are rare for the same reason that shopkeepers' records are rare: that until very recently no one thought them of any importance. For most carriers, as a consequence, the only written record is a brief entry in a contemporary directory. In that sense they will always remain shadowy figures, although it is clear from the vivid impression they have left in the memories of elderly people that they were often men of marked individuality. Yet with a little patience, the arid lists of names in directories can be used to reconstruct an elaborate pattern of routes and services around many an English market town. In doing so one gains a certain insight into the ordinary workaday world of the country people of the time and the market towns that focused so many of their interests. II. FUNCTIONS

The basic functions of village carriers in the nineteenth century were fourfold, although it is clear that there was a certain amount of regional, local, and seasonal variation in all their activities. First, they were shopping agents. Palmer's blackcovered pocket-book, roughly written in indelible pencil, records the wide variety of retail goods purchased in Leicester week by week for the villagers and farmers along his route: everything, in short, from sheep-netting to wallpaper, from lamp-oil to cups and saucers, from knitting wool to patent medicines, joints of meat, and pounds of tea. The oral evidence of elderly folk confirms this impression, and suggests that in some areas, as in south Leicestershire, the carrier often paid for the goods himself and added a penny or two for carriage when he returned to the village. Not infrequently he gave his customers credit, though if he was to remain in business he had to keep a wary eye on the more improvident. Secondly, the carrier's cart was the most usual means, often the only one, by which bulky parcels and goods were dispatched from the nearest town or railhead to their country destination. There were many variations on this theme in the carrier's life. Perhaps the most usual custom, if one had any goods or parcels to be delivered in the countryside, was to leave them at the inn or 'station' which the carrier frequented in town. In some cases, the railways themselves arranged with local carriers to run services for them as at Witney in the 18505, when William Payne operated a service from the station at Handborough,8 or at Hadlow in the i88os when the carrier's 'omnibus' ran twice a day to the station at Tonbridge. In the Preston area in the early 1900$ one of the local packmen used to tramp the Fylde with his samples one week, visiting the farms and hamlets, whilst the carrier came round the following week delivering the goods.9 Thirdly, in most villages the carrier's cart was the only form of public passenger conveyance, so that his vehicle was also a kind of primitive country bus, conveying

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villagers with no transport of their own - who of course comprised the great majority into the market town. By the 18505 the first rural 'omnibuses' were coming into existence, often operating between one town and another rather than between villages, though of course they also stopped at the villages en route. The earliest country bus so far noted was established in 1856 and ran between Sleaford and Boston, by way of Heckington and Swineshead.10 By the end of the century there was quite a number of country omnibuses in Kent, principally running from one small town to another, such as Tenter den and Cranbrook, or into the two chief market-centres of Maidstone and Canterbury. In the West of England the south Devon countryside was another area with many small towns and comparatively numerous bus services at this date. The rather grand-sounding word 'omnibus', however, should not deceive us into thinking that these horse-drawn vehicles were very different from the carriers' carts. They may have had slightly more comfortable seats; they probably afforded a little more protection from the weather; but they were certainly little faster than the carts and essentially they performed all the same services. In many directories they are in fact often listed under 'carriers' carts' as well as under 'omnibuses'; and a typical bus-service, Bennett's from Tenterden to Maidstone, took 3! hours to cover the 18mile journey. If any important distinction can be made, it is that the 'omnibuses' operated more frequent services than the plain carriers' carts. Many of them ran daily, and consequently developed in areas where shopping was no longer confined to market day but was spread out over the week as a whole. In Leicestershire, where the majority of road-services ran on market days, there were virtually no rural buses until after the i88os. In the Preston area there were none until 1882, when a daily service was established between Preston and Great Eccleston.11 In every county, moreover, omnibuses were still the exception in the i88os, and until after 1918 virtually all of them, like the carriers' carts, were certainly horse-drawn. The first motor-bus route in the countryside was established in 1898 and operated between Newport Pagnell and Olney, but that was decidedly a freakish exception.12 Another early route was started about 10 or 12 years later from Clipston (Northants.) to Market Harborough; but the vehicle was so uncomfortable with its solid tyres on the bumpy country roads that it was quickly abandoned.13 The fourth function of the carrier is the most difficult to assess, and that is his activity in conveying country produce to town for sale to provision merchants. His importance in this respect has only gradually become apparent to the present writer. There is nothing to indicate it in Palmer's notebook, and it is completely unrecorded in any local archives so far discovered. It came to light only in talking to old Leicestershire and Northamptonshire people, and in particular to the elderly son of another carrier in "Walton-by-Kimcote, the late Mr Abbott. How important was this activity? There is no possibility of establishing any statistical conclusions; but in certain respects it was vital to the urban food-supply, at any rate in Leicestershire. There and elsewhere the principal goods conveyed seem to have been poultry, game, rabbits, eggs, and dairy produce. Probably in many towns the carrier's cart was also an important


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source of fruit and vegetables, though this does not seem to have been the case in Leicestershire so much as in some districts. The area where it was most important was undoubtedly London. There it was said, about 1900, that the "residents on the highways and main thoroughfares leading from West Middlesex into London have to sleep as best they can to the constant rumbling of long processions of market-garden carts, which, leaving the farms in the evening, do their twelve-, fifteen-, or twentymile journey, and arrive at the London markets with their loads any time between midnight and three o'clock in the morning."14 Although these nocturnal carters of the London area were obviously not village carriers in the ordinary sense, very much the same functions were performed by carriers in other areas where towns were surrounded by market gardens. Many of those in the vicinity of Hull, for example, had their own vegetable grounds and brought their produce to town each market day on carts or 'rulleys':Is a Yorkshire and Lincolnshire word for a flat four-wheeled wagon, with removable shafts, from which goods could be sold in the market. A similar custom obtained in the Derby area, where many carriers came from the market gardening parishes along the Trent, and where in the 18505 there were "immense quantities of fruit and vegetables bought up by dealers from the Staffordshire potteries and the High Peak and Low Peak."16 At Derby there was one man employed in this activity who later in life was to become famous: Thomas Cook. Professor Simmons has told us that from 1818 to 1822 Cook was employed as a gardener's lad "first at Melbourne Hall, at a penny a day, and afterwards in the service of a market gardener, who was often tipsy and sent the boy to cry his wares round the villages near by or to sell fruit and vegetables in Derby market."17 Though statistics of even the vaguest description cannot be compiled, a vivid impression of the extent of this kind of trade is given by some of the late Mr Abbott's recollections. On their way into Leicester on market days before the First World War, he and his father used to call at various farms to collect eggs and poultry. On one wet morning in winter they were entering the town by Oxford Street when, turning a corner, the horse suddenly slipped on the granite setts, the whole cart turned turtle, and ten thousand eggs were smashed on the street. When one recollects that this old carrier was only one of more than 200 travelling into Leicester every week, most of them two or three times a week, one realizes how extensive the supply must have been. So far as poultry and game were concerned, the trade seems to have been busiest towards Christmas and perhaps at other festive seasons, when rods or poles were fixed to the top, sides, and bottom of the cart and hung with hundreds of birds, all rhythmically swaying from side to side with the motion of horse and cart. When the carrier reached Leicester, these goods were not sold in the market but delivered to select shopkeepers, who seem to have established regular arrangements with certain carriers to supply them. The carrier himself usually had too much business of other kinds in the town to attend to, for people back in the villages, to spare time to stand in a market stall.

284


How typical was the experience of Leicester in these respects ? Although the extent of its market area and the number of carriers visiting it week by week were exceptional, its experience probably only repeated on a large scale what was occurring in lesser or greater degree in many other places in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly in Market Harborough, on the Northamptonshire border of the county, the carriers of villages like Clipston performed very much the same service as the Abbotts in Leicester.18 To prove positively that carriers in all areas acted as suppliers of provisions it would be necessary to obtain more extensive oral evidence than has been possible for this article. It would be surprising if they generally went into market with empty carts; but the carrying trade was marked by pronounced regional differences, so that it would be rash to suggest that the experience of Leicester was exactly repeated in the country at large. For one thing it was a much larger town than most other carriers' centres.

III. NUMBERS

Regarding the great number of country carriers in England during the second half of the nineteenth century there can be no doubt, though they were not equally important in all districts. The evidence of the directories, when tabulated and analysed, makes it perfectly plain that most carriers worked regular routes at least once a week, often two or three times, and that they frequently called at three or four villages before reaching town. The routes of course varied greatly in length, but in most parts of the country the maximum distance did not generally much exceed 15 or 20 miles, although in exceptional cases journeys of 30 or even 40 miles have been found, for example in Devon, Kent, East Anglia, and Northumberland. Even so, at a pace of only three to five miles an hour, many carriers must have started very early in the morning to reach town in time; and although most of them began to turn homewards again by mid-afternoon, or in some areas as early as 2 p.m., it must often have been quite dark before they returned to their village. A day of 16 or 17 hours was not uncommon on the longer routes, and in wintertime they must often have set out and returned by the light of the moon. In some places, as at Exeter, Maidstone, Guildford, and Newcastle, a few of them spent the night in town and did not return till the following morning. In Kent many of those who had long distances to cover seem to have preferred to travel overnight. How reliable are the directories as a source for reconstructing these carriers' routes ? They vary in their value, of course. The 1884 edition of Wright's Commercial and General Directory of Leicester and Fifteen miles Round, is an exceptionally good one. Kelly's directories are also generally good, though in the writer's experience not so good as Wright's: that for Kent in 1882 contains many little discrepancies between the urban carriers' lists and their entries under village headings. But even at their worst the directories are the best source we have. The Census Returns may seem at first sight


285

to be more reliable as a source for carriers' names; but they are not available after 1871, and since most carriers operated only on market days, and engaged in other occupations such as that of shopkeeper, publican, or jobmaster during the rest of the week, they are not necessarily described as carriers in the Census. Occasionally, as in the Guildford area, parish magazines have provided a useful check;19 but newspapers have not been of much assistance, and the local train timetables formerly produced by town printers, which are said to have given lists of country carriers, have proved almost impossible to find.20 Nevertheless, it is sometimes possible to check one directofy with another, and the village entries with those under the market towns. Although it is plain that minor errors of spelling or of surname were frequent, comparatively few carriers' routes seem to have gone wholly unrecorded. Whatever their defects, there can be no doubt that the directories enable us to reconstruct for the nineteenth century a far fuller picture of carriers' routes around English market towns than for any earlier period. How far were these networks a survival from earlier periods ? Here, as has been said, it is necessary to draw a sharp distinction between the local country carrier, connecting a town with its hinterland, and the long-distance man who operated between London and provincial towns or between different urban centres in the provinces. The origins of the latter certainly go back at least to the 1630$, when the first 'directory' of services was published, John Taylor's Carriers' Cosmography (1637). The humble origins of the country carrier proper are more obscure; but one thing seems reasonably clear. Whilst the local networks of their routes around provincial towns had perhaps usually come into existence in some form well before the advent of railways, these networks did not disappear as the century advanced, like those of the long-distance men, but rather became denser and more extensive, particularly around the major market centres such as Maidstone, Newark, and Leicester. Allowances must be made for a more thorough recording of services by the compilers of the directories as the century advanced; but there can be no doubt at all that country carriers not only survived the advent of the railway but actually increased in numbers and in activity in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The railway, in fact, offered no real rivalry to their activity. Most villages were in any case without a station, even at the height of the railway boom; but quite apart from this fact, it is abundantly evident that those with stations werejust as well served by local carriers as those without. The reasons are not far to seek. The carrier passed by your door and stopped where you wanted him; the railway did not. The carrier would fetch and carry for you, acting as your shopping agent in the town; the railway could not. The carrier collected the produce from the farms and delivered it direct to the shopkeepers on behalf of the farmers; the railway could not. Where rural industries were concerned, moreover, like framework-knitting in Leicestershire, the carrier called at the factory or warehouse in the city as he passed, delivering the finished goods and collecting the raw materials for the village people at home. For local purposes the humble carrier's cart was a more versatile and adaptable means of transport than the railway train, and there

286


were many circumstances in which this versatility outweighed its slowness. For that reason the carriers themselves increased in numbers with the development of towns like Newark and Leicester as railheads, and with the unprecedented growth of the urban food market. How many carriers, then, were there in the later years of the nineteenth century ? There are no precise statistics, but it is possible to make some kind of rough estimate. The 1884 edition of Wright's Directory of Leicester lists altogether about 400 carriers serving the seven market towns of the area: Leicester, Loughborough, Hinckley, Lutterworth, Market Harborough, Uppingham, and Melton Mowbray. The total population of Wright's area, both rural and urban, was approximately 320,000, so that about one inhabitant in 800 was a carrier. If this ratio held good elsewhere, there would have been about 32,500 carriers in the country as a whole, with its 26 million inhabitants in 1881. In point of fact they were more numerous in counties like Leicestershire than in heavily urbanized districts. Some industrial towns in south Lancashire the West Riding, and the Black Country had little or no rural hinterland and in consequence few carriers in relation to their size. In the London area, although carters were numerous, there were of course no village carriers in the strict sense of the word. In all probability, therefore, the true figure was more like 20-25,000 than 32,500. There is no means whatever of forming a comparison with earlier centuries, but there cannot be any doubt that by the i88os the numbers had greatly increased - perhaps about doubled - since the beginning of the century. That is a point to which we shall return at the end of this article.

IV. CARTS AND HORSES

The carts or vans which the carriers employed figure not infrequently in Victorian photographs. It is clear that they varied a good deal in size and type, and some of these differences seem to have been of regional origin. Some were two-wheeled vehicles, some four-wheeled. Some were shallow and open, others covered with a canvas tilt stretched over a row of concentric hoops like the old long-distance wagons. Others again had hard flat roofs surrounded by a metal rail, for the carriage of goods on top as well as inside. In contrast with the long-distance wagons, drawn by as many as four, six, or even eight horses, the village carrier's vehicle was a comparatively small affair, usually drawn by a single horse, though in hilly country or snowy weather a second horse might be put in the shafts. Normally these carts cannot have carried many passengers; as a rule, it seems, not more than about a dozen. Even so the carrier's horse must often have had to draw a heavy load since the wagons were sometimes laden with up to two tons of goods. From oral evidence it is clear that the horse was regarded as a most valuable piece of property. For the small village man it was an expensive investment and accordingly it was treated with the greatest care. If the horse were overstrained and died, the


287

carrier might not be able to afford to replace it, and his livelihood would be at an end. One winter evening, probably about 1905, as old Mr Abbott of Walton was leaving Leicester, the snow began to fall. His cart was heavily laden with goods for the villages to the south of the town, and by the time they had travelled some five or six miles it became clear that the journey was too much for the horse. Taking a field-road near Foston, Abbott therefore abandoned his cart in the pastures, and completed his journey to Walton alone with his horse in the darkness, returning next day for the cart. This was no doubt an exceptional incident: the weather had been fine enough when he left home in the morning or he would have taken his second horse with him. In hilly districts it was not exceptional for passengers to get out and walk whenever the cart came to a steep gradient. In parts of Charnwood Forest, if reports are true, the able-bodied were expected to assist in dragging or pushing the laden vehicle up the severer inclines. These stories may seem to be exaggerated, but in a number of cases they receive striking confirmation from the routes the carriers operated. East of Oxford, for example, it is noticeable that all routes stopped abruptly at the foot of the Chilterns: not one crossed over the scarp to the hamlets and villages on the hills. Around Maidstone, where in 1882 more than 370 services were in operation each week, only 24 climbed the steep downland escarpment, which rises 500 feet behind the town. Nearly 330, by contrast, traversed the countryside to the south and west of Maidstone, where some of their routes extended to more than 30 miles, but where gradients were less severe. Similarly in the Bristol area the carriers' routes extended furthest in the relatively level countryside to the north of the city: to the east they stopped short at the foot of the Cotswolds, whilst of those to the south only one crossed the Mendips, and that by way of the gorge to Cheddar. Beyond the Cotswold edge the countryside lay chiefly in the carriers' region of Cirencester, and beyond Mendip in those of Taunton and Bridgwater. Distance was one obvious circumstance limiting the extent of a carrier's route; but long steep hills were clearly another consideration of equal importance for horse-drawn vehicles. That is no doubt one reason why in hilly districts like parts of south Devon and the Kentish downland, many hamlets and villages had no carriers' services at all. Such areas, as a consequence, were isolated in a sense that nowhere in Leicestershire was likely to be. In addition to their horses, some carriers employed an errand boy - in the Hull area they were clearly quite numerous - and in Leicester, at any rate, every carrier also had his dog. In west Surrey Gertrude Jekyll records that some of the carriers' carts were drawn by dogs - two or four in a team - instead of horses;21 but this practice has not so far been noted in other districts. The carrier's dog, it is clear, was scarcely less important than his horse. For when the cart reached the inn, the horse was taken out of the shafts to be watered and fed, and the carrier left his dog in charge whilst he went to transact his business in town. In Leicestershire there are many stories told of these fierce old carriers' dogs. On one occasion, when a Leicester man who had left a parcel in the cart later changed his mind and endeavoured to retrieve it, the dog fiercely defended the load and refused to allow him to approach it till its master returned.

288

Landscape and Community in England V. ROUTES AND REGIONS

Altogether, over the past four or five years, my students and I have reconstructed the routes of about 5,000 carriers centred on 40 or more English market towns and cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The towns in question have not been selected on any systematic basis, but according to personal predilection and the local availability of directories, chiefly in Leicester University Library. They include places of all sizes, from 2,000 or 3,000 inhabitants to 200,000 or 300,000, although in general we have concentrated on the more important centres. For 20 of the 40 towns the main statistical conclusions are summarized in the accompanying table (p. 289). In most cases a single year in the last quarter of the century was chosen, though for Bradford and Newcastle earlier directories were utilized. In three cases a longer time-span was examined: 1841-1932 for Preston, 1850-1950 for Guildford, and 1815-84 for Leicester. From these studies two general conclusions have emerged. First, within a broadly similar framework in all parts of the country, there was a good deal of local variation in the pattern of carriers' routes. Secondly, the demise of the village carriers came later than one might have expected. Though in one or two places, particularly Preston and Leeds, their numbers began to decline before the end of the nineteenth century, they generally held their own and indeed increased their activity until the First World War, and they were almost completely unaffected by motor transport until after 1918. When the war ended many of the surviving carriers purchased discarded military buses, and their functions began to change with the development of rural motor-services. The carriers were generally most numerous around the major county towns, such as Exeter, Oxford, Ipswich, Norwich, and Maidstone, and the big old market centres that had developed also as major ports or industrial towns, such as Bristol, Newcastle, and Hull. They were usually much less numerous around some of i the industrial cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham - which of course had little rural hinterland by this period - unless these were also old county towns, as in the case of Leicester, Nottingham, and Northampton. Where an industrial town was also an old agricultural centre, however, particularly if it was situated towards the edge of its manufacturing region, as at Wolverhampton, the carriers' network might be comparatively extensive. As a rule, the neAver towns of the time rarely became major route-centres; but one interesting exception here is Cheltenham, which by the late nineteenth century had become the principal focus of routes in Gloucestershire, apart from Bristol. In this respect Cheltenham contrasted with other inland spas, such as Tunbridge Wells, whose carrying traffic, though not inconsiderable, was much less important than that of the county town. Around seaside towns, such as Dover and Torquay, there were usually few carriers; but one exception to this rule was Scarborough, no doubt because of its somewhat isolated position in east Yorkshire. In a few counties there was no very obvious commercial capital and in consequence no dominating centre of carriers' routes. In Sussex the principal place was held by Brighton

289

Country Carriers in the Nineteenth Century TABLE

Carriers: Comparative Weekly Figures

Place Bradford Bristol Colchester Derby Devizes Devizes Great Driffield Guildford Guildford Guildford Guildford Hull Hull Ipswich Leicester1 Leicester Lincoln Maidstone Malton Melton Mowbray Newcastle Norwich Preston2 Preston2 Preston2 Scarborough Winchester Worcester

Date

Carriers

1863 1894 1878 1874 1890 1903 1879 1854 1894 1914

55 9i 49 73 47 46 94 45 39 41 40 149 151 135 116 204 105 85 95 47 146

1923 1882 1899 1883 1815 1884 1896 1882 1879 1884 1855 1875 1853 1882 1901 1890 1899 1879

IOI

72 60 39 67 43 93

Places served

63 126 72 144 9i 70 53 66 70 77 76 166 146 219 105 220 1 10 141

57 60 177 363 60 53 39 67 83 105

Services

Calls

69 320 164 156 72 68

187 931 264 273 242 158 148 261 339 553 444 465 591

102 1 06 H5

166 147 256 280 36i 152 461 196 376

1386

102

152

188 IIOO

4i3 1212

60

III

2093

4283

228

856 — — — 142 265 367

151

158 98 98 103

1 66

1

Long-distance carriers, which were numerous in 1815, have been omitted. It is not possible from the Preston directories to compile a valid figure for the total number of calls. 3 Excluding services and calls of 12 wherrymen operating to and fro at high water across the river between N. and S. Shields and Heworth and Bill Quay. These wherrymen are included in the number of carriers. 2

and in Somerset by Taunton and Bridgwater; but in neither county was there anywhere with an area comparable with those of Leicester, Ipswich, Norwich, or Maidstone. Clearly the size of a town and its position as a railhead might be influential circumstances in its development as a focal point; but once again we must not make the relationship too simple. Maidstone was not a large town - its population in 1881 was barely 30,000 - and for a county capital it was badly served by railways; yet the

290


pattern of carriers' routes dependent on it was one of the largest and busiest in the country, far and away the largest in south-eastern England.22 Despite these variations, the general pattern that obtained in Leicestershire in the iSSos, though not exactly repeated in other places, seems in broad outline to have been a characteristic one. I have described it in detail elsewhere, but the main conclusion may be briefly summarized here.23 Leicester itself was much the most important town in the county, and with 130,000 inhabitants it was nine times as large as its nearest rival, Loughborough. Every week it was linked by more than 200 carriers with some 220 villages, and its area extended as far as the borders of the county in every direction except Melton Mowbray and Ashby de la Zouch. These carriers operated 461 services into the town over 170 routes, and made a total of 1,100 'calls' or scheduled stops each week. Altogether the Leicester area covered nearly 350,000 acres and comprised a total population of 160,000, more than half of which was purely rural. With the 130,000 inhabitants of Leicester itself, almost a quarter of a million people were thus in some degree dependent week by week on the retail shopping facilities of the town. At the same time Leicester was by no means the only carriers' centre in the county. It was encircled by a ring of five or six smaller towns, each about 15 miles distant and each with its own subsidiary district: Melton Mowbray to the north-east with 60 villages in its area, Loughborough to the north with 38, Market Harborough to the south-east with 36, and Hinckley and Lutterworth to the south and south-west with 30 each. These, with Ashby de la Zouch a little farther away to the north-west, were then the only considerable shopping centres in the county apart from Leicester itself, and nearly 100 villages were linked by carrier both with these centres and with the county town. The largest subsidiary area, that of Melton, covered 100,000 acres and comprised about 25,000 inhabitants, or roughly four times as many as the town itself. That is some indication of the importance of the country trade to market towns like Melton Mowbray. One has only to glance through the account books of contemporary shopkeepers to realize the significance of this trade in building up retail fortunes in towns like Melton at this period.24 None of the towns examined for the present article seems to have had quite so large a market area in the late nineteenth century as Leicester, although Norwich, Ipswich, Cambridge, Maidstone, Bristol, and Northampton all appear to have come close to it. In the Ipswich and Maidstone areas the number of 'calls' or scheduled stops each week was actually greater than in the Leicester region. Around Norwich the number of hamlets and villages was considerably greater than around Leicester, to wit 363 compared with 220, though in general they were smaller than in the latter area. But on every other count, whether of carriers, services, routes, or total population, the Leicester region seems to have been the largest, though in most respects not by a very large margin. The Leicestershire pattern, of one dominating centre surrounded by a group of smaller towns, was paralleled in a number of counties. In central Yorkshire the city of

LEICESTER CARRIERS' ROUTES 1884

292


LEICESTER CARRIERS' ROUTES The figures on the map on p. 191 refer in most cases to the terminal points only on routes from Leicester. Intermediate places served by carrier are indicated by route numbers on the map only where it is evident that the carrier turned off the main route to reach them and then returned to the main route to complete his journey. Thus on route 91, from Leicester to Uppingham, the carrier turned off the main route twice, to reach Launde and Allexton, and then returned to it to complete his journey to Uppingham. All three places are therefore marked, to indicate the route taken, but intermediate stops along the main route (in this case King's Norton, Billesdon, East Norton and Belton) are omitted in order to avoid overcrowding the map. The following is a complete list of routes and villages served. 1. Anstey 2. Anstey, Newtown Linford 3. Anstey, Cropston, Roecliffe, Maplewell, Woodhouse 4. Arnesby 5. Arnesby, Knaptoft, Bruntingthorpe 6. Arnesby, Shearsby 7. Ashby Magna 8. Ashby Parva, Leire 9. Aston Flamville, Burbage 10. Aylestone, Whetstone 11. Aylestone, Blaby, Whetstone 12. Bagworth 13. Bardon-on-the-Hill, Hugglescote, Ibstock, Heather, Odstone 14. Barkby 15. Barlestone 16. Barrow-on-Soar 17. Barrow-on-Soar, Walton-onthe-Wolds, Wymeswold, Wysali 18. Belgrave, Rothley 19. Belgrave, Thurmaston 20. Billesdon, Skeffington, Tugby, Keythorpe, Goadby, East Norton, Loddington 21. Billesdon, Skeffington, Tugby, Goadby 22. Birstall 23. Birstall, Cossington, Sileby

24. Birstall, Wanlip, Mountsorrel, Quorndon 25. Birstall, Rothley^ Mountsorrel, Quorndon, Loughborough 26. Birstall, Mountsorrel, Quorndon, Loughborough, Kegworth, Hoton, Rempstone, Willoughby-on-the-Wolds, Walton-on-the-Wolds, Shardlow, Long Whatton 27. Bitteswell, Lutterworth, Cotesbach, Walcote 28. Bitteswell, Lutterworth, Cotesbach, Misterton, Walcote 29. Botcheston, Nailstone, Carlton-by-Bosworth, Bartonin-the-Beans 30. Bradgate 31. Braunstone, Desford, Barlestone, Osbaston, Hinckley 32. Broughton Astley 33. Broughton Astley, Frolesworth, Claybrooke, High Cross, Kimcote, Walton, Bruntingthorpe 34. Bruntingthorpe 35. Burton Overy, Carlton Curlieu 36. Cadeby, Stapleton 37. Cadeby, Sutton Cheney

Country Carriers in the Nineteenth Century 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Claybrooke, Ullesthorpe Cossington, Sileby Countesthorpe Cranoe, Medbourne Dadlington, Shenton, Sibson, Atherstone 43. Desford, Croft 44. Desford, Harwell 45. Desford, Newbold Verdon 46. Desford, Newbold Verdon, Barlestone 47. Desford, Cadeby, Market Bosworth 48. Desford, Cadeby, Market Bosworth, Shenton 49. Dunton Bassett 50. Earl Shilton 51. Earl Shilton, Barwell, Hinckley 52. Earl Shilton, Hinckley 53. East Langton, West Langton, Tur Langton, Church Langton, Shangton 54. Ellistown, Ibstock 55. Enderby 56. Enderby, Thurlaston, Normanton Turville 57. Evington, Stoughton, Stretton, King's Norton, Illston-on-the-Hill 58. Evington, Stoughton, Stretton, King's Norton, Galby, Illston-on-the-Hill, Shangton 59. Fleckney 60. Foston, Peatling Magna 61. Gaddesby, Ashby Folville, Twyford, Burrough-on-theHill, Melton Mowbray 62. Galby 63. Gilmorton, Lutterworth 64. Glenfield 65. Glenfield, Anstey, Ratby 66. Glen Magna 67. Glen Magna, Wistow, Newton Harcourt 68. Glen Magna, Kibworth,

293

Smeeton Westerby, Market Harborough 69. Glen Parva 70. Glen Parva, Blaby 71. Groby, Markfield, Loughborough 72. Groby, Markfield 73. Groby, Markfield, Thornton, Stanton-under-Bardon 74. Groby, Markfield, Shaw Lane, Copt Oak, Ulverscroft 75. Groby, Markfield, Shaw Lane, Ellistown, Coalville 76. Groby, Shaw Lane, Hugglescote, Coalville 77. Groby, Ratby 78. High Cross, Wibtoft, Claybrooke 79. Hinckley 80. Houghton 81. Houghton, Billesdon, Rolleston 82. Humberstone 83. Huncote 84. Huncote, Stoney Stanton 85. Husbands Bosworth, Welford 86. Kibworth, Tur Langton, Church Langton, Stonton Wyville, Glooston, Cranoe 87. Kilby 88. Kilby, Fleckney 89. Kilby, Fleckney, Saddington 90. Kilworth 91. King's Norton, Billesdon, East Norton, Launde, Allexton, Belton (Rut.), Uppingham 92. Kirby Muxloe, Glenfield, Ratby 93. Knaptoft 94. Knighton 95. Leire 96. Leire, Frolesworth, Sharnford 97. Littlethorpe 98. Littlethorpe, Broughton Astley, Frolesworth, Leire, Dunton Bassett, Ashby Parva, Bitteswell, Lutterworth

294 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.


