< Back Ketton Gas and Coke Company (limited). Chris Hunt 2021 Today, unless you live in a very rural village, you take a gas supply as the norm. Of course, it has not always been the case. In September 1965 forty-odd miles off the Lincolnshire coast Natural Gas was discovered and so began a speedy decline and demise of the Coal Gas industry, which was colloquially called Town Gas. The production was of course not dependant on the size of the settlement, but more on the ease of obtaining cheap coal balanced by customer demand, or should that be a population that could afford the cost of the product. It was not until the first decade of the 19th century that the technology for the safe production and distribution of gas was available. This led to the world’s first gas company in 1812, the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company. Initially outside of Britain’s coalfields the only places where cheap coal was available, were ports, riverside sites and towns supplied by canals. A major factor was that the use of gas for street lighting was so much cheaper than the use of oil lamps or candles. In Stamford’s case it was not until June 1823 that Royal assent was given for a Company for lighting the streets of the town which were first lit in March 1825. Locally to Stamford there were gas works at Easton on the Hill, King’s Cliffe and Ketton. Cheap coal only being available with the coming of the railways to these villages. The Ketton Gas and Coke Company (Limited) was incorporated in 1862. The Company was capitalised at £1,250 made up of 250 £5.00 shares. In November 1862, it was reported in the Stamford Mercury that a few shares were still available from the Company Solicitor, a Mr. John Dabbs of Stamford, and it further stated that ‘there is reason to believe that an ample Dividend of a permanent character will be realised’. The chosen site close to Ketton Railway station had been purchased and a contract had been entered into with Mr. George Bower of St Neot’s to provide the engineering equipment. The Directors of the Company had plans and specification drawn up for the building work which were made available between November 7th and 14th 1862 The tenders to be in the hands of the Secretary at the Office in Stamford by 1.00pm on November 15th or by 6.00pm on the same day at the White Hart Inn, at Ketton. Notice was given that the Directors would be meeting at the Inn on the same day to consider the Tenders and that those Tendering were invited to attend. Mr. Bower had also entered a Tender for the building work as on November 21st 1862 the Company announced that his Tender had been accepted, that the work would commence immediately with completion in ‘about two months’. George Bower, 1826-1911, was an industrialist and developer of gas appliances, whose products were sold at home and abroad from his iron foundry in St Neots. By 1880 he had also provided Gas Work equipment locally to gas works at Easton on the Hill and Kings Cliffe, and locally to the Marquis of Exeter at Burghley House, the Great Northern Railway at Essendine, Apethorpe Hall and Shillingthorpe Hall. The Ketton Gas and Coke Company must have initially been seen as a successful venture for in June 1865 five of the £5.00 shares were sold at auction by Mr. William Langley at the Assembly Rooms in Stamford for £6 2s 6d per share (a profit of 22.5% over three years). This success was short lived as at auction held by Mr. Richardson in March 1867 at the George Hotel, twenty fully paid up £5 shares went unsold as they only achieved £4 7s 6d and were bought in. If share prices are a guide to business success it would seem that the Company was not seen as a firm investment for when sixteen fully paid up £5 shares were offered by auction in January 1869 they sold for prices varying from £3 6s 0d to £3 10s 0d. In comparison shares in the Stamford Gas and Coke Company which had a face value of £50 were selling for £83 or £84 each. Clearly by 1891 the Company was in difficulty as in the August of that year the then Company Secretary, a Mr. H. B. Barnett, issued a notice that a meeting would be held on September 1st to consider the ‘Financial and General Position of the Company, and determine whether the business of the Company ‘shall be continued or wound up voluntarily or otherwise, and to transact such other Business as may be necessary’. The decision was made to issue a Winding-Up Petition for the Company which was duly advertised in the London Gazette on September 25th 1891. On October 20th 1891 the Ketton Gas Works and Plant were offered for sale by auction. This included the Gas Manager’s House, Retort and Purifying Houses, Purifier, Scrubber, Condenser, Meters, Mains, and other Effects, on a site of approximately 600 square yards. It therefore comes as a surprise to discover that the sale of shares in the Company were still being advertised in the Stamford Mercury in May 1899 when thirty fully paid £5 shares were offered at auction. Clearly Ketton still enjoyed a gas supply for in May 1908 the Gas Works and Plant were again offered for sale as a going concern. The site was described as having a Stone-built and Slated Manager’s house, Stone-built and Tiled Retort and Purifying Houses, Gasometer, Purifier, Scrubber, Condenser, Meters, Mains, and other Effects. The purchaser was Mr. J.H.Silcox, the managing director of the Pontardawe (Swansea) Gas Company for £360. New ownership under new management resulted in a degree of investment for when finally the ‘fixed and loose plant’ was sold in April 1916 some of the equipment was relatively new. What effect the Great War had on the supply of coal, a labour force to run the plant, or the demand for gas is uncertain. Messrs. Richardson, the auctioneers, split the machinery into Lots, including a Gasometer in excellent condition with 6,000 cubic feet capacity, a new 3¼h.p. 1915 Gas Engine by Crossley with fitted water cylinder, a Gas Engine by Robinson of Manchester, a new 1914 Exhauster by Bryan, Donkin & Co., a Scrubber, a set of Condensers, a 1914 Station Meter by Willey & Co., a Winch for raising the Purifier Box Top, two Retorts Beds (one of three beds and the other of one bed) with lids, a Boiler, two Water Tanks, eighty nine new slot and ordinary Gas Meters, and thirty one Gas Cookers (1914). Along with other numerous Gas Fittings and other effects. The site was sold separately and in 1923 the cottage, retort house, outbuildings, along with about three miles of gas mains; was bought by Mr. Sivers of Ketton for £250. So ended Ketton’s gas supply until the arrival of natural gas sixty odd years later. Ketton Gas Works 1886 A print version can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back The Social Impact of the Church in Victorian Stamford John F H Smith Lecture for Stamford Museum’s Winter Lecture Series, given 26 March 1998. (The transcript of the lecture has been edited by Dr N J Sheehan. with the author’s permission, for publication on the SLHS website) Editorial comment – This article contains references applicable and relevant to around the year 1998. Readers should take account of this and make the necessary allowances. To historians it is one of those well-known facts that until the present century, church and state in England were inextricably mixed so that any discussion of the social impact of the church can cover the whole spectrum of social, personal, civic and political life. Tonight, I am going to consider two aspects of the social impact of the Church: . how the church system was integrated into the secular social administration of the town; . the social side of religion itself: the various charitable works it undertook or stimulated, and a look at how the different denominations and sects within the town saw and reacted to each other. The emphasis will be on the 19th century but I shall be taking examples from earlier as well as the 20th century. I chose the 19th century because it was an age of transition; a time when the old medieval institutions that had governed the country for hundreds of years were seen to be inadequate for a country undergoing the massive upheaval of an industrial revolution. And of course, we were the first in the world to undergo this; there were; no guidelines; no precedents! The upheaval was not less because Stamford was a small conservative country town on the sidelines of such changes. If anything, it perhaps made it more difficult; the need for change was less, yet was demanded by the spate of new legislation. It was perhaps the native conservatism of our town fathers, and a subtle adaptation of the nationally imposed legislation, that helped retain Stamford's character and uniqueness. Today, unless one lives in a Muslim state or in Northern Ireland, we have a problem of perception and understanding as to how church, state and social life could be so inextricably mixed. Curiously, we quite accept it with secular institutions - could anything be more medieval than parliament? - but in this post-Christian age we do not extend the same tolerance to the Church. We have less sympathy for, and certainly less understanding of, medieval church institutions done up in new, sometimes not so new, clothes playing such an important part in social life. This is particularly so since most of these roles have long been taken over by the state or purely secular charities. 1851 RELIGIOUS CENSUS There is no doubt over the statistic that today well over 95% of the population does not regularly go to church, and I think we are well above the average in Stamford with about 3% church attendance. It is most probable that a majority of the country does not even believe in the traditional Christian view of God. It is therefore very hard for us to imagine today the impact the Church had on everyday life, say 100 years ago, where virtually everyone believed in the Christian idea of a personal God and well over 50% of the population were regular churchgoers. As this average figure included the large new industrial cities where the churchgoing habit had largely been lost, it shows how solidly churchgoing were the smaller traditional towns such as Stamford. We are lucky in that we have some precise figures to substantiate this claim, as right in the middle of the century, at perhaps the apogee of Queen Victoria’s reign, 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, a unique religious census of England and Wales was undertaken. Every Anglican incumbent, every Roman catholic priest, every dissenting minister was asked to fill in a return for attendances on Mothering Sunday, 30 March. The report, published in January 1854, concluded that 54% of the nation attended a church of some sort on that day, though modern historians have modified this figure to between 47% and 54%. While we think this an amazingly high figure, the Victorians thought it low and were shocked at the number of people who were not going to church. They were also shocked by how many dissenters there turned out to be, almost two thirds of Anglican numbers; particularly as before the fear had been of Roman Catholics, who turned out in fact to be fairly thin on the ground. One may argue about the accuracy of the census: the method of collecting, that the adjustments to account for people going to church more than once were extremely crude, that Stamford presented its own special problems - censuses being always held during fair week distorted the numbers of people in the town - but all these do not detract from the value of the survey and what it tells us about the church in Stamford. It shows us, for example, that church attendances on that Sunday were 79% of the population – 6776 out of a population of 8933. While, of course, this does not mean that 6776 people attended church, even using the census report's own crude calculations for double and triple churchgoers, it gives us a figure of 59% - 5% above the national average - which is what I suppose we should more or less expect. Actual figures may surprise us. Remembering that the town's population was only half what it is today, it was recorded that 850 people attended the evening service at St Michael's and, if one includes the Sunday school, well over 500 attended the morning service at St Martin's. Isn't it interesting that these are the most poorly attended churches today? In fact St Michael's was so poor that it was closed during the 1960s. It is also interesting to note that over 1,700 children attended the town's Sunday schools on that day, 500 of which were in the non-conformist schools. This is an extremely high proportion of school age children and probably reflects a number of reasons: piety (possibly more on the parents' part than the children themselves), getting the children out of the way for a while in crowded home conditions, and the patchiness of day school education - we mustn't forget this was 20 years before the Forster Education Act and 30 years before compulsory state education. The report also shows the relative support for the various denominations in the town. Roman Catholics were fairly thin on the ground at 3-4% of churchgoers, as the Stamford Mercury had also noted when the first RC chapel was being built in All Saints' Street in 1825, but this was about the national average. Dissent was much less strongly represented in Stamford than nationally - 29% of the churchgoing population as opposed to the 44% national average. This meant the Church of England was stronger - 67-8%, rather than the national 52%. Again, this confirms what we suspected: that Stamford was a very traditional and conservative town, with traditional beliefs, following the national established church. This, then, is the background. Let us now take a closer look at the church's influence upon town life. Just as we cannot appreciate fully the impact of Christian belief and strong churchgoing habits on the community, we are even less able to comprehend the part the church played in the civil administration of the town. The Anglican parish was the hub of the community and at the beginning of the 19th century carried out a wide range of duties that today we should see as the province of local government. It was: · the centre of the Poor Law a dministration and after the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was the basis of the groupings that made up the Poor Law Unions, · responsible for road maintenance and attendant paving and lighting (though it had the main arterial roads taken away from it during the 18th century with the establishment of turnpike trusts), · had the power to charge a separate church rate for the maintenance and repair of the parish church, · the basis for collecting tithes to pay the stipend or salary of the parson, · usually the stimulus for and controller of parishioners, and · generally ran a number of charities that had accumulated through the centuries. One of its major functions, therefore, was that of a statutory body with the power to raise taxes and, as such, was the centre of the civil administration of the town. Developed to administer a late medieval community, when there were no such things as dissenters (that is, non-conformists) and we were all part of one national church, there was no problem; but from the Reformation onwards society was not so homogeneous. There were considerable numbers of dissenters and Roman Catholics in the town who would grumble like the rest of us over the Poor Rate or Highways Rate, but would have a much more substantial and stronger objection to paying tithes for the stipend of the Anglican parson or paying rates for the repair of the parish church. THE VESTRY On the other hand, the system for its day was quite democratic. Parish administration was carried out by means of the vestry, a meeting of all parish residents with property qualifications (that is, a ratepayer but after 1869, merely an occupier) and was a very direct form of government. One did not elect members to represent you, but as a qualified parishioner you went along to take part directly and vote. It was almost an Athenian form of democracy. From the huge number of Stamford Mercury reports of vestry meetings, in Stamford they seem to have varied in size from a handful to over 200. From 1831 onwards legislation made it possible to streamline the system and elect smaller ‘select vestries’ to undertake parish business, but this opportunity was not taken up in Stamford. It seems to have been aimed at the larger towns and cities. This vestry was chaired by the rector or vicar (which of course gave him considerable power in addition to his right to appoint one of the two churchwardens) and met annually and as occasion demanded to elect officers and officials, and set parish rates. For example, in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign Stamford parish vestries were electing churchwardens, overseers of the poor, poor law guardians, surveyors of the highway, turnpike trustees, improvement commissioners and trustees for the various parish trusts, as well as appointing various officials, such as the parish watchmen, to carry out parish duties and fulfil legal requirements. As many of these posts carried a salary as well as to authority, the commissioning power of the vestry itself was considerable. The other side of the coin of Catholics and dissenters having to pay for things they didn't want - tithes and the church rate - was that they were equally represented on the vestry. As long as they fulfilled the residential and property qualifications, it didn't matter whether parishioners were Anglican, Roman Catholic, Dissenter or even atheists (though there were not many of these around at the time). All parishioners had their rights and could vote on the full complement of subjects, including the purely ecclesiastical. We therefore have the curious anomaly of Catholics and dissenters electing Anglican churchwardens as well as setting parish rates and the like. This right remains even today in vestigial form; any parish resident has the right to be on the church electoral roll and vote for the churchwardens at the annual vestry, a meeting that still precedes the parochial church council AGM. The powers of the parish were gradually eroded during the 19th century. I have already mentioned the removal of arterial roads maintenance to turnpike trusts, but in the 1830s came much larger inroads into the parish's powers. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was the first large dent and removed the ultimate responsibility for the "care" (I put that word in inverted commas) of the poor and destitute. From then on parishes were formed into unions, which in Stamford's case stretched from Clipsham to Stibbington, and while individual parishes still elected guardians to sit on the general board, parishes thereafter were hardly more than tax assessment and collecting areas. Sweeping in on the coat tails of the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Municipal Reform Act of 1835 made a formation of the borough council possible. This in turn led to further inroads in the secular powers of the parish with the creation of the Stamford Improvement Commission in the early 1840s. This removed from the parish things l ike roads, lighting, paving and embryonic planning controls. The demise of the parish as a secular body came in 1894 when an act established secular church councils as a further part of local government reform. Thus, within a space of 60 years the parish had been transformed from being the administrative hub of local government to being a secular irrelevancy. The situation is summed up by the position of the incumbent; he was demoted from being ex officio chairman of the old parish vestry with powers of both patronage and appointment to not being even a member of the new parish council unless standing for the election like anyone else. In Stamford, this demise should have been felt more strongly as there were no succeeding secular parish councils, the remaining powers devolving onto the more distant borough council. It is telling of the gradual decline of the old parish system that this was hardly noted at the time. ADMINISTRATION OF THE POOR LAW I want now to look in a little more detail at some of the functions of the parish in its heyday. Perhaps the largest social function the parish played in the life of the town was in the operation of the Poor Law. At the beginning of the 19th century the system of poor relief was based on Elizabethan legislation passed to deal with a very different society - an agrarian economy and with problems quite different from those of industrialisation three centuries later. One of the major problems in the 16th century had been caused by dissolution of the monasteries carried out by Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. The monasteries had been an important source of relief for the poor, not only in direct aid but by sheltering from the world large numbers of monks and lay brothers. The end of direct relief, together with the release into the wider world of the large numbers whom the monasteries had previously sheltered, caused huge problems. It was also complicated by the change of farming practices in many parts of the country , that is, the turning over of large tracts of countryside to relatively labour free sheep farming, the practice that Thomas More railed against in his Utopia . This dispossessed many and added to the problem of able bodied, or “sturdy” vagrants as they were called, wandering the land. They were the phobia of the Elizabethans and one of the major stimuli behind their poor law legislation. The basis of this poor law administration was the church parish – thus the problem was transferred from one church organisation to another – and it was charged only with looking after its own poor and destitute. The problem of "sturdy vagrants" was merely shunted on to the next parish. Unfortunately, not all the wandering poor were "sturdy vagrants' and the old poor law could not cater for the truly destitute stranded away from their birthplace. It was therefore a great disincentive to the mobility of labour by the poor in a changing world. The other great debate in the early 19th century was that of outdoor relief. The old poor law allowed support to be given to families living in their own homes, who though possibly working still were too poor to support themselves - the parish workhouses were reserved for the destitute and homeless. This had led to the depression of wages and pauperism as employers saw that they would be made up to subsistence level by the community. This sort of abuse was patchy throughout the country and it has been claimed that the East Midlands suffered from it less than many other parts. However, the figures I shall produce in a minute show a different picture. There was therefore a very strong case for reform but like so much legislation, today as well as in the 19th century, it was a case of trying to save money as much as reform the abuses. The new poor law, that is, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, reformed the administration by grouping parishes into unions, and, for the first time in centuries, Stamford became the centre of a sensible administrative district, the Stamford Poor Law Union, a union of thirty-seven parishes stretching from Clipsham in the north to Stibbington in the south; from Tixover in the west to West Deeping in the east. Parish workhouses were replaced by a single union workhouse, built on the Barnack Road in 1836 at a cost of £3,645, situated where there is now a turn-of-the-century terrace set back from the road, a little before you come to Newage's. This workhouse was demolished in 1902 and replaced by a new one in Ryhall Road. This was, until recently, the St George's Home and the site is now occupied by the Whitefriars old people's homes. The other great change was the prohibition of outdoor relief and the establishment of the principle that life inside the workhouse must not compare with that of the poorest who were surviving