Loughborough Lubenham Lutterworth Market Bosworth Market Harborough Markfield Markfield, Copt Oak Markfield, Copt Oak, Shaw Lane, Bardon-on-the-Hill, Coalville, Greenhill, Thringstone 107. Melton Mowbray 108. Mountsorrel, Barrow-on-Soar 109. Mountsorrel, Quorndon, Loughborough, Shepshed, Belton (Leics.) no. Mowsley. in. Mowsley, Laughton 112. Nailstone 113. Nailstone, Shackerstone, Newton Burgoland 114. Narborough 115. Narborough, Huncote 116. Narborough, Littlethorpe 117. Narborough, Littlethorpe, Cosby 118. Narborough, Croft: 119. Narborough, Sharnford 120. Newbold Verdon 121. Newtown Linford 122. Newtown Unthank, Botcheston, Bagworth, Ibstock 123. Noseley 124. Oadby 125. Oadby, Glen Magna, Kibworth, Smeeton Westerby, Gumley 126. Osbaston, Barleston 127. Peckleton & Roe's Nest 128. Peckleton & Roe's Nest, Kirkby Mallory 129. Peckleton & Roe's Nest, Kirkby Mallory, Sutton Cheney 130. Peatling Magna, Peatling Parva, Bruntingthorpe 131. Queniborough

132. Queniborough, South Croxton, Barsby 133. Ratby 134. Ratcliffe-on-the-Wreake, Thrussington 135. Rearsby, Gaddesby, Ashby Folville, Thorpe Satchville, Twyford 136. Rearsby, Twyford, Burroughon-the-Hill, Somerby, Pickwell 137. Rearsby, Brooksby, Rotherby, Hoby, Ragdale 138. Sapcote 139. Scraptoft, Keyham, Hungarton 140. Scraptoft, Keyham, Cold Newton, Lowesby 141. Scraptoft, Keyham, Hungarton, Lowesby, Marefield, Owston, Knossington, Cold Overton 142. Seagrave 143. Shangton, Tur Langton, Church Langton, East Langton, West Langton 144. Sharnford 145. Shawell 146. Shearsby, Knaptoft, Husbands Bosworth 147. Shearsby, Mowsley, Laughton, Market Harborough 148. Shepshed 149. Slawston 150. South Croxton, Melton Mowbray 151. Stoneygate 152. Stoney Stanton 153. Sutton-in-the-Elms, Broughton Astley 154. Swithland, Wbodhouse 155. Syston 156. Syston, Rearsby 157, Thornton 158, Thornton, Bagworth 159 Thrussington, Asfordby, Melton Mowbray

Country Carriers in the Nineteenth Century 160. Thurcaston 161. Thurcaston, Cropston, Swithland, Woodhouse 162. Thurmaston 163. Thurmaston, Syston, Barkby 164. Thurnby, Bushby, Houghton 165. Tilton, Halstead 166. Tur Langton, Church

167. 168. 169. 170.

295

Langton, Glooston, Hallaton, Horninghold, Blaston Walton-by-Kimcote Whatborough, Withcote, Braunston (Rut.), Brooke, Ridlington, Uppingham Wigston Magna Willoughby Waterleys

296


York fulfilled a similar role to that of Leicester, whilst Malton, Great Driffield, and Scarborough formed the chief subsidiary market towns to the north-east of the city. With populations of about 5,000 and 8,000 respectively in 1879, DrifField and Malton (with Norton) also showed striking similarities with one another so far as their market area was concerned. The 95 carriers of Malton's hinterland ran 152 services into the town weekly, serving 57 places whose total population amounted to nearly 25,000 and whose area extended to 150,000 acres. The 94 carriers in the Driffield district ran 148 services from 53 parishes whose total population exceeded 32,500 and whose area amounted to 168,000 acres. In both cases the strictly rural element in the population probably amounted to only about 20,000, since several other places served by the carriers were in fact small towns with shops of their own, such as Pocklington (in the Driffield area) and Kirkby Moorside (in that of Malton). Both towns, therefore, more or less resembled Melton Mowbray in the population and extent of their hinterland. There was one interesting difference between them, however. In the case of Malton, more than half the villages in the area had no connexion by carrier with any other town and hence were wholly dependent upon Malton for their requirements. All the Driffield carriers, by contrast, also operated services into other towns in the region, particularly to Beverley and Hull; so that in this case the country people of the area were not wholly dependent on the Driffield market. Nevertheless, the latter was said by contemporaries to be a very busy little town; and with 55 of the 94 carriers driving their carts to the inns around the crowded market-place alone - 23 of them to the Black Swan - this report must certainly have been true on market day. We must envisage a place like Driffield, in fact, as being a genuine little local capital for the people of the Yorkshire Wolds, not only for the exchange of goods and purchase of supplies, but also for the exchange of news and views. Scarborough was a much larger place than either Malton or Driffield, with 35,000 permanent residents in the 18905 and an estimated 60,000 during the summer season. Relatively speaking the trade of its dependent villages was therefore less important to its shopkeepers than was that of Driffield or Malton. Nevertheless, for a seaside resort, its hinterland was considerable, covering a wide stretch of the Yorkshire Moors and the Vale of Pickering, and extending to more than 240,000 acres. Much of this area was sparsely inhabited, but its total population amounted to about 35,000, distributed amongst 67 distinct places and served by 67 country carriers. A number of these places were also connected with other towns, however, so that the population of those dependent solely on Scarborough was in fact about 28,000. In this case, then, the rural area almost doubled the potential shopping population of the town; at Malton it trebled it; and at Driffield increased it fourfold or fivefold. The three industrial towns of Derby, Bristol, and Newcastle provide an instructive comparison with the foregoing places. Of the carriers' regions of these three towns, that of Derby was probably the smallest, though it is also the most difficult to assess. In 1874 73 country carriers operated 156 services into Derby from 144 places in the county or just beyond it. These 73 carriers made a total of 273 calls per week, a figure


297

which may be compared with the much larger total of 1,100 calls in the Leicester area in 1884. Though Derby was an important regional market, its district to the east and south was closely limited by those of other towns, particularly Nottingham, which was only 16 miles away. Much of its hinterland, moreover, was heavily industrialized, so that 80 per cent of the 192,000 inhabitants in its region in fact lived in places with more than 1,000 inhabitants, some of them considerable towns in their own right with numerous shops and services of their own. It is therefore difficult to estimate with any precision the population and extent of the area genuinely dependent on Derby; but to the west and north-west it was considerable and its population may possibly have amounted to about 2 5,000 on that side of the town. In the Bristol area in the 18905 91 carriers operated 320 services to 126 places, making a total of 931 calls every week. By comparing these figures with those for Leicester, it will be seen that, though there were fewer than half as many carriers operating in the Bristol area (911204) and many fewer places served (126 :22o) the total number of calls per week more nearly approaches that of the Midland town (931:1,100) than does the figure for any other place except Ipswich and Maidstone. This fact points up an important difference between Bristol and most other places. In most areas the great majority of carriers went into town on the traditional market days. Generally speaking the ancient medieval markets were still the principal centres of retail trade, though of course in every town there were also numerous shops. In Leicester, for example, nearly 900 of the 1,100 calls made by the village carriers every week were made on the two chief market days of Wednesday and Saturday. In Bristol, by contrast, the 931 calls were distributed more evenly over the week as a whole and the retail markets seem to have been of little importance, at any rate to country people. On the whole, as a consequence, the villages in the Bristol area were more frequently served by carrier than those elsewhere, with an average of seven or eight services each scattered over the week, compared with an average of five a week in the Leicester area, only two around Scarborough or Derby, and little more than one in the case of small towns like Melton Mowbray and Driffield. The most interesting feature of the Newcastle area was the number of longdistance carriers that survived alongside the purely local ones into the railway era. This phenomenon is in part due to the fact that an earlier year was chosen for this study than for other towns, namely 1855. Yet elsewhere the disappearance of the longdistance carrier followed the coming of the railway almost immediately, so that their survival in Newcastle is remarkable. It seems probable that, owing to its position as the port of the North East, the city and its market continued to act as a distribution point for goods coming through the port. In the remote countryside of Northumberland and the Border counties, with their small towns, scattered farms and hamlets, and difficult terrain, the carrier evidently continued to perform a function in which the railway could not yet challenge him, and which had few parallels elsewhere. It is noteworthy that most of these long-distance carriers operated between Newcastle and the other towns of the region - particularly those like Alnwick, Alston, and Jedburgh, to the north and west of the city - and not to the rural parishes.

298


The only other major town with a considerable number of long-distance men was, rather surprisingly, Maidstone. In this case it is noticeable that several of them operated services to towns with which Maidstone had as yet no rail connexion, such as Ashford, Hastings, and Battle. Unlikely though it may seem, there may also however have been some kind of a parallel with Newcastle. Maidstone had developed into the chief market town of the south-eastern counties partly, perhaps chiefly, because of its historic position as a river port in an important agricultural district. The Medway was the only river in the area naturally navigable for any distance inland and Maidstone itself was at the head of this navigation, about 25 miles from the sea. In the midnineteenth century the annual volume of its waterborne traffic amounted to some 120,000 tons, and the tolls on the Medway barges passing through Allington lock alone, just below the town, to ^3,000 a year. Though by the i88os this traffic had greatly declined, it may well be that the long-distance carrying trade had originated in connexion with it.25 Apart from Bristol and Maidstone, the examples so far discussed have related to places in the Midlands and the North; but it must not be suggested that country carriers were in any sense a regional peculiarity. They were also numerous in the southern counties, particularly, for example, around Oxford and Salisbury, in the South-West around Exeter, and in the eastern counties around Lincoln, Norwich, Ipswich, and Cambridge. In some south-country areas they seem to have remained important until a later period than in more industrial regions. This is indicated by a comparison between the carriers of the Preston area and those of Guildford. Though it would be misleading to argue too strongly from the evidence of two places only, the contrast between them is paralleled in a number of other instances. In 1841 Preston had a population of 50,000 and over the next 60 years this figure almost exactly doubled.26 It was the most important market town in central and north Lancashire, and it was also of course an important industrial centre. There was a marked contrast in fact between the semi-industrial hinterland south of the town and the rural hinterland north of the Ribble. Over the whole period from 1841 to 1914, the peak of the carriers' activity seems to have been achieved between 1850 and 1885, and after the latter date it gradually declined. In 1853 72 carriers operated 151 services into Preston, and these services brought 60 places within its orbit. In 1882 there were 60 carriers operating 158 services between 53 places and Preston. Between these dates the figures in general remained more or less stable; but after 1882, although the population of the area continued to increase, the numbers of carriers and services declined sharply. By 1901 there were only 39 carriers operating 98 services from 39 villages into the county town of Lancashire. The number had risen again slightly by the outbreak of the First World War; but it is remarkable that in this populous area, the decline of the country carrier had begun a good 15 years before the end of Queen Victoria's reign. In part the explanation seems to lie in the increasingly industrial character of the countryside south of the town, and the rise of rival urban centres to the west, such as Blackpool. The same tale of decline is found in the area round Leeds, where in all probability it began rather earlier than at Preston.

Country Carriers in the Nineteenth Century 299 Guildford was a much smaller town than Preston, with no more than 8,000 inhabitants in 1851 and about double that number by the end of the century.27 Even by southern standards it was not a large town; yet though barely 30 miles from London, it was the chief market town and carriers' centre for most of west Surrey and West Sussex. Its hinterland extended nearly as far as Chichester in a southerly direction and covered almost 250,000 acres. The most interesting feature to note about this area is the fact that despite a good deal of railway development and the gradual extension of London's commuterland, its extent varied remarkably little between the 18505 and the First World War. The truth seems to be that Guildford was then just sufficiently beyond commuting distance to be wholly independent of it. The one significant change was the increasing frequency of services. In 1854 45 carriers operated 106 services and made 261 calls or scheduled stops each week; in 1884 42 carriers operated 117 services, making 332 calls or stops; and in 1914 41 carriers operated 166 services, making 553 stops. There is thus no sign in this area of the decline of the country carrier that had taken place around Preston. It was the war that brought the first signs of change; but even after that event, by 1923, the figures had returned almost to their pre-war level. These facts may at first glance seem surprising; but to anyone familiar with the writings of Gertrude Jekyll and George Sturt they will not seem incredible; for this was the area, after all, of Old West Surrey (1904), Change in the Village (1912) and The Wheelwright's Shop (1923). There is abundant evidence from other areas, moreover, that the experience of Guildford was more characteristic than that of Preston. Certainly the recollections of old people in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire suggest that it was more or less closely paralleled in the east Midlands. Yet one must not exaggerate the decline even in the Preston area. Every Saturday morning until 1932 Walter Lord, cattle remover and carrier of Bleasdale, near Garstang, used to remove the tailboard from his wagon and fit two wooden benches inside to seat twelve local farmers with their produce for the journey to Preston market. It was only because the Traffic Commissioners refused to grant him a passenger licence that he was then forced to abandon this practice. In that refusal it is perhaps not fanciful to see something disagreeably symbolic of the time.

VI. THE RISE OF THE C A R R I E R S

CENTRES

Though it is impossible, as has been pointed out, to date the origins of the village carrier as distinct from the long-distance man with any precision, an examination of the first directory for Leicester to give a reasonably detailed list is suggestive. This is Fowler's Leicester Directory of 1815.28 Comparison of Fowler with Wright's volume for 1884 shews that over this period the number of country carriers journeying into Leicester week by week rose by three-quarters, from 116 to 204; the number of vilages recorded more than doubled, from 105 to 220; the number of services operated,

300


trebled, from 152 to 461; and the number of calls or scheduled stops increased sixfold from 188 to 1,1 oo. It is clear, then, that by 1884 there had been a very great expansion in the whole pattern of activity. Although this expansion was so striking, it is interesting to note that the actual area dependent on Leicester did not change very greatly in extent during the course of the century. The number of distinct routes in operation increased by less than half, from 116 to 170. The number of villages served was in fact rather higher in 1815 than the 105 recorded by Fowler, so that the expansion by 1884 was actually less pronounced than appears at first sight.29 Although by the end of the century, moreover, many additional outlying spots, such as Wymeswold, Sharnford, and Cold Overton, had been drawn within the orbit of the county town, it is noticeable that many routes still terminated at the same places as before: at Kegworth, Ibstock, Nailstone, and Walton-on-theWolds, for instance, at Atherstone, Kilworth, Medbourne, and Tilton-on-the-Hill. Broadly speaking, therefore, and with many variations of detail, the Leicester carriers' region of 1884 had already come into existence by 1815. How far back it had existed before the nineteenth century it is more difficult to say. The Universal British Directory of 1791 lists only 48 places in the county with direct services to Leicester. Clearly this list is an incomplete one: the Billesdon carrier, for instance, must have passed by Thurnby and Houghton, though no services are recorded for those villages. It may well be, however, that the pattern of village carriers' routes around towns like Leicester developed, like the village shop, chiefly during the second half of the eighteenth century. During the Victorian period many carriers were also part-time shopkeepers, and up to a point there was a direct connexion between the two developments, for carriers often brought back supplies for village shops from the market town. It is worth noting that in the Northamptonshire Militia Lists, 1777 (1973), which gives the occupations of nearly 12,000 people in the county, only one village carrier is recorded for Middleton near Cottingham (p-25). The differences between the carriers' lists of 1815 and 1884 were nevertheless real enough. What had changed by the latter date, and often changed dramatically, was the number of services and calls, and the distribution of these services over the week as a whole. By 1884 not only were more villages served: most of them were served more frequently and some much more frequently than in 1815. In the latter year nearly three-quarters of the places listed by Fowfer were linked with Leicester only once a week and only 5 per cent more than twice. As in many towns at this time, the country trade was concentrated overwhelmingly on a single day each week - the chief market day. Of the 116 routes recorded in 1815, 87 ran only on Saturday, and no more than 22 on the town's second market day, Wednesday. In 1884, by contrast, the number of villages with only one service a week had dropped from 75 per cent of the total to 15 per cent. Nearly a third were now connected with Leicester on at least three days and more than 20 on five or six. The average number of services from each village had thus increased from fewer than two in 1815 to five by 1884. Nor was that all. For country folk Wednesday had now become almost as important a market day as Saturday, with


301

160 services compared with 201 on the latter day. Even the remaining days now accounted for as many as 100 weekly services compared with a mere 35 in 1815. These developments at Leicester indicate a gradual change in shopping habits amongst country people during the course of the nineteenth century, and they seem to have been paralleled in many other areas. They did not generally take place to any great extent around the smaller market towns like Melton Mowbray and Great Drimeld; but around the principal centres they were apparently commonplace by the i88os, and sometimes more evident than at Leicester. At Bristol, as we have seen, services during the 18905 were widely distributed over the week as a whole and bore little or no relation to the incidence of market day. At Maidstone the two traditional markets on Tuesday and Thursday remained important; but by 1884 services were also frequent on every other day of the week: 52 of them on Monday, 70 on Tuesday, 48 on Wednesday, 77 on Thursday, 53 on Friday, and 70 on Saturday. Behind these changes it seems tempting to discern, perhaps, a general growth of retail shops and a decline in the old weekly markets. This is a development that has often been posited in the past and there can be little doubt that it actually occurred in many places. At Bristol it seems clear that the markets no longer held their old place in the life of the city, and in that respect Bristol was certainly not unique. Yet in fact there was a good deal of regional variation in the ability of markets to survive alongside the growth of retail businesses. In Leicester they certainly shewed no tendency to decline; and although by 1884 the country trade was no longer confined to Saturday, it was still concentrated overwhelmingly on the old market days of the town. In Maidstone the dispersal of carriers' services over the week as a whole was perhaps chiefly occasioned not by a decline in markets, but by the comparative smallness of the town in relation to its hinterland. Whereas in Leicestershire the rural area added about 90,000 people to the 130,000 of the county town itself, at Maidstone it added 103,000 to an urban community of no more than 30,000. If the carriers had operated only on market days, the press of vehicles in Maidstone would have been quite intolerable. Even as it was there must often have been a solid block of carts and horses from end to end of the town, with 50 carriers parking in the High Street alone, not to mention the crowd of farmers' wagons and tradesmen's vans. It is quite a delusion to imagine that traffic jams are a creation of the automobile era. At Carlisle carts and wagons from the countryside around filled "all the principal streets and many of the lanes" on market day as early as i829.3° At Northampton the nave of All Saints' church was pulled down after the fire of 1675 specifically to facilitate the flow of traffic through the town. In this increasing frequency of carriers' services during the nineteenth century we can also see the increasing dependence of rural areas upon their local capitals, a deepening connexion between each 'country', in the old sense of the word, and its county town. True, many of the ancient centres like Exeter and Leicester had focused much of the commercial life of their region for centuries. Yet they had never been quite so intimately bound up with it as they were now. By means of that dense web of carriers'

302


routes that had grown up for the most part during the nineteenth century, they were now connected every week - often every day - with scores of villages and hundreds of farms. Whether it was Leicester or Maidstone, whether it was Bristol or Hull, whether it was Norwich or Ipswich, they focused the attention of their area as they hardly can have done hitherto: polarizing its interests, orienting its economy, accentuating its distinctive character, and imparting to it a certain insularity and independence of mind. At a time when there was apparently so much to break down regional individuality in England, the fact that the old county towns and market centres, far from declining, were deepening their regional hold is worth pondering. It was a fact that necessarily worked against the tendency towards centralization in London: but it will come as no surprise to readers of The Mill on the Floss or The Old Wives' Tale. Provincial society in the nineteenth century was too varied and subtle in its development, too full of survivals and peculiarities, to fit neatly into any preconceived theories of urban evolution. Hand in hand with the increasing frequency of carriers' services during the nineteenth century went the rise of the village carriers' inns. The long-distance men had long had their own special hostelries, often by the mid-eighteenth century in towns like Leicester and Northampton; but these establishments, with their great stables, granaries, and warehouses, fulfilled a rather different purpose from the inns of the village carriers. Primarily they were intended for overnight accommodation, whereas the village men rarely stayed overnight, and their inns were essentially meeting places - the meeting-places of a local fraternity. During the nineteenth century it is clear that in many towns a small group of inns, usually those nearest the market, were able to attract a growing part of the country trade and so become noted centres for these village men. Certainly this was so in Leicester. In 1815 there were 50 inns in the town frequented by them, but most of these were patronized by no more than one or two carriers and only six by more than four. In 1884, by contrast, the number of carriers' inns had dropped to 43, but these were now headed by a close little caucus of ten dominant establishments which between them accounted for half the carrying trade of the town. The Saracen's Head, for instance, was the meeting-place for 11 carriers, the Anchor for 13, and the Fox for 15: altogether the men based on these three inns alone ran 87 services a week and connected 93 villages with Leicester. In Maidstone much the same development occurred, perhaps indeed to a greater extent than at Leicester since the town was so much smaller. There, more than 40 carriers met every week at two of the principal inns in the High Street - or the High Town as it used to be called - the Royal Star and the Rose and Crown: and to these inns they ran 132 services each week linking the country-folk of 91 places in the area with their local capital. In towns like Leicester and Maidstone, as a consequence, the 'carriers dinners' and 'market dinners' at the big inns formed a great gathering centre for country people from all over the region. Where such towns were also major centres of local railway lines, as at Leicester and York, the railways themselves reinforced these developments with the numerous 'market special' trains they put on.


303

Amongst the carriers themselves, oral evidence suggests that there was often a strong sense of community, fostered occasionally by relationship, but much more by their meeting one another week by week in the inns. Certainly in Leicestershire carriers from every part of the shire came to know one another intimately in this way; for they met together not only to eat and drink, but to do business, to gossip, argue, and exchange the news. This impression is confirmed for the King's Lynn region by Arthur Randell in Sixty Years a Penman (1967). Early in the twentieth century Randell used to go into Lynn with his father's aunt, 88-year-old Mrs Blade, who had been driving her carrier's cart from Wiggenhall to Lynn three times a week for more than 50 years. The passengers sat on three boards placed across the cart and there were usually 12 or 15 of them. The cart left Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen at 8.45 a.m. and passed through Wiggenhall St Peter's and St German's on its way into market. At St German's Hall the cart used to be stopped to allow Mrs Blade to go into the kitchen, where the butler always gave her something hot to drink. Not surprisingly the seven-mile journey took three hours and the cart did not arrive in Lynn till just before mid-day: a later arrival than in workaday Leicestershire, where they took business more seriously. After driving through the streets delivering orders, Mrs Blade pulled up at the Three Tuns, where the mare was taken out of the shafts and given a feed and water, while she and her party went into the inn for their dinner. There were always many other carriers dining there, from Massingham, Hunstanton, Harply, and other places; and since Mrs Blade was much the oldest of them, "she was looked upon as the Queen of the Carriers, and they would all get together and drink and talk of life in their villages ..." 3I No doubt many areas had their Mrs Blades. Certainly amongst the carriers of many regions there was a striking nexus of localized family names: the Busbys and Gelsthorpes in Leicestershire, for instance, the Toones and Hornbuckles, the Iliffes, Pochins, and Peberdys; or the Homewoods and Busswoods in Kent, the Bottles and Brigdens, the Igglesdens, Mackledens, and Waghorns: all of them names as local as can be, imparting to each region its own authentic character, as distinctive as the local dialect: most of them, moreover, names that can still be seen over old shop-doorways and in local directories. In Kent the same names also crop up, again and again, amongst the farming families of the county and amongst the trading folk and professional firms in towns like Maidstone and Canterbury. For the old county towns and the regional centres like Bristol and Hull were meccas not only of village carriers but of the whole indigenous life of their district. As the old farming families of the area proliferated during the nineteenth century, it was to these towns, much more than to London, that their junior branches tended to migrate: and there, at every point in the social spectrum they reappear: as brewers and bankers, as drapers and innkeepers, as surveyors, estate agents, doctors, and solicitors - as well as village carriers.32

304


Maidstone Carriers, 1882: number of calls Key to map opposite. The figure in brackets after each name represents the number of carriers stopping weekly. 1. Wateringbury (8) 2. Teston(i) 3. Banning (i) 4. West Farleigh (3) 5. East Farleigh (3) 6. Dean Street (i) 7. Coxheath(3) 8. Loose (10) 9. BoughtonMonchelsea(2) 10. Linton(io) 11. Langley(8) 12. Leeds (2) 13. Otham(i) 14. Weavering Street (i) 15. Beamed (2) 16. Detling(2) 17. Boxley(i) 18. Forstal(i) 19. Aylesford(2) 20. Ditton(2) 21. East Mailing (3) 22. Larkfieldfr) 23. Ham Hill (i) 24. Snodland(2J 25. Hailing (i) 26. Birling(4) 27. Leybourne(3) 28. Offham(2) 29. West MalKng (4) 30. Mereworth(7) 31. West Peckham (2) 32. Nettlestead (3) 33. Hadlow(4) 34. East Peckham (3) 35. Yalding(4) 36. Benover(i) 37. Hunton(3) 38. Collier Street (2) 39. Claygate(i) 40. Stilebridge (i) 41. Marden(6) 42. Staplehurst (9) 43. Headcom(7)

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Sutton Valence (8) Chart Sutton (2) East Sutton (4) Ulcombe(2) Crafty Green (i) Boughton Malherbe (4) Liverton Street (i) Sandway(3) Lenham(4) Harrietsham (2) Parkgate(3) Hollingbourne (2) Sittingbourne (i) Milton Regis (i) Key Street (i) Newington(2) Stockbury(3) Hartlip(i) Rainham(i) Bredhurst(i) Lidsing(i) Gillingham (2) New Brompton (i) Old Brompton (i) Strood(i) Rochester (2) Chatham (2) Wouldham(i) Burham(3) Ryarsh(i) Addington (j) Wrotham Heath (3) Wrotham (3) Borough Green (2) Ightham(3) St Mary's Platt (2) Crouch (i) Plaxtol(2) Dunk's Green (2) Seal St Lawrence (i) Seal (2) Riverhead(2) Sevenoaks(3) Tonbridge(i) Southborough (i) Tunbridge Wells (2) Tudeley(i)

91. Five Oak Green (i) 92. Pembury(i) 93. Paddock Wood (i) 94. Brenchley(2) 95. Matfield Green (i) 96. Horsmonden (i) 97. Goudhurst(i) 98. Lamberhurst (i) 99. Sissinghurst (3) 100. Cranbrook(5) 101. Benenden(4) 102. Hawkhurst(4) 103. Rolvenden(2) 104. Biddenden(4) 105. High Halden (i) 106. Tenterden(3) 107. Smarden(2) 108. Egerton(i) 109. Pluckley(2) no. Bethersden (i) in. Great Chart (i) 112. Lenham Heath (3) 113. Charing Heath (2) 114. Charing (2) 115. Hothfield(i) 116. Ashford(s) 117. Doddington (i) 118. Newnham(i) 119. Ospringe(i) 120. Faversham(i) 121. Farningham (i) 122. Foot's Cray (i) 123. St Mary Cray (i) 124. Orpington (i) 125. Hurst Green (i) 126. Battle (i) 127. Seddlescombe (i) 128. St Leonards (i) 129. Hastings (i) 130. Sandhurst (i) 131. Newenden(i) 132. Northiam(i) 133. Ewhurst(i) 134. Beckley(i) 135. Peasmarsh(i) 136. Iden(i) 137. Frittenden (i)


MAIDSTONE CARR I ERS,1 882. N U M B E R OF C A L L S .

305

306

Landscape and Community in England NOTES

1. The British Museum apparently has no copy of this work; there is a copy in Leicester University Library. 2. F. M. L. Thompson, Victorian England; the Horse-Drawn Society (1970), 19. 3. Edmund Calamy's reference to Mr Adrian Cook, the Nottingham-London carrier in the 16505 ( The Ejected or Silenced Ministers, 2nd edn, II, 522), suggests that Cook was a man of some consideration in Nottingham, who was listened to when he suggested candidates for preacher at St Mary's Church I am indebted to Mr Rupert Evans for this interesting reference. 4. 'Town and Country in Victorian Leicestershire: the Role of the Village Carrier', in Perspectives in English Urban History, ed. Alan Everitt (1973). 5. I wish particularly to thank the following: Messrs Michael Sherrington (for work on Preston), Ric Rogers (South Devon), David Aldred (Cheltenham), David Kaye (Boston and Brigg), Stephen Hampton (Guildford), David Page (Bristol), David Robson (Scarborough), John Mitchell (King's Lynn), Julian Johnston (Oxford), Garry Neave and Philip Lloyd (Norwich), Mark McDermott (Taunton and Bridgwater), Roger Bone (Brighton), R. Gribble (Ipswich), Ian Jones (Colchester), Peter Shilling (Worcester), Keith Thomson (Hull), Robert Albery (Norwich); Mrs Margery Tranter (Derby); the Misses Clare Tester (Bristol), Christine Ironfield (Maiton and Great Drimeld), Catherine Woodhouse (Winchester), Elizabeth Musson (Chesterfield), Elizabeth Edwards (Newcastle upon Tyne), Olive Noble (Lincoln), Anne Hartley (Bradford), Christine Ingham (Hull), Sheila Kelliher (Devizes). The work on Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Kent I have done myself. I am also much indebted to Mrs Margery Tranter for planning and drawing the map of the Maidstone area. 6. Kent Archives Office, Q/Ci. This appears to be a unique collection and relates to 540 debtors in the county, many of them small tradesmen of some kind. 7. 1974 edn, 45. Cp. also Gertrude Jekyll, Old West Surrey (1904), 924: "Now the carriers carry note-books, but the older men, who could neither read nor write, could remember, and would fill their vans with their many commissions without forgetting anything or making a mistake." 8. Ex inf. Mr Stanley C.Jenkins, based on the Works Committee Minutes of the Oxford, Worcester, & Wolverhampton Railway (British Transport History Records Office, RAIL 558/16). 9. Michael Sherrington, Preston Carriers (i 841-1932}: from the Railway Age to the Motor Age (M. A. thesis, University ofLeicester, 1973), 81. 10. Ex inf. Mr David Kaye. 11. Sherrington, op. cit., 44. 12. Ibid., 53. 13. Ex inf. Mr Maurice Wilford of Clipston. I am grateful to Professor Luke Herrmann for putting me in touch with Mr Wilford. 14. H. C. Darby, A New Historical Geography of 'England{1973), 691, quoting E. A. Pratt, The Transition in Agriculture (1906), 99-101. Most of the produce went by road because it involved less handling than rail transport. 15. Ex inf. Mr Keith Thomson, from local oral sources. 16. Stephen Glover, The History and Directory of the Borough of Derby (1843), 9, (1850), 9, (1858), VIII. 17. Jack Simmons, 'Thomas Cook ofLeicester', in Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions, xux(i973-4), 18. 18. Ex inf. Mr Maurice Wilford. 19. Mr Stephen Hampton used these to good effect in his Leicester M.A. thesis, Country Carriers of West Surrey: a Study of the Guildford Area, 1850-1950(1^1). Their coverage, however, was patchy. 20. A thorough search in the Preston and Guildford areas by Messrs Michael Sherrington and Stephen Hampton brought little to light.


307

21. Jekyll, op. cit., (1904), 294.1 am indebted to Mr Stephen Hampton for this interesting reference. The carts in question ran from Bramley to Guildford. There was also a number in Surrey used to draw fishcarts. The dogs used were Newfoundlands and the teams of four carried four hundredweight of fish. 22. See map on p. 305. 23. Everitt, loc. cit. 24. A Faversham chemist's account book (in private hands) relating to the period about 1900 shews this strikingly: many of the orders came from farmers and other country people and related to agricultural requirements. 25. Kelly's Directory of Kent (1882), 345. Many watermen are recorded in the Maidstone Poll Book of 1802. 26. This paragraph is based on Sherrington, op. cit. 27. This paragraph is based on Hampton, op. cit. 28. I am much indebted to Mr Roger Bone for drawing my attention to this directory. 29. There is a number of places through which carriers passed en route for other villages, as Groby on the way to Markfield, for which Fowler records no service. It is difficult to believe that they did not sometimes stop there. 30. Darby, op. cit., 504, quoting Parson and White's Directory of Cumberland and "Westmorland (1829), 31. Arthur Randell, Sixty Years a Penman (1967), 21-2. There is an illustration of Mrs Blade, aged 90, and also of her horse and van. I am indebted to Mr Michael Sherrington for this interesting reference. 32. These remarks are based on my own unpublished paper on 'Kentish farming families in the nineteenth century', for which about 4,500 families were examined. The paper was written for the conference of the British Agricultural History Society at Wye College in April 1972.


12

DYNASTY AND COMMUNITY SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY1

1. Introductory Arnold Bennett once remarked that people are always complaining that the romance of life has departed, but that until it has departed it is never romance. It is not my purpose in this paper to argue that the romance of life has departed; but we can often learn something of history by observing the changing scene around us, and pondering on the origin of those social institutions with which we were once familiar, but which have transformed themselves, or perhaps disappeared altogether, during our lifetime. Like many of our older novelists, Bennett was a perceptive social historian; it was his ability to observe and ponder in this way on the social institutions of the Five Towns, as they developed and transformed themselves, that lent historic depth to novels like Clay hanger and The Old Wives' Tale. One of the dominant themes in his work was the force of dynastic connexion in provincial society; and one of the great changes that many of us have witnessed during our lifetime has been the decline of that kind of influence over the country as a whole. It is the origin and the impact of this phenomenon that I wish to explore, very tentatively, in this lecture. I am not thinking of it at the level of landed families, or of what is commonly called the Old Boys' Network, but essentially at the provincial level. If I am asked to define what I mean by 'provincial', I am tempted to say anywhere outside

1 This is the text of my James Ford Special Lecture in Oxford on 28 October 1983. I am grateful to the Electors for inviting me, and particularly to Mr James Campbell, whose hospitality at Worcester College made it a memorable occasion. There are many other aspects of the subject on which evidence has been collected and which I hope to return to at a future date; but in the circumstances it seemed best to reproduce the lecture virtually as it was given, apart from a few verbal amendments and a revised conclusion; this explains the personal element in the following pages. I must also thank the Centre of East Anglian Studies of the University of East Anglia for permission to summarize here four of the paragraphs regarding farmers and blacksmiths which appeared in a more extended form in my Helen Sutermeister Lecture, Transformation and Tradition: Aspects of the Victorian Countryside, 1984, delivered at Norwich in 1982.1 hesitate to reproduce what I have already said more fully elsewhere; but to have excluded these topics would have impaired the argument of this paper.

310 Landscape and Community in England the Thames valley, except that there is nowhere so provincial as a London suburb. The decline I refer to is not, of course, a total one. There are still many spheres in which local dynastic connexion exerts a more powerful influence than is generally supposed. At a modest level, local family businesses remain sufficiently common in many retail trades, for example among greengrocers and butchers, tobacconists, newsagents, and chemists. They also remain characteristic of some, though not all, professional occupations, such as firms of estate-agents and of attorneys. Towns like Leicester and Maidstone still have their old solicitors' practices, family firms of venerable tradition and intense respectability, rarely given to hasty decisions, apt guardians of the affairs of our universities and deans and chapters. Nevertheless, against these vestiges of an older creation, we must set extensive losses. One of the most familiar, perhaps, is the gradual disappearance since the war of those great local drapers', grocers', ironmongers', and purveyors' establishments which once lent a certain individuality to every English country town of any consequence, and without which no self-respecting High Street in my own childhood could have contemplated a future existence. Stafford, it is true, still has its Woodalls, founded in the 1860's, Tunbridge Wells its Weekes's, Cheltenham its Cavendish House, Leicester its Walkers, and Kingston on Thames its Bentalls: all of them long-established firms still headed by at least one member of the founding family.2 There are other survivors, of course; but nowadays they are far outnumbered by those that have either ceased trading altogether, or else yielded to the somewhat doubtful embraces of Debenhams, Fenwicks, or the House of Fraser. Oxford no longer has its Elliston and Cavells, Northampton its Adnitts, or Canterbury its Le Fevres; Tunbridge Wells has lost its Dusts and its Waymarks, Sevenoaks its Youngs, Wrights, and Winties, and Leicester its Barnetts, Adderleys, Morgan Squires, Simpkin and James's, and Broughton and Jones's.3 Deploring the course of change is a singularly futile exercise, though one much beloved by the English. My sole purpose in mentioning the 2

I am indebted to Mr John Roles for the information regarding Cavendish House, and to Mrs Joyce Miles for that regarding Woodalls. The latter firm was established in 1869 by Josiah Lovatt and William Woodall; it still occupies the premises in which it was founded in the centre of Stafford. Walkers of Leicester was established in 1820. 3 Messrs Simpkin and James's originated in 1862, when Joseph Simpkin purchased the business of a retiring grocer, James Kirby, who had been in Leicester 'upwards of 45 years'. When it closed in 1970, the business itself had thus been operating for more than 150 years. It was a remarkable institution, with an astonishing range of stock, and a delivery service covering the whole of Leicesterhsire. -J. D. Bennett, 'The Story of Simpkin and James', The Leicestershire Historian, 1976, pp. 6 sqq. The gradual disappearance of family-breweries is another example of the decline of dynastic connexion. In 1870 there were more than 100 breweries in the single county of Kent; they were still numerous in my own childhood, in villages like Hadlow and Wateringbury as well as in towns like Maidstone and Faversham. Shepherd Neame's of Faversham is one of the few to remain in family hands.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 311 disappearance of family firms like these is to point up the historic fact that in a sense they were more than retail shops: they were landmarks, they were meeting-places, they were social institutions. Their origins often went back to the early nineteenth century, sometimes as in the case of Youngs of Sevenoaks to the eighteenth, and their roots ran deep in the local society of the area in question. When you look into their history, what you often find is that they formed part of an extensive network of local families whose ramifications spread far beyond the sphere of retail trade, into the professions, the processing trades, the industries, and the crafts of the town; and beyond it into the farming clans of the neighbourhood, into the ranks of the parsons, and occasionally into the minor landed families of the surrounding country. That is not always true, but it is frequently. We know a great deal about this kind of dynastic ramification at the level of the aristocracy, the squirearchy, and the landed gentry. We know a fair amount at the level of the so-called 'clerisy' - the Darwins, the Wordsworths, the Stephens, the Arnolds, the Stracheys, and so on. There are many important studies in print of historic family firms, usually industrial firms like Pilkingtons, Wedgwoods, Arkwrights, Crawshays, and Darbys.4 There is also a growing number of community studies, such as W. G. Hoskins's Midland Peasant, where the rise of a 'peasant aristocracy' has been identified, or the survival of what Marilyn Strathern described at Elmdon as 'kinship at the core'. For Oxford itself we have Dr Mary Prior's remarkable reconstruction of the evolution of family-networks in Fisher Row. At the other end of the economic scale we have Dr Richard Wilson's study of the merchant-community of Leeds between 1700 and 1830, perhaps the finest work of its kind.5 Where I think we still have much to learn is in visualizing and recreating those entire networks of regional and dynastic connexion which extended beyond the limits of the individual community, and which developed largely outside the ranks of the aristocracy and squirearchy. Over the past three or four centuries it seems to me that this principle of dynastic connexion, if I may so describe it, became an extaordinarily pervasive feature of English provincial society, though at the level of academic history it has been comparatively little studied. It not only shaped the structure of politics, where it has long been familiar; it influenced the 4 As, for example: T. C. Barker, Pilkington Brothers and the Glass Industry, 1960; R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and Arkwrights, 1964; J. P. Addis, The Crawshay Dynasty: a Study in Industrial Organization and Development, 1957; A. Raistrick, A Dynasty oflronfounders: the Darbys ofCoalbrookdale, 1953; S. D. Chapman, Stanton and Staveley: a Business History, 1981. 5 W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: an Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village, 1957; Marilyn Strathern, Kinship at the Core: an Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in North-West Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties, 1981; Mary Prior, Fisher Row: Fishermen, Bargemen, and Canal Boatmen in Oxford, 1500-1900, 1983; R. G. Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants: the Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700-1830,1971.

312 Landscape and Community in England course of regional trade; it facilitated the evolution of technical skills; it moulded the development of many professions; it channelled the diffusion of ideas; it bound the society of town and country together. It affected farming, it affected industry, it affected retail trade, it affected craftsmanship, it affected the church, it affected Nonconformity, it affected the army and the navy. These are large claims, and I shall not attempt to touch on all of them. But before proceeding to detailed examples, there are several problems of approach, and several underlying historical considerations, that need to be briefly discussed. 2. Approaches and Problems To begin with, a few points of method. The first to note is that, if we are to identify these family-galaxies, we generally need to study neighbourhoods rather than idividual places in isolation. If, for example, you examine the two typical south Leicestershire parishes of Kimcote and Gilmorton, you will find very few families that have remained within their borders continuously for as much as two centuries; but there is a substantial nexus of dynasties, such as the Wormleightons, the Bloxhams, and the Burdetts, that have remained in the same neighbourhood since the fifteenth or sixteenth century, moving around within an irregular circuit of five or six parishes.6 By the same token, secondly, we must not restrict our sights too narrowly to a single social class; for one of the striking features of the kind of families I speak of is the extent to which they transcended the boundaries of class and formed a continuous spectrum of status from craftsmen and shopkeepers to parsons, solicitors, and minor gentry. Thirdly, in studying any provincial society, we need to identify the core of dominant families who for one reason or another came to form the focus of influence within it. In the eye of heaven, no doubt, and before the dread bar of the computer, we are all equal; but in a fallen world that is rarely the whole truth about any human society; a group or knot of central or 'focal' families almost always develops. It is the gradual evolution of these 'focal families', through intermarriage and descent, to form a more or less extensive and cohesive network, over the last three centuries or so, that forms my real subject. It will not remain an unchanging network; from time tcTtime new strands will be woven into it and old strands will die out; yet once established it often comes to form a tenacious element of continuity at the heart of the society in question. In Gilmorton, for example, over a period of 250 years a small group of five related families of this kind held the office of church-warden for a total of 189 years, the Burdett family on no fewer than 72 occasions.7 6

Martin Bloxsom, A History of the Parish of Gilmorton, in the County of Leicester, 1918; ex inf. the late Rev. R. A. Cowling of Kimcote. 7 Bloxsom, op. cit., p. 83.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 313 Then, fourthly, we need to consider the origins of these central or focal families: and here I am increasingly struck by the extent to which they were drawn from the indigenous families of the area in question. That is not always true; there are generally a few exceptions, sometimes many; yet of the numerous places and neighbourhoods that have come to my own notice, Victorian Market Harborough was quite unusual in being dominated by two total strangers, the Scottish Symington brothers, who respectively founded the town's food-processing and corset-manufactories. The former still exists; the latter, when built in the 1870's, was said to be the largest corsetfactory in the world; it now houses the Harborough District Council.8 If these points of method have guided my own approach, what makes me think that it was the Stuart and Hanoverian eras in particular that witnessed the rise of these 'focal families' and their consolidation into united dynastic networks? It is a suggestion that must be tentative and can only be advanced with many qualifications. Connexions of this kind were, after all, a potent force in medieval society.9 Among farming families, especially in oldenclosed counties, there was often a direct link between the late-medieval network and that of the Victorian era, a point I shall return to later. Among clerical families, moreover, we can sometimes trace the beginnings of dynastic connexion virtually to the institution of clerical marriage itself at the Reformation. In most other spheres, however, and particularly in English towns, it is rare in my observation to find much continuity between the dominant families of the nineteenth century and those of the sixteenth at the social level I am concerned with. The rise of the long-established familyfirm, after all, is very largely a post-Elizabethan development. Our oldest businesses sometimes go back to the early eighteenth or late seventeenth century - Twining's tea, for example, to 1706, the Kentish Gazette to 1716, Spinks' of St James's to 1666, Adams's Ironstone to 1657 - but hardly ever beyond that period. In the professions generally it is in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that Geoffrey Holmes has established the really dramatic development of family groupings.10 In Leeds Richard Wilson 8

There is an article on the Symingtons and their businesses in Market Harborough by C. E. Page in The Leicestershire Historian, 1981/2; the corset-firm subsequently established factories in Desborough and Rothwell (Northants), Farnham (Surrey), and Rugby, and eventually in five overseas countries after the Second World War. Part of the Harborough factory has also been developed as a museum of the trade. 9 In towns as well as in the countryside and among landed families. William Caxton's numerous kinsmen in Kent, for example, included a prosperous clan of fellow-mercers in Canterbury. - George D. Painter, William Caxton: a Quincentenary Biography, 1976, and review of Lotte Hellinga, Caxton in Focus, 1982, in The Times Literary Supplement, 4 Feb. 1983. 10 Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State, and Society, 16801730, 1982. Professor Holmes develops this theme particularly amongst clerics, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, schoolmasters, naval officers, and army officers. Family groupings may of course be found in some professions by the early seventeenth century.

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focussed his survey of the merchant community on the generations between 1700 and 1830, though he was not implying that such families came to an end at the latter date. Amongst the 70 or 80 interlocking dynasties that dominated mid-Victorian Leicester, there were several that went back to the mid-eighteenth century but very few as far as the late seventeenth.11 Though there was obviously much variation from place to place and occupation to occupation, the two tentative generalizations that we can perhaps make are these: first, that the process of dynastic cohesion rapidly accelerated after the mid-seventeenth century; and secondly, that it achieved a kind of apotheosis in the later Georgian and High Victorian eras. If we ponder for a moment on the visual evidence, there are many little symptoms, after all, that bear out this suggestion. Think, for example, of those handsome Queen Anne and Hanoverian houses that still dominate many of our older towns like Salisbury, Warwick, and Louth: I do not mean those built for landed families, but for lawyers, doctors, merchants, brewers, aldermen, pseudo-gentry, and the like. Or think of the development of dynastic monuments at this level in so many of our urban churches and churchyards: at St Mary's, Ashford, for example, which is a veritable shrine of family memorials of this kind, predominantly dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Or think of those many country churches in counties like Kent, where you can find a whole series of monuments and floor-slabs recording the descent and the alliances of local yeoman dynasties: sometimes tiptoeing up into the ranks of the quasi-gentry over this period, like some of the Pilchers of East Kent; sometimes developing into major naval dynasties, like the Harveys of Eastry; sometimes rising to the level of squarsons, like the Edmeades of Nursted, where many of the monuments in the churchyard also relate to this single prolific dynasty.12 Or think again, at a somewhat later period, of the building of those great middle-class suburbs, like Stoneygate in Leicester, whose development between 1810 and 1910 is a kind of epitome of the rise of the focal family network in that particular city. Or think yet again of the profoundly symbolic development of the box-pew, from the late-

11 For the nineteenth century, see Dinah Freer, The Dynasty-Builders of Victorian Leicester', Trans, of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, LIH, 1977-8, pp. 42-54, based on the author's M. Phil, thesis, Business Families in Victorian Leicester: a Study in Historical Sociology, University of Leicester, 1975. 12 For the Harveys, see Colin Matson, 'Men of Kent. 2. Harvey of Eastry', Archaeologia Cantiana, LXXXV, 1965, pp. 98-106, especially p. 103. They produced several admirals and captains. The Edmeades still live at Nursted Court; about 60 members of the family are recorded in the churchyard and 30 in the church, from 1691 onwards.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 315 seventeenth century onwards: essentially, after all, a private, family pew, a dynastic pew . . . in a George Eliot world.13 If I am right in suggesting the dominance of this period, it is not difficult to discern a number of underlying trends contributing to the development of dynastic connexion, particularly after 1750: the increase of population, the growth of towns, the rise of manufactures, the proliferation of the professions, the general expansion of the economy, and the opportunities which such developments clearly opened up for family aggrandisement. Neither should we forget the decline of long-distance migration amongst apprentices, which in towns like Northampton and Oxford, along with other factors, necessarily intensified the local and regional concentration of many provincial families.14 These are important considerations; but nicest of them are familiar, and it is not my intention to pursue them further. There is one matter, however, which in the present context is perhaps less obvious and which seems to me to need brief discussion. This is the increasing scale of what may inelegantly be described as the 'focal household'. I do not mean the size of household in general, and 'household' is not perhaps quite the right word anyway; but it will have to serve. In the countryside one important circumstance behind the development I refer to was that old problem of English historiography, the decline of the small landowner, or rather its equally debatable corollary, the rise of the large farm and the large farming household. For although the occupier of the large, new farm might often be only a tenant rather than a freeholder, there was a sense in which this development increased his power in the locality because it increased the scale of his farming operations. This was, I think, one important factor in the growth of regional dynastic connexion in that section of society - the farming comminity - where in the nineteenth century it was most obviously extensive and most deeply entrenched. Both in areas of old scattered settlement and in areas where enclosure led to the dispersal of farmsteads out into the fields, we must, as a consequence, visualize many a farmhouse as developing over this period into a community in its own right, into a little commonwealth on its own. It was probably on the great arable farms of eastern Scotland that this phenomenon became most strikingly apparent. There Malcolm Gray has described communities in the 13 The box-pew came into fashion after the Restoration. When Northampton All Saints was rebuilt after the fire of 1675, it was specifically designed to accommodate box-pews; so too were some of the contemporaneous Wren churches in London. Those at Whitby typically date from the late-seventeenth to early-nineteenth century. - David Hey, Buildings of Britain, 1550-1750: Yorkshire, 1981, p. 122. Most box-pews were ripped out by Victorian ecclesiologists; but quite a number of Kentish churches still retain eighteenth-century examples. There is a fascinating sequence of dated pews, indicating the change-over to the box-type, in St Andrew's, Slaidburn, Yorkshire. 14 Based on: Northampton Borough Records, analysis of Apprenticeship Registers (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries); V.C.H., Oxfordshire, IV, The City of Oxford, 1979, pp. 115 sqq. et passim.

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nineteenth century of up to a hundred dependants, organized on a strictly hierarchical basis of ploughmen, cattlemen, 'orramen', shepherds, and the like, whose families lived in rows of cottages near the steading, and rarely went beyond the bounds of the farm except to attend kirk and school.15 Such extreme examples must have been uncommon over much of England; yet even in Kent, where farms were rarely on the scale of those in the great arable counties, there are scores of places, like Swarling in Petham and Matfield in Brenchley, where a row of cottages was added to the old farmstead, along with new buildings and oasts in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.16 What we need to envisage about such settlements, moreover, is that they were not merely isolated units. During this same period they became focal points or 'nerve-knots' in an ever-expanding network of farming dynasties, a point I shall return to later. The increasing scale of the 'focal household' was also paralleled in towns though perhaps less frequently, as families expanded and domestic servants and resident employees multiplied. Take the case of early Victorian Cheltenham, for example, and its retail drapers. In the Census of 1851 there were 65 drapers recorded, of whom 17 employed no resident assistants and most of the remainder only one or two. But there were two startling exceptions. The premises of Shirer and Co. in Imperial Circus housed William Debenham, his wife, their children, and their domestic servants, together with 19 shop assistants, three apprentices, two porters, and a clerk - a household of nearly 40 people in all. The rival firm of Cavendish House, in which the Debenham family also had an interest, similarly housed 17 draper's and silk mercer's assistants, and eight draper's and milliner's assistants.17 The mistresses of such urban establishments as these, like their cousins the Mrs Poysers of the Victorian countryside, needed organizing abilities of no insignificant order. They were far from the clinging, vapouring wives of Victorian legend. They were perfectly capable of continuing the family business if their husbands predeceased them, just as their counterparts in the countryside often continued to run their husband's farm. In the 1850's and '60's, indeed, there were nearly 23,000 women-farmers in

15

Malcolm Gray, The Regions and their Issues: Scotland', in The Victorian Countryside, ed. G. E. Mingay, 1981,1, p. 86. 16 These conditions lay behind the 'great rebuilding' of labourers' cottages in counties like Kent between c. 1770 and 1870. In the Midlands generally much of this rebuilding was accommodated in the villages; but in Leicestershire there are many farmhouses where a third storey was added at this time, often no doubt to house farm-servants, or where accommodation was added round the farmyard or near the house, as at Great Poultney Farm in Misterton. Dating must remain tentative till the subject has been systematically investigated in documents and on the ground; but it is well known that there are virtually no labourers' cottages antedating c. 1700. 17 John L. Roles, 'The Dull Haunts of Business': a Study of Retailing in Cheltenham, 1800-1851, M. A. Dissertation, University of Leicester, 1982, p. 69.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 317 England and Wales, an average of four or five hundred in every county: an historic fact of which I happily make a present to the Virago Press.18 3. Dynasty and Community In what kinds of context, then, in what types of community, in what circumstances, were dynastic networks of the kind I refer to most likely to arise? We might note first, perhaps, their evolution in provincial towns. In place after place, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, or sometimes the sixteenth, we can trace the beginnings of a new aristocracy of trading families, which gradually comes to form a basis for the dynastic network of the town. I am not thinking so much of places with a great staple trade, though of course these can be found, but of those with a varied spectrum of occupations in which the hereditary principle, though not universal, tends to become more pronounced as time moves on. In Gloucester, for example, Mr P. J. G. Ripley has described how between 1640 and 1740 the maltsters tanners, mercers, drapers, grocers, and cheesemongers of the town came to form an 'aristocracy of wealth', as he terms it.19 With local variations, that diverse pattern was frequently repeated in old urban centres which no longer retained a staple industry of their own. It was repeated in Northampton, for example, where mercers, drapers, tanners, grocers, and maltsters were among the richest families in the town, though there, by the eighteenth century, they had been joined by major innholding dynasties like the Lyons and the Peaches.20 In Canterbury there was likewise a varied range of dominant trades, in addition to the local silk industry; and there Stella Corpe has identified some 50 long-established families who in the eighteenth century formed a self-perpetuating oligarchy in the city, and whose intricate interconnexion was, in her words, 'as complex as that among the Kentish gentry' of the surrounding countryside.21 In many places this kind of diverse spectrum of occupations remained a major element in the network of focal families until the end of the nineteenth century; but naturally it was not unchanging. Professional families over this period frequently came to be more influential, and in many towns the rise of regional or local industry obviously modified the original pattern. In Worcester the growing wealth of the glove-manufacturers placed great power in the hands of a few local families like the Prices, who figure so 18 Pamela Horn, The Rural World, 1780-1850: Social Change in the English Countryside, 1980, p. 244. 19 P. J. G. Ripley, The City of Gloucester, 1660-1740, M. Litt. thesis, University of Bristol, 1977, p. 78. 20 Alan Everitt, The English Urban Inn, 1560-1760', in Perspectives in English Urban History, ed. Alan Everitt, 1973, pp. 129 sqq. 21 Stella Corpe, 'Canterbury Freeman, 1700-1750', dissertation for Diploma in Local History, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1982, pp. 14, 36-37.

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prominently in the Victorian novels of Mrs Henry Wood, herself the daughter of Thomas Price.22 In Northampton, a smaller town than Worcester in 1801 but a much larger one by 1901, a more dramatic transformation was wrought by the astonishing expansion of the shoe industry and the consequent rise of business dynasties like the Manfields, the Parkers, and Turner Brothers Hydes.23 In Leicester, two or three times the size of Northampton, the economy was never quite so dominated by a single industry; but it came to be even more dominated by dynastic connexion than either Northampton or Worcester. For the nineteenth century borough Dinah Freer has identified a group of eight 'major' and ten 'minor' dynasties in the early stages of formation, and the expansion of this group to comprise 58 major and 47 minor dynasties during the latter half of the century. In a remarkable piece of detective work, she has reconstructed the extraordinary ramification of marriage alliances which enabled them to maintain their dominance over the politics as well as the economy of the town down to the end of the century. To take a single instance, the Gee family alone married into the Tollers, Gimsons, Astley Clarkes, Tylers, Freers, and Corahs, each of whom evidently married into a series of other local dynasties. Whereas in the earlier part of the century, moreover, the caucus of Unitarian families, such as the Biggses, Brewins, and Pagets, had sometimes married into Unitarian dynasties elsewhere, like the Worthingtons, Walkers, and Rathbones of Liverpool, by the end of the century long-distance connexions of this kind had largely died out, and the tendency to marry within the local network sometimes within a single industry in it - was more striking than ever.24 When I first knew Leicester, 25 years ago, it was the enduring dominance of many of these old dynasties that most impressed me, some of them by then in their fifth or sixth generation, and justly conscious of their lengthy traditions. They had also given rise to a number of distinguished local

22

They appear in several of her Worcester novels, particularly Mrs Halliburton's Troubles, 1862, in which Thomas Ashley is a portrait of her father. Thomas Price inherited the glove manufactory from his father. - D.N.B., s.v. Ellen Wood. For the glove industry see Miriam Rogerson, People, Poverty and Occupations: Worcester, 1779-1821, M. A. Dissertation, University of Leicester, 1981, especially Chapter IV. 23 I am indebted for this information to Mr V. A. Hatley, who points out, however, that most of the shoe-manufacturers of Northampton did not found longestablished families. Mr Hatley has also found that very few English manufacturing towns in the mid-nineteenth were equally dominated by a single industry. 24 Dinah Freer, 'The Dynasty-Builders', loc. cit.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 319 architects - Gimsons, Picks, and Goddards - whose buildings are among the unsuspected pleasures of the east Midlands.25 The development of this massive dynastic connexion in Leicester was perhaps an extreme example of the species; yet something of the same kind was to be found in many English towns. In Hanoverian Leeds it was evidently quite as striking as in Leicester; in a major port like Hull society was dominated for generations by families like the Maisters, Peases, Standridges, and Wilberforces; and in Newcastle upon Tyne by families like the Claytons, Ridleys, and Blacketts.26 It was pre-eminently for dynastic networks of this kind that suburbs like Leicester's Stoneygate and Birmingham's Edgbaston were originally intended. Numerically, the families in question may have formed only a relatively small minority in the suburban population; but socially speaking they dominated it; it was they who gave it its social cachet, its natural focus of interest. Probably less familiar to most of us than the great urban cousinages of towns like these was the remarkable development, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards, of the great farming-clans of England. By the nineteenth century these had often come to extend over whole districts, or even counties, and in some areas at least it was from their ranks that many of the urban dynasties themselves were descended.27 At this level of provincial society, it is more difficult to reconstruct the family network of a whole district or county than at the level of the aristocracy and gentry; the 25 As, for example, Ernest Gimson's two notable Leicester houses, Inglewood (for himself, 1892), and The White House (for Arthur Gimson, 1897); S. P. Pick's Kilmorie (for William Skillington, 1895); and Goddard, Paget, and Catlow's outstanding church of St John the Baptist (1885). I am indebeted to Mrs F. E. Skillington for information .on S. P. Pick, who was not actually a native of Leicester but practised there. The late-nineteenth century Vernacular Revival architects of the city would repay further study as a group. Another interesting development was the strong local tradition of historical writing about Leicester and its people in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by members of these families: for example, William Gardiner (Music and Friends, 3 vols., 1838-53), Mrs Thomas Fielding Johnson (Glimpses of Ancient Leicester, 1891), and Isabel C. Ellis (Records of Nineteenth Century Leicester, 1935). Perhaps the most curious aspect of these dynastic connexions was the establishment of the Leicester Consanguinitarium, or 'house of refuge', erected by the architect John Johnson (1754-1814), on the site of the house in which he was born, for the benefit of his relatives. - See Jack Simmons, 'Notes on a Leicester Architect', in Parish and Empire, 1951; D.N.B., s.v. John Johnson (1754-1814). 26 R. G. Wilson, op. cit., Appendix B, lists some 40 Leeds families, and gives details of their origins, descent, and relationship; P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700-1800, 1982, p. 50. 27As, for example, in Leicester and Maidstone. In Victorian Leicester the children of these families were sometimes sent out of town in the insalubrious summer months to their kinsmen's farms. Mrs. F. E. Skillington tells me that the Skillington children were thus sent to their grandparents the Leatherlands' home at South Croxton. Oral and literary evidence suggests that this custom may have been widespread among urban families in the provinces.