outside. Arguably conceived from the best of motives, it left a pretty stark choice for those unfortunates who had to choose between starvation and the workhouse. I come from a generation old enough to have heard first hand tales that illustrated the horror of going into the workhouse that still persisted at the end of the century. Having said this, o utdoor relief was not entirely abolished in Stamford and there are a number of references to it in the Stamford Mercury , though as a report in 1851 [23.5.51:3.1] notes, “the check on vagrancy” (that old bugbear) “continues”. It was, as I said before, a case of our town fathers adapting national legislation to local needs. There are numerous literary illustrations of the harshness of the operation of the new poor law, Oliver Twist , for example, but real-life examples, I think, have more poignancy. I shall give only one to set the problem at our own doorstep. In September 1838, Catherine Whaley of St George’s parish received little justice from the system. Three weeks previously, her husband had run off leaving Catherine and their five children destitute. The Whaleys had been married eight years, but then it was discovered that the marriage had been bigamous. Mr Whaley had previously married another woman, with whom he had lived for three months! Catherine’s children were therefore “bastardised” (as the Mercury delicately puts it) and were dealt with accordingly by the law. The three children born before the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act had to be sent to the parish of their birth, so one was sent to Little Gonerby near Grantham and the other two were put in the charge of St George’s parish in Stamford. The other two children born after 1834 took on the birth parish of their mother and were sent with her to St John’s. Gonerby was in the Grantham Union so that child was sent to the workhouse there. There was only one workhouse in the Stamford Union, the new one on Barnack Road, so it is possible the two St George’s parish children may have had a little more contact with their mother, but this would have been severely limited. Ah, but the system did save money. In March 1839 the Stamford Mercury [1.3.1839:4.6] reported that nationally the new system was saving 36% upon the cost of the former system: £4,808,735 in 1837 as against £7,511,219 in 1834. In the Stamford Union the saving was much greater at 45%: £3,609 against £6,599, with the six Stamford parishes averaging 42.5%: £1,508 against £2,621. In the Mercury piece on the national picture stress was placed upon the savings made in administration and employment of officers and, additionally, the Stamford figure is probably distorted by proceeds from the sale of the former parish workhouses put up for auction in the second half of 1836. But the Mercury explanation doesn’t account for the bulk of the saving which was almost certainly due to the elimination of outdoor relief. Isn’t it strange that no reference is made to this by the contemporary report when it was one of the major reasons for the legislation. Perhaps the world wasn't so old fashioned then, the official explanation only containing one half of the story, and that the unimportant half. It shows what a long training our modern politicians have had. As an aside, it is not clear where all the former parish workhouses were. The site of the St Martin's one is known because it survives in Water Street, until a few years ago occupied by Hopkins the electrician and recently converted to a house. It still retains on its south side the large windows by which the inmates were able to see to carry out their prescribed work. For others we know the street or area, for example, the St John's workhouse was in Scotgate, but not the precise location. Let us then recap on the Church's position. As we have seen, the parish first administered the poor law totally and then, after 1834, elected guardians to the general union board and acted as a poor rate raising and collecting unit. The parish's responsibilities were diminished, but it hit the incumbent even harder. Instead of having to deal only with his parish overseers over whom he could exert influence, he now had to deal with a large organisation of 37 local parishes, from Clipsham to Stibbington, which appointed their own full-time officials as well as relying on the parish overseers. Having said this, such were the mores at the time that it is unlikely that any parson would have disagreed with decisions such as given over Catherine Whaley. It was in keeping with thinking of the time which in turn was in accord with the contemporary Christian principles and interpretation of theology. But practically, it did remove the direct dealing with problems from the local community and substituted bureaucracy for personal contact. THE CHURCH RATE One area of great concern to everyone in the early 19th century parish was the church rate. This was the right of the parish to charge a general rate for the repair of the parish church. In a homogeneous society where the whole population supported the national church, it would have been a sensible system, but when there were considerable numbers of dissenters and Roman Catholics about – and if you remember, between 30 and 35% of the churchgoing population in Stamford was non-Anglican (or just over 13% of adults in the town’s total population [using Mann’s calculation]) - then it was bound to cause trouble. The dissenters and Roman Catholics had a legitimate grievance in resisting paying for the repair of a building they disliked intensely, was the home of a national church which they felt to be doctrinally wrong and which they only entered unwillingly (before their own registration) to be married or buried from. There was also a feeling that the whole matter of quarrelling over the church rate or tithe (which I shall come to) was unseemly and un-Christian. It is interesting to note that in November 1838 the Mercury printed a long extract from the London Globe on this very subject stating that the feuding and wrangling over these things was promoting a general spirit of contention and animosity in congregations. Despite this, there are numerous examples of the church rate being levied in Stamford to repair our six (as there were at the time) medieval parish churches: for example, St Mary’s called emergency vestry meetings in 1841 to levy a rate to deal with the huge split that had appeared in the church causing the chancel to separate from the nave; and the church rate was used to help finance the various repewings of Stamford churches that took place during the 1840s and 1850s. But there were also moments of levity in the vestry meetings. At a St Mary’s vestry in April 1852 a dissenter complained that he was being charged for payments made to the church organist and choir as part of his church rate. These were not part of the fabric and therefore illegal. Some wag pointed out that this individual’s house had a rateable value of £11 when it was worth well in excess of £20 and as the Mercury says , “It was resolved...to make him pay one way if he would not another”. Other oddities, but of a more generous nature, can also be recorded, as in May 1851 when the St Mary’s vestry voted itself an additional and voluntary church rate to allow a young girl in the parish to emigrate to New Zealand. The rector was himself emigrating and was to escort her. If one were really cynical one might wonder if this might have been a cheap way of getting the fare of the rector’s personal maidservant paid, but the Stamford Mercury , normally quick to pick up such things, made no such comment. For many years the church rate had been stoutly resisted, especially in the towns, not only by the dissenters and Roman Catholics but also by many Anglicans who had accepted that the situation was unfair. There had been a great outcry in St Michael’s parish over the rebuilding of the church which had collapsed in 1832. The rector’s attempts to enlist help f rom the parish for rebuilding was met by strong resistance, and in the end it was rebuilt totally by subscription. This, however, is a special case as the parish felt, not without reason, that it should not foot the bill for rebuilding as the responsibility for the church's collapse lay firmly at the door of the rector. If you remember, he had had the “brilliant” idea of enlarging the church's seating capacity by pulling down every other one of the medieval columns, not apparently realising that columns have a structural significance. Church rates staggered on until 1868 when Gladstone abolished them, but there is one interlude in between which, if it had succeeded, would have had major repercussions today. The church rate had been abolished in Ireland in 1833 and an attempt was made the next year by Lord Althorp to do the same for England. Althorp's bill placed the responsibility for the cost of repairs to England's ancient parish churches at the door of the Treasury. Though the bill passed comfortably through the House of Commons, it got lost in the dying days of Lord Grey's Whig government and was never resurrected. But what a change it would have made! It was not until 1977 that state aid was made available for church repairs and even today the roughly £10 million pounds given to churches by the state is rather more than counterbalanced by the £17 million taken back in VAT (just to keep the lecture topical!). Gladstone's approach in 1868 was quite different from Althorp's. In the intervening years, the growing unpopularity of the church rate had led to the principle of church repair by voluntary subscription or contribution, as at St Michael's, being widely accepted. All Gladstone did was to capitalise on this. It was very sensible at the time, with well over half the population committed to the Established Church, and additionally let the government off an extra financial burden, but it makes it very hard for us today when a tiny proportion of the population bears almost the whole cost of this major part of the nation's heritage. Actually, to be technically correct, Gladstone did not abolish church rates, he just made them voluntary instead of compulsory. Every Anglican parish still has the theoretical right to levy a church rate, but you can refuse to pay. That’s why they’re never levied! TITHES The other great grievance of non-Anglicans was having to contribute towards the stipend, or salary, of the Church of England p arson through the payment of tithes. Again, this was a medieval custom that ultimately derived from biblical Judaic practice and meant that a tithing, or tenth, of all gain that the land produced was to be given to the church. Originally this had been in the form of produce and was the reason for the great medieval tithe barns that still dot the land. Tithes had always been unpopular and people would go to infinite ends to under-declare or get out of paying. The general attitude is summed up in this late 17th century song from John Dryden’s play King Arthur, and set to music by Henry Purcell. One particularly rumbustious song sung by a chorus of yokels has a verse: We’ve cheated the parson, we’ll cheat him again, For why should a blockhead have one in ten. One in ten, one in ten, For why should a blockhead have one in ten. In Stamford the amount paid in tithes depended on the holding in the open fields. The position was regularised with the Tithe Act of 1836 which allowed the commutation of tithes in kind for a cash payment, a tithe rentcharge based on the average price of wheat, barley and oats over a period of seven years. After the act these sums were generally assessed at about two thirds of the real value of the tithe, but incumbents were happy as previously they had been lucky if they had been able to prise half out of unwilling land owners. The tithe rentcharge, being set by a tithe commissioner, saved a tremendous amount of unseemly wrangling between land owners and incumbents. In actual practice, cash payments had been made for some years and it was in May 1828 that James Torkington, the Stamford Town Clerk, came to an agreement for a cash settlement with the Rev Thomas Wilkinson, vicar of All Saints’, the largest and most influential parish in the town. It was then agreed that the vicar would receive £370 per annum in lieu of the great and small tithes. This was based on about 1,200 to 1,300 acres of the Stamford open fields lying in All Saints’ parish and a tithe of about 6/- per acre (or 7/6d when the poor rate, highways rate and land tax were added). Accordingly, in May 1839 All Saints’ became the first parish to be assessed under the new system. The tithe commissioner, Mr Rawlinson, accepted the principle established by Torkington and Wilkinson and set the tithe at the same level, £370, though based on a more recent set of averages. I imagine the new vicar, Nicholas Walters, was delighted, not only because £370 per annum was a handsome salary in those days, but because he had scored a personal victory over the Town Clerk. He had secured the small tithes of £30 (for potatoes, clover, etc.) that Wilkinson had been persuaded to forego. Other parishes were not long in following All Saints' example, but as the century progressed tithes gradually fell into disuse. However, it was not until 1936 that the tithe rentcharge was finally extinguished after some civil disobedience by East Anglian farmers. It is not within the scope of this lecture to explain how this was compensated for; suffice it to say that sorting out Anglican clergy stipends was a very long process involving the Ecclesiastical Commission and Diocesan Boards of Finance. They were only finally sorted out, if anything can ever be said to be finally sorted out in the Church of England, as recently as 1976 with an Endowments and Glebes Measure . REGISTRATION The other major area where the established church became an arm of the state was that of registration - births, deaths marriages - and as before it became a grievance of Dissenters and Roman Catholics. At the beginning of the 19th century they were not allowed to be married or buried from their own churches (unless you were a Quaker or a Jew who had had special acts of parliament passed for them). The need of the modern state to have more information about its own people led in 1812 to an act of parliament in an attempt to get the information in the parish registers recorded more formally. From now on registers had to be given proper protection and quarterly returns of births deaths and marriages had to be made to the diocesan registrar. Dissenters and Roman Catholics were deliberately excluded from this process because, as the church historian Chadwick says, "their ministers were of insecure tenure, their chapels impermanent [and] their registers chaotic". That, as far as the last criticism is concerned, the same applied to many Anglican churches did not make any difference, and so for another quarter of a century Dissenters and Catholics had to use the parish church for marriage and burial. But 1836 was not 1812 and during the intervening period the restricting Test and Corporation Acts had been repealed and the Catholics emancipated. The situation was resolved in the latter year with a series of registration acts. From then on Dissenters and Catholics could be married from their own churches, as long as they were licensed. The Star Lane Independents were licensed in July 1837, as were the Roman Catholics at about the same time. The acts also relieved pressure for burials in the already overcrowded parish church graveyards, but this problem in Stamford was not solved for another twenty years, until the new town cemetery was opened off Little Casterton Road in 1854. EDUCATION/SCHOOLS It was, I think, the Jesuits who said, "Give me the child for the first seven years and I’ll give you the man.” They were. of course, talking about education; more precisely education into a particular mode of thought. The churches at this time were certainly not slouches in putting this axiom into practice and were the great stimulus for the advancement of education. There is no doubt they were doing this for altruistic reasons, but there is equally no doubt they were each operating their own agenda. In this age, before universal state education, schooling was given to those who could afford to pay for it, and for those who couldn't, it was provided at a profit by the supplier - the commercial profit of the private schools, or the profit to society of a better educated people who emerged from schooling as sympathetic or an adherent to your particular brand of Christianity. In either case, the promotion of social order and the habit of obedience to one's social superiors was also an essential ingredient. You probably have a vague memory from your schooldays that the first schooling for the poor was provided by Sunday schools, popularised and put on a national footing by Robert Raikes from 1780 onwards. While this interpretation is generally correct, like so many things we learnt at school it is a little simplistic. In Stamford, for instance, the Stamford Grammar School, or Radcliffe's School as it was then known, was founded in the 16th century to provide education for a number of poorer boys; and the Wells Charity or Petty School was endowed and established in St Peter's Street in 1604 to educate as many boys as his old house would accommodate, according to the will of Stamford shoemaker Edward Wells. Bluecoat School was founded in 1704 and was able to educate and clothe about 40-50 poor boys. The first Stamford Sunday school, on the other hand, seems to have been St Martin’s, founded about 1785. By 1801 it had about 270 children attending, though this is in conflict with the opinion of William Wilberforce, the famous reformer, who passing through Stamford in 1798 commented, “At Church, miserable work. Remnant of Sunday school, eight children! I have never seen a more apparently irreligious place”. However, it was not long before other parishes had set up their own Sunday schools and the Dissenters were quick to follow. While religious instruction would be given in all schools, instruction in the three Rs would also be given in the Sunday schools. There is a note in 1822 that the Independent Chapel (now URC) Sunday school in Star Lane was giving reading and spelling instruction to about 100 children. For the majority of these poor, the Sunday school would be the only formal education they would receive. By the early 19th century, schools were being set up by the dozen . A longside the large number of tiny dame schools, for example, Miss Bee in Barn Hill, the Misses Lowe in St Mary's Place, or Miss Wakefield in Broad Street, more substantial establishments were set up either by the parishes directly or with strong religious connections. In 1815 money left over from a lying-in charity helped establish the National School for Girls (later St George's School) which with the Bluecoat school for boys became one of the major schools for the poor of the town. The name National is significant because it meant the school had almost certainly accepted a grant from the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, and therefore had a particular religious affiliation. The National Society was founded in 1811 but three years later a non-denominational society, the British and Foreign Schools Society, was founded to counter this established church influence. Though claiming to be non-denominational, it inevitably had strong Dissenter influence. In 1838 when the Bluecoat School was rebuilt and expanded on St Peter's Hill (now the Masonic Centre) to cater for 150 boys instead of the previous 40-50, it stated its education would be according to the British and Foreign Schools Society system. They had presumably accepted a grant from them. In this case there was no inevitable Dissenter connection, for only sixteen years before the author of Drakard's History of Stamford had been fearful that Bluecoat, like the girls’ National School, was going over to the Madras system, which had Anglican associations. However, the result was that it attracted large numbers of Dissenters’ children and went down that path. Because of the mix of its children, it decided not to teach the catechism which aroused the fury of the Anglican clergy. They were so agitated that they refused to attend the first public examination at the school in 1839 which led the Stamford Mercury , a paper itself with strong liberal/nonconformist leanings, to accuse them of bigotry. It was inevitable there would be a school in the town under dissenter influence to counterbalance the growth of the Anglican parish schools. St Martin's day school was founded in 1833 and the new building of 1855 by the London architect Henry Clutton still survives today as the Stamford High School music school on the corner of Kettering Road. Later there followed St John's School on the corner of Scotgate, All Saints' School in Austin Street and St Michael's School on the corner of Recreation Ground Road (now the site of the Salvation Army). As well as this, the Anglican parish would have considerable influence in the other schools. The vicar and churchwardens of All Saints' awarded the lease of the Wells Charity School and this same triumvirate of incumbent and churchwardens in St George's parish dominated the National School. Side by side with the day schools the Sunday schools flourished to give the number of 1,700 attending on a typical Sunday as we saw earlier in the 1851 religious census figure. As we have seen, they taught the same subjects as at the day schools and in many cases the same day school masters and mistresses taught the Sunday schools in the same buildings. From the 1830s the government made small grants available for school building and during the 1840s these expanded hugely. It is most likely that the Stamford parish school building programme benefited from them. From 1840 grants were conditional on the schools accepting independent inspection and management, but as we have seen from the Bluecoat case above, and numerous other earlier examples, Stamford was already doing this. In other ways Stamford was conventional and followed accepted practices - the monitorial system of teaching in the earlier part of the century and the discredited 'payment by results' system in the 1850s and 60s. When the Forster Education Act was passed in 1870, Stamford was so well endowed with schools, all the major ones with strong religious connections, there was no need to establish new Board Schools. The result today is that of five primary schools in Stamford, three of them are Church of England schools, and of the other two, one of them, Bluecoat, has strong religious associations. LIBRARIES Alongside the schools we must not forget the libraries, for again, the church was the first institution to provide such facilities. Church or parish libraries go back to the Middle Ages and there survives today a medieval chained library in Hereford (All Saints, recently moved to the cathedral). St Wulfram’s at Grantham also has a surviving chained library, and a library was established at St Mary’s Stamford in the early 17th century by Richard Bannister, churchwarden but better known as an eye surgeon. Not all the works in the parish libraries were religious but naturally they were what we should call rather heavyweight, with a preponderance of theology and the Church Fathers, plus a smattering of commentaries, philosophy and the natural sciences. The library at St Mary’s, which still survives in the church, is distinguished because by the early 18th century it had been reformed and in 1721 had become one of the earliest lending libraries in the country. At least one book remains there that retains its contemporary list of borrowers on the flyleaf. This lending library predates considerably the first public subscription library in Stamford which was established in 1770. Wider public readership was only attained by the establishment of the Stamford Institution in 1842, but this secular library was rivalled by a parish library set up by All Saints in 1846, where the poor of the parish could borrow books every Monday morning for their edification - from Mr Maxey's establishment in St Peter's Street. It was, of course, not until 1906 that the present public library was established in a refurbished Portico, High Street, where it still remains. GENERAL CHARITY I said I was going to talk about the social side of the general charitable nature of the various churches in the town. Obviously, what we have just been considering - the poor law, the rates, tithes, education – all were important in a wider social context and there is evidence to show that Stamford followed national movements inspired by Christian and humanitarian concerns. For example, in June 1832 the Stamford Mercury records a proposal to establish an anti-slavery society here and s imilarly notes celebrations in the town when abolition of slavery in the British colonies was achieved the following year. What I wish to avoid now is merely a list of good works or individual charities run by the various religious groups. It would take a whole lecture just to run through the annual Stamford social calendar listing things like the regular charity balls - Lying-In Charity just before Christmas, Dorcas Charity just after, etc.