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numbers involved are vastly greater, and as yet there is much less of a genealogical nature in print. For the county of Kent, however, it so happens that, for a variety of reasons which are themselves of some interest, a good deal has been published, and the picture which emerges - of which I can give only the briefest outline in this paper - seems to me a revealing one.28 In Kelly's Directory of Kent for 1870 nearly 4,500 farmers are listed by name. The catalogue is not a complete one, but it represents the bulk of the farming community,29 and it is by far the longest list for any of the 1,400 occupations recorded in the directory. That fact alone is some indication of the extent to which farming families still formed the backbone of society in a predominantly agricultural area. When these names are followed up on a geographical and genealogical basis, four striking characteristics come to light: first, the remarkable insularity of the families in question; secondly, their local ramification through Kentish society at large; thirdly, their descent from almost entirely local or indigenous origins;30 and fourthly, the development of a great web of interdependent occupations, of occupations ancillary to agriculture - of millers, corn-chandlers, seed-merchants, woolstaplers, hop-factors, surveyors, solicitors, bankers, auctioneers, innkeepers, wheelwrights, and so on - in which the kinsmen and descendants of these farming families often came to occupy a dominating position. It was through such means as these, above all, that the market towns of Kent, like Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge in Dorset, formed 'the pole, focus, or nerve-knot of the surrounding countryside.'31 At the heart of the network there were some 220 paramount dynasties whose development I have reconstructed in detail. These comprised 4,450 28 There is a considerable number of family-histories and genealogies in print for such dynasties in Kent, in some cases because they produced notable figures, in others because they were descendants of old landed families. The outstanding publication in this field, however, is Prideaux George Selby's The Faversham Farmers' Club and its Members, 1927. This was the oldest farming club in England, and to celebrate its bicentenary Selby produced a kind of D.N.B. of all its members since 1727, interspersed with numerous family-trees. It was very much a 'familyclub', as he points out; the date of its foundation is worth noting in that context. Many descendants of these dynasties still farm in the area. 29 Including also farm-bailiffs, graziers, fruit-growers, and a few other smaller categories; the vast majority are listed as 'farmers'. It is difficult to estimate the real total, which depends partly on definition; but the directory probably includes at least two-thirds. 30 It is very striking that there were no major farming connexions of plainly nonKentish origin, though in the case of a small number bearing common surnames it is possible that some had migrated from other areas. Equally noteworthy is the remarkable fact that virtually none of the numerous Huguenot or Jewish dynasties of East Kent were to be found among these connexions, despite the fact that they often went back to the seventeenth-century; the Canterbury synagogue, which Dr A. N. Newman tells me is the oldest in England, originated at that time. 31 I owe this reference to The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978 edn, p. 64) to Dr Barrie Trinder.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 321 separately established branches altogether, virtually all of which were confined to the county.32 Not all these branches were still engaged in agriculture at this time; as population expanded over the preceding century, increasing numbers of younger sons had perforce left the land and established themselves as those craftsmen, tradesmen, innkeepers, or professional men I have referred to, occasionally rising into the ranks of the minor gentry. Of the total of 4,450 identifiable branches in 1870, about 2,450 were thus headed by craftsmen, innkeepers, manufactureres, or the like, and a further 850 by professional men or minor gentry, whilst some 1,140 were still active as farmers. When they left the parental home, however, the members of these old agrarian dynasties had rarely moved far. The vast majority still remained in Kent, migrating to nearby villages, or to market towns like Faversham, Maidstone, and Canterbury. Of those who continued to farm, virtually all remained in the county, except in the Weald, where they occasionally straddled the Sussex boundary. Of those who entered other occupations, about a third moved to rural villages and a further 60% into local towns, while only 7%, as far as I have been able to trace, migrated to London. Despite their massive ramification, therefore, these 220 paramount farming dynasties of Kent still remained intensely localized in their outlook and their connexions. The forty branches of the Denne family, for example, were entirely confined to the county in this way, the 26 branches of the Chittendens, the 24 of the Blaxlands, the 23 of the Hambrooks, the 21 of the Homewoods, and the 16 of the Kingsnorths. In most cases, indeed, they were predominantly restricted to a small group of nearby parishes within it. Of the Blaxlands, for example, all but one of the nine farming branches were to be found in a group of five neighbouring parishes near Faversham, not far from their medieval home at Blaxland in Slurry, while all but four of the remaining 15 lived in the same stretch of countryside. Similarly, of the 16 recorded branches of the Kingsnorths, all but three were to be found in the neighbourhood of Ashford, nine of them within five miles of the little Wealden settlement of Kingsnorth, where they had originated far back in the medieval period. Or perhaps most remarkable of all, take the Collards: of their 57 identifiable branches all but two lived in north-east Kent, 44 of them in a group of neighbouring parishes around St Nicholas-at-Wade, between Canterbury and Thanet. Of these 55,28 branches were still actively engaged in farming; and of those, 22 farmed in this same small group of parishes, where you literally met a Farmer Collard at every turn. If you had belonged to one of the farming dynasties of Kent in the 1860s and '70s you would thus have found yourself part of a vast cousinage, often with 15 or 20 32

I have discussed this subject at greater length in Transformation and Tradition: Aspects of the Victorian Countryside, 1984. The following account is based principally on analysis of the Directory, of the Return of Owners of Land, 1873, 1875, and on genealogical sources and local histories.

322 Landscape and Community in England other branches in the county, sometimes more, and with few or no branches as yet elsewhere. In the region around Canterbury in particular these circumstances formed the social basis for what their neighbour Samuel Egerton Brydges, earlier in the century, had angrily described as 'the mean, bigoted, and ignorant clanship' of East Kent.33 I am inclined to think that this aspect of the provincial economy in the Hanoverian and Victorian era would repay more serious investigation than it has yet received. The kind of regional farming cousinage I have described was more strongly developed in Kent than in sonic counties; yet there can be no doubt that something of the same pattern was repeated in many parts of the country. It was certainly well developed in Norfolk, and in areas like Westmorland and Devon it was very likely more striking than in Kent. Even in a small inland county like Leicestershire, with no natural boundaries, there are distinct traces of it; it clearly formed the background to numbers of those great urban dynasties of nineteenth-century Leicester described by Dinah Freer. 4. Dynasty and Occupation It would be misleading to imply that the local networks that dominated towns like Leicester, and the regional clans associated with rural society, were the only channels through which family influence operated in the provinces. Over these same generations dynastic links of many other kinds also deveoped, sometimes transcending the boundaries of both region and locality, sometimes cutting across other networks, and frequently associated with particular types of occupation. It will come as no surprise if I emphasize first of all their importance in the professions. In this sphere Professor Geoffrey Holmes has described the remarkable development of family connexion between 1680 and 1730 among the ranks of parsons, surgeons, physicians, apothecaries, barristers, solicitors, land-agents, naval officers, army officers, schoolmasters, and civil servants. By the 1720s and '30s, he tells us, there were 'whole clusters of attorney families in county after county whose extensive networks of fathers, sons, brothers and nephews were playing a vital part in the consolidation of the legal profession:' Fearnleys, Radcliffes, and Skeltons in and around Leeds, Mosleys and Byrons in the neighbourhood of Manchester, Peterses at Liverpool, Pottses at Newcastle, Bucks and 33

Sir Egerton Brydges, The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries . . ., 1,1834, p. 46. The Brydges family claimed kinship with the extinct Brydges family of Gloucestershire, and along with that they laid claim to the extinct Chandos of Sudeley peerage; their case was rejected, however, by the House of Lords. They probably stemmed from an old local yeoman family of Harbledown, near Canterbury, and thus actually from the same kind of social milieu as the neighbours they ostentatiously despised. - D.N.B., s.v. Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 323 Aslabees at Rotherham, 'and dozens of others like them elsewhere.' In Cornwall, he adds, 'there were times when it must have seemed that half the plentiful legal business of the county' - it always is plentiful in peninsulas - 'was being engrossed by cliques of Rawlingses, Sandyses, Polkinhernes, Lynes, and Tremenheeres.'34 Very much the same phenomenon, on a smaller scale, was beginning to appear at this time in the rapidly developing profession of the land-agents.35 By the nineteenth century, as Professor Eric Richards has demonstrated, 'there were many instances of dynasties of land agents whose hereditary claims on the position were almost a parallel to those of their patrons.' In a few cases, indeed, like the Oxley Parkers of Essex, they managed to found landed families of their own.36 If we are tempted to regard these developments as mere instances of Hanoverian corruption, or of the kind of Old Boys' Network peculiar to the upper middle classes, I must point out that during this same period precisely the same tendency for skills and 'mysteries' to be passed on within the family-circle may be found at the level of the craftsman and the small manufacturer. It was not a universal tendency; but it was certainly a growing one. It was especially pronounced in occupations that were becoming increasingly skilled, increasingly localized, or increasingly specialized; your skill, after all, was in this context your capital; it was only natural that you should wish to hand it on to your descendants. A recent survey of mathematical instrument-makers between 1688 and 1800, for example, has identified whole dynasties of Troughtons and Gilberts.37 The paper-making industry of Hanoverian Maidstone was likewise in the hands of whole dynasties of Holloways, Bunyards, Britters, Martins, Hollingworths, Danns, Pines, Longleys, Woods, and Woolletts: most of them as localized in their origins as the farmers of the surrounding countryside, from whose families several of them were indeed descended.38 The development of the elaborate type of wood-inlay known as Tunbridgeware, which was centred chiefly on Tunbridge Wells and oriented to the tourist trade, was almost equally dominated by local dynastic connexions: of families like the Wises, 34

Holmes, op. cit., p. 164. Ibid., p. 24: 'they not infrequently died in harness, and in the hope that the mantle would eventually fall on their sons and relatives.' Professor Holmes is quoting here from Edward Hughes, The Eighteenth-Century Estate Agent', in Essays in British and Irish History in Honour of James Eadie Todd, ed. H. A. Cronne, T. W. Moody, and D. B. Quinn, 1949. 36 Eric Richards, The Land Agent', in Mingay, ed., op. cit., II, pp. 443, 447-8. 37 Joyce Brown, Mathematical Instrument-Makers in the Grocers' Company, 1688-1800, with Notes on some Earlier Makers, 1979. 38 Based on analysis of the Maidstone poll-books of 1802 and 1832; see also Alfred H. Shorter, Paper Making in the British Isles: an Historical and Geographical Study, 1971, pp. 69-70, et passim. There were 30 paper-mills within five miles of Maidstone, which was then one of the principal centres of the industry. - Ibid., p. 173. Several are still working. 35

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for example, who operated between 1685 and 1874; of the Burrows and Fenners, who operated between 1720 and 1845; or of the Nyes and Bartons, operating between the eighteenth century and 1902.39 In incorporated towns, it seems to me, we can sometimes see family-networks of this kind virtually taking over the declining role of the medieval gilds and companies, in their increasing control over the avenues of apprenticeship.40 Some of the most interesting and widespread developments at this economic level of society were to be found, not in the rarer occupations, however, but among those traditional crafts whose skills remained essential to the economy of this country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite the advance of manufacture and mechanization. Though some traditional occupations of this kind declined in numbers, there was a whole range of craftsmen - blacksmiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, coopers, saddlers, harnessmakers, basket-makers, and so on - who continued to hold their own into the high Victorian era, and in many cases to expand.41 Perhaps I can take the example of the blacksmiths to illustrate some of the points that I have in mind. From a series of diverse calculations, I estimate that in the 1870s and '80s there were about 20,000 blacksmiths' forges in the market towns and rural parishes of England - that is, traditional shoeing smithies, not industrial 39 Ex inf. Tunbridge Wells Museum. For other typical examples of specialized local industries dominated by dynastic connexions, see: Mary M. Humphries, The Rush Industry of Islip', Northamptonshire Past and Present, 1980-81, pp. 223-9 (regarding the Loveday family, with pedigree from 1699 to 1976); H. H. OakRhind, The Adams Family - Pipemakers', The Suffolk Review, IV, No. 5, 1977, pp. 237-46 (with pedigree from 1689 to 1880). Such dynasties also seem to have been common among monumental masons, such as the Taylors of Loose, Kent, and several Leicestershire masons' families. 40 It is often assumed that apprenticeship declined with the decline of gilds and companies under the old corporations. What happened in Northampton, however, seems to have been typical of many towns in this respect. It was a place of many diverse crafts, in which skill was increasing and lengthy apprenticeship thus necessarily remained the only feasible method of training. The apprenticeship registers shew a threefold increase in the number of boys apprenticed, decade by decade, between the late-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries; but they were being drawn from a narrowing radius around the town, with a substantial rise in the numbers who were sons or kinsmen of the townsmen themselves. Such conditions inevitably increased the control of local family-networks; that control may not always have been exerted, as it was in Northampton, through the corporation itself; it was also found in unincorporated towns. The extent of the craft basis of English society as a whole during the Industrial Revolution needs to be more fully recognized. 41 Blacksmiths, for example, increased from 94,780 in 1851 to 140,020 in 1891; saddlers and whip- and harness-makers rose from 16,800 in 1851 to 30,680 in 1901; coopers remained at about the same level of 16,000, but rose to 19,240 in 1871; wheelwrights remained roughly constant at 28,000-30,000; millwrights declined in numbers from 8,220 in 1861 (their peak) to 5,290 in 1901. - Mingay, ed., op. cit., I, p. 316. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that such occupations were not merely picturesque survivals; they were basic to the economy.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 325 forges - and these probably employed somewhere about 90,000 smiths altogether.42 In Norfolk, for example, there were at least 677 smithies, and in Kent 630; and in both counties, just as in the case of farming, there seems to have been a striking tendency for the art or mystery of the blacksmith to run in families: sons, brothers, fathers, uncles, nephews, and cousins are often to be found at work in a group of nearby parishes, or in the back-streets of local market towns.43 In East Kent, for example, we find four of the Maxteds, with smithies in Hougham, Bishopsbourne, Wingham, and Ramsgate; in the Faversham neighbourhood, four of the Bensteds, with smithies in Eastling, Stalisfield, Doddington, and Newnham;44 towards Maidstone, four of the Hadlows, with smithies in Hollingbourne, Sittingbourne, Hucking, and Wormshill; and in the Weald, four of the Milsteds, with smithies in Tenterden, Staplehurst, and Lamberhurst. Many of the names of families like these have a purely local origin, moreover, just like those of the farming dynasties, to whom they were often related: Maxteds, Bensteds, and Milsteds, for example, Brissendens, Chittendens, Wickendens, Ashdowns, Shrubsoles, and so on: such names were derived from those of the woodland pasture-farms of pre-Conquest Kent, where their ancestors had originated far back in the medieval period.45 The village blacksmiths of the nineteenth century were often men of unusual skill and adaptability, moreover. It is the greatest possible mistake to regard such occupations as primitive or rudimentary. Those who took them up had to be both skilful and inventive if they were to satisfy the highly specialized requirements of their neighbourhood, or to solve the many novel local problems which the changing economy of the time presented. That is a point that recurs repeatedly in the literature of the period. 'Not many years ago', wrote George Sturt in 1913, 'the West-Surrey labourer in want of a good hoe preferred one made by a certain blacksmith in Farnham, who knew better than can be known at Birmingham what was likely to be useful 42

I have given the basis of these figures in Transformation and Tradition: Aspects of the Victorian Countryside, 1984. They are estimated principally from directories and cartographic evidence. The Census figures of course also include industrial smithies and are to that extent misleading in this context. 43 Based on Kelly's Directory of Kent for 1870, and Kelly's Directory of Norfolk for 1888.1 am indebted to Mrs Margery Tranter for extracting information from the latter. Broadly speaking, it should be remembered, directories record 'business units', not employees. The Norfolk evidence needs further local investigation to establish the closeness of these family-relationships; but it looks, on the face of it, very similar to that for Kent. 44 There was a fifth branch in a different area, at Boar's Isle in Tenterden. 45 The Maxteds had originated at Maxted in Elmsted, the Bensteds at Bensted in Hunton, the Milsteds at Milsted near Faversham, the Brissendens at Brissenden in Tenterden, the Chittendens at Chittenden in Cranbrook, the Wickendens at Wickenden in Cowden, the Ashdowns possibly at Ashdown in Lenham, and the Shrubsoles at an unidentified place of that name, probably on the Downs in West Kent. The surname of Hadiow derives from the village of that name near Tonbridge. All these families are still represented in Kent, some extensively.

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in his district. For wearing thin and true, and for convenient "set" at the neck, this man's hoes in his best days could not be surpassed . . ,'46 Wherever ingenuity of this kind was at a premium, whether it was that of the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the millwright, the crook-maker, the saddler, the charcoal-burner, or any other skilled craft of this kind, there was often a tendency for it to run in families in this way. As Sturt himself again pointed out, the more recondite traditional occupations almost inevitably 'grouped families together, linked generations, and gave characteristics to whole villages'.47

5. Conclusion

There are many aspects of family connexion in the period between 1650 and 1900 about which I have said nothing. I have made no reference to the development of dynasties of painters, for example, like the remarkable Williams family, or the Hilders of Kent;48 or of musicians, like the Valentines of Leicester and the Linleys of Bath; or of sculptors, like the De Carles of Norwich and the Coxes of Northampton; or of actors, like the Kembles, who occupy 200 pages in the Biographical Dictionary of Actors.49 Neither have I discussed such major subjects as the development of clerical

46

George Sturt, Lucy Bettesworth, 1913, p. 193. He adds that 'at the present time the really desirable hoes for the same country come from a smithy at Milford, near Godalming.' 47 Ibid., p. 197. For a family of charcoal-burners, see his remarks on the Parratts of West Surrey in Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, 1907, p. 120. 48 In the latter case from the early nineteenth century down to the present day; in the former during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Edward Williams, the mid-eighteenth century engraver, married a sister of James Ward, the animal painter, and was thus related to George Morland, H. B. Chalon, and John Jackson. Edward's son, another Edward, was also an artist and had seven sons, all of whom became landscape painters. To avoid confusion, three of these sons took the names of Henry John Boddington, Arthur Gilbert, and Sidney Percy. Boddington's son Edwin, and several of his nephews, were also painters. - D.N.B., s.v. Henry John Boddington, Sidney Richard Percy. 49 Clementina Black, The Linleys of Bath, 1971 edn, pedigree following p. 292, et passim; Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851, 1968 edn, pp. 114-5, 124-5; P. H. Highfill, K. A. Burnim, and E. A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, VIII, s.v. Kemble.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 327 dynasties in the Church of England;50 or the rise of those family-networks that came to dominate Nonconformist bodies like the Unitarians, the Quakers, and the Plymouth Brethren;51 or of those great familyramifications which facilitated the spread of Evangelicalism, and which enabled it to transcend the boundaries not only of place, but of denomination and class.52 But if I go on in this strain, you may think me guilty of the same reductio ad absurdum as Mr Andrew Barrow, who assures us that the Queen, Mrs Thatcher, Lord Longford, Harold Macmillan, Captain Mark Phillips, Alistair Cooke, Sir John Betjeman, David Dimbleby, and the previous Archbishop of Canterbury but one are all connected with one another by way of Miss Christine Keeler.53 Even without such picturesque claims as that, the characteristics and consequences of what I have been talking about are sufficiently multifarious. I shall not attempt to tie up all my obviously loose ends; but we may perhaps conclude with four tentative observations. First, it is important to remember that, during the period when these dynastic networks developed, England was being transformed from one of the most rural countries of Europe into one of the most urban. In 1600 there were no English towns with more than 25,000 inhabitants except London; by 1900 there were scores of them. The metamorphosis was less complete and more gradual than is sometimes supposed. We must not telescope the complexities of three centuries and 40 counties. Neither must we imagine that urbanization specifically created family networks of this kind; for they

50

Clerical dynasties were becoming common by the mid-seventeenth century in some areas; they were, of course, much more numerous than those of artists and the like. Of 99 Lincolnshire clergy between 1640 and 1660 whose father's occupation is known, 40 were clergy. - J. E. Swaby, Ecclesiastical and Religious Life in Lincolnshire, 1640-1660, Ph.D. thesis, University of Leicester, 1982, p. 75. The rise of 'squarson' families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should also be noted in this connexion: for example, the Edmeades of Nursted, the SmithMarriotts of Horsmonden, and the Curteises of Sevenoaks in Kent; the Belgraves of North Kilworth, the Moores of Appleby Magna, and the Burnabys and Burdetts in Leicestershire. The Belgraves have been resident in Kilworth since the fourteenth century, and were rectors from 1701 to 1901, with only one short break from 1804 to 1812. For the Burnabys, dating from 1666, see Simon C. R. Harratt, Leicestershire Parish clergy during the Archidiaconate of Andrew Burnaby, 17861812, M.A. Dissertation, University of Leicester, 1983, p. 4. 51 Among Quakers, Plymouth Brethren, and some other sects the fact that members were often forbidden to marry outside the denomination inevitably led to strongly cohesive dynastic networks of this kind. For their importance in the success of a Quaker school, see Kathleen Davis, Polam Hall, 1981. Florence Nightingale made extensive use of her numerous Unitarian kinsfolk. 52 For the last point, see 'Springs of Sensibility: Philip Doddridge of Northampton and the Evangelical Tradition', supra. 53 As reported in Alan Hamilton's review of Andrew Barrow, The Gossip Family Handbook, The Times, 21 Oct. 1983.

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were equally apparent in some other European countries. Nevertheless, it undoubtedly afforded them unprecedented opportunities. Then in the second place, these circumstances in a sense made dynastic connexion a social necessity. For although by Queen Victoria's reign England had largely ceased to be a 'face-to-face' society, in the strict sense of the term, it was still a society where personal acquaintance counted for a great deal, and where dynastic connexion was often necessary to identify you. There were countless matters in which it was the only means by which you could establish your credentials, your credit, your bonafides; there were many circles to which it offered you the only entree. Its great advantage was that it enabled you to be placed, to be vouched for, to be tracked down, put in context, put on the map of communal knowledge. We can often learn something from unconscious habits of speech; and in the kind of society in which I was brought up - if I may for a moment be allowed a personal note it was still common to hear one woman say to another, 'of course she was a Talbot,' or 'she was a Ware'. That settled it; that explained everything. For what it summoned up to your mental vision was not just an egregious parent, or an idiosyncratic household, but a whole ramification of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and connexions, whose personal peculiarities and family traditions were more or less distinctly known to you - or if not known could readily be imagined. Then, thirdly, in ancient boroughs like Leicester (for example) or Newcastle-under-Lyme, the development of dynastic connexion outside the old corporation often established a kind of 'alternative society', an informal substitute for the cursus honorum of the guildhall. As the old institutions ossified or decayed, the new network thus gradually came to provide a notably flexible and adaptable mechanism of economic progress and social ambition. By the early nineteenth century what really mattered, in business and cultural terms, in a borough like Leicester was no longer the notoriously corrupt municipality, but the Nonconformist family-network of the town, particularly the forceful, Liberal family-network of the Unitarian Great Meeting. After the reforms of the 1830s, there was only one Leicester M.P. during the following 50 years who was not a Liberal, while all the first seven mayors of the new corporation were drawn from the ranks of the Unitarians. No wonder the Great Meeting came to be known, with a characteristic touch of Leicester humour, as 'the Mayors' Nest'.54 Finally, though the groups of 'focal' families I have been discussing rarely formed more than a minority in any individual community, they often bred into it an extraordinary toughness of fibre. It was through them that the 54 Jack Simmons, Leicester Past and Present, I, Ancient Borough to 1860, 1974, pp. 143 sqq., 149, 167, 178; these first seven mayors were also all connected with the hosiery industry. For Newcastle there is much incidental information bearing on the origins of what I have here described as 'an alternative society' in R. W. Bridgett, The History of Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1661-1760, M.A. thesis, University of Keele, 1982.

Dynasty and Community since the Seventeenth Century 329 fabric of provincial society was woven together. Through the ramifications of their kinsmen and dependants, they contributed much to that density in the social texture, that intractability of provincial character, which figures so powerfully, at times so ruthlessly, in the novels of George Eliot, Mrs Oliphant, and Arnold Bennett. Think of the four Dodson sisters, for example, in The Mill on the Floss; or the Salem Chapel families in The Chronicles of Carlingford; or Constance and Sophia Baines in The Old Wives' Tale. Such characters might not be of the stuff that Victorian heroes and heroines were made of; John Ruskin, indeed, described those of The Mill on the Floss as 'simply the sweepings out of a Pentonville omnibus;'55 there must have been unusual omnibuses in Pentonville. But if they were imperfect, they were indestructibly real, more real than anything Ruskin envisaged. If they were riven by family feuds, moreover, they nevertheless recognized that there were limits to a legitimate antagonism. There were generally circumstances in which they would close ranks and draw together, locked shut like a vice against the world outside.56 The growth of dynastic connexion in provincial society is a subject, it seems to me, with a number of far-reaching implications. There is so much in our history over the past three or four centuries that plainly tended to undermine local independence that it is easy to overlook the fact that there were other developments, equally powerful, which strengthened the forces of local and regional cohesion. The rise of the family networks described in this paper provided a cohesive force of this kind which surely merits more serious consideration. In approaching the past we may perhaps assume, almost without thinking, that because the king ordained and parliament legislated, the provinces instinctively obeyed. Yet what we have to remember is that for the past thousand years and more no government, no institution, has ruled over a virgin countryside; authority has always had to take account of the inner life of those localities and communities, too numerous to mention, on whose co-operation it depended. That life was not 55 Quoted from Ruskin's Fiction, Fair and Foul in Joan Bennett, George Eliot: her Mind and her Art, 1962, p. 116 n. There is much more in the same strain. 56 There was no love lost between Aunt Glegg, one of the Dodson sisters, and her niece Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss; but when Maggie at last returned to St Ogg's after her unfortunate escapade towards the end of the novel, Mrs Glegg, almost alone, stood fiercely by her and offered her a home. 'If you were not to stand by your "kin" as long as there was a shred of honour attributable to them, pray what were you to stand by? Lightly to admit conduct in one of your own family that would force you to alter your will, had never been the way of the Dodsons . . . The circumstances were unprecedented in Mrs Glegg's experience nothing of that kind had happened among the Dodsons before; but it was a case in which her hereditary rectitude and personal strength of character found a common channel along with her fundamental ideas of clanship . . . ' - The Mill on the Floss, Everyman edn, 1961, pp. 469-70. The whole chapter is revealing in this context. It sheds a vivid light, too, on those lengthy and characteristic eighteenth and earlynineteenth century wills in which every bequest is minutely specified, and virtually every penny left strictly within the family circle.

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detached from metropolitan developments or from the life of the community of the realm; yet because it stemmed ultimately from different roots and subscribed to partially different mores, it could often be independent and at times intransigent. In the perpetual counterpoint which developed in this way between our national experience on one hand, and the experience of these profoundly ancient localities and communities on the other, dynastic connexion, at almost every level, has played a notable part. For me it is one of those elements in our past that lends English history its perennial fascination. The romance of life has not yet departed.

INDEX Abbott family (of Walton-by-Kimcote), 282 sqq., 287 Aberdeen, 212n., 230 Abney, Elizabeth, 233 Abney family, 233 Abney, Lady, 233 Abney, Parnell, 233 Abney, Sir Thomas, 233 academies, 179 academies, Dissenting see Dissenting academies accountants, 25 account books, for Suffolk, 141, 142,145n., 146,149 Accounts Committee, for Suffolk, 141 sqq. Acrise, Kent, 44, 54 actors, 326 Adams family (of Suffolk, pipemakers), 324n. Adams, Samuel, 32n. Adam's Ironstone, 313 Adderleys, of Leicester, 310 Adisham, Kent, 44, 53 administrative functions, of inns, 174 sqq. admirals, 314n. Adnitts, of Northampton, 310 Afon Crai, Breconshire, 46 agrarian regions, 16 agricultural counties, 106-7 agricultural depression (late nineteenth century), 76 agricultural machinery-making, 174 sqq. agricultural marketing, 207 agricultural occupations, 6-7 agricultural specialization, 22 agricultural traffic, 139 air-pumps, 34 Airedale, Yorks., 215 Aldeburgh, 131, 141 alehouses, 157, 158, 163, 164, 165, 175, 202, 204, 206 Allerton, Lanes., 223n. Allington, Kent, 298 Alliston, Obrien, Northampton innkeeper, 185 Alnwick, 297 All Souls College, Oxford, 256 America, 130, 228 American Indians, 220 Amsterdam, 183 Andover, 46 Anglicanism, 119, 138, 227, 240

anglicans, 150, 210, 219, 220n., 226, 227, 233, 238, 240 anglican [tradition], 136 Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, 95 antiquarians, 29, 251, 254 antiquaries, 260, 269-70, 271, 275 anti-slavery meetings, 178 apothecaries, 194, 322 Appleby Magna, Leics., 327n. Appledore, Kent, 115 & n., 271 appraisers, 25, 172, 194 apprentices, 8, 24, 212 & n., 315 & n., 316 apprenticeship, 31, 252, 324 & n. apprenticeship registers, 39, 208, 324n. Apulderfield, Henry de, 110 arable farming, 76 & n. arable farms, 315-16 arable land, 90; see also corn growing Archer, James, 259 architects, 25, 29, 319 & n. Arden, Forest of, Warws., 3, 4, 14, 15, 43, 70, 99 aristocracy, 121, 174, 180, 311, 319 aristocrats, 232 Arkwright, firm of, 311 Arminiffnism, 227n., 235 Armston, Northants., 97n. army, 312 army officers, 313n., 322 Arnesby, Leics., 122 & n. Arnold family, 311 artists, 29 Arts and Crafts movement, 32 Ashbourne, 159 Ashburn, Devon, 45 Ashburton, 45,46,48 Ashby de la Zouch, 94, 191, 290 Ash-by-Wingham, Kent, 53 Ashdown family, 325 & n. Ashdown in Lenham, Kent, 325n. Ashenfield, Kent, 56n. Ashford, Kent, 2, 87, 89n., 94, 97, 104,110, 115,116,178,179,298, 304, 314, 321 Ashley near Harborough, Northants., 225 Ashton, Northants., 97n. Ashwell, Herts., 45n. Aslabee family (of Rotherham), 323 assarting, 54 assemblies, 27, 178 sqq., 181 assembly rooms, 120, 157, 166, 178 sqq., 208

332


assessments, 141, 147,151 assizes, 27 Astle, Thomas, 250 Astley Clarke family (of Leicester), 318 Atherstone, 291 Atherstone, Warws., 300 Atkins, Robert, Northampton innkeeper, 185 attorneys, 25, 263, 310; see also lawyers; solicitors attorneys' families, 322-3 auctioneers, 320 Augusta, Princess of Wales, 220 Austen family, 256 Austen, Jane, 9,12, 217, 234n., 265 Australasia, 65 Avery, Samuel, 131n. Ayerst family, 256 Aylesbury, 95, 174 Ayloffe, Sir Joseph, 251 Aynho, Northants., 121 Ayscough, Francis, 220 Bach, J.S., 244 Bacon family, 130, 134, 136, 141,143, 145n., 154 Bacon, Nathaniel, 138,145 Bagnal, Elizabeth, 243 backheavers, 34 Badbury, Dorset, 45n. Badbury Rings, Dorset, 45n. Baldwin family, 272 Baltic, 38 Banbury, 26, 37, 94-107 passim, 207 Banbury Hundred, 98,100 sqq. Banbury Lane, Oxon., and Northants., 96, 160 bankers, 25, 303, 320 banking, 173 banquets, at inns, 177, 180,181 Baptist Missionary Society, 227, 266 Baptists, 119, 122 & n., 227n., 228n., 266 Barby, Northants., 225 Barford, Dorset, 45n. Barfreston, Kent, 53n. barge-builders, 36 Bargrove, Kent, 53n. Barham, Kent, 48, 49 & n., 50, 52, 53n., 54n. Barker family, 136 Barker, Mr, of Walthamstow, 238 Barkestohe, Leics., 122 Barming, Kent, 264

Barnard Castle, 94 Barnardiston, Arthur, 135 Barnardiston family, 130,133,134,136, 139,143 sqq., 150,151,154 Barnardiston, Jane, Lady, 135n. Barnardiston, Nathaniel, 135 [son of Sir Nathaniel] Barnardiston, Sir Nathaniel, 134 & n., 136 sqq., 144n., 145,154 Barnardiston, Pelatia, 135 Barnardiston, Samuel, 135 Barnardiston, Sir Thomas, 135,136,137,144n., 145,154 Barnardiston, William, 135 Barnet, Herts., 186 Barnetts, of Leicester, 310 barns, Kentish timber, 87n. Barnsley, Dorset, 45n. Barnstaple, 215 Barnwell, Northants., 97 baronets, 244n. barracks, 89n. Barrington family, 130 Barrington, Sir Thomas, 148 barristers, 322 Barrow, Andrew, 327 Barrow-on-Soar, Leics., 117 barrows (prehistoric), 16 Barton family (of Tunbridge Wells), 324 Base, John, 141, 145 Baskerville, Thomas, 165, 167 basket-makers, 36,105, 324 basket-making, 123 Bath, 25, 37, 212n., 220, 326 Bath road, 159, 163 Battle, Sussex, 298 Baxter, Richard, 130, 218 sq., 221 Beale family, 272 Beaumont family [of Suffolk], 145 Beauvoir, Osmund, 29n. Beccles, Suffolk, 141,143n. Bedford, 136 Bedford, Duchess of, 218 Bedford, Duke of, 218 Bedfordshire, 17,19, 45, 51, 57, 58, 62, 63n., 99,130n., 131n., 142,199 Bedingfield family, 134,154 Bedworth, Warws., 228n. beer-brewing, 257 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 29 Bekesbourne, Kent, 48, 49 Belgrave family, 327n. Belvoir Castle, Leics., 122 Belvoir, vale of, Leics., 122 Benares, 269

Index Benefield, Northants., 97n. Bengal, 264, 267 Bennett, Arnold, 9, 309, 329 Bensted family, 325 & n. Bensted in Hunton, Kent, 325n. Bentalls, of Kingston on Thames, 310 bereavement, effect on devotional life, 241 sqq. Beresford, Maurice, 93, 94 & n., 110, 125, 202 Berkshire, 18, 19, 36n., 57-8 & n., 63n., 76n., 106, 162-3, 167, 251, 252 Berkshire Downs, 18,19, 47 Berwick, 136 Best family, 272 Betjeman, Sir John, 244, 327 Beverley, 296 Bewley Bar, Kent, 79 Bible Christians, 213 Biddenden, Kent, 69 Bideford, 215 Biggleswade, 51 Billesdon, Leics., 123, 162, 300 billheads, Heal Collection of in British Library, 208 Birinus, 97 Birmingham, 2, 6, 94,106, 109,182, 200, 205, 319, 325;carriers, 173; coaching, 104; industrial evolution, 3, 8, 22, 25, 26 & n., 37; nonconformists, 209, 233 bishops, 233 Bishopsbourne, Kent, 48, 49, 325 Bishop's Fee, Leicester, 1634 Bishop's Lands, 130 Bisley, Glos., 113n. Black country, 3, 13, 39, 142, 286 Black Death, 82, 115 Blackett family (of Newcastle upon Tyne), 319 blacking manufacture, 105 Blackmore, Richard Doddridge, 213, 279 Blackpool, 298 blacksmiths, 7, 31, 33, 105, 279, 309n., 324-6 & n. Blade, Mrs (Wiggenhall carrier), 303, 307 Blair, Robert, 228n. Blake, Robert, pugilist, 182 Blandford Forum, 94, 159, 178 Blaxland family, 9, 254, 321 Blaxland, Kent, 9, 254, 321 Blean Forest, Kent, 73n., 74n., 199 Bleasdale, Lanes., 299 Blockley, Glos., 113n. Bloody Innkeeper, The (1675), 200-201 Blower, Samuel, 226 Bloxham family, 312 Boar's Isle in Tenterden, Kent, 325n.

333

boat-building, 105 Boddington, Edwin, 326n. Boddington, Henry John, 326n. bonds, bipartite, 178 book advertisements, 30 book-keeping, 30n. book-sales, 171 book-sellers, 231, 232 Borden, Kent, 272 Border counties, 297 Bordrigge, James, Northampton innkeeper, 167, 185,188,189,192 boroughs, 94, 109 et seq. ,117 Borrow, George, 9, 201 Borsay, Peter, 28 Bostock, Mrs, 167 Boston, 147, 282, 306 Botesdale, Suffolk, 141 Boteler, William, 29n., 254, 269-70 Bottesford, Leics., 45n., Ill, 122,123 Bottle family (Kentish carriers), 303 Boughton Street, Kent, 69 & n. Boughton-under-Blean, Kent, 72n., 89, 261 Boulogne, 136 boundary markets, 116-20,125 & n. boundary settlement, 17-18n., 89 & n., 125n. Bourne, Kent, 41, 48 50, 53 Bourne Place, Kent, 48n. Boys family, 249 Boys, John, of Betteshanger, Kent 76n. Boys, William, 29n., 254 Boxley, Kent, 103, 269 Boxley Lodge, Kent, 272 box-pews, 314-15 & n. Bradgate Park, Leics., 29 Bramley, Surrey, 307 Bradford, Yorks., 288, 289, 306 Badgate Park, Leics., 29 Bramley, Sussex, 307 Brasted, Kent, 11 On. braziers, 32, 33, 36 Brecon, 159 Bredgar, Kent, 272 Brenchley, Kent, 316 breweries, 7, 36n., 31 On. brewers, 263,303,314 brewery villages, 123n. brewing, 36,105,106, 123, 207 Brewster family, 143, 144n., 154 Brickhill, Beds., 199 brickmaking, 105 Bridge, Kent, 48 & n., 49, 50, 82n. Bridges, John, historian of Northamptonshire, 183 Bridgwater, 287, 289, 306 Brigden family (Kentish carriers), 303

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Brigg, Lines., 306 Brighton, 37, 288, 306 Brigstock, Northants., 225n., 227n. Brine, John, 214n. Brington, Northants., 121 Brissenden family, 325 & n. Brissenden in Tenterden, Kent, 325n. Bristol, 40, 200, 217; carriers, 287, 288, 289, 290, 296 sq., 298, 301, 302, 303, 306; craftsmen, 3In.;infirmary, 30n., 212n.; occupations, 24n.; provincial newspapers, 25 British Agricultural History Society, 307 British Museum, 250, 269 Britnell, R.H., 112n. Britons, 83 & n. Britter family (of Maidstone), 323 Brixworth, Northants., 123,124n. brocades, 172 Brome, Suffolk, 131 Bromsgrove, 200 Bromswold, Beds, etc., 19, 51, 52, 57, 58n. Brooke family, 134,143 Brooke, Elizabeth, Lady, 138 Broughton and Jones's, of Leicester, 310 Brownage Wold in Odell, Beds., 57 Brownrigg, J.S., 276 Brussels, 183 Bryant family, 256 Brydges family (of Kent), 322n. Brydges family (of Glos.), 322n. Brydges, Samuel Egerton, 29n., 322 & n. Buck family (of Rotherham), 322 bucket-engines, 34 Buckinghamshire, 62, 63n., 99,116, 124, 160,181, 199, 228; during Great Rebellion, 130n., 147; inns, innkeepers, 158; lace industry, 26n., 124n.; population, 88n., 106; regional markets, 23; settlement evolution, 15, 16,17 building materials, 91 Bunyan,John, 201, 224, 243n. Bunyard family (of Maidstone), 323 Burdett family, 312, 327n. Burford, Oxon., 159 burgage tenure, 109-110 burghal status, 103 burhs, 95 Burnaby family, 327n. Burnby,John, 29n. Burney, Fanny, 167, 203 Burney, Rev., of Thurnham, Kent, 272 Burrow family (of Tunbridge Wells), 324 Burt, Elizabeth, Northampton innkeeper, 189

Burt, William, Northampton innkeeper, 188-9 Burton Lazars, Leics., 98, 99 Bury and West Suffolk Archaeological Institute, 275 Bury, Franchise of, Suffolk, 145n. Bury St Edmunds, 131, 132,133, 140 sqq., 151,152,173,215,254 Busby family (Leics. carriers), 303 business dynasties, 317 sqq. business schooling, 30 business meetings, at inns, 176 sq. Busswood family (Kentish carriers), 303 butchers, 310 Butler, Joseph, bishop, 215, 219 Butlin, John, 280 Butlin, Richard, 34 Buxton, 159 by-employments, 3, 58 Byron family, 322 cabinetmakers, 32, 35, 36, 37n., 266 Cadogan family, 233 Caistor, Lines., 94-99 passim Caistor High Street, Lines., 96 Calais, 135 Calamy, Edmund, 306 Calcutta, 268, 276 Calne, 45n., 165 Calverton, Bucks., 116,160 Calvin, John, 138, 218, 219n. Calvinism, 218, 227 & n., 235, 236n. Cam, 142 Cambrian mountains, 64 Cambridge, 51,132,135,139n., 142,146 sqq. 153,173,218,220,290,298 Cambridge Platonism, 219 Cambridgeshire, 14, 20, 57, 58, 63n., 136, 142; arable farming, 76; during Great Rebellion, 13In.; settlement evolution, 18 & n., 19, 51, 54, 71, 72, 83; woodland, 74 Cambridgeshire wolds, 52 Camden Town, 262 Campbell family, 233 Campbell, Colen, 71 Campbell, James, 309n. canals, 177 Candover, Hants., 45n. Canons Ashby, Northants., 195 Canterbury, 2, 8, 9, 51 & n., 53n., 63,116 & n., 135,138,160,168,178,184,199, 250, 282, 303, 310, 313n., 317, 320n., 321, 322 & n.; craftsmen, 31n.; during Great Rebellion, 131n.; dynastic connexion, 317; Hasted family, 251 sqq., 261, 262,

Index 274; inns, innkeepers, 156, 158, 162; monastic houses, 43n., 80; poll-books, 39-40; regional centre, 23-29; Roman roads, 49n., 50 & n., 81, 82n., 97 Canterbury, see of, 98 captains (naval), 314n. Cardiff, 159 card-parties, 178,181 Carey, William, 227 & n., 266 Caribbean, 38 Carlisle, 173, 301 Carlton-cum-Willingham, Cambs., 14, 20n. Carlyle, Thomas, 129 Carnation Feasts, 181 carpenters, 31,105 carpet-sales, 171 Carr, Sloswick, Northampton innkeeper, 176,186,189-90,192 Carr, Mrs, widow of Sloswick, 192 'carriage' families, 12, 272 Carriers' Cosmography, 285 carriers, country, 7, 25, 106n., 279-307 carriers' dinners, 302, 308 carriers' dogs, 287, 307 carriers' families, 280, 303 carriers' inns, 191,192, 302 sq. carriers, long-distance, 25, 38,159, 172-3, 279, 280, 285, 286, 289, 297, 298, 299, 302 carriers' notebooks, 280, 281, 306 carrying trade, long-distance, 162, 163, 184, 186 carters, 280, 283, 286 carts, carriers', 280, 281-7, 296, 301, 303, 306,307 Cartwright, Thomas, 204 Castle Hill Church, Northampton, 212-42 passim cathedral cities, 178 cathedral clergy, 232, 233, 259 Catholicism, 235 cattlemen, 316 cattle-pastures, 76 cattle remover, 299 cattle trade, 115 Cavaliers, 119,133,153,154, 254 Cavendish House, of Cheltenham, 310 & n., 316 Caxton, William, 313n. Celtic place-names, 73n., 95 Celtic river-names, 45 sqq., 47, 48 & n. Celtic settlement, 70 Celtic society, 80 Census of 1851,6 Cerne, Dorset, 45

335 chairmaking, 26n. Chalbury, Dorset, 45 Challock, Kent, 110 Chalon, H.B., 326n. chamberlains' accounts, 208 chamberlains, at inns, 184 Chancery, 262, 276 Chancery Proceedings, 207 Chandos of Sudeley peerage, 322n. Change in the Village, 299 chapelries, 81, 86n., 97 & n., 98,116, 163 chapels, 119 chape-makers, 33 Chaplin, Thomas, 145 charcoal-burners, 326 & n. Charing, Kent, 94-104 passim, 111, 114, 115 &n. Charity Schools, 177, 243 Charlbury, Oxon., 26n., 94-107 passim Charles I, 118,119,129,, 131-3, 139n., 154 Charles II, 119,132 Charles Edward, Prince, the Young Pretender, 176,180 Charlton in Bishopsbourne, Kent, 49 n. Charlton by Dover, Kent, 49n. Charlton by Greenwich, Kent, 49n. Charnwood Forest, 14, 287 Chartland, Kent, 67, 69, 71, 72n., 73, 82, 85,114n., 272 Chart Sutton, Kent, 67, 81n. Chatham, Kent, 73n., 74n., 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 263, 270, 272-3, 275, 304 Chatham dockyard, 255 Chattenden, Kent, 73n. Chaucer, Geoffrey, 69n. Cheapside, London, 219 Cheddar Gorge, Som., 287 Chediston, Suffolk, 134 cheese mart, at inn, 171 cheesemongers, 317 Cheetham, Lanes., 74n. Chelmsford, 163,174 Cheltenham, 104, 288, 306, 310, 316 chemists, 310 Cheshire, 21, 233 Chester, 23, 184,186,187 Chesterfield, 306 Chesterfield, earl of, 187 Chester road, 159 Chetham, Kent, 73n., 74n. Chetney, Kent, 73n. Chevening, Kent, 18n., 11 In., 113n. Chicheley family, 256

336


Chichester, 29, 299 Chiddingstone, Kent, 79 Chieveley, Berks., 58n. Chilham, Kent, 3,18, 69,113,114 Chilterns, 14,16,18,19, 57, 287 Chilton, Suffolk, 134 china, 38 Chippenham, Wilts., 158 Chipping Warden, Northants., 103 &n., Ill Chittenden family, 321, 325 & n. Chittenden in Cranbrook, Kent, 325n. Cholwich family, 249 Christ Church, Oxford, 220 Chronicles of Carlingford, The, 329 church dedications, 116n., 119 Churchfield, Northants., 97n. Church of England, 213, 214, 218, 219,312,326 Cirencester, 287 civil servants, 313n., 322 Civil War, the, 8,11, 86n., 129-54,177, 240, 248 clanship, 322 Clare, Suffolk, 136,143n. Clark, Samuel, 218, 221, 223, 236n. Claw, Devon, 45 Claydon, Oxon., 100 Clayhanger, 309 clay-pipe drainage, 16 Clayton family (of Newcastle upon Tyne), 319 clergy, 27,131n., 138,176, 201, 219, 220n., 232, 233, 238, 272, 311, 313n., 326-7 & n.; see also parsons clergy, ejected, 240 clerical dynasties, 215, 313, 326-7 & n. clerisy, 311 Clerkenwell, 266 Cliffe, J.T., 64n. Clifford, Sir Corners, 251 Clipston, NoBthants., 24n., 282, 284, 306 clockmakers, 32, 33, 35 closed villages, 93 cloth industry, Wealden, 87 cloth-merchants, 170 cloth trade, 168,170 cloth-weaving, 3,4, 105 clover seed, sale of, 169 Clyst, Devon, 45 coachbuilders, 32, 35, 36 coachbuilding, 105 coaching, 164,165,184,186 coaching-centres, 159 sqq., 160,163 coaching inns, 189 sqq., 206

coaching routes, 199 coaching trade, 161 sqq.; see also stagecoaches; stage-coaching coalfields, 75 coal-trade, 125n. coat and conduct money, 137 Coates, Bryan E., 112n. Cobb family, 272 Cobham Hall, Kent, 263 Cobham, Richard Temple, Viscount, 185 Cock, F.W., 271 cockfighting, 178,181 Coddenham, Suffolk, 143n. coffee houses, 175,198, 206 coffee-rooms, at inns, 189-90 Colchester, 23,131n., 132,133, 289, 306 Coldharbour, Kent, 79 Cold Higham, Northants., 160 Cold Overton, Rutland, 300 Cole, Thomas, 145 Collard family, 9, 321 Collier family, 243n. Collinson, P., 136&n. Colne, Essex, 45n. Colne, Glos., 45n. Colne, Lanes., 45n. colonization, 3,15,17 & n., 18,19-20, 44, 70, 72, 82 sqq. colonizing activities, overseas, 139 colour-merchant, 217 Coly, Devon, 45 Colyton, Devon, 45 commercial classes, 247 Committee for Advance of Money, 139n. Committee for Compounding, 139n. Committee for Scandalous Ministers, 13 In. Committee of Both Kingdoms, 131, 145,149, 150n., 152 common fields, 20 & n., 58, 89 common pasture, 89n. 'common' settlements, 17 commons, 88 Commons, House of, 152 Compton Census, 87n. Compton, Lady Jane, 180 comptroller of City of London, 257 Conant, John, of Northampton, 201, 206, 226 & n., 240 concerts, 178,183 Congregationalists, 13n., 122, 212, 214, 222, 227n., 228n.; see also Independents Coniston, Lanes., 1 Connell, Bryan, 235n. Constable, Henry, 236n. Convention Parliament, 130

Index Cook, Adrian, 306 Cook, Joseph, Northampton innkeeper, 191,192 Cook, Thomas, 283 Cooke, Alistair, 327 Cooke, Elizabeth, 233 coopers, 36, 324 & n. coppice woods, 75 Corah family (of Leicester), 318 Corbett, Miles, 148n. corn-chambers, at inns, 169 corn-chandlers, 320 corn-exchanges, 156 corn-growing, 89 corn-growing counties, 76 corn trade, 169, 172, 207 Cornwall, 12, 76n., 110,153, 231n., 323 Cornwallis family, 131 Corpe, Stella, 317 corporations, old, 324n. corset-manufactories, 313 &n. Corsham, Wilts., 262, 269, 271 Cotswolds, 13,14,19, 51, 57, 58, 64, 96, 287 cottage-rows, 90 cottage-visiting, 243 cottages, rebuilding of, 316n. Cottingham, Northants., 300 Cotton End, Northants., 162,172 cotton industry, 104 cotton-mill, Northampton, 34 Council of the North, 157 country carriers see carriers, country country gentry see gentry, country countrysides see pays County Committee, of Kent, 144, 146, 149 County Committee, of Norfolk, 150n. County Committee, of Suffolk, 131 sqq., 136,138, 139, 140-6, 149,151,154; members of, 133,134, 139n., 143 sqq., 146 county communities, 12, 13, 20-23, 38, 39-40,42,151-2,175 county families, 134 sqq., 143,144-5,154, 181,195,254,272 county gentry, 180, 181,182,190, 249, 256, 257 county halls, 174 county infirmaries, 176-7, 211, 243 county inns, 176-7 county society, 174 sq., 177 county towns, 94n., 95n., I l l , 140-41, 163; carriers, 288, 289, 290, 298-303 passim; craftsmen, 30, 33, 35; inns, innkeepers,

337 174 sqq.; regional capitals, 21-30, 37-8; social centres, 177 sqq., 184 cousinage, 174, 321-2 Coventry, 122n., 173,182, 185, 186, 215, 231 Coventry, Countess of, 232 Coward Trustees, 242n. Cowden, Kent, 325n. Cowgrove, Dorset, 45n. Cowless Shaw, Kent, 47 Cowper, William, 228 Cox family (of Northampton), 326 craft dynasties, 323 sqq. craft-regions, 26 crafts, 3, 7, 25, 26, 91, 105 sq., 124, 279, 311, 324 sqq. craftsmanship, 30-37, 312, 321, 323, 324 craftsmen, 12, 30-37, 40, 90,109, 110, 124, 171,231,312 Cranbrook, Kent, 85, 282, 304, 325n. Crane, Sir Robert, 134 & n. Crawford, Lawrence, 151n. Crawshay, firm of, 311 Cray, Kent, 46 & n., 47, 48n., 82 Crayford, Kent, 46,116n. Creaton, Northants., 225 Crediton, 45,47, 217 Greedy, Devon, 45 Crick, Northants., 225 Croft family, 272 Croft, Sir John, 272 Cromwell family, 233 Cromwell, Henry, 233 Cromwell, Oliver, 129 sqq., 139n., 144n., 147-53 passim, 170,233 Cromwell, Richard, 233 Cromwell, William, 233 crook-makers, 326 Cropredy, Oxon., 100 Grossman, Samuel, 241 n. Crowland, Lines., 132 crownstone, 123n. Croydon,169 Croydon-cum-Clopton, Cambs., 280 Croydon Wilds, Cambs., 51 Crunaale, Kent, 70 Cullompton, 45,46, 231 Culm, Devon, 45 Culmstock, Devon, 45 Culpeper family, 138, 273 cultural functions, of inns, 177-84 cultural life, 28-30 Culver stone Green, Kent, 79 Culworth, Northants., 121 Cumberland, 74, 77,147

338


Curteis family (of Sevenoaks), 327n. Curtis, Hugh, Northampton innkeeper, 185 cutlers, 33 cutlery, 26n. Czech, 217 dairy produce, 282 Danish, 228 Dann family (of Maidstone), 323 Darbys of Coalbrookdale, 311 Darent, Kent, 46 sqq., 48n., 67, 82 Darenth, Kent, 41 Darenth, North and South, Kent, 46, 47 &n. Darent valley, Kent, 46-8, 63, 72n., 258 Darnley, Earls of (Bligh family), 263 Darracott, Risdon, 238 Dartford, 13, 46 sqq., 50,114, 116n., 258, 260 Dartmoor, 13, 17 Darwin family, 311 Daundy family, 135 Daventry, 121,167, 169,173, 181 Davis, William, Northampton innkeeper, 185 Day, John, Northampton innkeeper, 185 Deal, 51,55,74, 76n., 114,125 Dean in Waltham, Kent, 56n. Debenham family (of Cheltenham), 316 Debenham, William, 316 De Carle family (of Norwich), 326 Deenethorpe, Northants., 197 Defoe, Daniel, 28, 165, 167, 187, 207 Deism, 215 delinquents, 129, 132 sqq., 139n., 141, 143 Delapre Abbey, Northants., 243n. Dell, William, 15 In. Denbighshire, 204 Denne family, 8, 249, 321 Dennehill, Kent, 8 denns, Kentish, 71n., 77 Denton, Kent, 29n., 48, 49, 53 Deptford, 62, 88n. deputy lieutenants, 133, 140, 174 Derby, 25, 29, 94n., 105, 158,159, 173, 174,178, 182, 233,283,296,297, 306 Derbyshire, 112n., 130n., 280 Dering family, 249, 256 Desborough, Northants., 313n. deserted medieval settlements, 20 & n., 70 &n., 125 detached pastures, 79

Devizes, 94, 158,167, 289, 306 Devon, 62, 64, 76, 175, 248, 253, 273n., 282, 289, 322; boroughs, 110 & n.; carriers, 284, 287, 306; Doddridge, Philip, 214n., 215, 217, 230; during Great Rebellion, 153; lace-making, 26n., 39; population, 6; settlement evolution, 41-47, 71 Devonshire, Duke of, 187 devotional life, English, 211-45 passim D'Ewes, Sir Simonds, 134 & n., 138 dialect regions, 42 Dimbleby, David, 327 Dingley family, 257 sqq., 270 Dingley, Robert, 257 directories, 247 sqq., 272, 280, 281, 282, 284-307 passim, 325n. dispersed settlement see scattered settlement Dissent see Nonconformity Dissenting academies, 30n., 183, 211, 212, 218, 219, 222, 225 & n:, 243 Dissenting chapels, 122-3 & n. Dissenting connexions, 233 distilling, 105 doctors, 25, 201, 244n., 303, 313n., 314 dockyard towns, 37n. Dodd, William, Northampton innkeeper, 173 Dodderidge, in Sandford, Devon, 217 Doddington, Kent, 325 Doddington Place, Kent, 272 Doddridge, Daniel, 217 Doddridge, Elizabeth (daughter of Philip and Mercy Dooddridge), 242 sq. & n. Doddridge, Sir John, 217 Doddridge, Mary, 213 Doddridge, Mercy, nee Mavis, 212, 223, 242, 243n. Doddridge, Monica, nee Bauman, 217 Doddridge, Philip, of Northampton, 30 & n., 35,183,209-45,265 Doddridge, Philip, jr., son of Philip Doddridge of Northampton, 213 Doddridge, Philip, sr (steward to Duke of Bedford), 218 Dodgson, J. McN., 90n. dog transport, 287, 307 Dolings, Lady, 233 Domesday Book, 18n., 55n., 71 & n., 74, 101, 102,114 domestic chaplains, 150, 240 domestic comfort, 241 & n. domestic pietism, 239 sqq.; see also family religion domestic servants, 31 & n. Doncaster, 167

Index Doolepore, 269 Dorchester, Oxon., 97, 98 Dorman family, 261, 270 Dorman, Dorothy, 261 Dorman, John, 261 Dorman, Mary, 264, 266 Dorset, 47, 57, 76n., 88n., 159, 214n., 320 Dour, Kent, 46, 47, 48n. Dover, 2, 5, 8, 9, 40, 45-6, 47, 49n., 50, 51, 82n., 115,161,261,288 Dover road, 159,160-61 Dowell, Daniel, Northampton innkeeper, 186 Downe, Kent, 62 downland or wold (wald) countryside, 1619, 20, 41,47, 48n., 50-59, 74 downland, Kentish, 44, 46, 48, 49, 67, 98, 110, 272, 287, 325n.; carriers, 287; landholding, 5; routes through, 64, 78 sqq.; settlement evolution, 19, 43, 50-59, 69 sqq., 78-90 passim Downland ridgeway, Kent,, 47, 96 Downs, Mr, of St Albans, 218 drapers, 31n., 303, 310 sq., 316, 317 drapery-sales, 171 Drayton, Dry or Wald, Cambs., 5In. Droitwich, 96 drovedens, Kentish, 79 sqq., 82, 85 drovers, 24, 38,172,173 drovers' inns, 191 droveways, 78-9, 160 droving, 162 Dryden family, 195 Dryden, Dr, canon of Windsor, 195 Dryden, John, 183 Ducarel, Andrew, 29n., 251 Dukinfield family, 233 Dukinfield, Robert, 233 Dukinfield, lady, 233 Duncombe, John, 29n. Dunk, Sir Thomas, 89n. Dunkirk, Kent, 86n. Dunstable, 159, 186 Duppa family, 272 Durham, 173 Durham, Co., 147 Dusts, of Tunbridge Wells, 310 Dutch, 228 dynastic connexion, 8 & n., 193-8, 208, 215-16, 233, 249-77 passim, 303, 309-30 dynastic monument, 314 Earle, John, Northampton innkeeper, 186 earthenware manufactories, 123n.