- or the annual appearance of the soup kitchens in winter. These do not seem to have been treated as emergencies at the time for they were so regular as to be part of the annual calendar. The only variation was their number, which depended on the severity of the weather. Another important feature of the social round was the religious lecture. They were extremely popular, though to our eyes hardly distinguishable from sermons, and individual lectures regularly attracted audiences of well over a thousand. It rather puts into the shade what we consider the undoubted success of these museum lectures. To show how far this extended, during the 1830s and 40s even the smallest parish in the town, St Mary's, not only had a curate but also a separate lecturer (just as Boston retains today). The Victorians still have a very bad press today and one of the most serious charges against them is that of hypocrisy. Nowhere, apparently, is this better illustrated than in contrasting, say, the establishment of the Church of England Temperance Society tea-room in Broad Street (now the dry cleaner on the corner of Ironmonger Street) with the alcohol problems suffered by the clergy themselves: for example, MacDougall of St Michael's who had to be protected by his friends after becoming 'tired and emotional' in church one day, or Micklethwaite of Little Casterton being found staggering drunkenly up Nags Head Passage one day in 1907. But this is as much our hypocrisy as theirs. In making these judgments, we are ignoring the equally blatantly obvious cases of double thinking that pervade our own society, but at the same time we wilfully misunderstand the Victorian epoch, which was grappling with changes in society that were the equal of anything we see today. And they were doing this, unlike today, in a world less used to change. Also, until numbers become statistically significant, individual cases can only be anecdotal. We may also find it difficult to understand the feelings of guilt felt by the Victorians - they would call this contrition - but can we imagine today state sponsored national Days of Humiliation and Fasting? There w ere at least four of them during the 19th century: 1832 and 1853 for cholera, 1854 for the Crimean War, 1857 for the Indian Mutiny. Man made wars perhaps need contrition, but for Acts of God such as cholera we find this a little harder to take. The days themselves were commemorated during the week and, as the Stamford Mercury remarked in 1854, they were “not marked by large church attendances but all businesses (were) suspended”. These days also illustrate what an age of transition the 19th century was. The stimuli for the days were perhaps feelings left over from less rational ages, but as the Mercury shows, they were not generally well supported and other sources tell us that they were actively opposed by the more advanced. This opposition included Roman Catholics and Dissenters who were protesting against the established church connection, and within the established church itself, Anglo-Catholics who saw the days as government interference in church affairs. The categories I've illustrated show the major concerns of the Victorians: education and the care of those less fortunate than themselves, spurred by strong religious convictions but tinged with a primitive sort of guilt. We can certainly say that what they did was patchy and ineffective, even that they were being hypocritical and selfish and paying lip service to good works, or that they were not living to the biblical standards they set themselves. We may even take a Marxist view and see the Victorian Bourgeoisie doing just enough to protect itself from the unbridled disaffection of the urban poor. All these criticisms may be true in part but they fall into the trap of judging a previous generation by our own standards and are therefore not very useful. It is much more fruitful to judge them on their own terms and then we can see how the age reacted to the severe problems they were facing. THE DENOMINATIONS For the final section tonight, I said I would look at the different denominations in the town to see how they interacted with each other, or more accurately, how they were viewed and reacted to by the townspeople. I shall start with the Dissenters. Since the second half of the 17th century dissenters, that is, all the Protestant non-conformist groups, had been barred from public office, particularly from standing for parliament. During the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment there had been a growing toleration, so that by 1828 the removal of the legal barriers of the Test and Corporation Acts was little more than a formality. The Independents (later the Congregationalists, now the URC) had a chapel in Stamford before 1680 but this was burnt down by the mob on the death of Queen Anne in 1714. A new chapel in Star Lane replaced it in 1720, and the present chapel in almost the same position was built in 1819. The Methodists first built here in 1803 on their present site, and that chapel, with the lovely carvings of Faith, Hope and Charity on the gable, still survives behind the present 1880s Gothic chapel. The General Baptists, who had good 16th and 17th century antecedents, were recorded in Stamford during September 1829 holding a mass baptism by general immersion in the River Welland; the first time this had happened in Stamford for 100 years said the Stamford Mercury . This became a regular event the novelty of it attracting ever growing crowds, up to 1,800 a few years later. Flushed by their success the Baptists were able to build themselves a chapel in 1835, significantly on the banks of the Welland in Bath Row. It survives as the pair of buildings that come down to the street front just west of the Bath House. However, the General Baptists did not fare well as they were recorded in the Mercury as having gone by 1846, and there is no trace of them in the 1851 religious census. I think I may know why. Some years before, two young Church of England curates, William Tiptaft and Joseph Philpot, serving in parishes near Oxford, became great friends and after studying and praying together grew so disillusioned with the Church of England that they seceded. They became itinerant preachers in the John Wesley mould, but were, what we should call today, Strict Baptists. William Tiptaft, who was a natural if fiery preacher, came from the east Midlands and had two sisters living in Oakham and Stamford. His Stamford sister was married to the brewer Joseph Phillips, and who, reading between the lines, was caused endless embarrassment by her brother. On one of Tiptaft's frequent visits to Stamford he met Dr Merveilleux (pronounced Mirvilow), doctor at the infirmary and a strong Independent of Star Lane Chapel, who actually lived on this very site [Stamford Arts Centre] - his front room is now the booking office. Merveilleux was so impressed with him that he arranged for him to preach in the Assembly Rooms next door in October 1831. With his local upper-class connections, Tiptaft drew a large and miscellaneous audience including the cream of society. Unfortunately, his normal open-air-from-the-back-of-a-farm-waggon preaching style didn't go down too well with the cream of society, especially as he was not only haranguing the Church of England but the general dissenters as well. Many walked out and the rest stayed to shout. His sister, Mrs Phillips, is reported as commenting “William is mad!” The uproar was such that the Assembly Rooms could never again be hired for Tiptaft, but Merveilleux was so impressed he immediately left the Independents and determined to build a chapel for the strict preaching of the gospel. This was more difficult than imagined for, after the uproar, it would be difficult to get a site and the intention must at all costs be kept from the ears of the Marquess. Merveilleux secretly acquired a piece of land on the waste to the north of the town and the chapel, built entirely at his own cost, was erected in 1834. This is the North Street Particular Baptist Chapel. Tiptaft’s friend, Philpot, became minister – perhaps Tiptaft was too restless a soul to settle yet in one place – and such was the fervour of the preaching that numbers grew, and a gallery had to be added in 1838. This is perhaps why the general Baptists disappeared; they faded away or were absorbed by the competition. It is worth adding that Joseph Philpot, who married Tiptaft's niece and settled in 10 Rutland Terrace, became famous in his own right as editor of The Gospel Standard which we are told circulated widely among the troops during the Crimea. Perhaps beyond the scale of dissent are the Mormons, or the Church of the Latter- day Saints. This new sect, only founded by Joseph Smith in America in 1830, had established a chapel here in Gas Lane as early as 1836, eleven years before Brigham Young led the Mormons on their mammoth trek to establish Salt Lake City. Though seating only fourteen people, the Stamford chapel was exclusively a religious building. People were very suspicious of such groups and typical is the case at Ryhall in May 1849. While holding a total immersion baptism ceremony in the River Guash, they were set upon by the local rowdies and received a severe ducking, and a second attempt two weeks later met with the same fate. However, today, they are still firmly established in Stamford at 16 Broad Street, having moved there about 15 years ago from what is now the museum education room and store. As I hinted when outlining the 1851 religious census, there was a traditional fear of Roman Catholicism in England, and this went back to the 16th century. There still lingered the old Elizabethan concept equating Roman Catholicism with treason and as late as 1780 London had been paralysed for four days by the anti-Catholic Gordon riots. Like the Dissenters, Catholics were penalised and could not hold public office, but while removing barriers from Dissenters was relatively easy, removing them for Roman Catholics was a much thornier problem. However, with the development of an industrial society it was quite clear that it would be impossible to continue sanctions against large sections of the population on grounds of religion, and Catholic emancipation in the long-term became inevitable. It was finally achieved in 1829 by the Duke of Wellington, Prime Minister, helped by the conversion of Sir Robert Peel to the cause, though it was the final nail in the coffin of the old Tory party already in its death throes. On the local scene, there had been enough toleration in Stamford for the Roman Catholics to build a chapel in All Saints Street as early as 1825 and by 1834 this had been rebuilt. On the other hand, the run up to emancipation had seen a petition presented at the town hall opposing concessions to Catholics and at the same time the British Reformation Society "to educate Catholics in Protestant beliefs" visited Stamford. In 1837 further diatribes against Catholicism are recorded in the Mercury , but what is more surprising is that this anti-Catholicism continues all through the 19th century, though now the debate turns on purely religious arguments rather than political ones. For example, in one of the winter lecture series in the 1850s (these are the sort I mentioned before as attracting audiences of over 1,000), two of the lectures seem to be devoted entirely to anti-Catholic propaganda, while as late as 1877 Roman Catholicism was controversial enough to provoke public disorder. In January of that year a visiting lecturer to the Oddfellows Hall, a Dr Hammond, a recent convert to Rome, provoked "a scene of the wildest disorder and confusion" and had to be escorted back to the Midland Railway Station surrounded by a mob of several hundred people. [Waterfield's, Annals of Stamford , 26 January 1877.] But it was not just against the other denominations that hate and vituperation were directed in the 19th century. The Church of England was just as happy to turn on itself and hand out harsh criticism to fellow members whose behaviour did not accord with their own. The introduction of the Tractarian ideas of the Oxford movement from the 1830s onwards is a suitable case in point. There had always been a tension within the Church of England between high and low, Catholic and Protestant; and while Protestantism had dominated the church since t he reign of Elizabeth, its Catholic nature had never been forgotten. It received fresh impetus under the influence of Newman, Keble and Pusey. The idea of the transcendence and mystery of God expressed in worship, a Church with authority, together with a dash of Romanticism looking back to the Middle Ages and the Gothic Revival in architecture, made Tractarianism very attractive to the younger more progressive clergy, especially those who worked in the urban slums. The same sort of dissatisfaction that had pushed Tiptaft and Philpot to extreme Protestantism pushed these other priests towards Catholicism. Unfortunately, the fear of Roman Catholicism was so great that it extended to any perceived Romanising tendency within the Church of England itself. Not that it expressed itself in Stamford very early. The Reverend Dennis Edward Jones, who came to St John’s in 1833 (and stayed 50 years), was accused by the Stamford Mercury in 1845 of introducing Puseyite practices into his church, but upon examination it seems that he had only taken to preaching in a surplice and had introduced chairs on each side of the communion table. But even this was seen to be Romish in an intensely Protestant town. Eleven years later when the architect Edward Browning restored St John's and painted the medieval angels on the roof in bright colours, the Stamford Mercury , still on the offensive, attacked this for making the church as gaudy as continental Papist ones. However, despite this and other hysterical outbursts, one in 1879 directed at the 'tin tabernacle' in Water street - an offshoot of St Martin's erected to take the poor excluded from the main church because of the appropriated pews - and another in 1882 screaming that "Ritualism or semi-Romanism (was) creeping into Stamford", Anglo- Catholicism did not really come to Stamford until 1890. It was then introduced to St Mary's by an aristocratic young incumbent who immediately instigated a major restoration of the church by the famous London Arts & Crafts architect John Dando Sedding. He paid three quarters of the cost of this himself. It is interesting that this young rector, Carew Hervey St John-Mildmay, came to Stamford just at the same time as his Bishop, Edward King of Lincoln, was being prosecuted in the courts for Anglo-Catholic practices, for such outrageous things as making the sign of the cross and having lighted candles on the altar during the communion service. Internecine warfare of this sort was getting the Church a very bad name. But Mildmay was a very forthright young man who did not mind stirring up controversy and his antics at St Mary’s had the town stirred up for years. By this time there was another newspaper in Stamford, the Stamford and Rutland Guardian , a paper that would give The Sun a run for its money in tackiness and pandering to the basest instincts, and it had a field day over what was going on at St Mary’s. Surpliced choirs were a high church novelty at this time and the Guardian thought it highly amusing to see Mildmay driving his surpliced choir down the aisle “like a flock of sheep”, and at the archdeacon’s visitation poked fun at the “meek and gentle way” the assembled clergy “glowered at each other during certain ritualistic practices”. More seriously the journal The Protestant Observer thundered, “No Evangelical churchman can look to the future without anxiety. The ritualistic ornaments are intended to teach those false doctrines to the eye which in due course may be heard from the pulpit. Where will Mr Mildmay end? Having started with his face towards Rome, will he ever reach the end of his journey? (In Mildmay’s case, the answer was yes, though not without a bit of dabbling in Spiritualism first!). But what Mildmay was chiefly remembered for outside the church was the non-religious impact of his work. He was the man who got rid of the carillon that had played hymn tunes on the St Mary’s bells since the early 18th century, and had stopped the centuries old practice of ringing the curfew bell each evening. St Mary’s continued to cause controversy in the town, for after the brief interlude in the first few years of this century when one of the rectors suddenly declared himself to be a socialist and was forced to leave town by the Marquess, there was a great deal of fuss when the church began to use incense in the 1920s. When this was done at a joint service, it provoked intense letters of protest to the Mercury by other Anglican clergy of the town. This was perhaps the last time when this sort of inter-church rivalry showed itself so openly, and while similar attitudes simmered under the surface until the 1950s, there has been a marked sense of co-operation and ecumenism since the 1960s. But it is at just this time that the general public found the churches to be less relevant in their lives and stopping the inter-church bickering perhaps came too late. What then are we to conclude from this individual, perhaps idiosyncratic, trip through the social aspects of church affairs in the 19th century? The biggest changes affected the Church of England as it had to come to terms with the change from being an arm of the secular administration to being a purely ecclesiastical organisation. All the churches had to adapt to living in a new industrial age, and the transition was putting a strain on all sections of the community. How did they do? Well, first of all they were largely reactive to change rather than pro-active. With a few notable exceptions they reacted to change by battening down the hatches. The churches were worried by the 1851 religious census and saw that they were not getting to church as many people as they imagined or hoped for. However, the census was an isolated and unique event and a single point on a graph is no use for predicting trends. Even so, there was a general suspicion among more intelligent churchmen that numbers were on a downward slope and an appreciation that the Churches were not being effective, especially in the larger industrial cities. The Evangelicals, and later the Anglo-Catholics, had made some inroads here, but were under-resourced and the Church at large did not, or perhaps could not, capitalise on these initial moves. This led some Anglo-Catholics to go down the road of Christian Socialism (which in one of its wilder manifestations saw the red flag flying from the tower of Thaxted church during the 1920s), but their efforts were small compared with the size of the problem, and were anyway overtaken in this century by state involvement. Typically, the Anglo-Catholic movement came late to Stamford - at the very end of the century – and, being Stamford, was concerned more with ceremonialism, church restoration and personal piety than with mass evangelism or social reform. The brief flirtation with Christian Socialism in the first decade of the new century was soon brought to an end by the combined hostility of the parish, town and Marquess, and the personal inadequacies of the rector. The other great debate, that between Christianity and science, is hardly visible in Stamford. I stand to be corrected in the light of future evidence, but all the indications are that if one looked at church affairs during the second half of the 19th century one would not know that Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution even existed. The Stamford Institution did a little on him but this merely emphasises the growing gulf between the secular and church worlds. In general, the Church was largely at a loss as to how to come to terms with the changing situation it faced during the 19th century. The removal of the secular powers from the Church of England was a marvellous opportunity to redirect its energies to tackle the problem of falling church numbers and develop a new spirituality in an industrial world increasingly dominated by science. That it failed to do so and was content to retreat into internecine warfare was a huge missed opportunity. It has only been since the Second World War that remedial action has been applied. All we can hope is that it is not “too little, too late”! John F H Smith. A print version can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back Woman’s Suffrage in Stamford Fight for the Vote 1913 Chris Hunt 2023 On Saturday July 12th 1913 the talk in Stamford was of that evening’s meeting on the Meadows where the issue of female suffrage and the right to vote was to be discussed. Reporters from the three local newspapers were in attendance, the Stamford and Rutland Guardian , the Stamford & District News and the Lincolnshire, Rutland & Stamford Mercury . Today we remember the Suffragettes, the militant wing of the movement for Votes for Women. There was however a non-militant organisation, the Suffragist’s, who allowed men to join their organisation, and it was them who organised the meeting on the Meadows as part of the 1913 Great Pilgrimage for women’s suffrage. Groups of women, with some men, marched from all parts of the country to London. Where on Saturday July 26th 1913 in Hyde Park a crowd of over 50,000 heard speeches calling for Votes For Women and those present unanimously passed the motion: - “That this meeting demands a Government measure for the enfranchisement of women.” As to the meeting in Stamford. The Guardian reporter summed up the day as follows:- The announcement on local hoarding, in eye-aching red and green, that a number of ladies belonging to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies would address the people of Stamford on Saturday evening, in the Meadows, created keen interest, and their arrival was awaited by a huge assembly. The party, known as the Great North Road section, is one of a number marching through the country to London, and they are identified with a strictly law abiding and non-party organisation. Leaving Newcastle on June 18th, the contingent under notice has been subjected to what can only be described as hostility and rough treatment in some places, notably, in Mansfield and such occurrences can only be described as despicable seeing that the ladies are pursuing their agitations for the vote – the merit or de-merit of the demand we are not concerned with – by perfectly peaceful and legitimate means. On the other hand they have been the recipients of extraordinary kindness and hospitality. The