339 East Anglia, 11,64, 284 East Anglia and the Civil War 129-54 passim East Anglians, 146 East Anglian Studies Centre (University of East Anglia), 309n. East Bergholt, Suffolk, 143n. Eastchurch, Kent, 8In. Eastern Association, 129-39 passim, 140-54 Eastern Association Committee, at Cambridge, 135, 146,147, 148 & n., 149,150,153 & n. Eastern Association Committee, in London, 148 &n., 153 &n. eastern counties, 44n., 76 & n., 129, 130,132, 135,139,147,152,153,230,298 Eastgate House Museum, Rochester, 250, 263 East Kent, 320n., 322, 325 Eastling, Kent, 325 East Midlands, 319&n. East Riding, 76 & n. Eastry, Kent, 29n., 50 & n., 53, 84,114, 269 East Sutton, Kent, 81 Eastwell, Leics., 122 Eaton, Leics., 122 ecclesiastical census of 1851, 231 ecclesiastical' estates, 97 sqq. ecclesiologists, 315n. Ecton, George, Northampton innkeeper, 194-5 Eden, Kent, 48n. Eden, Peter, 203 Edgbaston, Birmingham, 319 Edict of Nantes, 198 Edinburgh, 209n. Edmeade family, 314 & n., 327n. education, 234, 260; family, 240; household, 243; in the home, 212 & n.; of young children, 211, 240; see also schools educational reform, 244 Edward VI, 102 Egerton, Kent, 98 eggs, 282, 283 Egmont, Earl and Countess of, 187 elder wine, 257, 275 elections, parliamentary, 174 electrical machines, 34 Elham, Kent, 51n., 54n., 88,113,115 Ellesmere, Salop, 177 Ellesmere Canal, 177 Ellis, Isabel C, 319n. Elliston and Cavells, of Oxford, 310 Eliot, George, 9, 39, 217, 234n., 244, 315, 329 &n. Elizabeth I, 134,136 Elizabeth II, 327 Elmdon, Essex, 310 Elmington, Northants., 97n:

340


Elmsted, Kent, 54 & n., 56n., 325n. Elmstone, Kent, 53 elopement, 259-60 Ely, 18 Ely, Isle of, 13In., 150sq. embroidery-work, 123 emparking, 91 enclosures, 315 encroachment, 17n. engineering profession, 34n. engineers, 25 English Revolution, 214 engraver, 326n. entrepot trade, 187; see also inland entrepSts entrepreneurial towns, 22, 25, 26 & n., 37 episcopacy, 129,133 Epwell, Oxon., 100 Ermine Street, 96 errand boys, 287 Erskine family, 233 Essex, 11,19, 54n., 62 & n., 66, 76 &n., 84n., 125n., 130,131 &n., 136,139n., 140,147, 323; during Great Rebellion, 64,149; inns, innkeeping, 157,163,164, 202; population, 88n., 9On., 106; settlement evolution, 45 estate agents, 303, 310 estate parishes, 5 sq., 93, 120 sqq. estates, landed, 272 estate villages, 127 Eton College, 260 Evangelical establishment, 233 Evangelicalism, 213 & n., 229, 231 &n., 234, 235, 239 sq., 244 sq., 265, 266, 327 &n. Evangelical Movement, 263 Evangelical Revival, 30, 210 sqq., 232, 243-5 Evangelicals, 210, 228, 277 Evangelical tradition, 209-45 Evenlode, 95 Evenlode valley, 98 Exeter, 1, 111, 135, 215; carriers, 284, 288, 298, 301; craftsmen, 33; Doddridge, Philip, 217, 230, 231; Hasted family, 259; hotel, 156; infirmary, 212n.;inns, innkeepers, 162, 170,175,184, 206; militia lists, 39-40; regional centre, 23-31 Exeter Militia List, 33n. Exeter road, 159 exhibitions, at inns, 183

extra-mural suburbs, 162, 164 extra-parochial tracts, 125, 164 Eye Kettleby, Leics., 98 Eyhorne House, Kent, 272 factors, 135, 136', see also merchants factors, travelling, 168,173,190 Fairclough, Samuel, 137,138 Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 152,153 Fairford, Glos., 159, 266 Fairlawne, Kent, 79 fairs, 102,109-27 passim, 136, 142,170 Falfield, Glos., 113n. family businesses, 310 sqq., 316 sqq. Family Expositor, The, 214, 219 & n., 220, 229 sqq., 235 sq., 240 family firms, 311 family-histories, 320n. family monuments, 91 family religion, 223, 226 & n., 235 sqq.; see also domestic pietism farm-bailiffs, 320n. farmers, 9, 37n., 74, 231, 247, 272, 285, 309n., 320 farming, 312 farming clubs, 320n. farming families, 8, 9, 303, 307, 311, 313, 315,316,319-22,325 farming production, 279 farming regions, 42 farms, farmhouses, 89-90 & n., 315-16 farms, Kentish, 72 farm-sites, 43n. Farnham, Surrey, 313n., 325-6 Faussett, Bryan, 29n., 251 Faversham, 13, 29n., 69, 79,110,114,199, 310n., 321, 325 & n.; carriers, 304, 307; fruit-growing, 16n.; Hasted family, 253, 254, 275; market, 116n. Faversham Farmers' Club, 320n. Fawler, Oxon., 95 Fawsley, Northants., 121 & n. Fearnley family, 322 feasts and banquets, at inns, 166-7 Felden, the, Warws., 3 fell and moorland areas, 16-17, 20 fellmongers, 195 fenlands, 16-18, 20,129 Fenner family (of Tunbridge Wells), 324 Fenny Stratford, Bucks., 5On., 116n. Ferrar family, 240 fielden areas, 16-17, 20, 93 Fielding Johnson, Mrs Thomas, 319n. field-systems, 100 Fiennes, Celia, 28

Index Fifth and Twentieth Parts, the, 141-2, 145 Filchborough, Kent, 90 & n. Filmer family, 249 Finberg, H.P.R., 94 & n., 95n., HOn. Finedon, Northants., 116n. finishing schools, 184 First World War, 283, 288, 299 Firth, C.H., 129 fishcarts, 307 Fisher, Peter, 143 Fisher Row, Oxford, 311 fishing, 125n. fitches, polecats, 90 & n. Five Towns, the, 309 Flanders, William, prizefighter, 182 Fleetwood, Elizabeth, 233 Fleetwood family, 233 Fleetwood, Mrs, of Northampton, 233 Fletcher, Anthony, 21 Fletcher, John, Northampton innkeeper, 193 flint building, in Kent and Norfolk, 89 &n. Florence, 22 florists'feasts, 178, 181 'focal' families, 312 sqq., 328-9 Folkestone, 84, llOn., 114 food-processing, 313 & n. Foothills, Kent, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72n., 73, 76, 81-2, 87 footpads, 199 Foots Cray, Kent, 46 Ford, W.J., 20, 80n. Fordingbridge, Hants., 164 forests, forest areas, 4, 16-18, 19, 20, 42, 47, 70, 73n., 74 & n., 75, 77 sqq., 86, 199-200; see also woodland forges, blacksmiths, 324-5 & n. forstals, Kentish, 88, 89, 253 Foster's Booth, Northants., 160, 203 Foston, Leics., 287 Fotheringhay, Northants., 121 Fowler's Leicester Directory (1815), 299 sqq. Foxlydiate, Worcs., 200 framework-knitting, 123, 285 France, 38, 161, 261-2 Frant, Sussex, 119 sq. Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, 220 Freeby, Leics., 98, 99 freeholders, 4 sqq., 86 freeholders' parishes, 4 sqq., 93, 120 sqq. freemasons, 177 freemen's lists, 208 Freer family (of Leicester), 318 Freer, Dinah, 318, 322

341 French, 228 Fridaybridge, Cambs., 122n. Friend, Jeremiah, Northampton innkeeper, 198 Frome, 45n. fruit, 283 fruit-farming, 90, 91 fruit-growers, 320n. Fuller, Andrew, 227n. Fullerism, 227n. Fur ley, Robert, lln. furnishing, of inns, 188 furniture industry, 37n. furniture sales, 171-2 Fylde, the, Lanes., 281 Gabrielle Enthoven Collection of Playbills, in Victoria and Albert Museum, 208 Galsworthy family, 273n. game, 282, 283 gardeners, 181 gardening, 181-2, 258 Gardeners' Society meetings, 181 Gardiner family, 233 Gardiner, S.R., 129 Gardiner, William, 29 & n., 319n. Garrad, G.H., 66 Garrick, David, 29 Garrington, Kent, 5In. Garstang, Lanes., 299 Gascony, 93 Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 234n. Gatteridge, Kent, 55 Gault Clay vale, Kent, 67 Gault Vale settlements, 15,17 gavelkind, 277 Gee family (of Leicester), 318 Gelling, Margaret, 41n., 44 & n., 57 Gelsthorpe family (Leics. carriers), 303 Geneva, 136 gentlefolk, 263, 265, 267, 270 Gentleman's Magazine, 34 & n., 180 gentleman-farmers, 272 gentry, 8, 38, 40, 260, 263, 275, 319; country, 177, 178, 183, 195; county, 12, 26; dynastic connexion, 8; Doddridge family, 217; inns, innkeepers, 174-80 passim, 187-91 passim, 201; Kentish, 27, 63-4, 272; landed, 8, 27, 56, 86, 91, 232-3; minor, 9, 27, 85, 217; Suffolk, 129-54 passim; see also pseudo-gentry geology of Kent, 66-7 George I, 161 George II, 63,161 George HI, 220n.

342


Gilbert, Arthur, 326n. Gilbert family (instrument-makers), 323 gilds, 324&n. Gillingham, Kent, 13,116n., 304 Gill, John, 214n. Gilmorton, Leics., 123, 312 Gimson, Arthur, 319n. Gimson, Ernest, 319 & n. Gimson family (of Leicester), 318 Gippes, Thomas, 145 glassmaking, 3, 4 glass-sales, 171 Glastonbury, Som., 156 glove-industry, 317-18 & n. glove-making, 26 & n. glove manufacture, 105 Gloucester, 25, 26n., 29, 30,159, 200, 212 &n., 220, 317 Gloucestershire, 14, 45n., 63n., 94,110, 112, 113 &n., 115,120n., 121,127, 200-201, 288, 322n. Godalming, Surrey, 326 Goddard, Paget, and Catlow, of Leicester, 319 &n. Godden Green, Kent, 88 Godinton, Kent, 27 Godmanchester, 51 Godmersham, Kent, 103 Godshill, Hants., 164 Godstone, Surrey, 162 Godstow Abbey, 102 goldsmiths, 35, 257 Goruckpore, 269 Goslin, Mary, 252 Gostling, William, 29n. Gothic Revival, 210 Goudhurst, Kent, 3, 69, 100, 113 Grafton Regis, Northants., 121 grammar school, 179 granaries, at inns, 172, 302 Grand Remonstrance, 175 Granta valley, Cambs., 20n. Grantham, 105, 156,159,162 grass seed, sale of, 169 Gravesend, 13, 63, llOn., 116 & n., 117-18 &n. Gray, Malcolm, 315-16 graziers, 320n. Great Bourton, Oxon., 100 Great Chart, Kent, 67 Great Driffield, Yorks., 289, 296, 297, 301,306 Great Eccleston, Lanes., 282 Great Glen, Leics., 116 & n. Great Meeting, the, Leicester, 328

Great North Road, 159 Great Poultney Farm, Leics., 316n. Great Rebellion see Civil War Great Rebuilding, 87 Great West Road, 165 Great Witcombe, Glos., 113n. Great Yarmouth, 40 Greek, 3On. greengrocers, 310 Greenway, Kent, 97 Greenwich, 63, 79-80, 247 Grenfell, Joyce, 1 Grey of Warke, William Grey, Lord, 148 Griffis, Mr, scientific lecturer, 183 Grimsbury, in Banbury, 95, 97 Grim's Dyke, Oxon., 95 Groby, Leics., 307 grocers, 310 & n., 317 Groombridge, Kent, 113,118&n. Grovehurst, Kent, 74n. Guildford, 284, 285, 288, 289, 298, 299, 306,307 Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, 117n. gun-finishers, 33 gunsmiths, 33 Gurdon, Brampton, 133 Gurdon family, 134,136,143,154 Gurdon, John, 134 & n. Gussage, Dorset, 45 gypsies, 200 Hadleigh, Suffolk, 132 Hadlow family, 325 & n. Hadlow, Kent., 123n., 281, 31 On., 325n. Halesworth, Suffolk, 143n. Halifax, 170 Halifax, Anne Montagu, Countess of, 232 Halifax, George Montagu, Earl of, 175,180 Hallaton, Leics., l l l , 1 1 5 & n . Halley, Joseph, Northampton innkeeper, 198 Hall, Francis, London innkeeper, 186 Hall, Joseph, Northampton innkeeper, 192 Halstead, Kent, 274-5 Halstow, Lower, Kent, 256 Hambrook family, 321 Hamlet, performed at inn, 183 hamlets, 72, 87, 88, 89 Hammill, Kent, 5In., 53 Hampden, John, 217 Hampshire, 55, 62n., 140, 248; arable farming, 76n.; Doddridge, Philip, 214n., 224; Hasted family, 251, 252, 255, 257; inns, innkeepers, 164,168; population, 88n., 106; settlement evolution, 45n., woodland, 75 & n.

Index Handborough, Oxon., 281 Hanover, 161 Hanslope, Bucks., I l l , 124 & n. Harbledown, Kent, 322n. Harborough, Countess of, 232 Harborough District Council, 313 Hardingstone, Northants., 195 Hardres, Upper and Lower, Kent, 51n., 53 Hardy, Thomas, 39, 279, 320 harness-makers, 7, 36, 324 & n. Harply, Nfk., 303 Harrietsham, Kent, 272 Harrison, Mrs, Northampton innkeeper's widow, 198 Harrold, Beds., 57 Harste family, 274 Hart Hall, Oxford, 220 Hartopp family, 233 Hartopp, Sir John, 233 Harvey, Edmund, 145 Harvey family (of Eastry), 314 & n. Harvey, P.D.A., 97, 101 Harwich, 125n. Haselbech, Northants., 228n. Hasted family, of Kent, 27, 247-77; see also Hausted; Heighsted; Highsted; Hysted; Isted Hasted family, of Suffolk, 254 Hasted, Anne, sister of the historian, 258 sqq., 277 Hasted, Anne, nee Dorman, 261 sqq., 266 Hasted, Anne, nee Tyler, 257 sqq., 277 Hasted, Anne, daughter of the historian, 262, 264, 266, 267, 273 Hasted, Charles, 262, 263 sq., 268, 270, 272-3, 277 Hasted, Edward, father of the historian, 257sqq., 277 Hasted, Edward, historian of Kent, 27, 43, 44, 64, 81, 90n., 113n., 114n., 125n., 161, 179, 247'-77 passim Hasted, Edward, son of the historian, 250, 254, 262-77 passim Hasted, Edward, son of Francis Dingley, 267 Hasted, Elizabeth, 275 Hasted, Francis Dingley, 262, 263, 264 sqq., 268, 270, 276 Hasted, Francis, son of Francis Dingley, 267 sqq., 276 Hasted, George, 262, 263, 269, 276 Hasted, George, son of Francis Dingley, 267, 268 Hasted, Henry, of Suffolk, 275 Hasted, John, son of Francis Dingley, 267,

343 269, 276 Hasted, John Septimius, 262, 263, 264, 273 Hasted, Jonathan, 267 Hasted, Joseph, 251, 252, 255 sqq., 269, 275 Hasted, Katherine, nee Yardley, 255, 256 Hasted, Katherine, daughter of the historian, 262, 264, 266, 273,277 Hasted, Mary, nee Edwards, 254, 275 Hasted, Mary, nee Goslin, 254, 255, 275 Hasted, Mrs, nee Notley, 263 Hasted, Moses, 252, 254 sqq., 274, 275 Hasted, Nathaniel, 275 Hasted, Sarah, nee Powell, 266, 267 Hasted, Sarah Anne, 267 Hasted, Thomas, 275 Hastingleigh, Kent, 81 Hastings, 81, 273n., 298, 304 Hatley, V.A., 318n. Hatley Wilds, Cambs., 51 Hausted family, 251, 252, 255 Hausted family, of Hampshire, 274 Hausted, Humphrey de, 274 Hausted, John, 251 Hausted, John, jr., 251 Hausted, Laurence, 251, 252 Hautsbourne, Kent, 48n. Haverhill, Suffolk, 136 Hawkhurst, Kent, 89 & n., 179 Hawkins family, of Northampton, 196 Hawkins, William, of Northampton, 196-7 Hawley, Kent, 257 sqq. Hawstead, Suffolk, 254 Haxey, Lines, 123 Haydn, F.J., 29, 244 Hayes family, of Northampton, 196 Haysted, George, 252 Haysted, John, 252 Haywood, Kent, 74n. Heal Collection of billheads, in British Library, 208 Hearth Tax, 63,64 heathen centres, 97, 98 heaths, heathlands, 16-18, 20, 88 Heckington, Lines., 282 Heighsted family, 254 Helen Sutermeister Lecture, 309n. Helmingham Hall, Suffolk, 146n. Helpston, Northants., 121 Hemington, Northants., 97n. Henham, Suffolk, 134, 135 Henry V, 161 Henry VI, 102 Henry, Matthew, 218 Heppington, Kent, 29n. Herbert, George, 218, 226

344


Hereford, 1, 29, 159 Herefordshire, 76n. Herne, Kent, 48n. Herring, Thomas, archbishop, 220 Hertford College, Oxford, 220 Hertfordshire, 11, 45n., 62,131n., 147, 151,153,158,233 Hervey family, 131 Hervey, James, 228 & n. Heveningham family, 136,154 Heveningham, William, 148n. Hever, Kent, 5 Heworth, Co. Durham, 289 Hextal, John, 225 Higham Ferrers, Northants., 116n. High Cross, Kent, 79 Highgate, Kent, 89 & n. High Halden, Kent, 123n. Highland Zone, 3,12, 42, 80, 23In. High Peak, Derbys., 283 Highsted family, 253, 254 Highsted in Chislet, Kent, 275 Highsted in Sittingbourne, Kent, 253, 269 highwaymen, 163,172, 173,199 sq., 205-6 High Weald, Kent, 67 High Wycombe, 26n. Hilder family (painters), 326 hill forts, 95 Hill, Sir Francis, 131n. Hillmorton, Warws., 226 Hilton, R.H., 109 & n. Hinckley, 26n., 110, 200, 286, 290, 291 Hintlesham, Suffolk, 131 Hinton, Dorset, 45 History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 250, 260, 273n. Hitchcock, John, Northampton innkeeper, 186 Hitchin, 26n. hithes, 48n. Hoadly, Benjamin, 214n. Hoare family, 257 Hoare, Richard, 257 Hobart family, 154 Holland, 154 Holland, Thomas, Northampton innkeeper, 185 Hollingbourne, Kent, 250, 253, 254, 263, 264, 266, 267, 268, 269-73, 276, 277, 325 Hollingbourne House, Kent, 272 Hollingworth family (of Maidstone), 323 Hollo way family (of Maidstone), 323 hollo ways, Kentish, 78

Holmes, Geoffrey, 313 &n., 322-3 & n. Holt, Dorset, 45n. Home Counties, 11 & n., 38 Homewood family (Kentish carriers), 303, 321 Honduras, 38 hone-making, 123n. Honiton, 26n. Honywood family, 256 Hoo, Hundred of Kent, 73 & n. Hooke, Delia, 19 Hooker, Richard, 136,138, 217 hop-factors, 320 hop-farming, 90, 91 hop-gardens, 16, 67, 73, 75 hop trade, 168 Hornbuckle family (Leics., carriers), 303 Horncastle, 95-97 passim Horringer, Suffolk, 133 horse-dealers, 171 horse-fairs, 171 horse-markets, 171 horse-races, 180 horses, 158,159,191, 258, 279, 282, 283, 286-7, 301 horses, raising of in Civil War, 142 horses, stabling for at inns, 165-6 horse-trade, 171 Horsmonden, Kent, 327n. Horsted family, 274 horticulture, 181 Horton, Glos., 113n. Horton Kirby, Kent, 47 hosiery industry, 24, 26 & n., 123, 328n. Hoskins, W.G., 7, 12, 41, 44-5, 47, 7In., 99,125,249,253,311 hospitality, antique notions of, 150 hotels, 156 sq., 206 Hougham, Kent, 325 Houghton-on-the-Hill, Leics., 300 Houndhill, Dorset, 45n. Hounslow Heath, Middx., 165 Howe, John (of Sudbury), 145 Howe, John (Dissenting author), 219 hoys, hoymen, 24n., 125n. Hucking, Kent, 263, 271, 325 Hudson, W.H., 279 Huguenot families, in Kent, 320n. Hulkes, Stephen; 80n. Hull, 215, 283, 287, 288, 289, 296, 302, 303,306,319 humanitarian movements, 211 humanitarianism, 227, 234, 243, 245 Humberside, 41 Hunstanton, Norfolk, 303 Huntingdon, 130

Index Huntingdon, Selina, Countess of, 119, 232, 240 Huntingdonshire, 19, 51, 57, 58, 63n., 130n. 131n., 142,147, 240 Hunton, Kent, 325n. Hurst Hill, Kent, 74n. husbandmen, 12, 90, 249, 252 Hyde, F.E., 203 hymnody, development of, 30 hymns, 211, 214, 223, 224 & n. Hysted family, 254 Ibstoek, Leics., 300 Ickham, Kent, 48, 49, 50n., 51n., 53, 82n. Icknield Way, 96 Ickworth, Suffolk, 131 Ifield, Kent, 116 Igglesden family (Kentish carriers), 303 Ightham, Kent, 79 Iliffe family (Leics. carriers), 303 illuminism, 216 & n., 244 sq. incorporated boroughs, 102 Independents, 100,119,120n., 143 & n., 144n., 212, 228n.; see also Congregationalists India, 264 sqq. Indian nabobs, 266 India Office, 269 Indies, 38 indigo merchant, 264 indigo planters, 269 industrial cities, 22, 94 industrial counties, 106-7 industrial occupations, 6-7 industrial regions, 8, 39, 59 Industrial Revolution, 23, 30, 32, 35, 36, 104 sqq., 324n. industrial towns, 105 sq., 286 industrial villages, 69, 123 sqq. industries, 311 industries, small-scale, 105 sq. industry, 312 infirmaries, hospitals, 30 & n., 211-12 & n. Ingham, Benjamin, 220, 238 inheritance customs, 198 inland entrepots, 24, 25, 37,167, 172, 184 inland trade, 103-4,168 sqq. innkeepers, 31n., 40,158,184-201, 303, 317, 320, 321; see also publicans innkeepers' recognizances, 208 innkeeping dynasties, 193-8, 208, 317 inns, 24, 27, 89n., 104, 142,155-208, 281, 296, 302 sq. inn-trading, 203 inoculation, 211 & n.

345 instrument-makers, 34n. insurance offices, 25 internal trade, 22 Interregnum, 240 Ipswich, 23, 130, 132,135,140 sqq., 154, 288, 289, 290, 297, 298, 302, 306 Ipswich, Guildable of, 145n. Ireland, 38,142,186,187 ironfounding, 105 iron industry, Wealden, 87 ironmongers, 142, 310 Ironsides, 129 iron working, 3, 4 Irthlingborough, Northants., 116n., 123 Islip, Northants., 324n. isolated churches, 70 & n. isolated farms, see scattered settlement Isted family, 253 Italy, 38 Jackson, John, 326n. Jacob, Edward, 29n. Jacobites, 176 James Fox Special Lecture, 309n. Jedburgh, 297 Jeffcut family, of Northampton, 196, 197 Jeff cut, Henry, 196 Jeffs, Robert, 161 Jekyll, Gertrude, 287, 299 Jennings, John, 218 Jermyn family, 134, 141 Jermyn, Sir Thomas, 131 jersey combers, 195 Jessup, Ronald, 96 Jewel, John, Bishop of Salisbury, 136 jewellery sales, 171 Jewish families, in Kent, 320n. jobmasters, 285 jobmen, 280 Johnson, John, 319n. Johnson, John, of Leicester, 157 Johnson, Joseph, prize-fighter, 182 Johnson, Pelham, 259 Johnson, Samuel, 29 joiners, 32 Jurassic Way, 96 justices of the peace, 140, 174, 208, 251, 263 justification by faith, 234 Jutes, 83n. Jutish monarchy, 99 Jutish settlement, 70 Kay, Richard, 244n. Kedington, Suffolk, 135,136, 154

346


Keeler, Christine, 327 Kegworth, Leics., 116 & n., 123, 300 Kelly's Directory ofKent (1870), 320 Kemble family (actors), 326 Kemsley, Kent, 74n. Kendal, 173 Kenewesbourne, Kent, 48n. Kennington Lees, Kent, 87-8 Kent, 21, 29, 37n., 39,168,177, 199, 240, 279, 282, 314, 315n., 316 & n., 324 sqq.; breweries, 31 On.; carriers, 284, 306; county committee, 143, 144; craft dynasties, 323 sqq.; craftsmen, 36, 279; during Great Rebellion, 129, 131 &n., 132, 133, 134,136, 138, 139 & n., 140, 152; dynastic connexion, 320 sqq.; gentry, 27, 63-4, 272; Hasted family, 247-77 passim', inns, innkeepers, 158, 206; markets, 110-27 passim;pays, 2-17 passim', primary towns, 94-107 passim; settlement, 20n.; settlement evolution, 41-59, 61-91 Kent Archives Office, 280 Kentish families, 247-77 Kentish Gazette, 313 Kentish law and custom, 43 & n. Kentish petition (1642), 175 Kentish ragstone, 67 Kentish villages, carriers' routes and services to, 304-5 Kesteven, 18, 19 Kettering, 26n., 105,116n., 185, 186,199, 227 &n., 259 Kettlebender, Kent, 89, 90 & n. Kettleshffl, Kent, 79 Key family, of Northampton, 197 Key, Harry, Northampton innkeeper, 194 Key, John, Stilton innkeeper, 194 Key, Josiah, Northampton innkeeper, 186, 194 Key, Robert, Northampton innkeeper, 194 Keyes, James, Northampton innkeeper, 192 Keysoe Row, Beds., 17, 18n. Keysoe, Beds., 18n. Kibworth, Leics., 116 & n., 122 Kibworth Harcourt, Leics., 218, 222 Kilsby, Northants., 225 Kilworth, Leics., 300 Kimcote, Leics., 280, 312 & n. King's Bench, 251, 262, 266 King's Cliffe, Northants., 26n., 115 & n., 123, 227 Kingsdown-by-Wrotham, Kent, 47 & n., 50,113n. King's Lynn, 132, 303, 306

Kingsnorth (near Ashford), Kent, 321 Kingsnorth family, 321 King's School, Canterbury, 263 King's School, Rochester, 260 Kingston, A., 129 & n., 146,150 Kingston, Cambs., Ill Kingston, Kent, 48, 49 Kingston Lacy, Dorset, 45n. Kingston upon Thames, 217, 310 Kington, Herefs., 159 kinship-groups, 215, 233; see also dynastic connexion Kinver, Staffs., 200 Kirby, James, 31 On. Kirby Moorside, Yorks., 296 Kitts End, Barnet, Herts., 186 Knatchbull family, 249 Knole.Kent, 143,144 Knowlton, Dorset, 45 labourers, 12, 31,40 labourers' cottages, Great Rebuilding of, 90 labouring population, 90 lace-dealers, 124,206 lacemakers, 105 Lacemakers' Petition (1698), 124 & n. lacemaking, 3, 26 & n., 124 & n. lacemaking districts, 39 lace markets, 170 lace-schools, 124 Lacey, Mrs, Northampton innkeeper's widow, 198 Lady Hungerford's Hospital, Corsham, Wilts., 262 Laforce, Rene, Northampton innkeeper, 185,198 Laithwaite, Michael, 159 Lake District, 17 Lambarde, William, 177 Lamberhurst, Kent, 179, 325 Lambeth, 220, 266 Lambourne, Berks., 18,159 Lamorby Park, Kent, 257 Lampen stream, Kent, 53 Lancashire, 4, 6-7, 8n., 9, 36, 45n., 62, 74n., 107,114, 169, 244n., 248, 286, 298 Lancaster, 173, 209n. land-agents, 322, 323 landed families, 8, 65, 215, 309, 311, 313n., 314, 320n., 323 landowners, 4 sqq., 120 sqq., 135,13940, 248,251,315 landownership, 56, 85n., 127 landscape, 1 sqq., 12 sqq., 43, 44, 58, 61-91

Index landscape painters, 326 & n. land-surveyors, 34 lathes of Kent, 82n., 98, 99n., 114,141, 144 Latin, 3 On. latitudinarianism, 235 Laudians, 132 Lavenham, Suffolk, 143n. Law, William, 227, 229, 240 lawn (cloth), 171 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 167-8 lawyers, 201, 259, 260 sq., 313n., 314; see also attorneys; solicitors Leamington Spa, 104 Learned English Dog, the, 182 leather-dealers, 171 Leatherland family, 319n. leather market, at inn, 171 lectures, at inns, 178,183,191 Leeds Castle, Kent, 272 Leeds, Yorks., 94, 288, 298, 311, 313, 319 &n., 322 Lee's Rest, in Charlbury, Oxon., 96 Le Fevres, of Canterbury, 310 legal profession, 322-3 Leicester, 1, 2, 7,13, 23, 24, 28,104, 112, 115,116n., 122n., 125,169, 172, 206; carriers, 280-99passim; coaching, 104, 159; dynastic connexion, 318-19 & n., 322, 326, 328 & n.; hosiery industry, 26; hotels, 157; inns, innkeepers, 162,163,165,166,170,176,177; music, 29 & n.; newspapers, 25; nonconformity, 209; shoe industry, 26n. Leicester and Nottingham Journal, 178 Leicester Consanguinitarium, 319n. Leicester Constitutional Society, 166 Leicester Infirmary, 177 Leicester Literary Society, 177 Leicester, University of, 109n. Leicestershire, 2 sqq., 33, 66, 72, 74n., 83, 90,169, 178,199, 240, 316n., 322, 324n., 327; carriers, 280-307 passim; Doddridge, Philip, 218, 230, 233; dynastic connexion, 312, 322; markets, 113-27 passim; primary towns, 93-107 passim; settlement evolution, 45n., 58, 71, 83; woodland, 19, 74 Leicestershire villages, carriers' routes and services to, 292-95 Leicestershire wolds, 51,58 Leigh, Dorset, 45n.