National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage did not allow the march of the pilgrims to proceed without protest, and consequently men paraded the streets bearing sandwich-boards, upon which placards declared that women do not want votes. The Pilgrims made it quite clear that some women want them badly. The Suffragists, neatly attired in walking costumes, and wearing sashes of red, white and green, numbered about a dozen and carried banners setting forth the nature of the cause they are advocating. A motor car preceded them, containing Miss Norma Smith, who made the necessary arrangements at each place. The party left Grantham on Saturday morning (July 12th 1913), and on the way to Stamford held successful meetings at Colsterworth and Great Casterton. Their arrival here took place about 7.30 and an eager and expectant concourse of people gathered in Red Lion Square and lined Scotgate. As the Suffragists accompanied by several Stamford ladies who supported their cause, marched to the Meadows their reception was by no means unfriendly. Several of the ladies carried bouquets of flowers and altogether they presented a very attractive appearance. No time was lost in starting the speech making and very soon the trollies forming temporary platforms were surrounded by a dense throng of people. The crowd in the Meadows and lining the river bank must have numbered between three and four thousand, and very wisely, the police force was strongly augmented by constables from the adjacent district (Kesteven Constabulary). The arrangements for coping with any rowdyism were excellent, and Supt Theaker, the head of the Stamford force, who was consulted regarding the arrangements by the Union representatives, is to be congratulated on the way in which such a huge assembly was handled. It will be well recollected that upon the occasion of a Suffragette meeting in the Square a few months ago there were disgraceful scenes, and on Saturday evening it was soon evident that a number of those present were bent on creating a noise. Rushes were made for the platform occupied by Miss Garlick and her friends, but the police were able to prevent any mischief. Verbal interruptions were frequent, but these were of a good-natured character, and the ladies powers of repartee were fully demonstrated. It was a case of give-and-take, and the sallies evoked hearty laughter. Strangely enough all the opposition was centred on one trio of speakers. The speeches from the other platform proceeded without interruption to the end. Miss Garlick presided over the unruly assembly, and the other speakers were Miss Beaver and Miss Meikle (Leeds). On the other platform were Mrs Gerald Dowson as “chairman,” accompanied by Miss Norma Smith (organising the pilgrimage from Sheffield to Huntingdon), and Mrs W.E.Dowson of Nottingham. Miss Garlick, like the other speakers, placed the Suffragist arguments very eloquently. Some facts revealed concerning their Union included the information that it has a membership of 47,000, fresh adherents having been obtained at the rate of a thousand a month for some time past; that their methods are perfectly peaceful and law-abiding; that they are no way associated with the militant section, and that their express purpose is not only to assure the people of the country, but once again to assure the Prime Minister and all Members of Parliament that women do want the vote, notwithstanding the fact that on the way there that evening they notice a few tired-looking gentlemen carrying placards bearing the strange device, “Women Don’t Want the Vote.” She made it clear that the Union to which she belonged did not favour the militant methods. Miss Beaver spoke well, but was soon interrupted, and her mention of Mrs Pankhurst’s name was an error. It raised a storm of disapproval, and the hubbub after this was on the increase. The speaker urged that if women were not deemed intelligent enough to have votes, then some men who now possessed them scarcely knew how to use them. This remark did not mend matters and the interruptions continued at intervals. However, Miss Beaver managed to make some excellent points. Miss Meikle had not the best of attention and at the outset of her remarks, when interrupted, wrote notes on a tablet until the noise ceased. Towards the close of the meeting turf was thrown, and the addresses, which lasted for about an hour and a quarter ended amid much animation. The descent of the speakers from the trollies was the signal for a determined attempt to rush them, but the police succeeded in forming a strong bodyguard. As the ladies approached the bridge a desire was somewhat apparent to push them, along with the police, into the Welland. A number of townsmen however, went to the assistance of the officers and the ladies were got safely across the bridge, the entrance to which was then barricaded by the majority of the police while the suffragists made their way to the different residences which were affording them hospitality for the night. The following Wednesday afternoon (July 16th 1913) there was another suffrage meeting in the town. This one was organised by the Stamford branch of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association. This was held in the Bede House garden, Broad Street, which was addressed by the Countess of Selborne, President of the Association. This meeting being held in the week was a much more refined occasion, with tea and cake, and no need of police protection. The meeting was as political and the Guardian was there to report on the speeches. The Rev. J.R.H.Duke, rector of Thornhaugh presided over a good attendance, and was supported on the terrace by Lady Selborne, Misses M.Evans (Hon. Secretary of the local branch, D.Evans, Young, Hart, M.Kellett, Sunderland-Taylor, Williams, and Duncombe (Honorary Secretary of the Oakham Branch), along with Mr T.Sandall and a number of local clergy. The chairman, in a brief series of remarks, said that by all rules of ordinary logic women should have votes upon the same terms as men. At present they had municipal votes and could fill the office of Town Councillor, Guardian, and even Mayor. There was no reason why they should not take an equal interest in the greater affairs of the empire. Municipal questions largely concerned building, drainage, and roads, which was not really women’s business, so that the Parliamentary vote would enable them to deal with questions with which they would be more at home. As to property and taxation, it had been well said that representation and taxation should go hand-in-hand; there should be no objection against the contention that if women had to pay their share towards the upkeep of the country they should be given the chance of helping to decide how it should be expended (hear, hear). Besides, women were more economical than men, whilst they were quite as intelligent, if not more so in many cases. Women were conservative in the ordinary sense and would do more than men in the assistance of art, and the preservation of the memorials of the past. They would, as voters, strengthen the Conservative and Unionist side of the House of Commons, and might be reckoned on to protect the Church from attack, particularly the Welsh portion. To say, as some did, that if women had votes they would be under the influence of the parish priest was ridiculous. As to the militant methods of some women, there was no reason why so many others who favoured peaceful advocacy should be deprived of the privilege they claimed. He regarded the “cat and mouse” Act as a bad piece of legislation. The government had practically invited outrage, and one prominent supporter told those who asked for women’s suffrage that they would not get it until they made themselves a nuisance. Could it be wondered at that some took his words seriously? In conclusion, Mr Duke asked the Countess to address them. Her ladyship, he said, bore an honoured name, one which was respected all over the county. She was the daughter of a great statesman, and sister to Lord Roberts and Lord Hugh Cecil, who were staunch supporters of the Church. Lady Selborne, who was warmly received, said she was very pleased to visit Stamford, which was the only place represented by her father, the late Marquis of Salisbury, in the House of Commons, up to the time he went to the House of Lords. When she was asked to come and speak here, she felt that she would like to do so, for his sake (applause). He was always a supporter of the principle of giving votes to women and furthered the cause when County Councils were instituted and women were granted the power to vote in those elections. Thus, she felt that the work of their Association would have had his approval. Women had just as great an interest in all public questions as men possessed, and it was the theory of democracy that those that contributed to the State should have a voice in the choice of legislation and in the selection of the government responsible for the public business of the country. If women were granted the vote it was not likely that the powers of government would ever be put into their hands, and they would always be content to leave it to men to deal with, even if they ever possessed the right to become Members of Parliament. It was the business of women to choose and not to govern. Women had great influence in politics, and any Bill which had their support always made its way to the front. The speaker dealt with the great influence exercised by women, and its power of good or evil. Women with votes would know that with political power they would also have responsibility and they would therefore deal with any question with more care and thought than was the case at present. If women had the vote they would not be so likely to rush into politics in an emotional way just when some question cropped up that specially interested them. It would be far better to have voting women than influencing women. The passing of a reasonable measure entitling women to vote would prevent much of the present evil of militancy, which was depriving the cause of a great deal of sympathy. In several of our colonies, America and Norway, women had been granted the vote, and the system was a success. In Sweden and Denmark the granting of the vote was being favourably considered. It was somewhat remarkable that in no other country but ours had the agitation for votes for women resulted in militant methods. But any violence was due to Ministers saying one thing and meaning another. They should have said “No” at the outset, instead of making promises and not fulfilling them. In the House of Commons Women’s Franchise Bills had passed their second reading, and it was generally understood that when this was the case the principle of a measure was approved. But despite this women had not yet been granted a vote. The speaker considered that the Prime Minister, had he taken more care, could have drawn up the Franchise Bill so as to admit an amendment. This would have saved a great deal of bitterness and controversy. But the militant outrages formed no reason why the female sex generally should not be granted votes, for the women who had resorted to extreme measures did not number more than about 50, and it was unfair to keep a million and a half women disfranchised because of the faults of a few. Women had as great an interest in the affairs of the country as men, and what was sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander (applause). The best argument of all in support of votes for women was that it was a success, whether in County Councils or other departments of public life. Her ladyship, in conclusion, urged the members of the branch to continue the good work they had undertaken, and go forward with all possible activity. They should read up the subject, for it was only by being themselves convinced that they could convince others. Let them persuade their friends to join the Association, and thus strengthened, go on until their aim was accomplished. In proposing a vote of thanks to the Countess for her address and to the chairman, Miss Evans said that Stamford had a special claim upon her ladyship’s kindness, for she did not come among them as a stranger but as the daughter of the late Lord Salisbury, who in bygone years ably represented Stamford in Parliament. Her visit would rouse this branch to do even more for the cause of women’s liberty. Some said it was unwomanly to work for that cause, but how could it be when there were so many women who could not protect themselves, and who were working under labour conditions that urgently called for reform (applause). Other people said that a vote was no protection, but if this were the case why was there so much battling concerning the proposal to abolish plural votes? Miss Evans was congratulated on an able speech. Once the meeting finished those present were entertained at tea. How different to the earlier meeting held on the Meadows? In the same week that the Stamford and Rutland Guardian reported on the Suffragists meeting on Stamford Meadows and the meeting of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association there appeared in the same paper the following poem entitled:- THE SUFFRAGETTES We collected in our thousands, By the Welland’s flowing stream, To beguile the evening hours, Listening to the suffrage scheme. I am not disposed to offer, Views upon the female vote, But I wish to tell the scoffer, Things I would have him note. When he cast his senile “booing”, In a helpless woman’s face, He was eloquently showing, Much degeneracy of race. Pity him his lack of reason, Scorn for those who urge him on, This is Stamford’s senseless season, Chivalry is past and gone. Is there one who this attended? Could have faced, on yonder dray, With a courage, cool, and splendid, Asses with so loud a bray? (by) CYNICUS As to the Stamford & Rutland Guardian’s editorial comment. It stated:- All things considered, the Suffragist’s meeting at Stamford, on Saturday passed off remarkably well. For the credit of the great majority it must be made clear that those who disturbed the meeting and initiated the horseplay were simply out for a lark and cared nothing for common sense or argument. There was a chance of a Saturday night spree and that was all they wanted. Some, it was obvious, had had recourse to something stronger than water and so their share of the clamour need not be taken much notice of. Several of the interjections during the speeches were by no means devoid of wit and had the interruptions been simply verbal the meeting would have been quite enjoyable. But the foolish josting and turf-throwing was quite another story, and proved the caddish propensities of a certain section of the crowd. The speakers were ladies of education and should have been treated as such. However, as we have said, no great harm was done, and perhaps the occasional disorder was but the vent for those of vinous tastes. The Stamford and District News also reported on the event and although their report is similar there are a number of incidents reported that did not appear in the Stamford & Rutland Guardian . As they passed the Post office there was a slight attempt to “boo” them, but this soon subsided, and escorted by members of the Police Force the ladies were escorted down St John’s Street and Castle Hill to the meadows. Two trolleys belonging to Mr B.W.Aldwinckle were standing one on each side of the footpath between the two bridges, and speeches were delivered simultaneous from the two vehicles, to an assembly of between 2,000 and 3,000 persons. During part of the rally, at one time the crushing was so bad that numbers of little children near (one of) the wagons were escorted by the police out of the crowd into places of safety. Several of the men possessing a greater sense of justice and fair play than some of the others appealed to the disorderly ones to be quiet, but this had no effect, and the disorder continued, during which there was singing (including a verse of a hymn) and shouting, while a few piece of turf were thrown at the ladies. As to the scenes on the Meadows, the disturbances led to an appearance of two of the agitators at the Magistrates Court under the news banner, Disorderly Scenes at a Suffragette Meeting. Stamford Men Summoned. Amusing Evidence. Clearly the editor, or the compositor, or the reporter should have picked up that the Meeting had been held by Suffragists and not Suffragettes. The whole report mentioning Suffragettes. Two men were ordered to appear before the Magistrates on Saturday (July 19th 1913) on charges of improper conduct on the occasion of the Suffragettes meeting in the Meadows last week. They were Robert Stafford, 3 East-street, who was summoned for using indecent language, and Naaman Briggs, of 1 Zebra Cottages, against whom there was a charge of being drunk and disorderly. With regard to Stafford, P.c. Holgate stated that the man was very much under the influence of drink, and was creating annoyance by swearing and shouting. One man went to him and asked him to be quiet, whereupon defendant said words telling him in effect, to get out of the way. The defendant pushed about, and a man of about 50 years of age was knocked down. If the crowd had come that way, the constable feared the man would doubtless have been seriously injured. Supt. Theaker informed the Court that Stafford had been before the Magistrates seven times previously, and said he desired to press the case, as the language used by the defendant could only be described as vile. A fine of 10 shillings, with 7 shillings costs was imposed. The man Briggs created some amusement by a quaint saying. Asked whether he was guilty of being drunk and disorderly on the occasion referred to, he said, “I reckon I had a drop of beer, but I was not disorderly.” After P.c. Pacey had been sworn, Briggs said “Now, what did I say?” but he was told to be quiet. The officer told the Bench that the defendant, who was very drunk, was shouting and pushing about among the crowd. He called out “Mrs Pankhurst , ***** her.” Someone near asked him to be quiet, whereupon he expressed the hope that the suffragists would be in a much warmer place than the defendant, said the constable, continued this sort of thing for something like twenty minutes, pushing both women and men about, and although witness spoke to him he took no notice whatever. Defendant: What did you say when you brought me the summons? Didn’t you say go straight home when you spoke to me? The Constable: I never said anything of the sort. Defendant: None of your “guyfly.”(Laughter) I did nothing but shout Mrs Pankhurst! The Clerk: You can only ask the witness a question. Defendant: Was I drunk? The Constable: Certainly. Defendant: Then why didn’t you lock me up? The Constable: I gave you a chance to get home. Defendant: If I was drunk I couldn’t have got home. Briggs added that he went out shopping before he went home at half-past nine. Turning to P.c. Pacey, he said “Tell a straight tale.” Supt. Theaker, who was also present at the Meeting, supported the evidence of the constable, and said, that the man was frequently asked to go home by several in the crowd. Defendant: That was Daddy Hopkins. (Laughter). The Inspector: continuing said the defendant’s conduct was very bad indeed. There were several there who were rather disorderly, but he didn’t take much notice of that; in a case of this kind, however, where very bad language was used he considered it his duty to bring it before the notice of the Bench. The Chairman (to the Defendant): Have you anything to say? Defendant I expect I have got to pay, but I don’t want to pay much. (Laughter). I ain’t ??? a deal. (Laughter). This is the first time I’ve been here, and it would take a different suffragette meeting from that to get me here again. (Laughter). Defendant added: I saved the women. They were pelting at me instead of the women. (Laughter). While the Magistrates were considering the verdict the defendant caused further amusement by asking, “Have they done with me now, here? The Justices imposed a fine of 5 shillings, including costs, and the Mayor expressed the hope that this case would be a warning to him in the future remarking that if he kept from the drink he would be all right. Defendant: But I started young sir. (Laughter). Supt. Theaker: Are you going to pay? Defendant: No; shall you trust me? He was allowed a week. The Great Pilgrimage was a protest march in favour of votes for women and against militancy and was arguably the single most influential non-violent event in the fight for votes. It created an environment across the country, especially where meetings were held, of open debate of the subject rather than the newsworthy reports of broken windows, arson and hunger strikes. Previously it was as if any disaster could be blamed on the Suffragettes. Stamford was no different. Back on Thursday May 22nd 1913 two separate fires one at the Wesleyan Chapel on Barn Hill and another in the stables behind the Stamford Hotel created rumours in the town that those ‘damn suffragettes’ were involved. Suddenly in the minds of some, a woman should not be allowed out with a box of matches. Stamford had a population of around 9.500 people in 1913, between 2,000 and 3,000 attended the meeting on the Meadows that Saturday evening. Let us hope that the majority supported female suffrage. Sources 'By the Way’ Comment Stamford & Rutland Guardian July 19th 1913 p7/c1 Suffragettes Poem Stamford & Rutland Guardian July 19th 1913 p7/c2 Unionist Women Franchise Meeting Stamford & Rutland Guardian July 19th 1913 p8/c1&2 Suffragists Visit To Stamford Stamford & Rutland Guardian July 19th 1913 p8/c4&5 Women Suffragists in Stamford Stamford & District News July 16th 1913 p5/c2 Stamford Men Summoned Stamford & District News July 23rd 1913 p5/c1 Suffragettes On Tour Stamford Mercury July 18th 1913 p4/c4 Notes: Stamford & District News published on Wednesdays Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury on Friday Stamford & Rutland Guardian published on Saturdays The first names/initials of the women at the Conservative and Unionist meeting were added from the Stamford & District News of July 23rd 1913 p7/c1. For more background information on this topic the recently published book by Jane Robinson; Hearts And Minds. The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote , is a MUST read. A print version can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back The Vestry Books and Registers of St.John's Parish, Stamford Submitted by Chris Hunt Perhaps the best plan to give an idea of the oldest of the three vestry books will be to take the first three pages, where are recorded the particulars of all the payments made by the Churchwardens for the year ending 18th April 1588, and a statement of the parish accounts rendered at the end of the year. The first entry reads this:- Payd forth for riting at the larst account to Master Tompson ijd. Payd uppon Low Sunday for a pynt of Moskadyne and brede vijd. for hallf a pynt the Sunday following iijd. for mending the grett bell stay ijd. for ij load of sand for the pavements xxid. for ijd load of stone carrige viijd. for mending an irron pin for the grett bell ijd. to the pavyer for his worke vis. viijd. to the plumer for mending the leaydes ijs. viijd. for wood id. the xxvijth of August for a quart of Moskadyne for the Communion xiid. to the bookbinder for mending the service book and the prayer book iis. vijd. to the parritor for the carriage of the inventary to Lincolln xiid. to George Ellington for harroing the Church land iiijs. for mending the bandrick of the seckond bell iiijd. Bestowed on the ringers on St. Thomas’ Day in drink and brede viiid. Payd for mending the grett bell whell iiijd. for neilles ijd. for a pottell of Moskadyne on Christmas Day for the Comunion ijs. for the xiiijth of January for a pynt of Moskadyne vid. for the xxith of January a pynt of Moskadyne for the Comunion vid. for mending the hookes of the Church door iiijd. for washing the surpllis and tabell clothe iiijd. for ij horses to the vysitation iis. viijd. for horse keep xd. for our dinners ijs. vid. for making our bill iiijd. for mending the belt of the grett bell and irons ijd. to Goodman Goodlands for mending the great whell and stay ijs. for a pottell of Moskadyne for Pallmes Sunday ijs. for glass for the west window and ij guardes viijd. for vi strick of barly for sede vis. xd. for George Ellington for pllowing and sowing iiijs. for half a pynt of Moskadyne for Easter even xijd. for V pientes of Moskadyne for Easter Daye ijs. vid. It is interesting to note the quantity of wine used at this period, viz., a pottel or four pints on Christmas Day and Palm Sunday; a quart was used on Easter Eve and five pints on Easter Day. These quantities are large, but I noticed in the account 40 years later, viz., in 1629, they were still larger, viz., on Good Friday two quarts and on Easter Day six quarts of wine were consumed. Other payments interesting to the parishioners of St. John’s are those referring to the cultivation of the church land, viz., for seed corn, ploughing, sowing and harrowing, as this land is still held by the Churchwardens though now let on a building lease and the rent used towards church expenses. After the detailed particulars of expenses the following memorandum is recorded, and it is interesting to notice the altered meaning of words. Memorandum that William Hutton and Matthew Southwell, Churchwardens of St. John’s Parish in Stamford, did gyve their accompt up to the viijth day of April 1588, for yo yeare before, before Tobye Loveday, Alderman of the Borough and Towne of Stamford aforesaid, Robert Meadowes, gentn; John Symon, John Yarwood, Geo. Hall, John Barnes, and others, in wch yeare their receipte came to xliiijs. ixd., and their allowance came to liiijs. ijd., so yt their allowance amounted their receipte ixs. ijd. All wch accompt was brought in Church stock, which at the accompt before was delivered to sundrie men as by the former accompt appeareth, and which Church stock with the increase comes zvl. xiijs. --- say Fyfteen pounds eyght shillings at which accompt the foresaid William Hutton, Senior Churchwarden, was dismyst, and John Musson was was elected the chosen officer by the parishioners, at which time was delivered to the Churchwarden the sum of eight and twenty shillings and sevenpence, and there remayned to be putt to trust of the Parish the summe of xiiil. xs., besyde xxxjs. for the two acres of barlye sold to John Barnes, to be payd at the next accompt, in the whole fyfteen pounds rwo shillings. I say xvl. ijs. Delivered the said thyrteen pounde tenn shillinge into the hande, custodye, and keping of Tobye Loveday, Alderman, and Robert Medowes, gentn. You will notice instead of their “payments exceeded their receipts,” it is stated “their allowance amounted their receipts,” and also that having fulfilled his duty and accounted for the balance in hand the senior Churchwarden was “dismyst,” really meaning they awarded him a legal discharge from further responsibility. In 1606 there is first entered a list of church goods which were formally handed over to the new Churchwarden, as follows:- A silver cuppe with a cover for the Comunion. An olde table clothe made of an olde cope. A surplis. A Bible in the large vollume. Two Comunion bookes. A prayer booke for the King’s deliverance. Jewell’s Appologie. Two bookes of Homelyes. One other little booke of Homelyes. Two bookes of Homelyes. One other little booke of Homelyes. A booke of Cannons. A Homelye on the right use of the Lord’s Supper. The Register books. In addition to the above, “A new bason” was given by one Anne Anthony in 1612, also two puter flagons and a boule for the Communion, given by Mr. Thomas Harrison of London, draper. In the list for 1634, is added:- A pewter cup for the bread. Four trenchers and a basket, and some additional books, viz:- An old book of prayers for Wednesday and Friday. A form of prayer with an order of Fasting. The remonstration of King James against Cardinal Perron and Erasmus’ Paraphrase of ye Four Evangelists and the Acts of the Apostles chained to a desk with two chains. The four trenchers seem to point to a practice, similar to that of the Scotch Church at the present time, of handling the bread to communicants in their seats. The Churchwardens appear to have regularly paid the ringers for ringing on the anniversary of the King’s Coronation, on the 5th November, St Thomas’ Day, for the Bishop, &c., and it was interesting to note in the accounts of 1634 an entry, “Paid for ringing when the King came through the town, 2/,” especially when referring to the history of Stamford, I found it recorded in May of that year “Charles the First and his Queen, after spending two days at Apethorpe, passed through Stamford, the Mayor bearing the mace before them.” The system of election of Churchwardens which ruled from 1588 to 1702 appears to be one which gave very many parishioners an interest in Parish work and might, I am inclined to think, be reverted to with advantage. Thus a senior Churchwarden, a junior Churchwarden and a sidesman being appointed, the next year the senior Churchwarden retired, the junior Churchwarden became the senior, and the sidesman became junior Churchwarden and a fresh parishioner was elected as sidesman. In 1702, however, the present rule of a Parish Churchwarden and a Rector’s Warden appears to have been introduced and the rotation system dropped. In 1608 a sounding board appears to have been thought necessary for both reading desk and pulpit, for there is an entry. Paid for making a new Reading seat and a cover over it and for the pulpit cover 48/2 The Vestry proceedings of 1626 are interesting to Stamfordians, as they may be seen the signatures of two comspicuous men, Mr Wm. Salter, who was three times Mayor, and also that of Mr Jeremy Cole, who was Mayor in 1640, when the Council petitioned Parliament in favour of making Stamford a shire town by adding to it the County of Rutland, the Soke of Peterborough and the Hundred of Vess. He also desired to make the river navigable and obtain other privileges. It appears to have been quite the practise at this period, 1630, to give the clergy occasionally officiating a complimentary present of wine, thus:- Gave to Mr. Fish, Preacher, a quart of white wine and sugar 1/6 Gave Mr. Williams a pint of sack 1/- Gave Mr. Millwood a pint of sack and a quart of claratt 2/- and not only the clergy but the Bishop also was favoured thus in 1633:- To the Bishop one pottell of sack 2/- and again in 1634:- Given the Bishop the 7 Aug. in wine 3/8 Another visitor in 1652 appears to have fared even better than the Bishop, it being recorded Sent M. How preaching at St. John’s a pint of sack and a pint of white wine, he dining at Mr. Alderman’s (that is at the mayor’s house. And at the end of the 17th century there are many entries such as the following:- 1673. Published and collected the brief for the great fire at Fordingbridge in Southamptonshire happening on Sunday, 23 June 1672, upon which was collected ten shillings and five pence. Again 1686:- Collected in the parish of St John’s £7 14s 4d for the poor distressed French Protestants. Briefs are mentioned very frequently but without the object being named. Archaeologists would be interested in the records of 1695 when Robert Peck, the father of Francis Peck, the antiquarian and historian, was elected sidesman, and in 1696 and 1697 junior and senior Churchwarden in the usual rotation previously mentioned. Francis Peck was born in the parish in 1692, the Register recording his baptism that year thus:- Francis son of Robert and Elizabeth Peck, born May 4th, bapd. May 12th. In the inventory of church goods in 1717 there is an additional item to those mentioned in1681. viz., a pulpit cloth, and I note this is as this same old pulpit cloth, more than 200 years old (with the date 1701 handsomely embroidered upon it) may still be seen at St. John’s Church, fixed up round the inside of the pulpit. Another difference in the two inventories is the omission in 1717 of “Twelve leather buckets” mentioned in an earlier list, at which time the church was apparently made use of as fire station. Under the date 16th April 1729, is an account of what certificate men belong to the parish, with a list of thirty names following, and a foot-note dated 26th April 1733:- An account of Ceificate men entered this day with 5 additional names. Later in the same month at a meeting, the Vestry marked their disapproval of supporting the “Bull Running” proceeding out of church funds, as it was resolved: That the Churchwardens shall not be allowed to expend money at the Apparitions, or on Bull Running Day or at any other time without the consent of the parish, and no allowance shall in future be made for ringing on 23rd April. This is St George’s Day, which used to be celebrated as a national festival long after and not withstanding Queen Elizabeth’s order to discontinue the celebration. I will only make one quotation from the last century’s records, namely in 1813. An agreement was made with Mr. Robert Taylor, of St. Neots, to re-hang the four bells and re-cast the second, for the sum of £42, carriage included. The Registers of St. John’s begin with the year 1561. The first records are from 1561 to 1634, written upon vellum. There is then a blank till 1664, from which date until 1705 they are continued. These two old registers were not put into bindings and were becoming very dilapidated. At my suggestion the then Churchwardens (Mr. Poole and the present Mayor, Mr Higgs) had then put into a suitable cover, which will protect them in future. The next volume dates from 1706 to 1774 and the third from 1775 to 1812. The first Register is headed thus:- All those that have been married, christened & bureyed from the first of St Michael the Archangel in the year of our Lord God 1561, unto the end & terme of the same feast in the year of our Lord God 1562. and the first entry is:- Married. Francis Tueson and Ellyn his wife 22 Oct. 1561. This is a name still known in Stamford, and, indeed, in St John’s Parish. Times do not appear to have been very prosperous in 1569 and 1570, as the record for both years reads:- Married this year – none. It is an interesting fact to the present Rector, and especially to the inmates of Snowden’s Hospital in Scotgate, that each page of the Register from 1561 to 1598 is signed by the Rector, Richard Snowden, the founder of that charity 300 years ago. Another memorial of this gentleman remains in in the church tower where one of the bells bears the inscription: “Richard Snowden, Parson, Anno, 1561”. The entry in 1585 of the burial on 2nd January of Richard Bernard, the Bellman, reminds us of the old custom of the Bellman, who used to go round the town between twelve at night and two in the morning for some weeks before Christmas, ringing his bell and informing the inhabitants of the time of night and the state of the weather. This custom was continued up to about 40 years ago (1860’s). The normal death rate of the parish for some years previous to 1604 had been about six or eight, but in that year when, as stated in Butcher’s History, 713 persons died of the plague in Stamford and St. Martin’s, a special entry of 88 burials is registered in St. John’s Register in six months, and included Mr Snowden, the Rector. The entry is headed:- In the sickness time from 27 April until 2 October 1604 were buried. then follow the names and dates, frequently two and three in a day, and whole families seem to have been stricken, for example:- Agnes Davison buried 17th June; Alice Davison buried 18th; Richard Davison buried 19th; Jane Davison buried 20th; Phillis Davison 21st. Again, the Norton family had a terrible record in the burial of seven members of the family in four days, viz.:- Zackary Norton, buried 5th Aug., Tobie Norton buried 6th Aug. & Lucy Norton the same day, Jane Norton on the 7th and Abraham Norton the same day, & Nicolas Norton & Lucy Norton, junr. on 8th August. The following is a copy of an entry made in the Register in 1602. Whereas there is a license to eat flesh upon fish days granted to Isabel Salter the wife of William Salter Gentleman, she being notoriously subject to sickness and with child, dated the 15th day of March 1602, and the cause thereof continuing still the eighth day after, and desiring the said licence to endure still upon full recovery, therefore the said license is recorded in the Church book the 8th day after the date thereof being the 22nd March in the year aforesaid in the presence of the Churchwardens. John Tod Thomas Lytler his mark. In 1633 the burial of the then Rector is recorded thus:- 2 July. Buried. John Reynolds Clark. and in the Churchwardens’ accounts is an entry Paid for ringing at the burial of Mr Reynolds 1/6 As this was more than the amount usually paid for ringing, viz., 8d., we may infer, I think, that dumb peal was rung on the occasion. In the Register of Baptisms for 1636 is that of Thomas Hardy, son of Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth his wife. This youth appears to have gone to London, as Thomas Hardy, citizen of London, died in 1747, founded the Charity now known as Hardy’s Charity, for the benefit of eight widows of St John’s, his native parish, and which is distributed on his birthday, 5th June. He was baptised on the 6th, the next day, as recorded in the Register. Stamford being situate upon the Great North Road accounts for many deaths being recorded of unknown travellers such as I find in 1769:- A poor unknown soldier buried 12 Sept. A poor traveller, his name not known 19 Sept. (Vestry Book 1675). The next is, I think, a very interesting entry referring to the burial of Humphrey, an ex-Churchwarden, Town Councillor, and a prominent parishioner. From the Vestry Book I find he was a Sidesman in 1647, Churchwarden in 1648, Overseer of the Poor in 1674. His name is frequently mentioned, and his signature appears as one of those present at the Vestry Meeting in 1675, yet in February 1680, when he died, in the place of the usual record of burial it is stated:- Humphrey Reynolds an excommunicate person thrown into a hole. This Humphrey Reynolds was a chandler and one of the issuers of the Stamford series of 17th century tokens. Drakard’s History of Stamford, page 529 gives an illustration of his coin. He took up his freedom 24th October, 1644, was elected a capital burgess 17th Feb., 1646, chamberlain 1656 (and therefore a predecessor of my own, as I am now chamberlain or borough treasurer), but he was removed from the chamber 7th October 1659, by virtue of a writ of mandamus. According to the sessions rolls he was pursuant to the verdict of the jury of the clerk of the market, fined 5/- for having four single pounds, two half-pounds, and two quarters too light, and on 5th April 1665, his name, with that of Humphrey Allen Reynolds, was presented to the jury, they having absented themselves from attending their parish church (St. John’s) for the space of three months. During his life he appears to have paid but little respect to either municipal or ecclesiastical authorities of the day, for besides being removed from the council chamber he was also excommunicated, as is proved by the record of his burial. Another reference to excommunication occurs two years later, when in 1682 is the following:- Mary the daughter of William Moss an excommunicate person was baptised & the mother churched. There are many records I could quote, interesting to Stamfordians of to-day, but I will only mention a few. 1751. Elizabeth daughter of Edward Lyon basket maker and Mary his wife. This name and trade is still associated together in Stamford. Mr W. Lyon of 36, Broad Street, is a basket maker, and I have no doubt this association has remained during the last 150 years. Another similar instance of a long succession in business occurs with the family of Ratcliffe, also basket makers. In 1770, Thomas, son of John and Elizabeth Ratcliffe, basket maker, was baptised, and up to a very few years ago Mr. Ratcliffe carried on the business now continued by Mr. Friend. Some of the occupations mentioned about this period are curious:- Humphrey Jenkins, wire dancer. John Johnson, silk throster. J.Skeith, dish turner. Sam Tabbener, horse courser. Geo. Allen, post boy. Israel Holford, hemp dresser. In 1769 is recorded the burial of Cassandra wife of James Whitley, player, aged 57. Buried 10th Feb. I mention this as there is a monumental tablet on the north wall of St John’s Church to the memory of this lady, described as one “who possessed all the good qualities that accomplish the best of women,” and judging by the monument, the shield of arms and crest, and the description of the husband as James Whitley, Gentleman, he was probably a man of means and a noted actor in his day, who had retired and settled in Stamford. It will be interesting to members of the Stamford and County Club in St Mary’s Street to know that this James Whitley it was, who with Mr. Alderman Clarke, built the old Stamford Theatre in 1768, at a cost of over £800, and which building was converted into the present Club Room in 1871. After 1754 a separate Register was kept for marriages, and first used in August of that year, according to Act of Parliament. Whereas previously there was only the entry in the handwriting of the Registrar, in the new book both the contracting parties sign in the presence of two witnesses and the officiating clergyman as at present. It is interesting to note that the first 50 marriages there are 54 signatures and 46 marks, so that only about half the persons were able to write their names. The marks, however, are very interesting, not being ordinary crosses, but a printed initial P or T, a man’s hat, fish-hook, half-circle, a square and many other things. I will only give one more extract and that is for the year 1783, when on March 30th is recorded the burial of Wm. Pepper, victualler, aged 49, who, according to Drakard’s History, aspired to be a poet. Upon his grave stone in St. John’s Churchyard was inscribed, after the usual name and date:- Tho’ hot my name, yet mild my nature, I bore good will to every creature, I brewed fine ale and sold it too, And unto each I gave his due. THOMAS SANDALL (1905) SOURCE THE RUTLAND MAGAZINE VOL. 2 No. 12 – 1905-06 page 117-124 for the xiiijth of January for a pynt of Moskadyne vid. for the xxith of January a pynt of Moskadyne for the Comunion vid. for mending the hookes of the Church door iiijd. for washing the surpllis and tabell clothe iiijd. for ij horses to the vysitation iis. viijd. for horse keep xd. for our dinners ijs. vid. for making our bill iiijd. for mending the belt of the grett bell and irons ijd. to Goodman Goodlands for mending the great whell and stay ijs. for a pottell of Moskadyne for Pallmes Sunday ijs. for glass for the west window and ij guardes viijd. for vi strick of barly for sede vis. xd. for George Ellington for pllowing and sowing iiijs. for half a pynt of Moskadyne for Easter even xijd. for V pientes of Moskadyne for Easter Daye ijs. vid. It is interesting to note the quantity of wine used at this period, viz., a pottel or four pints on Christmas Day and Palm Sunday; a quart was used on Easter Eve and five pints on Easter Day. These quantities are large, but I noticed in the account 40 years later, viz., in 1629, they were still larger, viz., on Good Friday two quarts and on Easter Day six quarts of wine were consumed. Other payments interesting to the parishioners of St. John’s are those referring to the cultivation of the church land, viz., for seed corn, ploughing, sowing and harrowing, as this land is still held by the Churchwardens though now let on a building lease and the rent used towards church expenses. After the detailed particulars of expenses the following memorandum is recorded, and it is interesting to notice the altered meaning of words. Memorandum that William Hutton and Matthew Southwell, Churchwardens of St. John’s Parish in Stamford, did gyve their accompt up to the viijth day of April 1588, for yo yeare before, before Tobye Loveday, Alderman of the Borough and Towne of Stamford aforesaid, Robert Meadowes, gentn; John Symon, John Yarwood, Geo. Hall, John Barnes, and others, in wch yeare their receipte came to xliiijs. ixd., and their allowance came to liiijs. ijd., so yt their allowance amounted their receipte ixs. ijd. All wch accompt was brought in Church stock, which at the accompt before was delivered to sundrie men as by the former accompt appeareth, and which Church stock with the increase comes zvl. xiijs. --- say Fyfteen pounds eyght shillings at which accompt the foresaid William Hutton, Senior Churchwarden, was dismyst, and John Musson was was elected the chosen officer by the parishioners, at which time was delivered to the Churchwarden the sum of eight and twenty shillings and sevenpence, and there remayned to be putt to trust of the Parish the summe of xiiil. xs., besyde xxxjs. for the two acres of barlye sold to John Barnes, to be payd at the next accompt, in the whole fyfteen pounds rwo shillings. I say xvl. ijs. Delivered the said thyrteen pounde tenn shillinge into the hande, custodye, and keping of Tobye Loveday, Alderman, and Robert Medowes, gentn. You will notice instead of their “payments exceeded their receipts,” it is stated “their allowance amounted their receipts,” and also that having fulfilled his duty and accounted for the balance in hand the senior Churchwarden was “dismyst,” really meaning they awarded him a legal discharge from further responsibility. In 1606 there is first entered a list of church goods which were formally handed over to the new Churchwarden, as follows:- A silver cuppe with a cover for the Comunion. An olde table clothe made of an olde cope. A surplis. A Bible in the large vollume. Two Comunion bookes. A prayer booke for the King’s deliverance. Jewell’s Appologie. Two bookes of Homelyes. One other little booke of Homelyes. Two bookes of Homelyes. One other little booke of Homelyes. A booke of Cannons. A Homelye on the right use of the Lord’s Supper. The Register books. In addition to the above, “A new bason” was given by one Anne Anthony in 1612, also two puter flagons and a boule for the Communion, given by Mr. Thomas Harrison of London, draper. In the list for 1634, is added:- A pewter cup for the bread. Four trenchers and a basket, and some additional books, viz:- An old book of prayers for Wednesday and Friday. A form of prayer with an order of Fasting. The remonstration of King James against Cardinal Perron and Erasmus’ Paraphrase of ye Four Evangelists and the Acts of the Apostles chained to a desk with two chains. The four trenchers seem to point to a practice, similar to that of the Scotch Church at the present time, of handling the bread to communicants in their seats. The Churchwardens appear to have regularly paid the ringers for ringing on the anniversary of the King’s Coronation, on the 5th November, St Thomas’ Day, for the Bishop, &c., and it was interesting to note in the accounts of 1634 an entry, “Paid for ringing when the King came through the town, 2/,” especially when referring to the history of Stamford, I found it recorded in May of that year “Charles the First and his Queen, after spending two days at Apethorpe, passed through Stamford, the Mayor bearing the mace before them.” The system of election of Churchwardens which ruled from 1588 to 1702 appears to be one which gave very many parishioners an interest in Parish work and might, I am inclined to think, be reverted to with advantage. Thus a senior Churchwarden, a junior Churchwarden and a sidesman being appointed, the next year the senior Churchwarden retired, the junior Churchwarden became the senior, and the sidesman became junior Churchwarden and a fresh parishioner was elected as sidesman. In 1702, however, the present rule of a Parish Churchwarden and a Rector’s Warden appears to have been