347 Leighton Bromswold, Hunts., 51-57 Leighton Buzzard, 95, 99,199 Leighton, Robert, archbishop, 218-19 leisured classes, 31, 35,177 sqq., 231, 247 sqq., 264 Len, Kent, 48n., 79, 82 Lenham, Kent, 99,113,114,115, 253, 325n. Leonard Stanley, Glos., 1.13n. Lesser or Little Stour, Kent, 48, 49, 82 Leven, Countess of, 232 Lewis, John, 29n. Lewisham, 79-80, 247 Liberals, 328 liberal theology, 234, 235n. Licensed Premises, Magistrates' Registers of, 208 Lichfield, 29 & n. Lickey Hills, Worcs., 200 lime-burning, 105 Limen, Kent, 48n., 84 Lincoln, 21n., 136, 289, 298, 306 Lincoln, bishops of, 98,102,163 Lincolnshire, 62, 63n., 76, 120n., 142, 283, 327n.; arable farming, 76n.; during Great Rebellion, 147,148,149;markets, 111; nonconformity, 6, 228n.; primary towns, 94, 95, 97, 99; settlement evolution, 45; wolds, 19 Lincolnshire wolds, 19, 51, 57, 96 Lindsey, 6 linen-sales, 171 Linley family (of Bath), 326 & n. Linton, Cambs., 132 liquor licensing, 207 Lisbon, 230, 243n. Lister, Thomas, 148n. literary gatherings, at inns, 183 literature, English, 234 & n. Little Betsoms, Kent, 89 Littlebourne, Kent, 48, 49 & n., 82n. Little Chart, Kent, 98 Little Gidding, Hunts., 227, 240 Liverpool, 30n., 186, 212n., 223n., 322 livestock-farms, 45n. livestock trade, 115 Llandilo, Carmarthenshire, 159 local communities, typology of, 93 locksmiths, 33 London,.8, 72n., 81, 82n., 116, 125n., 131, 135, 136,145n., 161,163,164, 165, 168,172,176,182,183,187, 200, 202, 217, 233,,247-8, 272, 273n., 299, 302, 303, 310, 321; carriers, country, 279, 280, 283, 286, 305, 306; carriers, long-distance, 285; coaching, 104, 189

348


cultural centre, 28; Doddridge, Philip, 217, 223, 229, 230, 231; during Great Rebellion, 130,131,142, 144,146,150,153; Evangelical Revival, 213; Hasted family, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 266; influence of, 11, 38,139,144, 175; influence on Kent, 62, 63, 73, 75, 115; lace markets, 170; nonconformity, 214 & n., 219, 226n.; population, 6, 327 London Colney, Herts., 186 Longbridge Lees, Kent, 87, 89n. Long Buckby, Northants., 122 Longford, Lord, 327 Longley family (of Maidstone), 323 Long Melford, Suffolk, 64,129 Loose, Kent, 324n. Lords, House of, 322n. Lord, Walter, 299 lost churches, 71 & n. lost towns of England, 109-27 Loughborough, 110,116n., 123,158,159, 169,178,286,290,291 Louth, 45n., 95,105,178, 314 Lovatt, Josiah, 31 On. Loveday family, 324n. Low Countries, 136 Lowestoft, 132 Lowland Zone, 3,12,18, 36,42, 44, 76n., 80,83 Low Peak, Derbys., 283 Low Weald, Kent, 67 Lucas, Gibson, 145 Lucas, Robert, Northampton innkeeper, 192 Luddington, Northants., 97n. Luke, Sir Samuel, 15In. Lullingstone, Kent, 47 Lushington, Henry, 269 Lushington, Colonel James L., 269, 276 Lutherans, 217 Luton, 26n., 45n., 95, 99 Lutterworth, 23n., 28, 94,123, 286, 290, 291 Lydd, Kent, 18 &n. Lyminge, Kent, 84, 88 Lymington, 224 Lyne family, 323 Lyon, Charles, Northampton innkeeper, 189,193-4 Lyon, Charles II, of Northampton, 194 Lyon, Charles III, of Northampton, 194 Lyon, Mrs Elizabeth, of Northampton, 194 Lyon family, of Northampton, 189,193 sq.,

197,317 Lyon, Henry, Northampton innkeeper, 188, 193-4 Lyon, John, Northampton innkeeper, 194 Lyon, Katherine, Northampton innkeeper, 193-4 Lyon, Mary, Northampton innkeeper, 189, 194 Lyon, Samuel, of Northampton, 193-4 Machynlleth, 159 Mackleden family (Kentish carriers), 303 Macmfflan, Harold, 327 McNeill, Neil, Northampton innkeeper, 186 Macray,W.D., 129 Maddox, Isaac, bishop, 220 magistrates see justices of the peace Maidstone, 2, 62, 67, 84, 310 & n., 319n., 321, 323 & n., 325; carriers, 280, 282, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 297, 298, 301, 302, 303, 304-5, 306; Hasted family, 264, 272;inns,innkeepers, 162,175; market, 114; poll-books, 3940, 307, 323n.; primary town, 94-107 passim; regional centre, 23-29 Maidstone Museum, 250-51, 254 mail-coaches, 207 Maister family (of Hull), 319 Maitland, F.W., 9, 216n. Malda, Bengal, 265 malignants, 148, 175 Mailing Abbey, Kent, 117 & n. Malmain family, 274 malting, 36 & n., 105,123,197 Malton, Yorks., 289, 296, 306 maltsters, 130, 196,317 malt trade, 169 maltyards, 196 Manchester, 6, 8,104,105,106,170, 209, 288, 322 Manchester, Edward Montagu, Earl of, 131 & n., 140,148 & n., 149 sqq., 153 & n. Manchester road, 159 Manfields, of Northampton, 318 Manley, William, innkeeper, 200 Mannock family, 131,134 Mannock, Sir Francis, 129 manorial chapels, 56 & n., 240 manorial parishes, 4 sqq. manorial structure, in Kent, 80 sqq. manorial waste, 125 Mansfield, 26n. Mantuas, Italian], 172 manufacturers, 321, 323 manufactures, 104 sqq., 279, 315

Index manufacturing classes, 247 manufacturing towns, 318n. Maplescombe, Kent, 47 & n. marble-working, 123n. Marden, Kent, 100, 115 & n. Margary, Ivan, 97 Margate, 114n., 156 Maris, Mercy see Doddridge, Mercy market charters, 101 sqq. market crosses, 111 market dinners, 302 marketing, 168 market gardeners, 181, 283 market gardens, 171, 283 Market Harborough, 94, 109, 116n., 159, 164,168,212,222,282, 284, 286,290, 291, 313 & n. marketplaces, 103, 111 & n., 116 sqq., 161 sq. market rights, 94 Market Stainton, Lines., Ill market tolls, 169 market towns, market centres, 22-26 passim, 93-127, 136, 142, 203, 258, 279-307 passim, 320, 321, 324-6; carriers, 279-307 passim; decayed markets, 69, 109-27; evolution, 46, 48 &n., 56, 84;inns, 159 sqq., 200; nonconformity, 6, 231; social centres, 37 Markfield, Leics., 307 Markyate, Herts., 186 Marlborough, 158,165 Marlow, 164 Marshall, William, 42, 66, 76n. marshlands, 16-18, 20, 48n., 256 marshland, Kentish, 69, 71, 77, 80, 88n. Marston Moor, Yorkshire, 129, 135, 151 Martin family (of Maidstone), 323 Masham, Sir William, 148n. Massingham, Nfk, 303 Matfield,Kent,316 mathematical instrument-makers, 33, 323 mathematical instruments, 34 Matlock, 280 Matthews, Abraham, Northampton innkeeper, 192 Matthews, A.G., 149n. Matthews, Robert, St Albans innkeeper, 186 Maurice, Matthias, 227n.

349 Maxted family, 325 & n. Maxted in Elmsted, Kent, 325n. Mayo, Daniel, 217-18 mayoral feasts, at inns, 191 mead, 257 mechanization of agriculture, 16 Medbourne, Leics., 45n., 300 medical enterprise, 243, 244 & n. medicine, 234 Meditations among the Tombs, 228n. Meditations on the Tears of Jesus, 228n., 236 &n., 237,242, 243 & n. Mediterranean, 38 Medway, 17, 24n., 48n., 63, 67, 72n., 73 &n., 82,97, 298,305 Medway towns, 62 megaliths, 96 Melbourne Hall, Derbys., 283 Melton Mowbray, 64, 94-104 passim, 110, 286,289,290,291,296,301 Mendips, 14, 287 men tali'tes, 234 sqq. Meopham, Kent, 79 Meopham Bank, Kent, 79 mercers, 313n., 317; see also silk mercers Mercer, Samuel, 223n. merchants, 130, 133,135, 136, 138, 153, 168, 172, 190, 200-201, 282, 311, 314 Mercia, 11, 97 Mereworth, Kent, 71, 274 Meriden, Warws., 200 Merseyside, 11,38 metal trades, 22, 26n. Methodism, 213, 215 Methodists, 123, 219, 220-21 & n., 228n., 232 middlemen, 24, 207 Middlesex, 62, 63n., 64, 90 & n., 131n., 139, 158,230,283 Middleton, Northants., 300 Midland Association, 147 Midlands, 64, 66, 90, 100, 106, 113, 123, 147, 156, 157, 169, 225, 316n.; carriers, 298, 299; Doddridge, Philip, 230; enclosure, 89; inns, innkeepers, 164, 169, 199, 200; landed families, 5; nonconformity, 14, 209, 231n., 244; settlement evolution, 43, 70 & n., 71, 72, 73n., 86 migration, 8, 315 migration of innkeepers, 184 sqq. Milford, Surrey, 326n. Militia Lists, 31 & n., 39-40 Mill on the Floss, The, 302, 329 & n.

350


millers, 7, 320 milliners, 316 millwrights, 32, 34 & n., 35n., 324 & n., 326 Milsted family, 325 & n. Milsted, Kent, 325n. Milton by Gravesend, Kent, 116n., 11718 &n. Milton Regis, Kent, 94-103 passim, 114, 116n., 160,304 ministers, dissenting, 21845 passim minor gentry, 150, 154, 167, 185, 197, 217, 244n., 251,254, 255,311, 312,321 minster churches, 45n., 97-8 Minster-in-Sheppey, Kent, 81n. Minster-in-Thanet, 29n., 114 missionary activity, 30, 211, 225, 227 & n., 243, 244,266 Misterton, Leics., 316n. Mockbeggar, Kent, 90 & n. Molash, Kent, 70 Mollington, Oxon., 100 Monins, John, 29n. Montague family, 181 Montagu, Frederick, 166 Montagu, Mrs Elizabeth, 179 monumental inscriptions, 241 & n., 273, 276, 277 monumental masons, 324n. Moravians, 217 & n., 221n., 236, 238 Moor Crichel, Dorset, 45 Moore family (of Appleby Magna, Leics.), 327n. More, Henry, 219 Morgan Squires, of Leicester, 310 Morland, 326n. Morrill, J.S., 21 Morton, John, 160 mortuary poets, 228 & n. Morwenstow, Cornwall, 1 Mosley family, 322 Mote Park, Kent, 272 Motet, Mr, French sculptor, 183, 205 mother churches, 97-8 motor-buses, 282 motor transport, 288 Moulsham, Essex, 163, 164 Moulton, Northants., 124 Mount Morris, Kent, 179 Mount Radford, Devon, 217 Mountsorrel, Leics., 94, 116 & n., 117&n. murders, at Putloe, Glos., 200-201 musical life, 29, 234,258

muslins, 171 Muston, Leics., 122 Myddle, Salop., 93 nailers, 33 nailmaking, 3, 26 Nailstone, Leics., 300 Namier, Sir Lewis, 21 Napoleonic Wars, 76n., 89 & n., 90n., 174 Naseby, Northants., 121,129,135, 153 naval dynasties, 314 & n. naval officers, 313n., 314 & n., 322 navy, 312 navigational improvement, 169 navigation, river, 176,177 Neal, Nathaniel, 220 needle-making, 26 & n. neighbourhoods, 12, 39, 42, 215, 312 Neilson, Nellie, 69 Nene, 17, 166, 172, 176, 227n. Nene valley, 96 Netherlands, 230 Nettleton, Elizabeth, nee Doddridge, 217, 218 Nettleton, John, 218 Newark, Notts., 40,105, 159, 162,165, 285, 286 Newbury, 163 Newcastle, duke of, 175 Newcastle, William .Cavendish, Earl of, 147 Newcastle-under-Lyme, 328 & n. Newcastle upon Tyne, 22, 40, 173, 284, 288, 289, 296 sq., 297, 298, 306, 319, 322 New College, London, 21 In., 229n. Newenden, Kent, 11 On. New England, 230 Newington-next-Hythe, Kent, 53n. Newington-next-Milton, Kent, 114n., 116n., 126n., 256,263 New Jerusalem, the, 130,151,154 Newland (Brixworth), Northants., 111-12 & n. Newman, A.N., 320n. Newmarket, 132,173 New Model Army, 130, 134,148,150, 151 sqq. New Model Ordinance, 152 Newnham, Kent, 80n., 103, 325 Newport Pagnell, 26 & n., 186, 206, 282 New Romney, Kent, 179 newsagents, 310 newspapers, provincial, 25, 168, 173, 208, 216,285 news-rooms, at inns, 176 New Testament, 235 sqq. Newton Bromswold, Northants., 51, 57 Newton,John, 228, 265

Index Newton, Richard, 220 Nicolson family, 233 Nightingale, Florence, 327n. nobility, the, 182 No Man's Land, Leicester, 163 Nonconformist school, 218 Nonconformity, Dissent, 5-6, 8,14, 89n., 93, 119-20, 122 sq., 127,164, 209-45 passim, 312, 327n., 328 Norfolk, 21, 39, 62, 63n., 64, 89n., 106, 110, 131, 136, 139n., 142,149, 153, 325 &n. Norman Conquest, 19, 43n., 55, 78, 80, 85 sqq., 89, 94, 99, 103, 116,254 Norris, John, 226 Northampton, 8, 94n., 112 & n., 156, 301; carriers, 288, 290; Doddridge, Philip, 209-45 passim', dynastic connexion, 310, 315, 317, 318 & n., 324n., 326; inns, innkeepers, 156, 158-206 passim, 302; nonconformity, 122n., 209-45 passim; poll-books, 3940; regional centre, 22-35, 103 sqq., 115 Northampton Academy, 30n., 183, 212 &n., 214, 225 & n., 243 Northampton Castle, 222 Northampton, Elizabeth Compton, Countess of, 180 Northampton Infirmary, 30 & n., 176, 211 Northampton, James Compton, Earl of, 180, 193 Northampton Mercury, 8, 28 & n., 30, 39, 165, 168, 170, 173, 180, 181 sqq., 184,189, 190,199,205,216 Northampton Philosophical Society, 30n., 34 &n., 183, 225n. Northamptonshire, 5, 24n., 26n., 63n., 64, 73, 94, 97 & n., 99,142, 204, 213, 214n., 248, 313n.; arable farming, 76n.; carriers, 280, 282, 284, 299, 300, 306; craftsmen, 31; inns, innkeepers, 160, 175, 182, 183, 199; markets, 111-27 passim; nonconformity, 213, 214n., 216, 225 sqq.; population, 106; settlement evolution, 19,51,57,58 Northamptonshire Militia List, 31, 300 Northamptonshire petition (1642), 175 North, the, 298 North America, 65 Northbourne, Kent, 50, 53 North Cray, Kent, 46 North Country, 75, 209, 23In.

351 North-East, the, 11, 297 northern counties, 90n., 23In. North family, 134, 136, 143, 154 North, Henry, 145 North, Sir Roger, 134&n. Northfleet, Kent, 116n. North Kilworth, Leics., 327n. North Riding, 106 North Shields, 289 Northumberland, 62, 74, 77,147, 284, 297 Northumberland, Countess of, 232 Northumbria, 97 Norton Court, Kent, 8In. Norton Green, Kent, 8In. Norton (near Malton), Yorks., 296 Norton St Philip, Som., 170 Norwich, 13, 111, 132, 219, 309n., 326; carriers, 173, 288, 289, 290, 298, 302, 306; poll-books, 40; regional centre, 23, 24, 25, 26n., 29 Norwood, Kent, 74n. Nottingham, 23, 24, 25, 26, 40, 41n., 173, 174,182,222,288,297,306 Nottinghamshire, 15, 36, 110, 130n., 157 Nottinghamshire Wolds, 58 nucleated settlement, 58, 69-70, 83 sq., 113 'nurseries of piety', 215, 226, 240n. nurserymen, 169 Nursted, Kent, 314 & n., 327n. Nuttall, G.F., 30n., 21 In., 218, 227 & n., 232n., 235, 237n. Nye family (of Tunbridge Wells), 324 oasthouses, 316 < occupational regions, 22, 26, 39 occupational structure, 24, 40 oculists, 171 Odell, Beds., 57 oil-milling, 105 Old Bottom, Kent, 5In. Old Boys' Network, 309, 323 old corporations, 328 Old Dissent, 209, 215, 216, 219, 228n. Old Downs, Kent, 5In. Oldfield in Ellington, Hunts., 5In., 57 Old Hurst, Hunts., 5In. Old, Northants., 5In. Oldridge, Devon, 51n. Old Testament, 235 Old Weston, Hunts., 5In., 57 Old West Surrey, 299 Old Wives' Tale, The, 302, 309, 329 oligarchy, 317 Oliphant, Mrs Margaret, 329

352


Olney, Bucks., 26n., 228, 242n., 282 omnibuses, 281-2, 288 open market, the, 168 open villages, 93 orchards, 16, 67, 73 organic towns, 94, 103,104 Oriel College, Oxford, 262 orramen, 316 Orton family, 230 Orton, Job, 225n., 230 Ospringe, Kent, 79 ostlers, 185 Otford, Kent, 47, 102 Otterden, Kent, 85n. Otterpley in ChaUock, Kent, 110 Ottery St Mary, Devon, 1, 26n. Oundle, 94-102 passim, 176, 231 Oundle, Eight Hundreds of, 95-101 passim Ouse, Great, 17, 142,150 overseas exploration, 234 Overton, J.H., 227n. Ovid's Metamorphoses, 182 Owen, D.M., 97 Owen, John, 218 Oxenden, Kent, 54 Oxford, 8, 23, 104, 202, 212n., 309n.; carriers, 173, 287, 288, 298, 306; Doddridge, Philip, 217, 220; during Great Rebellion, 132, 133, 146, 153; dynastic connexion, 311, 315, 319; Hasted family, 262 Oxfordshire, 15, 45, 63n., 76n., 95,100, 101,105,106 Oxford, Worcester, and Wolverhampton Railway, 306 Oxinden family, 133, 256 Oxinden, Sir James, 144 Oxley Parker family, 323 oyster-dredging, 125n., packmen, 281 Paddlesworth, Kent, 44, 53 Paganini, Nicolo, 29n. painters, 326 & n. painter stainer, to the Navy, 255 Pakenham, Suffolk, 134 Palliser, D.M., 202 Palmer family (of Walton-by-Kimcote), 280 Palmer, Frederick William, 280, 282 Palmer, Samuel, 74 Pamphill, Dorset, 45n. pannage, 54, 55n. Pantin, W.A., 155

paper industry, 24, 26 papermakers, 24n., 323 paper-making, 40,105,106, 323 & n. paper-mills, 323 papists, 139n. parchment-making, 123 parish formation, 82-3, 84, 85, 86 & n. Parker family, 134, 136,143 Parkers, of Northampton, 318 parliament, 11, 160,175 Parliament, during Great Rebellion, 129, 131 sqq., 137 sqq., 142, 144 sqq., 152, 153 parliamentarianism, 132 parliamentary elections, 176,195, 204 parliamentary enclosure, 16, 35, 57, 72, 89 Parratt family (charcoal-burners), 326n. parsons, 322; see also clergy partible inheritance, 43n., 91 pastoral husbandry, 3, 76 sqq. pastoral regions, 69 pastoral society, 80 sq. Patrixbourne, Kent, 48, 49 Pattishall, Northants., 160 Payne, William, 281 pays, or countrysides, types of, 3, 4, 13-20, 22-3, 38-9, 41-59, 66 sqq., 180, 301 Payton, John, 166-7 Peach family, of Northampton, 194-7, 317 Peach, Conyers, of Northampton, 197 Peach, Elizabeth, of Northampton, 196 Peach, Henry, of Northampton, 195, 196, 197 Peach, John I, of Northampton, 195 Peach, Robert, of Northampton, 196-7 Peach, Thomas I, of Northampton, 194-5 Peach, Thomas II, of Northampton, 195 Peach, Thomas HI, of Northampton, 195-6 Peach, Thomas IV, of Northampton, 196-7 Peach, Thomas V, of Northampton, 196-7 Peach, William, of Northampton, 196-7 Pearson, Mr, Congregational pastor, 224 peasant aristocracy, 311 peasant economy, 7, 279 Pease family (of Hull), 319 Peberdy family (Leics. carriers), 303 peers, 201 Pembroke College, Oxford, 217 Penavayre, John, Northampton innkeeper, 198 Penenden Heath, Kent, 96 Pennines, 17, 64, 74, 77, 99 Penshurst, Kent, 5,113n. Pentonville, 329 Pepys, Richard, 145

Index Pepys, Samuel, 207 Percy, Sidney Richard, 326n. Pershore, 222 Peterborough Abbey, 98,101 Peters family (of Liverpool), 322 Petersfield, Hants., 55, 74 Petham, Kent, 316 Pettus, Sir John, 134 Pevington, Kent, 98 pewterers, 33 Peyton family, 240 Philadelphia, 32n. Phillips, Mark, 327 philosophical instruments, 34 physicians, 322 Pick, S.D., 319 &n. Pickering, Vale of, Yorks., 296 Picket Post, Hants., 164 pickpockets, 163 picture-sales, 171 pietism, German, 217 Pilcher family, 314 pilgrims to Canterbury, 156,160 Pilgrims' Way, Kent, 77, 82, 96 sq., 114 Pilkington, firm of, 311 Pine family (of Maidstone), 323 pin-makers, 33 pin-making, 26n. pipemakers, 324n. pipe-making, 105 piracy, 154 Pitstock, Kent, 45n. place-name evidence, 43 & n. Plain and Serious Address to the Master of a Family, 237n., 240 planted towns, 93 sq., 125 Plaxtol, Kent, 86n. playbills, Gabrielle Enthoven Collection of, in Victoria and Albert Museum, 208 plays, 27, 183, 191,208 Playters family, 136 Playters, Sir William, 134 ploughmen, 316 Pluckley, Kent, 98, 274 Plumstead, 247 Plungar, Leics., 122 plush-making, 26,105 Plym, Devon, 45 Plymouth Brethren, 213, 327 & n. Plympton, Devon, 45 Plymstock, Devon, 45 Pochin family (Leics. carriers), 303 Pocklington, Yorks., 296

353 Pococke, Richard (bishop), 159, 207 Polebrook Hundred, Northants., 97n. Polebrook, Northants., 97n. political clubs, 174 sq., 176 political functions, of inns, 174 sqq. Polkinherne family, 323 poll-books, 27n., 39-40, 323n. poor relief, 90 & n., 163 population, 85 sqq., 88 & n., 100, 103, 106 sq., 315 portreeves, 102 Posse Comitatus, of Buckinghamshire, 124n. post-horses, 191 posting inns, 165-6,167 post office, in Northampton, 191 posting services, 184 potato seed, sale of, 169 Potts family (of Newcastle upon Tyne), 322 poulterers,, 168 poultry, 282, 283 Powell, Benjamin, 266, 268 Powell, Mr, fire-eater, 182 Powell, Samuel, 266 Prague, 217 Pratt family, of Northampton, 193 Pratt, John, Northampton innkeeper, 193 Pratt, Mr, Northampton innkeeper, 189, 192 preaching-tours, 214 & n. pre-Conquest markets, 95n., 101 sqq. prehistoric tracks, 96-7, 102; see also Pilgrims' Way presbyterian classis, at Northampton, 176 prebyterian classis, of Suffolk, 143 & n., 153n. Presbyterians, 119, 120n., 143 & n., 144n. prescriptive markets, 101 sq., 102, 112n., 113n., 114n., 126 Preston-by-Wingham, Kent, 53 Preston, Lanes., 7, 169, 178, 180, 281, 282, 288,289,298,299,306 Price family (of Worcester), 317-18 Price, Thomas, 318 & n. Pride and Prejudice, 259 primary settlements, 114 primary towns, 46 & n., 48, 93-107 printers, 25, 28n. printing, 105 Prior, Mary, 311 private schools, 184 prize-fighting, 182 processing trades, 311 professional classes, 40, 178, 232, 247, sqq., 256 professional families, dynasties, 259, 317, 322-3

354


professional firms, 303 professions, professional men, professional occupations, 6-7, 9,25,124,310-13,315,317, 321,322-3 property auctions, 171 Property Returns of 1860,127n. Propositions, the, 141 Protectorate, the, 119,134,136,143, 154 Protestantism, 210, 213, 234, 235 provisioning, 106n. provision merchants, 282 pseudo-gentry, 27-8,178, 248-77 passim, 314 psychology, 234 publicans, 285; see also innkeeping public breakfasts, at inns, 181 publishers, 25, 29 & n. pugilists, 182pump-makers, 33 purgatory, 234 Puritan divines, 218 Puritan families, 233 puritanism, 130, 133,136 sqq., 154, 209, 210, 213, 219, 226, 231, 235, 240 Puritans, 132,136-8, 220 purveyors, 310 Putloe, Glos., 170, 200 sq. Quakers, 327 & n. Quarry Hills, Kent, 67 quasi-gentry, 314 rabbits, 282 rabbit-warrens, 89n. races, 27 Radcliffe family, 322 Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, 212n. Radnor, second Earl of, 262 Raikes, Robert, 212 railheads, 289 railways, 16,115,156,160,161, 279, 280, 281, 285, 289, 297, 302 Rainham, Kent, 4In. Ramsey, Hunts., 122n. Ramsey, Michael (archbishop of Canterbury), 327 Ramsgate, 325 Randell, Arthur, 303 Rathbone family (of Liverpool), 318 Raverat, Gwen, 280 Rawlings family (of Cornwall), 325 Reader family, 272 Rebellion of 1745,180

Reculver, Kent, 114 Recusants, 132 & n., 141, 145 Redbourn, Herts., 186 Redditch, 26n., 200 Redmile, Leics., 122 Reformation, the, 136, 210 & n., 313 Reform Bill (1832), 104,174 reform of manners, 234 regional capitals, 21, 303 regional cultures, 8-9, 22 regional development, 38, 39, 59 regional evolution, 11-40 regional industries, occupations, 25, 317-18 regional markets, 23, 28, 35, 37, 103 sqq. regional origins, 41-59 regiones, 45 sqq., 46, 84, 98, 114 religious census of 1851, 122-3 religious publications, in eighteenth century, 216 & n. Renaissance, 210 Rendham, Suffolk, 238 Republicans, 119 Requests, Court of, 207 Restoration of Charles II, 86n., 104,132, 154, 170,175, 184, 254, 315n. retailers, 31, 124 retailing, 301; see also shopkeepers; shopping retail shops, 310-11 retail trades, 105, 297,312 Return of Owners of Land (1873), 4, 248, 321n. Revell family, 33, 34 Revolution Club, Leicester, 166 Reyce, Robert, 135, 136,138 & n., 154 Reynolds, Edward, bishop, 219 Ribble, 298 Richards, Eric, 323 Richborough, Kent, 49n., 53, 82 & n. Riddell, Rev., of Harrietsham, 272 Ridgly, Elizabeth, 228n. riding schools, 184 Ridley family (of Newcastle upon Tyne), 319 Ringwood, Hants., 164 Ringwould, Kent, 51 &n. Ripley, P.J.G., 317 Ripple, Kent, 5 In. Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, 211,224il., 228 sq., 239 & n. Riverhead, Kent, 86n. river port, 298 Rivers, Elizabeth Darcy, Countess, 129 river-settlements and estates, 41-50, 52-59 road-books, 207

Index Robins family, 272 Rochester, 13, 116n., 138, 160; carriers, 304; Hasted family, 250, 255, 256, 257,259,260,263,264,274; monastic houses, 43n., 80, 117n.; poll-books, 40; settlement evolution, 50n. Rochester, Bishop of, 117 & n. Rockingham, Northants., 121 Rockingham Forest, 97n., 176-7, 199 Rockingham, Lewis Watson, Earl of, 185 Roman coins, 96 Roman Conquest, 95 Roman road, 45n., 48, 49 & n., 50n., 53n. 55,69,77,81-2,96-7,100,116 Roman settlements, 95 Roman towns, 94, 96n. Roman villas, 47, 95, 96 Rome House, Chatham, 259 Romano-British settlement, 18 & n. Romney, Earl of, 272 Romney Marsh, 14, 15, 16, 43, 67, 69, 73, 79, 80 &n., 116 rope-making, 105 Rothley, Leics., 117 Rothwell, Northants., 116n., 122n., 226n. 227n., 313n Rous family, 135,136, 143 Rous, Sir John, 134 Rowe, Sir William, 148,149 Rowzee, Dr, of Ashford, 179 royal estates, Anglo-Saxon, 98 royal family, of George II, 182 royalism, 129, 131 & n., 132, 154 Royalists, 129, 133, 141 Royal Navy, 255 Royal Society, 34,182, 225n. Royal Society of Arts, 34 Rugby, 313n. rulleys, 283 rural economies, 3-4,15 Rushbrooke, Suffolk, 134 rush-industry, 324n. Rushworth, John, 146-7, 212n. Ruskin, John, 329 & n. Rutland, 63n., 130n. Rutland, dukes of, 122 Rye, 89 sack-manufacture, 105 saddlers, 7, 36, 197, 324 & n., 326 St Albans, 158,172,186, 218, 221, 236n. St Augustine, lathe of, Kent, 82n.

355 St Diuma., 97 St George-in-the-East, London, 264, 268 St Ives, Hunts., 25 St Leonards in Mailing, Kent, 272 St Leonards, Sussex, 273n., 304 St Margaret Helles, Kent, 47 & n. St Mary Cray, Kent, 46 & n. St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, 64 St Neots, Hunts., 173 St Nicholas-at-Wade, Kent, 321 St Paul, 224 St Paul's Cray, Kent, 46 St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, 64 St Wilfred, 97 Salcey Forest, 199 Salisbury, 23, 25, 29,158,164,184, 298, 314 Salisbury Journal, 30 Salisbury Plain, 74 saltway, 96 Sam well family, 181 Samwell, Sir Thomas, 35 Sandred, K.I., 84 & n. Sandwich, 9 Sandys family (of Cornwall), 323 satin, 171 Savage family, 272 scalemakers, 33, 34 & n. scandalous ministers, 149 Scarborough, 182, 288, 289, 296, 297, 306 Scarfe, Norman, 138n. scattered settlement, 20n., 55, 58, 69-71, 87sqq., 315 Sea wen, Mi, 152 schoolmasters, 313n., 322 schools, 183-4, 327n.;see also education schools, private, 30 & n. science, teaching of, 225n. Scotch cloth, 170 Scotland, 38, 170,186, 187, 230, 231, 315 Scots, 133, 185-6,313 Scots, as innkeepers, 189-90 Scott, Sir Edward, 144 Scott, Sir Walter, 244 Scottish cloth merchants, 200 Scottish nobility, 233 Scotts of Scots Hall, Kent, 89n. Scrivener family, 145 sculptors, 326 sculpture exhibitions, at inns, 183 scythe-makers, 33 scythe-making, 26 & n. Seal, Kent, 88 Seal Chart, Kent, 67

356


Seasalter, Kent, 11 On., 125n. Seeker, Thomas, archbishop, 219-20 secondary settlement, 85 sqq. Second World War, 313 Seebohm, Frederic, 9 seed-merchants, 320 seed trade, 169 Segary, John, Northampton innkeeper, 192 Sense and Sensibility, 265 sensibility, 209-45 Sequestration Committee, for Suffolk, 141, 145,153 Sequestration, sequestrated estates, 131 & n., 132n., 141, 142n., 143,146, 153 Serasing, India, 276 serge industry, 24 Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, 227, 229, 240 servants, 40, 258, 259 settlement, 2, 3, 11,13-20, 43-59, 61, 67 sqq., 72 sqq., 80-91, 100, 114 Sevenoaks, 102, 110,113n., 114, 304, 310, 311,327n. Sevenoaks Weald, Kent, 86n. Severn, 159 Severn valley, 14 Shadwell, London, 264, 277 Shaftesbury, Dorset, 162 Shakespeare Jubilee (1768), 166-7 Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover, 46 Shapwick, Dorset, 45n. Sharnford, Leics., 300 sheep-pastures, 76 sq. sheep trade, 115 Sheerness, 263 Sheffield, 8, 22, 26 & n., 95, 105 Sheldwich, Kent, 261 Shelvingbourne, Kent, 48n. Shepherd Neame's Brewery, Faversham, 31 On. shepherds, 316 Shepperton, MX., 217 Sheppey, Isle of, Kent, 73, 77 & n. Sherwood Forest, 15 shielings, 55, 85, 86 shipbuilding, 104 ship-money, 137 shipwrights, 36 Shirer & Co., of Cheltenham, 316 Shirley family, 240 shoe industry, 22, 24, 318 & n. shoemakers, 7, 24n., 31, 36 shoemaking, 26 & n., 105,123,171 shoe manufacturers, 195

shoe-trades, 40 shop assistants, 316 shopkeepers, 285, 290, 296, 300, 312; see also retailing shopping, 25, 282, 285, 290, 301 shopping-centres, 106n. Short Parliament, 133 Shrewsbury, 28-30, 33, 39-40,184, 212n., 215, 230 Shropshire, 177,199-200, 230 Shrubsole family, 325 & n. Shutford, Oxon., 100 Shuttlewood, John, 226, 228n. Sibertswold, Kent, 50, 5In. Sibford Gower, Oxon., 100 Sibton Abbey, Suffolk, 145 & n. sign-boards, 207 silk, 171 silk industry, 317 silk mercers, 316 silverware sales, 171 Simmons, Jack, 283 Simpkin and James's, of Leicester, 310 & n. Simpkin, Josiah, 31 On. Singlewell, Kent, 116 Sittingbourne, 16n., 63,100 & n., 114n., 116n. 126n., 160,165, 203, 253, 304, 325 Skelton family, 322 Skillington family (of Leicester), 319n. Skillington, Mrs F.E., 319n. Skillington, William, 319n. Slaidburn, Yorks., 315n. slaves, 244 Sleaford, 282 smallholders, 4 small landholders, decline of, 315 smallpox, 243n. Smarden, Kent, 2, 69,115 Smeeth, Kent, 89n. Smith, Adam, 32n. Smith, A. Hassell, 21 Smithfield, London, 186 smithies, 36, 279, 324-5 & n. Smith-Marriott family, 327n. smuggling, 125n. Soame family, 141, 154 Soan family, 259 Soar, Leics., 169,177 social functions, of inns, 177-84 social season, at county towns, 177 sqq. sokes, 95 Sokespitch family, 249 solicitors, 303, 310, 312, 320, 322; see also attorneys; lawyers Some, David, 21 In., 222

Index Somerby, Leics., 123 Somerden, Kent, 79-80 Somerleyton, Suffolk, 134 Somerset, 23, 26n., 45, 62n., 64, 110, 133,230,238,289 Somerset, Duchess of, 232 Somerset, Duke of, 165 Sondes family, 240 Sonning, Berks., 251, 252 Sotterley, Suffolk, 134 Souldrop Wold, Beds., 57 South Cray, Kent, 46n. South Croxton, Leics., 319n. South Downs, 47,74 South-East, 41, 131 South-Eastern Association, 135 south-eastern counties, 140,147, 160, 298 south-eastern England, 290 Southern Choirs Festival, 29 southern England, southern counties, 88n., 123, 230, 231n., 248, 298 South Foreland, Kent, 67 South Sea Bubble, 255 South Shields, 289 South-West, 298 Southwold, Kent, 5In. Spain, 118, 133, 154 spas, 288 Speen, Berks., 163 Speenhamland, Berks., 162-3 Speldhurst, Kent, 118 sq. Spinks of St James's, 313 spoon-making, 26n. Spring family, 143 Spring, Sir William, 134, 145 Spufford, Margaret, 20 Spurgin, Mr, curate of Hollingbourne, 271 squarsons, 314 & n., 327n. sqatter's settlements, 87, 89, 119, 126, 163 squirearchy, 57, 122, 219, 311 squires, 64n., 131, 167, 232, 254, 256, 272 stabling, at inns, 157-8, 165-6, 171, 172,191, 302; at commercial premises, 166 Stafford, 29n., 200, 310 Staffordshire, 3, 29n., 59, 76n., 159, 200 Staffordshire potteries, 283 stage-coaches, 25,159, 189, 194, 279 stage-coaching, 89n., 104, 206-7 stage-wagons, 159, 206 Stalisfield, Kent, 325

357 Stamford, 37, 159 Standridge family (of Hull), 319 Stansted, Kent, 47, 79, 86n. Stansted Mountfichet, Essex, 148 Staple, Kent, 53 Stapleford, Leics., 103 Staplehurst, Kent, 69, 325 Starveall, Kent, 90 & n. Starvecrow, Kent, 90 & n. statuaries, 35 Staunton Harold, Leics., 240 Staunton, Thomas, 133 steads, 54n., 56, 84 & n. Stede Hill, Kent, 272 Stelling Minnis, Kent 44, 53, 88 Stephen family, 311 stilliers, 33, 34n. Stilton cheese, 165 Stilton, Hunts., 159, 165,194 Stockbury, Kent, 81n. stock-dealers, 162 stock-farms, 84 stocking-knitting, 3, 26 & n. stockings, 171 Stodmarsh, Kent, 48 & n. Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk, 129, 131 Stoke Newington, 233 Stoke-on-Trent, 8 Stone, Dorset, 45n. Stone-by-Dartford, Kent, 46 Stone Hills, Kent, 67, 78, 79, 82, 90 stonemasons, 36 stone-quarrying, 105 Stoneygate (Leicester), 314, 319 Stonhouse, Sir James, 212n., 244n. Stony Stratford, 26n., 50n., 94, 116 & n., 160,162,169 Stoughton, John, Northampton innkeeper, 185 Stour, Kent, 48, 67, 82, 84, 97 Stourhead, Wilts., 257 Stour Levels, 48n., 50, 69 Stour, Little, Kent, 48, 49, 82 Stourmouth, Kent, 53 Stourton, Staffs., 200 Stour Valley, Kent, 50, 54n., 57, 72n. Stowlangtoft, Suffolk, 134 Stowmarket, 132,140 Strachey family, 311 Strange, Thomas, 225 Stratford upon Avon, 166-7 Strathern, Marilyn, 311 straw hats, 171 straw-plait industry, 26n. street-hamlets, 88

358


street-migrations, 89, 100, 160 street-names, 111 Stroud, Glos., 113n. stucco-artists, 35 Studdal, East and West, Kent, 5In. Studley Royal, Yorks., 180 Sturry, Kent, 48, 84 Sturt, George, 32n., 299, 325, 326 & n. subscribers' lists, 229 sqq. subsequent settlements, 84 sqq. suburbs, middle-class, 314, 319 Sudeley, Glos., 322n. Suffolk, 14, 63n., 64; arable farming, 76 &n.; cheese, 135; markets, 110, 113 & n., 114 & n., 115,120n., 121, 126,127; Doddridge, Philip, 230; during Great Rebellion, 129-54; Hasted family, 254, 275; population, 106; settlement evolution, 19, 66 summer pastures, 41, 55, 71n., 79-80, 82, 85, 86 Summers, John, Northampton innkeeper, 191 Sunday Schools, 212, 242 & n., 243 Sundridge, Kent, 18n., 79-80 surgeons, 171, 194,263,322 surgical beltmaker, 34 Surrey, 5,17, 54n., 62, 64, 79, 84n., 131n., 168, 313n., 325-6 &n.; arable farming, 76n.; carriers, 287, 299, 307; Hasted family, 260; population, 88n. surveyors, 25, 303, 320 surveyors' equipment, makers of, 33, 34 Sussex, 3, 4, 17, 19, 21, 39, 47, 63n., 76n., 98,133,140, 168, 321; carriers, 288; Hasted family, 249-50, 273n.; population, 88n., 90n., 106; settlement evolution, 11, 54n., 77, 81, 83, 84n., 88,118,120; wold, woodland, 19, 55, 70, 73,74 Sussex villages, carriers' routes and services to (from Maidstone), 304-5 Sussex, West, 299 Sutton-at-Hone, Kent, 46, 81n., 257, 261,276 Sutton-by-Dover, Kent, 51n., 81n. Sutton, Edward, prize-fighter, 182 Sutton Valence, Kent, 81 Swalcliffe, Oxon., 100 Swalcliffe Lea, Oxon., 100 Swanton, Kent, 55 Swarling, Kent, 316 swine-pastures, 76 sqq. Swineshead, Lines., 282

Swiss cowherds, 80 swordsmen, 181 Symington family (of Market Harborough), 313 &n. Syriac, 229 Sysonby, Leics., 98, 99 tailors, 31,105, 252 Tamil, 229 Tarn worth, 159 tanners, 31n., 171,317 tanning, 105 tapsters, 185 Tarrant, Dorset, 45 Tate, Mrs, 180 Taunton, 45n., 95 & n., 215, 287, 289, 306 taverns, 157, 185, 206 Tavistock, 41,45 Taviton, Devon, 41, 45 Tavy, Devon, 45, 47 Taw, Devon, 44, 47 Tawney, R.H., 9 Tawstock, Devon, 41, 44, 47 Tawton, Devon, 41, 44, 47 Taylor, Alexander, Northampton innkeeper, 192 Taylor family (of Loose, Kent), 324n. Taylor, John (author of Carriers' Cosmography), 172-3, 285 Teign, Devon, 45 telescopes, 34 Telford, Thomas, 177 Tenterden, 58n., 79-80, 82n., 179, 282, 304, 325 & n. Textus Roffensis, 7In. Teynham, Kent, 116n. Thame, 45n. Thames, 17, 73,118, 230 Thames valley, 310 Thanet, Isle of, Kent, 44, 48n., 58n., 69, 76, 79, 82n., 321 Thanington, Kent, 79 Thatcher, Margaret, 327 theatres, 179, 183 Thetford, Norfolk, 132 Thirsk, 164 Thirsk, Joan, 14, 20, 42,125 Thirty Years' War, 217 Thomas family, 272 Thomas, Rev., of Fairford, 266 Thomas, Roger, 235n. Thompson, Philip, London Colney innkeeper, 186 thoroughfare towns, 158 sqq., 186,191 Thorpe Arnold, Leics., 98

Index Thrale, Hester Lynch, 167 Thrapston, Northants., 24n., 95,176 Three Choirs Festival, 29 Thrower, John, 145n. Throwley Forstal, Kent, 89 Thurlow, Suffolk, 141 Thurnby, Leics., 300 Thurnham, Kent, 272 Thurning, Northants., 97n. Tibbutt, H.G., 15In. Tilden, Kent, 79 Tilton-on-the-Hill, Leics., 300 timber-framed buildings, 87n., 90 Timperley family, 131 Tingey, Thomas. 226 & n. Tinley Lodge, Kent, 79 tinmen, 36 tithe dispute, 271 tobacconists, 310 Todd, Henry, 29n. Toke family, 27n. Toland, John, 214n. Toll, Thomas, 148 toll books, 111 Toller family (of Leicester), 318 Tolpuddle, Dorset, 13 Tonbridge, 21, 79, 85, 94, 110,119, 281, 304,325n. Toone family (Leics. carriers), 303 Tories, 175,204 Torquay, 288 Torrington, John Byng, Viscount, 179, 207 Towcester, 26n., 124n., 160, 169 town gentry, 27-28, 167, 176, 178, 179, 181, 183, 187,189, 195, 197, 222, 224,256,259,272 town-houses, 27,161, 177 Town, Mary Jane, 261 sq., 265 Tractarian Movement, 210 tradesmen, 9,110,181-2, 231, 232, 249, 255,306,321 trading at inns, 168-73, 207 Traffic Commissioners, 299 transhumance, 78 sqq. transubstantiation, 234 Tranter, Margery, 325n. travel, literature of, 206-7 trefoil seed, sale of, 169 Tremenheere family, 323 Trenley Park, Kent, 49n. Trent, 5 8, 283 Trinder, Barrie, 320n. Trinitarianism, 234n. Trinitarians, 210

359 Trinity College, Cambridge, 147 Trinity College, Oxford, 220 Troughton family, 323 Truro, 238 Truro Cathedral, 1 Tuck well family, 33,34 Tuckwell, Thomas, 34n. tumuli, 95 Tunbridge-ware, 75, 323-4 Tunbridge Wells, 75,118-20, 250, 288, 304, 310, 3234 &n. Tunstall, Kent, 45n. Turkey, 135 Turner Brothers Hydes, 318 turnery-ware, 26n. turnip seed, sale of, 169 turnpikes, 159 turnpiking, 115 Tuscany, Duke of, 187 twine-making, 105 Twinings, firm of, 313 Twysden, Kent, 254 Twysden family, 240, 249, 254, 256 Twysden, Sir Roger, 152 Tyers family, 33 Tyler, Elizabeth, nee Dingley, 257 Tyler family (of Leicester), 318 Tyler, Joseph, 257 Tyneside, 11 Under River, Kent, 79 Unitarian dynasties, 318 Unitarianism, 210 sq., 235 Unitarians, 213, 327 & n., 328 Universal British Directory (1791), 300 University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 11 upholsterers, 194 upholstery ware, sale of, 171 Uppingham, Rutland, 286, 291 urban dynasties, 313n., 317 sqq., 322, 328 &n. urban food market, 286 urban food-supply, 282 urban hinterlands, 39, 42, 59 urban origins, 98 sqq. urban typology, 93 & n. Valentine family (of Leicester), 326 vans, 286,301,306,307 vegetables, 283 velvets, Dutch, 172 Venice, 22 ventilators, 34 vernacular architecture, 72n., 87n.

360


Vernacular Revival, 319n. Vernall's Inquest, Northampton, 191 Victoria, Queen, 161 Vienna, 28 village carriers see carriers, country village gentry, 272 village preaching, 225, 226n., 231, 243 village shops, 300 Waddenhall, Kent 56n. Waddlingwood, Kent, 5 In. Wade, General George, 187 Wadham College, Oxford, 220 Waghorn family (Kentish carriers), 303 wagons, 279, 280, 283, 286, 301 Walcot, Oxon., 95 wald see downland Waldegrave family, 136 Walderchain, Kent, 50, 5 In. Waldershare, Kent, 19, 50, 51n. Wales, 93,153,172, 227, 230, 231n., 317 Walkers, of Leicester, 310 & n. Walker family (of Liverpool), 318 Walker, Miss (wife of Richard Yardley), 255 Wallenberg, J.K., 88 Waller, Sir William, 149 Walmer, 29n. Walsh, John, 21 In., 215 Waltham, Kent, 51 & n., 54n., 56n., 89 Walthamstow, Essex, 238 Walton-by-Kimcote, Leics., 112,123, 280, 282, 287 Walton-on-the-Wolds, Leics., 300 Wansford, Northants., 159 Warburton, William, bishop, 220 Ward, James, 326n. Ward, William, 200 Wardington, Oxon., 100 warehouses, 302 warming-pan makers, 33, 34 Warminster, Wilts., 164 Warwick, 21n., 29,159,162,173,174, 182,205,314 Warwick, Sir Robert Rich, Earl of. 129, 143 Warwickshire, 3,15,17, 20 & n., 36, 42, 59, 70, 80,110,199, 230, 244, 280 Warwickshire cheese, 171 Wash, the, 230 waste, 82 watchmakers, 35 Wateringbury, Kent, 123n., 31 On. watermen, 24n., 142,150, 307

water supply, Northampton, 177 Watford, Northants., 194 Watling Street, 62, 74 & n., 77, 79, 81-2, 97, 98,116 &n., 160,199 Watts, Isaac, 218, 219n., 220, 233, 238, 242n. wayfaring society, traders, 24, 38,199, 201 Waymarks, of Tunbridge Wells, 310 Waytts, Major, 272 Weald of Kent and Sussex, 43, 46, 98, 99,114n. 116, 123n., 179, 215, 321, 325; pays, 14, 15,16,17, 51; settlement evolution, 17n., 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 67-71; woodland, 73-4; woodland pasture, 77 sqq.; woodland settlement, 3, 4, 5 Weaver, John, 149 weavers, 31 Weavers' Company, London, 8 Weber, Karl Maria Friedrich Ernst von, 29n. Wedgwood, firm of, 311 Weekes's, of Tunbridge Wells, 310 weighbridges, 34 Weldon, Sir Anthony, 144 Welford, Northants., 163, 226 & n., 228 Welland valley, 19 Wellingborough, 24n., 26n., 95,105, 173,185, 186, 227n. Welsh, 228 Welsh Marches, 17,64, 230 Wendover, 46, 94-99 passim Wentworth, Sir John, 134 Wenyeve, Edward, 145 Wesley, John, 119, 215,220 Wessex, 11,97 West, John, 225 West Brook, Kent, 48n. West Country, 170 Westerham, Kent, 89 West Indian slaves, 244n. West Kent, 325n. West Mailing, Kent, 117 & n., 178, 304 West Midlands, 11,38,110 Westminster, 131n., 144 Westmorland, 2, 26n., 147, 322 West of England, 238, 282 West Riding, 36,107, 230, 286 Weston Favell, Northants., 228n. Westwell, Kent, 99,103 Whaddon Chase, Bucks., 205 Wheelbarrow Town, Kent, 51n. wheelwrights, 7, 31, 32, 36, 279, 320, 324 & n., 326 Wheelwright's Shop, The, 299 wherrymen, 289 Whigs, 175 whip-makers, 197, 324n.

Index Whitby, 315n. Whitefield's Tabernacle, 220 Whitefield, George, 220 Whitefoord family, 233 White Hart Society, 162 whitesmiths, 33, 34,105 Whitfield, Kent, 5 In. Whitley Row, Kent, 17,18n. Whitstable, 114n., 125&n. Whittlewood Forest, Northants., 199, 205 wholesale trade, 279 Wickenden family, 254, 325 & n. Wickenden in Cowden, Kent, 254, 325n. Wickham, in Banbury, 95, 96n. Wickhambreaux, Kent, 48, 49 & n., 50n., 53 Wiggenhall St German's, Nfk., 303 Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen, Nfk., 303 Wiggenhall St Peter's, Nfk., 303 Wigston Magna, Leics., 125 Wilberforce family (of Hull), 319 Wilberforce, William, 265 Wildage, Kent, 5 In. Wild Barns, Cambs., 51 Wildmarsh, Kent, 74n. William the Conqueror, 43n. William III, 166 Williams family (painters), 326 & n. Williams, Edward, jr, 326n. Williams, Edward, sr, 326n. Williams, Joseph, Northampton innkeeper, 191,192 Williams, Thomas, 260 sqq. Wilmington, Kent, 46 Wilson, Richard, 311, 313-14 Wiltshire, 19, 36n., 45,136,158, 257, 262, 271 Wiltshire Downs, 19 Wimborne Minster, Dorset, 45 & n., 46, 47,48 Wimborne St Giles, Dorset, 45 & n. Winchester, 29, 30, 212n., 289, 306 Winckles, George, Northampton innkeeper, 186 Wingham, Kent, 50, 53,114, 325 Winthrop, John, 133,144n. Winties, of Seven oaks, 310 Winwick, Northants., 97n. Wise, John, Liverpool innkeeper, 186 Wise family (of Tunbridge Wells), 323 Witchampton, Dorset, 45 witches, 143 Witney, 281 Woburn, Beds., 199, 218 Woden, 97

361 Wold Farm in Odell, Beds., 57 wolds see downland Wolverhampton, 3, 26n., 205, 288 Wolverton, Bucks., 116,160 women-farmers, 316-17 women's influence, in religious movements, 232 Womenswold, Kent, 19, 50, 51n. Wood family (of Maidstone), 323 Wood, Mrs Henry, 318 & n. Wood, Nathaniel, 218 Wood, Samuel, 21 In., 238 Woodalls, of Stafford, 310 & n. WoodaU, William, 31 On. Woodbridge, Suffolk, 141 wood-carvers, 35 woodcrafts, 3, 4, 26n., 75 woodland, woodland districts, 3,19, 47 & n.. 53 sqq., 70, 73-5, 82, 86, 90n., 126, 199-200; see also forests woodland settlement, 3,18, 41, 50 sqq., 70, 78 sqq., 93, 254, 325 wood-pasture, 41, 42, 43, 47, 49n., 50 sqq., 58n., 100, 325 Woodstock, Kent, 45n., 74n. Woolage, Kent, 52, 53n. woollen manufacture, 170, 177 Wobllett family (of Maidstone), 323 woolstaplers, 195,320 wool trade, 170,168 Woolwich, 63, 79-80, 88n., 247 Wootton, Kent, 48, 49, 53 Worcester, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30,184, 212 & n., 220, 289, 306, 317-18 & n. Worcester College, 309n. Worcester Journal, 199 Worcestershire, 3, 110, 168, 200, 230 Wordsworth family, 311 workshops, 32 sqq., 36 & n., 37n. Wormleighton family, 312 Wormshill, Kent, 325 Worthington family (of Liverpool), 318 Worthington, Miss, of the Angel, Stilton, 165 Wreake Valley, Leics., 58 Wren, Sir Christopher, 315n. Wren, Bishop Matthew, 129 Wrentham, Suffolk, 143 wrestlers, 182 Wright, Joseph, 29 Wrights, of Sevenoaks, 310 Wright's Commercial and General Directory of Leicester (1884), 280, 284,299 sqq. writing schools, 179, 184

362


Wrotham, Kent, 47, 79, 86n., 114 Wye, Kent, 51, 81, 83, 94-104 pass* w, 114,115 &n. Wye College, 307 Wykeham-Martin family, 272 Wymeswold, Leics., 300 Wymondham, Nfk., 26n. Yardley, Mis, nee Walker, 255, 270 Yardley, Richard, 255 Yarmouth, Nfk., 173 YeldenWold, Beds., 57 Yellowstone Forests, America, 53n. yeoman dynasties, 314, 322n. Yeoman, Thomas, 34 & n., 35 & n. yeomen, 5, 56, 63-4, 86, 90, 249, 252, 275

York, 21n.,22n., 23, 25,28, 29, 30, 111; carriers, 296, 302; craftsmen, 31n.; infirmary, 212n.; inns, innkeepers, 157-8, 168,182, 206; poll-books, 40 Yorkshire, 39, 62, 71n., 77, 248, 283; carriers, 288, 290; Doddridge, Philip, 230, 231n.; inns, innkeepers, 157,167, 170,185, 186;pays, 14; wealth, 64 &n. Yorkshire Moors, 296 Yorkshire Wolds, 18,19, 51, 296 Youngs, of Sevenoaks, 310, 311 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus Ludwig, Count, 217 &n., 236 & n.

Landscape and Community in England

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