introduced and the rotation system dropped. In 1608 a sounding board appears to have been thought necessary for both reading desk and pulpit, for there is an entry. Paid for making a new Reading seat and a cover over it and for the pulpit cover 48/2 The Vestry proceedings of 1626 are interesting to Stamfordians, as they may be seen the signatures of two comspicuous men, Mr Wm. Salter, who was three times Mayor, and also that of Mr Jeremy Cole, who was Mayor in 1640, when the Council petitioned Parliament in favour of making Stamford a shire town by adding to it the County of Rutland, the Soke of Peterborough and the Hundred of Vess. He also desired to make the river navigable and obtain other privileges. It appears to have been quite the practise at this period, 1630, to give the clergy occasionally officiating a complimentary present of wine, thus:- Gave to Mr. Fish, Preacher, a quart of white wine and sugar 1/6 Gave Mr. Williams a pint of sack 1/- Gave Mr. Millwood a pint of sack and a quart of claratt 2/- and not only the clergy but the Bishop also was favoured thus in 1633:- To the Bishop one pottell of sack 2/- and again in 1634:- Given the Bishop the 7 Aug. in wine 3/8 Another visitor in 1652 appears to have fared even better than the Bishop, it being recorded Sent M. How preaching at St. John’s a pint of sack and a pint of white wine, he dining at Mr. Alderman’s (that is at the mayor’s house. And at the end of the 17th century there are many entries such as the following:- 1673. Published and collected the brief for the great fire at Fordingbridge in Southamptonshire happening on Sunday, 23 June 1672, upon which was collected ten shillings and five pence. Again 1686:- Collected in the parish of St John’s £7 14s 4d for the poor distressed French Protestants. Briefs are mentioned very frequently but without the object being named. Archaeologists would be interested in the records of 1695 when Robert Peck, the father of Francis Peck, the antiquarian and historian, was elected sidesman, and in 1696 and 1697 junior and senior Churchwarden in the usual rotation previously mentioned. Francis Peck was born in the parish in 1692, the Register recording his baptism that year thus:- Francis son of Robert and Elizabeth Peck, born May 4th, bapd. May 12th. In the inventory of church goods in 1717 there is an additional item to those mentioned in1681. viz., a pulpit cloth, and I note this is as this same old pulpit cloth, more than 200 years old (with the date 1701 handsomely embroidered upon it) may still be seen at St. John’s Church, fixed up round the inside of the pulpit. Another difference in the two inventories is the omission in 1717 of “Twelve leather buckets” mentioned in an earlier list, at which time the church was apparently made use of as fire station. Under the date 16th April 1729, is an account of what certificate men belong to the parish, with a list of thirty names following, and a foot-note dated 26th April 1733:- An account of Ceificate men entered this day with 5 additional names. Later in the same month at a meeting, the Vestry marked their disapproval of supporting the “Bull Running” proceeding out of church funds, as it was resolved: That the Churchwardens shall not be allowed to expend money at the Apparitions, or on Bull Running Day or at any other time without the consent of the parish, and no allowance shall in future be made for ringing on 23rd April. This is St George’s Day, which used to be celebrated as a national festival long after and not withstanding Queen Elizabeth’s order to discontinue the celebration. I will only make one quotation from the last century’s records, namely in 1813. An agreement was made with Mr. Robert Taylor, of St. Neots, to re-hang the four bells and re-cast the second, for the sum of £42, carriage included. The Registers of St. John’s begin with the year 1561. The first records are from 1561 to 1634, written upon vellum. There is then a blank till 1664, from which date until 1705 they are continued. These two old registers were not put into bindings and were becoming very dilapidated. At my suggestion the then Churchwardens (Mr. Poole and the present Mayor, Mr Higgs) had then put into a suitable cover, which will protect them in future. The next volume dates from 1706 to 1774 and the third from 1775 to 1812. The first Register is headed thus:- All those that have been married, christened & bureyed from the first of St Michael the Archangel in the year of our Lord God 1561, unto the end & terme of the same feast in the year of our Lord God 1562. and the first entry is:- Married. Francis Tueson and Ellyn his wife 22 Oct. 1561. This is a name still known in Stamford, and, indeed, in St John’s Parish. Times do not appear to have been very prosperous in 1569 and 1570, as the record for both years reads:- Married this year – none. It is an interesting fact to the present Rector, and especially to the inmates of Snowden’s Hospital in Scotgate, that each page of the Register from 1561 to 1598 is signed by the Rector, Richard Snowden, the founder of that charity 300 years ago. Another memorial of this gentleman remains in in the church tower where one of the bells bears the inscription: “Richard Snowden, Parson, Anno, 1561”. The entry in 1585 of the burial on 2nd January of Richard Bernard, the Bellman, reminds us of the old custom of the Bellman, who used to go round the town between twelve at night and two in the morning for some weeks before Christmas, ringing his bell and informing the inhabitants of the time of night and the state of the weather. This custom was continued up to about 40 years ago (1860’s). The normal death rate of the parish for some years previous to 1604 had been about six or eight, but in that year when, as stated in Butcher’s History, 713 persons died of the plague in Stamford and St. Martin’s, a special entry of 88 burials is registered in St. John’s Register in six months, and included Mr Snowden, the Rector. The entry is headed:- In the sickness time from 27 April until 2 October 1604 were buried. then follow the names and dates, frequently two and three in a day, and whole families seem to have been stricken, for example:- Agnes Davison buried 17th June; Alice Davison buried 18th; Richard Davison buried 19th; Jane Davison buried 20th; Phillis Davison 21st. Again, the Norton family had a terrible record in the burial of seven members of the family in four days, viz.:- Zackary Norton, buried 5th Aug., Tobie Norton buried 6th Aug. & Lucy Norton the same day, Jane Norton on the 7th and Abraham Norton the same day, & Nicolas Norton & Lucy Norton, junr. on 8th August. The following is a copy of an entry made in the Register in 1602. Whereas there is a license to eat flesh upon fish days granted to Isabel Salter the wife of William Salter Gentleman, she being notoriously subject to sickness and with child, dated the 15th day of March 1602, and the cause thereof continuing still the eighth day after, and desiring the said licence to endure still upon full recovery, therefore the said license is recorded in the Church book the 8th day after the date thereof being the 22nd March in the year aforesaid in the presence of the Churchwardens. John Tod Thomas Lytler his mark. In 1633 the burial of the then Rector is recorded thus:- 2 July. Buried. John Reynolds Clark. and in the Churchwardens’ accounts is an entry Paid for ringing at the burial of Mr Reynolds 1/6 As this was more than the amount usually paid for ringing, viz., 8d., we may infer, I think, that dumb peal was rung on the occasion. In the Register of Baptisms for 1636 is that of Thomas Hardy, son of Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth his wife. This youth appears to have gone to London, as Thomas Hardy, citizen of London, died in 1747, founded the Charity now known as Hardy’s Charity, for the benefit of eight widows of St John’s, his native parish, and which is distributed on his birthday, 5th June. He was baptised on the 6th, the next day, as recorded in the Register. Stamford being situate upon the Great North Road accounts for many deaths being recorded of unknown travellers such as I find in 1769:- A poor unknown soldier buried 12 Sept. A poor traveller, his name not known 19 Sept. (Vestry Book 1675). The next is, I think, a very interesting entry referring to the burial of Humphrey, an ex-Churchwarden, Town Councillor, and a prominent parishioner. From the Vestry Book I find he was a Sidesman in 1647, Churchwarden in 1648, Overseer of the Poor in 1674. His name is frequently mentioned, and his signature appears as one of those present at the Vestry Meeting in 1675, yet in February 1680, when he died, in the place of the usual record of burial it is stated:- Humphrey Reynolds an excommunicate person thrown into a hole. This Humphrey Reynolds was a chandler and one of the issuers of the Stamford series of 17th century tokens. Drakard’s History of Stamford, page 529 gives an illustration of his coin. He took up his freedom 24th October, 1644, was elected a capital burgess 17th Feb., 1646, chamberlain 1656 (and therefore a predecessor of my own, as I am now chamberlain or borough treasurer), but he was removed from the chamber 7th October 1659, by virtue of a writ of mandamus. According to the sessions rolls he was pursuant to the verdict of the jury of the clerk of the market, fined 5/- for having four single pounds, two half-pounds, and two quarters too light, and on 5th April 1665, his name, with that of Humphrey Allen Reynolds, was presented to the jury, they having absented themselves from attending their parish church (St. John’s) for the space of three months. During his life he appears to have paid but little respect to either municipal or ecclesiastical authorities of the day, for besides being removed from the council chamber he was also excommunicated, as is proved by the record of his burial. Another reference to excommunication occurs two years later, when in 1682 is the following:- Mary the daughter of William Moss an excommunicate person was baptised & the mother churched. There are many records I could quote, interesting to Stamfordians of to-day, but I will only mention a few. 1751. Elizabeth daughter of Edward Lyon basket maker and Mary his wife. This name and trade is still associated together in Stamford. Mr W. Lyon of 36, Broad Street, is a basket maker, and I have no doubt this association has remained during the last 150 years. Another similar instance of a long succession in business occurs with the family of Ratcliffe, also basket makers. In 1770, Thomas, son of John and Elizabeth Ratcliffe, basket maker, was baptised, and up to a very few years ago Mr. Ratcliffe carried on the business now continued by Mr. Friend. Some of the occupations mentioned about this period are curious:- Humphrey Jenkins, wire dancer. John Johnson, silk throster. J.Skeith, dish turner. Sam Tabbener, horse courser. Geo. Allen, post boy. Israel Holford, hemp dresser. In 1769 is recorded the burial of Cassandra wife of James Whitley, player, aged 57. Buried 10th Feb. I mention this as there is a monumental tablet on the north wall of St John’s Church to the memory of this lady, described as one “who possessed all the good qualities that accomplish the best of women,” and judging by the monument, the shield of arms and crest, and the description of the husband as James Whitley, Gentleman, he was probably a man of means and a noted actor in his day, who had retired and settled in Stamford. It will be interesting to members of the Stamford and County Club in St Mary’s Street to know that this James Whitley it was, who with Mr. Alderman Clarke, built the old Stamford Theatre in 1768, at a cost of over £800, and which building was converted into the present Club Room in 1871. After 1754 a separate Register was kept for marriages, and first used in August of that year, according to Act of Parliament. Whereas previously there was only the entry in the handwriting of the Registrar, in the new book both the contracting parties sign in the presence of two witnesses and the officiating clergyman as at present. It is interesting to note that the first 50 marriages there are 54 signatures and 46 marks, so that only about half the persons were able to write their names. The marks, however, are very interesting, not being ordinary crosses, but a printed initial P or T, a man’s hat, fish-hook, half-circle, a square and many other things. I will only give one more extract and that is for the year 1783, when on March 30th is recorded the burial of Wm. Pepper, victualler, aged 49, who, according to Drakard’s History, aspired to be a poet. Upon his grave stone in St. John’s Churchyard was inscribed, after the usual name and date:- Tho’ hot my name, yet mild my nature, I bore good will to every creature, I brewed fine ale and sold it too, And unto each I gave his due. THOMAS SANDALL (1905) SOURCE THE RUTLAND MAGAZINE VOL. 2 No. 12 – 1905-06 page 117-124 A printed version HERE Previous Next

< Back Obituary and Records – July 1810 At Stamford, died, aged 70, George Bindby. He was a very eccentric character, and dealt in toys, oranges, &c., with which he attended the neighbouring markets and fairs. The room in which he slept was so filled with goods, that he was obliged to climb over them in order to get into bed, which was situated within half a yard of a window that had scarcely a whole pane of glass in it. His family had received relief from All Saints parish, he always pleaded poverty, and giving them to understand that if they relied on him for any assistance they must starve; notwithstanding which he died possessed of property to the amount (it was supposed) of £1000, which he bequeathed, the day he died, to a person in no way related to him. At a sale of his effects, there was a turn-out of very many curious articles of every description, such as old knives, buckles, spurs, pistols, &c., which would at the present day produce much competition among antiquaries. Source: Obituary and Records for the Counties of Lincoln, Rutland & Northampton by Justin Simpson, page 99. Printed by William R Newcomb, Stamford 1861. Submitted by Ronnie Teasdale. Note: £1,000 pound sterling was worth £46,525.20 in 2017 according to The National Archives website. In 1810 this would buy: 95 horses; 200 cows; 111 stones of wool; 175 quarters of wheat; and 6,666 days wages for a skilled tradesman. They go on to state - The result of this calculation is intended to be a general guide to historical values, rather than a categorical statement of fact. The Bank of England website gives a November 2025 value of £68,497.34, based on £1,000 in 1810. A print version of this can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back William Luff By Karen Smith My husband’s first ancestor to come to Australia was William Luff (1795-1852), a convict from Stamford, Lincolnshire. This paper outlines William’s life and seeks to understand the meaning that William gave to his convict experience. At first glance, this is difficult as there are no surviving oral, written or pictorial accounts from William himself. The want of his ‘voice’ therefore necessitates an outside-in approach, which is accomplished through online records. These records enable informed assumptions about how William’s convict experience impacted his life. William was baptised in 1795 at St John’s (Church of England), Stamford, Lincolnshire. He was the son of Thomas Luff, soldier, and Ann. [1] It is likely that Thomas Luff served in the British Army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, standards of living in the rural areas of England had fallen. When harvests were bad, farm workers and small tenants were the first to suffer. This caused a migration towards towns where work was easier to be found. Then, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain was in considerable turmoil with returned soldiers and others involved in war production suddenly finding themselves out of employment and in competition for jobs. It was into this turmoil that twenty-year-old William Luff, labourer, found himself. On the night of Thursday 16 November 1815, the White Hart Inn at Ketton, Rutland, some three miles south west of Stamford, was subject to burglary. The objects stolen included “a considerable sum of money” and two silver watches. [2] Suspicion quickly fell on William Luff and Joseph Briggs as they had been seen in the vicinity. Image of the White Hart Inn, taken in 2009 Image of the White Hart Inn, taken in 2009, from: White Hart, Ketton ( closedpubs.co.uk ) William was apprehended by the Stamford town sergeant on 13 January 1816. He went through two trials before his case went before the grand jury at the Rutland Assizes, held at Oakham Castle, on 7 March 1817. The delay was due to the hope that Briggs would be apprehended, as it was thought he was the instigator, but he evaded capture. [3] At trial, the sergeant testified that William had freely confessed to the crime without coercion, to which William interrupted, “Yes he did [coerce me]: he said I should be hung if I did not ‘peach”. [4] William’s confession was read out: Briggs identified the White Horse as a good mark, and said he would commit the burglary if William would keep watch. After listening to evidence, the jury found William guilty, and Judge the Hon. Baron Richards passed the sentence of death, saying that only God’s grace could save him from the gallows with the reprieve of transportation, upon which William interjected with, “I hope not, my Lord, I would sooner be hanged.” It was subsequently reported, “Nothing so thoroughly hardened and wicked as this man’s behaviour in Court is remembered before in Rutland.” [5] God’s grace must have shone down, because William’s sentence was commuted to seven years transportation to New South Wales (NSW). [6] On the prison coach’s journey from Rutland to Portsmouth, it stopped at Stamford, where two of his brothers and their wives visited William and lamented his fate. [7] On 20 May 1817, at Portsmouth, William was placed on the prison hulk, Leviathan, a 74-gun ship used at the Battle of Trafalgar. [8] The hulk’s register describes William as 5ft 11¼ inches tall, with black hair and grey eyes. [9] Whilst on the hulk, William and his fellow inmates were required to work at Portsmouth and Langston harbours. [10] William was one of 180 convicts transported to Australia on the Ocean , under Master Samuel Remmington. [11] The ship was also carrying 12 bales of wool, 3 tons of coal and 4 head of horned cattle, an indication of the paucity of industry in Australia at the time. [12] The ship’s surgeon and superintendent was George Fairford, whose journal tells us that the ship departed England on 24 June 1817 and arrived at Sydney on 16 January 1818. On the journey the ship stopped at St Helena, where one of the convicts, James Barnes, aged 21 years, was taken off the ship after an episode of “high delirium” during which he confessed to murdering a woman in Scotland two years prior. [13] William Luff was not amongst the 30 convicts and soldiers who received medical treatment on board ship. It should also be noted that there was no loss of life on the journey, a result of the Redfern report, which led, in 1815, to the Naval Transport Board assigning a qualified naval surgeon to accompany every convict ship arriving in Australia. [14] On the day of the Ocean’s arrival at Sydney Cove, John Thomas Campbell, Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s then Secretary, wrote to Reverend Samuel Marsden JP, Parramatta, listing convicts for distribution. Campbell specified eight convicts be assigned to his 1,500-acre Bringelly property, Shancomore , including William Luff. [15] It is likely Campbell selected William and his cohort on the basis of their good health and productive potential. It has been argued elsewhere that nepotism in the assignment period of convict history (1788-1839) led to inconsistencies in the application of penal policy and practice. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that a convict’s progress from primary incarceration, transportation, assignment, and reintegration through ticket of leave and tickets of freedom largely depended on their behaviour, reformative goals and the value placed upon their skills. [16] At the time of William’s arrival, the colonial population of NSW was around 13,000, made up of government and military officials, soldiers, ex-convicts and their families, and a few free settlers. The colonial population regularly came in contact with Aboriginal people visiting and trading with settlers. Shancomore is in Dhurug country, and in May 1814 it was reported that around 400 Aboriginal people attacked the property, spearing the overseer in the shoulder, killing several pigs, and stealing grain and other provisions. [17] In July 1815 James Daley’s 40-acre Bringelly property was approached by a number of Aboriginal people. James was away at the time, and his wife, Maria, shot at them as a deterrent, then ran in terror from the house leaving behind two children and her three-day old infant. When she returned the two children had been murdered, but the infant was unharmed. It was thought this was payback for two Aboriginal children shot two months earlier. [18] Shancomore was not an easy assignment for convicts. [19] Another letter from Campbell to Robert Lowe Esq JP, Bringelly, also dated 16 January 1818, sought to have eight convicts at Shancomore removed as they were found to possess “bad conduct”. [20] Earlier, in February 1816, convict Andrew Coultra drowned in the Nepean while escaping, and in January 1818, almost as Willian Luff commenced work on the property, another convict, James Pestill, escaped by stealing Campbell’s horse and other property. [21] Regrettably, by November 1819, William had run afoul of Campbell, and was working at Sydney’s Brickfields. [22] A gang of eight men was expected to make 3,000 bricks a day at this site. [23] William would have been there for weeks or months depending on the severity of his offence, and would have been wearing ‘party dress’ as a public mark of disgrace. [24] 1820 - Day in the life of a convict Image from: 1820 - Day in the life of a convict ( mhnsw.au ) William was back with Campbell in 1820, and in 1821 was assigned to Sir John Wylde, Judge Advocate, who owned Cecil Hills, Cabramatta. [25] It is likely William’s work at both properties involved clearing land, fencing, building, tending stock, and ploughing. [26] Every Sunday he would have been required to attend church. There are no records of William ever committing another offence either as a convict or after his emancipation on 6 October 1825. His Ticket of Freedom record shows that William’s convict experience was written on his body: he was an inch shorter, had greying hair, and ruddy complexion. [27] In 1828, William was working as overseer for George Wentworth, son of D’Arcy Wentworth, at Greendale near Bringelly. [28] In 1835 the property was described as 7,000 acres, 35 miles from Sydney, and, “On the Farm is an excellent Cottage, containing eight apartments, with detached Kitchen, Stabling, and commodious Sheds. The whole is enclosed with a three-rail fence, and divided into eight Paddocks…” [29] It is likely that William, as overseer, was responsible for the management of convicts in this role. William next appears in the records in 1834, when he was a landholder for free inhabitants of the Illawarra (Tharawal country) who signed a petition to the Governor of NSW, Major-General Sir Richard Bourke requesting the construction of a road to the district. [30] There is a dearth of information about William from 1834 to 4 September 1837, when he married colony-born Catholic, Catherine Devlyn (1824-1895), at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney. [31] Catherine was 13 years old, the age of consent for women being 12 years, and for men, 14. [32] We can only speculate why theirs was a Catholic marriage. Marriages between those of the Church of England faith and Roman Catholics were recognised by legislation passed in 1834. [33] Perhaps the Reverend Samuel Marsden’s ‘flogging parson’ reputation diminished William’s Church of England allegiance, or perhaps it was a condition set by Catherine’s parents. [34] By October 1838 William and Catherine had made their way from Sydney to Tumut (in Ngarigo Wiradjuri country). William was working for John Archer Broughton (1818-1878), who owned a property named Mundongbeggey , which was located some four and half miles east of Tumut. [35] We know this because William placed a newspaper notice advertising the stud services of his three-year-old horse, Jupiter, who won the hurdles at the Yass races, earning William £20. Moreover, Jupiter was related to Hector, once the property of the Duke of Wellington. [36] This advertisement allows us not only to establish William’s location at a specific date, but also the circles he was moving in and his personal interests and abilities. It shows us that William was coming up in the world. William and Catherine commenced having a family in 1839, with Thomas born that year, Ann in 1841, and Catherine in 1844. [37] While these births were unregistered, five subsequent births were registered at a Catholic church in the Yass mission, possibly St Augustine’s Church, Yass, which was built between 1838-1844. [38] St Augustine's Catholic Church Image of St Augustine’s Catholic Church (foreground) from: Lovat-Chapel-Memorial-Booklet.pdf ( staug-yass.org.au ) By 1841 the family was living in a wooden home at Gobarralong, alongside the mighty Murrumbidgee River, some 30 miles north of Tumut (Ngarigo Ngunawal country). [39] Between March 1840 and September 1845, William applied for seven licenses to depasture stock at their property, Courah , Gobarralong. [40] At the time the property was a modest 1,280 acres, with grazing capability of 280 cattle and 17 horses. [41] Image of "Courah", Gobarralong, taken by author 2023 In June 1849, William sponsored the immigration of his niece, Mary Ann True (nee Luff) and her husband Samuel to Australia on the ship, John Bright . Mary Ann was the daughter of William’s older brother George Luff (1793-1862). Mary Ann, dressmaker, was aged 24 years, and Samuel, stone mason, 34. The ship’s passenger list says she has an uncle, William Lough [sic], on the Murrumbidgee. [42] After their arrival in Australia, the Trues made their way to Gundagai, no doubt stopping at Gobarralong on the way. One of Mary Ann and Samuel’s descendants shared the following: “Story comes from Alice Jones (True) about her grandparents travelling from Sydney to Gundagai by bullock wagon in 1849. They came upon some Aboriginals roasting an animal by the side of the track, probably taken from a settler’s herd of cattle. Mary True became quite frightened and upset as she was convinced the Aboriginals were cannibals and they were cooking humans! She wanted to turn around and immediately return to England! The journey from Sydney to Gundagai in those days was quite perilous and difficult with the journey taking up to three months. The road was nothing more than a rough bush track made by the wheels of the wagons travelling through the never-ending scrub.” [43] Mary Ann’s arrival in Australia shows that William was in touch with his Lincolnshire family: he managed to retain close family bonds despite transportation. Sadly, however, William Luff’s story ends in tragedy. William was in Gundagai on the night of 25 June 1852, when the town was washed away by the flooded Murrumbidgee and at least 78 people lost their lives. William happened to be staying overnight at The Rose Inn when the flood occurred. He and twenty-seven others climbed on the roof hoping to escape the water, but to no avail: “William Luff, a squatter from Gobarralong…was amongst those drowned. James Gormley said that Luff was a strong man in the prime of life . He was an ex-convict from Stamford, Lincolnshire, who had arrived in the colony on board the Ocean in 1817 [sic].” [44] William Luff was only one of 171,000 convicts transported from England and Ireland to Australia. We don’t have access to William’s reflections on his experience. However, we can see that following his sentence he lived a law-abiding life. In addition, by relocating from Sydney to Gobarralong he was able to shed the convict and emerge the squatter, racehorse owner, uncle of an assisted immigrant. His legacy remains in Gobarralong, where Luffs work, worship, and prosper to this day. Bibliography Allen, Matthew, ‘The Myth of the Flogging Parson: Samuel Marsden and Severity of Punishment in the Age of Reform,’ Australian Historical Studies , 48, 2017, pp. 486-501. Allport, Gordon W., ‘The Nature of Prejudice,’ 1979, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 97F5FE75CF9A120E7DC108EB1B0FF5EC.holocaust-the-nature-of-prejudice.doc ( live.com ) . Ancestry.com , 1841 New South Wales, Australia, Census. Ancestry.com , England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975. Ancestry.com , Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1828-1896. Ancestry.com , New South Wales, Australia, Certificates of Freedom, 1810-1814, 1827-1867. Ancestry.com , New South Wales, Australia, Returns of the Colony, 1822-1857. Ancestry Library Edition, Australian Convict Transportation Registers – Other Fleets & Ships, 1791-1868. Ancestry Library Edition, England and Wales Criminal Registers, 1791-1892. Ancestry Library Edition, New South Wales, Australia, Colonial Secretary’s Papers, 1788-1856. Ancestry Library Edition, New South Wales, Australia, Convict Intents, 1788-1842. Ancestry Library Edition, New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convict Lists, 1787-1834. Ancestry Library Edition, New South Wales, Census and Population Books, 1811-1825 Ancestry Library Edition, UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849. Ancestry Library Edition, UK, Royal Navy Medical Journals, 1817-1856. Australian National University, ‘Sir John Wylde ,’ Australian Dictionary of Biography website, n. d., Biography - Sir John Wylde - Australian Dictionary of Biography ( anu.edu.au ) . Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, ‘The AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia,’ 1996. British Broadcasting Commission, ‘Crime and Punishment In Industrial Britain, c. 1750- c. 1900,’ British Broadcasting Commission website, n.d., Crime and criminals - impact of industrialisation - Crime and punishment in Industrial Britain, c.1750-c.1900 - OCR B - GCSE History Revision - OCR B - BBC Bitesize . Cumpston, J. S., Shipping Arrivals & Departures, Sydney 1788-1825 , Roebuck Society Publication No. 22, 1977, Canberra. Cunneen, Matthew & Malcolm Allbrook, ‘Understanding convict lives: A historiographical and methodological reassessment,’ Australian Journal of Biography and History , No. 7, 2023, ANU Press, Canberra, 1-21. Dodd, Ian, ‘Marriage Law in Colonial New South Wales: C. H. Currey Revisited,’ Journal of Colonial Australian History , Vol. 20, 2018, 1-23. Drakard’s Stamford News. Foxall, Katherine, ‘From Convicts to Colonists: The Health of Prisoners and the Voyage to Australia, 1823-53,’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History , 2011, 39:1, 1-19. French, Reverend J. D., Tumut and District Historical Society, Discovery and Early History of Tumut Valley , 1965, Discovery and Early History of Tumut Valley - J. D. French - Google Books . Gibbs, Martin, Tuffin, Richard, Roe, David, ‘An Historical Archaeology of Labor in Convict Australia: A Framework for Engagement,’ Historical Archaeology , 2023, 57: 1008-1030. Maher, Rev. Brian, Memories of Yass Mission St Augustine’s Parish, Yass, N. S. W. Sesquicentenary 1838-1988 , St Augustine’s Parish Sesquicentenary Committee, Yass, 1988. Museums of History New South Wales, ‘Convict Sydney Sandstone Bricks,’ n. d., Sandstock Bricks ( mhnsw.au ) . Museums of History New South Wales, ‘Depasturing Licenses Index 1837-1851,’ n. d., Depasturing licenses index 1837-1851 ( mhnsw.au ) . Museums of History New South Wales, ‘Treatment of convicts by private employers,’ n. d., Convict assignment records ( mhnsw.au ) . New South Wales Government, An Act to Remove Doubts as to the Validity of Certain Marriages Had and Solemnized within the Colony of New South Wales and to Regulate the Registration of Certain Marriages Baptisms and Burials , 4th July, 1834, act-1834-7a ( nsw.gov.au ) . New South Wales Government Gazette. NSW Land Registry Services, Historical Parish Maps, Historical Land Records Viewer, NSW Land Registry Services | HLRV ( nswlrs.com.au ) . Parliament of Australia, House of Representatives, House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, 2012, ‘Inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2012 and the Marriage Amendment Bill 2012’. Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser . Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, New South Wales. Stamford Mercury. State Library New South Wales, ‘The Convict Experience,’ State Library of New South Wales website, n.d., The convict experience | State Library of New South Wales ( nsw.gov.au ) . The Australian. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. The Sydney Monitor. The Sydney Morning Herald. Watson, Frederick, Chapman, Peter & Australia Parliament Library Committee, 1914, Historical records of Australia, Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, Sydney Historical records of Australia ( nla.gov.au ) Wikipedia, ‘List of British Prison Hulks,’ Wikipedia website, 2024, List of British prison hulks - Wikipedia . [1] Baptism record for William Luff, England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975, FHL Film No. 1450474, Reference ID: -2:3Q8FMVV, Ancestry.com , accessed 2 June 2024. Keith Hansell (Stamford and District Local History Society) to Karen Smith [email], 30 May 2024 original held by author. [2] “BURGLARY,” Drakard’s Stamford News , Friday 17 November 1815, p. 3. [3] “Rutland Assizes,” Stamford Mercury , Friday 14 March 1817, p. 4. [4] As above. [5] William Luff, England and Wales Criminal Registers, 1791-1892, England, Rutland, 1817, Accessed online at Ancestry Library Edition, 4 June 2024. [6] Hulk record for William Luff, Leviathan Register 1801-1836, UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849, p. 8, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed 15 May 2024. [7] ‘Domestic News,’ Drakard’s Stamford News , Friday 23 May 1817, p. 3, The British Newspaper Archive, accessed 15 May 2024. [8] Record of the Leviathan , Wikipedia, ‘List of British Prison Hulks,’ Wikipedia website, 2024, List of British prison hulks - Wikipedia , accessed 14 June 2024. [9] Record for William Luff, p. 8, Leviathan Register 1801-1836, UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849, Ancestry Library Edition. [10] The Navy,” Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser, Monday 3 February 1817, p. 2. The British Newspaper Archive, Brass Ornaments In The Roman Style. No Buttons Ar e Seen On The New Jacket, The Front Being Secured By Hook* | Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser | Monday 03 February 1817 | British Newspaper Archive [11] Record of transportation for William Luff, Australian Convict Transportation Registers – Other Fleets & Ships, 1791-1868, 1810-1817, record of convicts aboard the ship, Ocean , p. 178, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed online 7 May 2024. Frederick Watson, Frederick & Peter Chapman, Australia Parliament Library Committee, 1914, Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, vol. 9 (January 1816 - December 1818), p. 749, Series 1, vol. 9 (January 1816 - December 1818) ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 2 June 2024. [12] J. S. Cumpston, Shipping Arrivals & Departures, Sydney 1788-1825 , Roebuck Society Publication No. 22, 1977, Canberra. [13] Museum of History New South Wales, “The convict impact on Aboriginal people: Impacts of the convict system on Aboriginal Country and communities,” accessed online 7 June 2024: The convict impact on Aboriginal people ( mhnsw.au ) [14] Katherine Foxall, “From Convicts to Colonists: The Health of Prisoners and the Voyage to Australia, 1823-53,” p. 3, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History , 39:1, 1-19 (2011). [15] Letter concerning assignment of William Luff, New South Wales, Australia, Colonial Secretary’s Papers, 1788-1856, Copies of Letters Sent Within the Colony, 1814-1827, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed 15 May 2024. Map of the Parish of Bringelly, County of Cumberland, sheet reference 1, undated, Historical Parish Maps, NSW Land Registry Services, Historical Land Records Viewer, NSW Land Registry Services | HLRV ( nswlrs.com.au ) , accessed 6 June 2024. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, The AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia , 1996. [16] Martin Gibbs, Richard Tuffin and David Roe, “An Historical Archaeology of Labor in Convict Australia: A Framework of engagement,” Historical Archaeology , 2023, 57: 1108-1030, p. 1012. [17] The AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia, 1996 ; The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 7 May 1814, p. 2, Sydney: accessed online at: 07 May 1814 - Sydney. - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) ; The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 1 Sep 1821, p. 2, Classified Advertising, accessed online at: 01 Sep 1821 - Classified Advertising - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) [18] Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the Early Colony, 1788-1817 , (2014), New South Publishing, p. 127, accessed online 7 June 2024: ProQuest Ebook Central - Book Details ( utas.edu.au ) [19] State Library New South Wales, ‘The Convict Experience,’ State Library of New South Wales website, n.d., The convict experience | State Library of New South Wales ( nsw.gov.au ) , accessed 13 June 2024. [20] New South Wales, Australia, Colonial Secretary’s Papers, 1788-1856, Copies of Letters Sent Within The Colony, 1814-1827, p. 1272, accessed online at Ancestry Library Edition, 6 June 2024. [21] The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 3 Feb 1816, p. 2, Sydney, accessed online 6 June 2024: 03 Feb 1816 - Sydney. - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) ; The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 28 Sep 1816, p. 2, SYDNEY, accessed online 6 June 2024: 28 Sep 1816 - SYDNEY. - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) ; The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 10 Jan 1818, p. 1, Classified Advertising, accessed online 6 June 2024: 10 Jan 1818 - Classified Advertising - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) [22] 1819 population muster record for Will Luff, New South Wales, Census and Population Books, 1811-1825, Population Muster, 1819, p. 86, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed 23 May 2024. [23] Museums of History New South Wales, ‘Convict Sydney Sandstone Bricks,’ Museums of New South Wales website, Sandstock Bricks ( mhnsw.au ) , accessed 13 June 2024. [24] Frederick Watson, Frederick & Peter Chapman, Australia Parliament Library Committee, 1914, Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, vol. 9 (January 1816-December 1818), p. 518, Series 1, vol. 9 (January 1816 - December 1818) ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 13 June 2024. [25] Record for William Luff in 1820, New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convict Lists, 1787-1834, New South Wales, Male K-Y, 1820, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed 14 June 2024. Record for William Luff in 1821, New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convict Lists, 1787-1834, New South Wales, Male K-Y, 1821, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed 4 June 2024. Australian National University, Australian Dictionary of Biography , Sir John Wylde , accessed Biography - Sir John Wylde - Australian Dictionary of Biography ( anu.edu.au ) , 4 June 2024. Parish of Cabramatta, County Cumberland, Parish Cabramatta, Sheet Reference 1, Historical Parish Maps, New South Wales Land Registry Services, accessed 4 June 2024. [26] ‘Classified Advertising,’ The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 4 Sep 1813, p. 1, 04 Sep 1813 - Classified Advertising - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 6 June 2024. ‘Classified Advertising,’ The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 19 Sep 1814, p. 1, 19 Feb 1814 - Classified Advertising - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 6 June 2024. ‘Classified Advertising,’ The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Sat 1 Sep 1821, p. 2, 01 Sep 1821 - Classified Advertising - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 11 June 2024. Crops and stock of John Thomas Campbell Esq., New South Wales, Census and Population Books, 1811-1825, New South Wales Land and Stock, 1819, p. 23, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed 13 June 2024. Stock of John Wylde Esq., New South Wales, Census and Population Books, 1811-1825, New South Wales Land and Stock, 1819, p. 88, Ancestry Library Edition, accessed 13 June 2024. [27] Certificate of Freedom for William Luff, Number 43/4395, New South Wales, Australia, Certificates of Freedom, 1810-1814, 1827-1867, Ancestry.com , accessed 1 May 2024. [28] ‘Family Notices,’ The Sydney Monitor , Sat 22 Sep 1832, p. 3, 22 Sep 1832 - Family Notices - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) accessed online 30 May 2024. [29] The Sydney Herald, Thu 7 Mar 1833, p. 3 “Advertising”: accessed online 27 May 2024: 07 Mar 1833 - Advertising - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) [30] The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Thu 1 May 1834, p.2, accessed online 7 June 2024: p2 - 01 May 1834 - The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1803 - 1842) - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) [31] Marriage certificate for William Luff and Catherine Devlyn, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New South Wales, registration no. 641/1837 V1837641 128. [32] Birth register entry for Catherine Develyn [sic], Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New South Wales, registration no. 519/1824 V1824519 125. Parliament of Australia, House of Representatives, House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, Inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2012 and the Marriage Amendment Bill 2012 , Chapter 2: History of Marriage Laws in Australia, section 2.6, https___aphref.aph.gov.au_house_committee_spla_bill marriage_report_chapter2.pdf , accessed 8 June 2024. [33] New South Wales Government, An Act to Remove Doubts as to the Validity of Certain Marriages Had and Solemnized within the Colony of New South Wales and to Regulate the Registration of Certain Marriages Baptisms and Burials , 4th July, 1834, act-1834-7a ( nsw.gov.au ) , accessed 12 June 2024. [34] Matthew Allen, ‘The Myth of the Flogging Parson: Samuel Marsden and Severity of Punishment in the Age of Reform,’ Australian Historical Studies , 48, 2017, p. 491. [35] Reverend J. D. French, “Discovery and Early History of Tumut Valley,” (1965), p.8, accessed online 25 May 2024: Discovery and Early History of Tumut Valley - J. D. French - Google Books . Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, The AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia, 1996. [36] ‘Advertising,’ The Australian , Thur 13 Dec 1838, p. 4, p4 - 13 Dec 1838 - The Australian (Sydney, NSW : 1824 - 1848) - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 25 May 2024. ‘Yass,’ The Australian , Sat 27 Oct 1838, p. 4, 27 Oct 1838 - YASS. - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 8 June 2024. [36] ‘Magistrate for the Ensuing Week, John Piper, Esquire,’ The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser , Thu 1 Jan 1824, p. 2, 01 Jan 1824 - MAGISTRATE FOR THE ENSUING WEEK, JOHN PIPER, ESQUIRE. - Trove ( nla.gov.au ) , accessed 20 May 2024. [37] Unregistered births: Thomas in 1839, Ann in 1841, and Catherine in 1844. [38] Birth register entry for Alice Luff, born 1845, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New South Wales, 1887/1845 V18451887 62. Birth register entry for Sarah Luff, born 1846, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New South Wales, 1891/1846 V18461891 63. Birth register entry for James Luff, born 1848, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New South Wales, registration no. 1743/1848 V18481743 65. Birth register entry for William Luff, born 1850, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New South Wales, registration no. 415/1850 V1850415 67. Birth register entry for Jane Luff, born 1851, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New South Wales, 2057/1851 V18512057 68. Rev. Brian Maher, Memories of Yass Mission St Augustine’s Parish, Yass, N. S. W. Sesquicentenary 1838-1988 , St Augustine’s Parish Sesquicentenary Committee, Yass, 1988, p. 18-23. [39] Census record for William Luff, 1841 New South Wales, Australia, Census, Abstracts, Murrumbidgee, p. 4, Ancestry.com.au , accessed 3 June 2024. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, The AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia , 1996. [40] Depasturing licenses for William Luff, Murrumbidgee District, Depasturing Licenses Index 1837-1851 , Museums of History NSW, Depasturing licenses index 1837-1851 ( mhnsw.au ) , accessed 10 June 2024. [41] Description of the holding capacity of Courah, New South Wales Government Gazette , Sat 16 Feb 1850 [Issue No. 22 (SUPPLEMENT)], p. 263, 16 Feb 1850 - SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF CLAIMS TO LEASES OF CROWN LANDS BEYOND THE SETTLED DISTRICTS. - Trove , accessed 15 May 2024: [42] Assisted immigrant passenger list for Mary Ann and Samuel True, New South Wales, Australia, Assisted Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1828-1896, 1849, February, John Bright, p. 2, accessed at Ancesty.com 1 June 2024: Ancestry.com.au - New South Wales, Australia, Assisted Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1828-1896 [43] Marcia McIntyre, shared on Ancestry.com , 6 April 2012. [44] Cliff Butcher, Gundagai: A Track Winding Back , published by A. C. Butcher (2002). By Karen Smith 59 Market Street Boorowa, New South Wales, 2586 Australia Email: karenjanesmith@gmail.com A print version can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back A print version can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back The Night of the Coventry Blitz - 1940 On the night of November 14th and into the morning of November 15th 1940, squadrons of German planes flew over Stamford on their way to bomb Coventry. That night, as on many others, fire watchers were readying in cities, towns and villages for the ever-expected arrival of the War to their communities. In Stamford, fourteen-year-old Eric Hunt, too young for the Army or the Home Guard, was on duty as a fire watcher at the top of Lowe, Son, and Cobbold’s brew house on North Street, wondering who was getting bombed tonight. Memories of Eric Hunt. A printed copy can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back Adam Horsley – Rector of St John the Baptist. A Stamford 14th Century Cleric By Chris Hunt From 1369 to 1385, Adam Horsley was the rector of St John the Baptist Church in Stamford. Not the building we see today, which dates from the middle of the 15 th century, but an earlier structure whose origin is uncertain, on what was the boundary of the original Danish Burh and the post Norman Conquest growth towards the town’s Castle. The patronage of the church had been controlled by the Priory of St Fromonde in Normandy, an alien priory, but it had been appropriated by Edward III, and was therefore in the hands of the Crown when Adam was granted the living in 1369. Danish and Saxon Burh map Adam Horsley was a King’s Clerk, an exchequer clerk, and a controller of the great pipe roll from 1375 to 1382. He was then appointed as foreign apposer of the exchequer from 1382 to 1385, a post that audited sheriffs’ accounts. In 1377 an English clerical poll tax assessment took place and he was described as ‘not resident’, unique in the arch deaneries of Lincoln, Leicester and Stowe. If Adam visited his parish, it was probably only when the Royal Court passed through the town. And although Richard II visited Stamford in 1377, when he held a council of war in the town, there is no evidence that Adam was in attendance. In the 1380s Horsley was in correspondence with an Augustinian canon, Walter Hilton, who was his spiritual counsellor, it seems that Horsley had a troubled conscience. A letter from Walter Hilton titled “ On the Usefulness and Prerogatives of Religion” , addressed to Adam and probably written in 1384, has survived these last six hundred years appearing in print before the Reformation. In the early 1380s, Hilton turned away from the world and became a solitary, as he is described in his earliest extant work, a Latin letter “ On the Image of Sin”. In October 1383 Adam sat in the Westminster Parliament, a tax raising parliament, in the sixth year and already the tenth parliament of the reign of Richard II. When the King had turned sixteen, he became more settled in his own choices, all be it fatal to his reign and ultimately his life. Finally in March 1385 Adam resigned both his living in Stamford and ceased working for the Crown. Shortly after, he entered Beauvale Priory (also known as Beauvale Charterhouse) which was a Carthusian monastery in Nottinghamshire. In 1385, Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent died, she had been the wife of the Black Prince and was mother of Richard II, and was buried in Stamford, however, by the time of her death Adam was no longer the Rector of St John’s. Although the date of Adam’s death has not survived these last six hundred years, it seems that this occurred within a few years of him entering the monastery. Chris Hunt January 2023 Notes. An apposer is an archaic term for an examiner or a person who asks questions , historically referring to an officer in the English Court of Exchequer who audited sheriffs’ accounts. It describes someone whose specific duty was to put questions to test knowledge. A print version can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back Stamford Library Rules and Regulations 1906 By Chris Hunt Stamford Free Library was formally opened on January 25 th 1906 by the Lord-Lieutenant of Lincolnshire, Adelbert Brownlow-Cust, 3 rd Earl Brownlow; also present on the day were other members of the local aristocracy and their wives, the Mayor, Mr George Higgs; members of the Council, their Officials, and members of the public. Although at first there was some opposition on the Borough Council to a Public Library in the town, the actions of Major Henry Hart swayed its members along with the gift of £2,500 from Mr Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. The Library was funded by the Borough Council providing the site, a small addition to the town rates, and by public donations, after which borrowing was free to those on the Borough Burgess Roll. The rules and regulations that established Free Libraries were governed by Acts of Parliament. The most different ones to us here in the 21 st century are the punishments laid down in statute, which are repeated in the Rules and Regulations which were drawn up by the town’s Library Committee in August 1905. Which are: - “Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously destroy or damage any Book, Manuscript, Picture, Print, Statue, Bust, or Vase, or any other article or thing kept for the purposes of Art, Science, or Literature, or as an object of Curiosity in any Museum, Gallery, Cabinet, Library, or other repository, which is either at all times or from time to time open for admission of the Public, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding six months, with or without hard labour, and if a male under the age of sixteen years, with or without whipping” And that:- “Any person who in any Library or Reading Room to which this Act applies (Libraries Offences Act 1898), to the annoyance or disturbance of any person using the same: - (1) behaves in a disorderly manner: (2) uses violent, abusive, or obscene language: (3) bets or gambles: (4) or who, after proper warning, persists in remaining therein beyond the hours fixed for the closing of such Library or Reading Room. “shall be liable on summary conviction to a penalty not exceeding forty shillings.” Chris Hunt January 2026 Notes The opening days of the week and times vary between the Reading Room and the Free Lending Library. The following document is r eproduced by kind permission of Lincolnshire Libraries. The original was printed by Dolby Brothers in 1907, and is part of the local studies reference collection at Stamford Library, www.better.org.uk/library/lincolnshire/stamford-library Page 5 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 A print version can be downloaded HERE Previous Next

< Back Religious Foundations of Medieval Stamford John S Hartley and Alan Rogers 2017 There have been many requests for this book which is now out of print and not easily reprintable, so we have decided to create a .pdf of the book for free distribution. We have taken the opportunity to list below additional information found since its original publication under each of the headings as below. This pdf may be copied freely - we hope that eventually it will be available for download on the website of the Stamford and District Local History Society John S Hartley Alan Rogers February 2017 T he book can be read HERE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION GENERAL Considerable information about the ownership of property in Stamford by all the religious foundations is to be found in the following volumes which have been published since this catalogue was first produced: The Act Book of St Katherine’s Gild, Stamford, 1480-1534 edited Alan Rogers 2011 Bury St Edmunds: abramis ISBN 978-1-84549-509-1; 299 pages People and Property in medieval Stamford: a catalogue of title deeds from Stamford, Lincolnshire, from the twelfth century to 1547 2012 edited Alan Rogers abramis ISBN 978-1-84549-548-0 Noble Merchant: William Browne (c1410-1489) and Stamford in the fifteenth century, Alan Rogers 2012, abramis ISBN 978-1-84549-565-7 ALL SAINTS CHURCH Robert rector of church of All Saints in the Market late 12th century PRO E326/4293, 4626 Proctor of the mass celebrated in the church of All Saints in the Market 1339-40, PRO E326/4690 Church taxed at 8 marks 1450 PRO E36/52 Stock of All Saints gild valued at £4 1524/5 PRO E179/136/315 ST ANDREW’S CHURCH It would seem to have been located in the churchyard of St Michael - see PRO E326/4736 for mention of two churchyards; see also M E Briston and T M Halliday (ed) The Pilsgate Manor of the Sacrist of Peterborough Northants Record Society 2009 p 91 - St Michael’s church paying a rent for two churchyards in Staunford, 1271-4 ST CLEMENTS CHURCH Ascelin priest of St Clements church late 12th century PRO E326/4626 ‘Parson’ of St Clements church taxed to lay [sic] subsidy 12d, 1450 PRO 179/276/44 Chantry certificate 1548 PRO E301/33/122 ST GEORGE’S CHURCH This may be the church of St Gregory mentioned in PRO CP40/296 m42; Justin Simpson’s notes 1 p56 (in Town Hall, Stamford) 1450 church was untaxed - a pension of 16s was due to Fromond priory PRO E36/62 Stipend of the church in 1524/5 was £4 PRO E179/136/315 HOLY TRINITY/ ST STEPHENS CHURCH Stock of the gild of Holy Trinity valued at £3 1524-25 PRO E179/136/315 CPSD letters ST JOHN THE BAPTIST Valued at 17 marks without the pension to Fromond 1450 PRO E36/62 ST MARTIN’S CHURCH Gild taxed at 6d in 1450 PRO E179/276/44; paid pension to sacrist of Peterborough PRO E36/62 Stock of St Martin’s gild valued at £3 in 1524-25 PRO E179/136/315 Chantry certificate 1548 in full in Justin Simpson’s notes 1 page 93 Inquiry into land of church 1617 Justin Simpson’s notes 1 pages 140-1 ST MARY’S CHURCH Gild of Corpus Christi taxed at 6s in 1449-50, PRO E179/276/44 Gild of Our Lady, stock valued at £10 1524-25 PRO E179/136/315 ST MARY BYNEWERK See Howgrave pp 10, 96 ST MICHAEL’S CHURCH Pension in 1450 was 14s PRO E36/62 See St Andrews church Gild in St Michael’s church: in 1524-25, the stipend of the church was valued at £2, the stipend of the gild at £6, PRO E179/136/315 ST PAUL’S CHURCH For the gild of St Katherine which met in this church, see St Katherine’s Gild book listed above ST PETER’S CHURCH Valued at 14½ marks with pension to Lincoln of 20s in 1450 PRO E36/62 DEAN OF STAMFORD Alexander dean early thirteenth century PRO E326/4548 Reiner dean teacher and dean; probably son of Herward PRO E326/ 4541, 4548, 4626 1442 the will of John Browne father of William Browne was proved in the court of the dean of Stamford held in All Saints church; Devon Record Office Simcoe 1038 M/T/9/2. BROWNE’S HOSPITAL The most up-to-date account of this hospital is to be found in Nick Hill and Alan Rogers 2013 Guild, Hospital and Alderman: new light on the founding of Browne’s Hospital, Stamford 1475-1509 abramis The Wardens: managing a late medieval hospital (Browne’s Hospital, Stamford 1495-1518) edited Alan Rogers 2014 abramis and Stamford Survey Group. ST GILES HOSPITAL For Spittle Close in 1556, see Justin Simpson’s notes 1 pp 111-112 ST JOHN’S HOSPITAL Justin Simpson’s notes 1 p 91 cites chantry certificate: the free chapel of St John is annexed to a spittell house being situated upon Stamford bridge and is no parish church; one stipendiary priest SCHOOLS John Cissor alumpnus quondam domini Henrici Engayne 13th century PRO E328/16 Master Peter alumnus of Reiner sometime dean of Stamford thirteenth century PRO E326/4541 ST LEONARDS PRIORY Rent in St Mary’s parish, thirteenth century PRO E326/4553 1450 valued same as in 1291, PRO E36/62 1833 rebuilding John Chandler notes pages 188-9 See: Alan Piper, St Leonard’s Priory in Stamford Historian Nos 5 & 6 NUNNERY OF ST MICHAEL Possessions in the whole diocese valued at £66 13s 4d 1450 PRO E36/62 AUSTIN FRIARS Illustration on p.60 – the stone is now to be found on the inside face of the (rebuilt) town wall on the south side of North Street almost opposite the former Police Station, technically in the back garden of a Barn Hill property. Contribution by Lady Margaret Beaufort to repairs at Austin Friars of £3-6-8 St John’s Cambridge D91.20 p.195 GREY FRIARS First mention in 1240-45 in Calendar of Liberate Rolls 1240-45 p 253 [thanks to Martin Olle) Excavations by Cambridge Archaeological Unit 2015-16 - report not available yet BRAZENOSE SITE See Nicholas Sheehan’s article at https://www.stamfordhistorysociety.co.uk/published-articles-1/the-brazenose-site-in-stamford MONASTIC HOUSES ASHBY PRIORY: Rent of 2s given to canons of St Mary, Esseby, mid 13th century PRO E326/4760 BOURNE ABBEY held property in Stamford valued at £2 and free of court, 1450 PRO E36/62 BROOKE PRIORY: Valuation in 1450 same as 1291 PRO E36/62 CROWLAND: Valuation in 1450 same as 1291 PRO E36/62 CROXDEN ABBEY: Valued at £17 10s in 1450 - tax is paid by the tenants PRO E36/62 For sale in 1545, see Justin Simpson notes 1 p 27 CROXTON: Valuation in 1450 same as 1291 PRO E36/62 Bought by Thomas earl of Rutland in 1547 but came back to the king PRO E328/157 FINESHADE PRIORY: Valuation in 1450 same as 1291; tax paid by the tenants PRO E36/62 Rent of ½ mark in St Mary’s parish PRO E326/4551 Gable in west end of house used to support a beam, PRO E326/4747 House in Colgate PRO E326/4752 HUNTINGDON PRIORY : Valuation in 1450 same as 1291 PRO E36/62 See Justin Simpson’s notes 1 pp 28-29 PIPEWELL ABBEY: Valued at £2 6s 8d in 1450, PRO E36/62 SEMPRINGHAM PRIORY: Dispute between Elmes and Lee over a garden in the parish of St Peter which Lee claimed Sempringham had leased to him in 1528, PRO E321/15/7 SWINESHEAD ABBEY: See Calendar of Patent Rolls Elizabeth 1 Vol 5 p.74-5, No. 554 21 March 1570: Lease for 11 years to William Cecil lord Burghley of lands [...in Bourne ....] and (tenant named) in Stampford co Linc late of monastery of Swineshead .... rents a) £27-15-8 (detailed) and b) 8s. in consideration that three tenements on the premises have been burnt down and must be rebuilt - also costs of draining marshlands and repairing 2 mills badly decayed for which the Crown has been charged ....... VAUDEY ABBEY: Valuation in 1450 same as 1291 PRO E36/62 ANCHORESSES: There are several references to be found in the papers of Lady Margaret Beaufort in St John’s College, Cambridge, D91; see also publications listed at head of this note; also, E A Jones Speculum Inclusorum: a mirror for recluses Liverpool University Press 2013. Previous Next

< Back Brazenose College, Stamford Nicholas J Sheehan 2024 Brazenose College in Stamford was reputedly a house occupied by disaffected students and masters from Oxford University during the Stamford Schism in 1333-35, when the rebel academics defected from Brazenose Hall and Merton College. [1] Tradition has it that one of the students took a brass nose-shaped door knocker from Brasenose Hall to Stamford, thereby providing a name for their new abode in the Lincolnshire town. Apart from its alleged association with the secession, little is known of this building. The designation of Brazenose College as an academic secular college or semi-collegiate hall [2] owes more to supposition than to hard fact. The first mention of a property in Stamford called Brasenose was in a lease in 1559, when a tenement belonging to the Corporation was known by this title. [3] A reference to ‘Phillip le maniciple atte Brasenose’ in 1335 [4] cannot necessarily be taken as evidence of occupation of the house by the migrant academics since Oxford antiquary Anthony à Wood added the words ‘in Stanford’ much later, [5] which may have been an unfounded assumption. Nonetheless, the surviving gateway indicates a thirteenth century date. [6] [7] After 1335 there is no indication that the Stamford property was used as a place of study. [8] Thomas Blore speculated that Brazen-Nose College was attached to the Grey, or Franciscan, Friars’ monastery ‘from the scite of which it is separated by a lane only.’ [9] The lane in question is most likely the modern-day Brazenose Lane but debate continues as to whether the identities of the Whitefriary and the Greyfriary were erroneously transposed by historians. [10][11] Fig.1 (a) Brazenose College and Gateway as depicted by John Speed in about 1600 (Extract of Stamford town plan inset in Speed’s map of Rutlandshire with Oakham and Stanford, 1611); (b) Drawing of College and Gateway based on Speed’s sketch Details of the structure of Brazenose College are literally sketchy. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) surmised that it was a large stone building around a courtyard but it offered no evidence for this. [12] No doubt it had undergone many changes by the time it was described in the sixteenth-century lease as ‘a messuage called Brassen Nose in St. Paul’s [parish], with all houses, barns, stables and other buildings.’ [13] There are no formal images of the property and the only known illustration is the simple drawing on John Speed’s map of about 1600 (Fig.1(a)), which shows it as standing back from the street (now St Paul’s Street). The drawing depicts a L-shaped, two-storey building with a tower at its northeast corner and a detached gatehouse to the north affording access from the public thoroughfare (Fig.1(b)). Fig.2 Extract of a later version of Speed’s map showing the Brazenose Gate aligned with the boundary wall of the College grounds (Reproduced from History of Stamford by Rev C Nevinson) Speed’s illustration has been described as a generic representation and possibly an imaginative reconstruction. [14] However, credence is given to it by the illustrations of the town’s churches, where St Michael’s, St John’s, St George’s and St Martin’s churches are correctly depicted with towers and All Saints and St Mary’s with spires; also Browne’s Hospital which is shown with a bell lantern centrally on the roof as was the case before the almshouse was altered in 1870. [15] Sited centrally in front of the main college building, the freestanding gateway to the street appears to be recessed from the northern boundary wall. The rear of the College abuts the town’s east wall, close to where the latter veers away from Brazenose Lane before continuing southwards to St George’s Gate. Different versions of Speed’s map generally reproduce these characteristics of the central building faithfully but some show the gatehouse as being in line with the boundary wall (Fig.2). [16] Certain features of the College can be verified. Based on the visit of Brian Twyne, the Oxford antiquary, to Stamford in 1616, Wood recounts that the building retained its old name of Brasenose [sic] and that it had ‘a great gate and a wicket; upon which wicket is a face or head of old cast brass with a ring through the nose thereof.’ It also had a sizeable refectory. [17] Twyne stated that there was by then an alehouse in the hall and that ‘ye other rooms are put to other uses.’ [18] He did not mention any annexes, outbuildings or other auxiliary buildings. In 1673, when the College was in a very poor state of repair, Anthony Markham was given a building lease instructing him to spend £300 on the property within three years [19] but he paid to be discharged from the lease before any work was done. In 1688 Alderman Richard Burman was awarded a grant towards ‘flooring such roomes and glaseing soe much of ye windows as hee shall thinke necessary’ [20] but the building was instead pulled down in that year. Thirty-seven years later, in 1725, Alexander Morris, a workman involved in the demolition, told Stamford antiquary Francis Peck that the refectory, or hall, was a strange wide place with a fire hearth in the middle, adding that there were many little rooms and apartments about the rest of the house, with stone stairs leading up to them. [21] William Stukeley embellished this by stating that the house had ‘a fine hall or refectory and spacious lodgings with stone staircases up to the chambers.’ [22] Perhaps its use had changed again since Twyne’s visit. It is debatable whether there were sufficient grounds to justify Peck’s contention that the building was a typical university hall, or the supposition that the multiple little rooms were the students’ lodgings. [23] Nothing is known for certain about the use of the building. Fig.3 William Stukeley’s drawing of Brazen-Nose College* (Designs of Stanford’s Antiquitys, 1735) [*referred to herein as Brazenose Hall] After the medieval property was demolished, a new building, Brazenose Hall, [24] was erected close by on the site using recycled materials from the old college. [25] Stukeley’s drawing of this building in 1735 (Fig.3), [26] four years before it became the town workhouse, [27] indicates that it was erected immediately to the west side of the ancient gateway. The gateway is now incorporated into the front wall of the garden of the current Brazenose House at number 28 St Paul’s Street. James A Knipe’s plan of Stamford, from a survey carried out in 1833 (Fig.4), confirms the location of the original Brazen Nose College. It shows the northern boundary of the College site extending eastwards along St Paul’s Street to Brazenose Lane from the smaller of the two listed barns (A1, A2) flanking the entrance to what is now Stamford School’s car park (Fig.5). Fig.4 Extract of James Knipe’s map of Stamford, with the site of Brazen Nose College circled Fig.5 Site of Brazenose College (Drawing based on Knipe’s Plan of the Borough of Stamford and Saint Martin’s Stamford Baron, 1833) Unlike Speed (Fig.1(a)), Knipe does not show the east wall cutting sharply into the college site. The course favoured by the Royal Commission (Fig.6) corresponds to the present wall along the southern boundary of the car park and the ditch below it now occupied by cottages and gardens.[28] Fig.6 Line of the medieval town wall with its suggested course across the Brazenose site (A. is the site of St Paul’s Gate and B. the site of St George’s Gate. ‘scarp’ marks the present wall and ditch) [Drawing based on RCHME map] It has been queried whether the Brazenose Gateway was originally the entrance gate to the college, or alternatively whether it might first have been a doorway inside the building. [29] Twyne’s description of the brass knocker on the wicket door suggests that it was indeed the entrance gate. It has also been questioned whether the gateway now stands in its original position. Based on the information that he received from Alexander Morris, Peck tells us that the gateway ‘stood formerly more backward than it does now; but, when pulled down with the college, the corporation.....ordered it to be set up again, though not in the very same place where it stood before, yet as near as might be.’ [30] However, Markham’s lease in 1673 implies that the gate already stood alongside the street and the Royal Commission found no structural indication that it had been moved. [31] Stukeley’s drawing shows it directly alongside the new Brazenose Hall and opening on to the street (Fig.3). The gateway was left intact when this later building was itself razed to the ground in 1822. [32] Fig.7 Sketch map combining details from the maps of 1600 (Speed) and 1833 (Knipe) showing the possible location of the college buildings (From Clark, M. Archaeological Recording at New Carpark Stamford School, Stamford. Site of Brazenose College Stamford, 1995) An archaeological evaluation of Stamford School in 1992, and subsequent ground works in 1995, revealed the remains of walls which were thought to have been part of Brazenose College. [33] One of the walls, comprising irregularly-sized and rough-faced limestone blocks with a rubble core, was approximately 0.4 metres in width and mainly dry stone in construction. Roof tiles and a stone-lined well shaft were also discovered. Although lying within its precinct, no evidence was obtained that the well had existed in the time of the College. However, after the demolition of the college buildings there was no substantial building in that area of the site that might have warranted the construction of a new well. [34] Because the 1559 lease described an extensive range of buildings to its east, it has been surmised that the college may have been located slightly further to the west on the site than shown on Speed’s map (Fig.7). [35] Fig.8 Brazenose Gateway in Stamford The Brazenose Gateway (Fig.8) is now the only vestige of the putative medieval college. One of the oldest surviving architectural structures in Stamford, it was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1951 and was listed Grade I in 1954. [36] The gateway has been rebuilt on several occasions [37] but the general design has been retained throughout the various restorations. [38] Acquired by Brasenose College in 1890, the original Brazenose Knocker holds pride of place above the high table in the hall of the Oxford college (Fig.9(a)), while the present knocker in Stamford is a replica (Fig.9(b)). [39] Fig.9 (a) Original Brazen Nose Knocker on display in Brasenose College, Oxford (The iron ring has been replaced eccentrically); (b) Replica knocker on Brazenose Gate Brazenose College is integral to the story of Stamford’s ephemeral medieval university. Of all of the supposed colleges dubiously linked with the university, it has the strongest claim to a semblance of the truth. A print version can be downloaded HERE References [1] Sheehan N J (a). Stamford University: the stuttering dream. Stamford, 2012. pp.28-46 [2] Knowles, David and Hadcock, R Neville. Medieval Religious Houses England & Wales. London: Longman, 1971 (first edition published 1953). pp.455-56 [3] Hartley, John S and Rogers, Alan. The Religious Foundations of Medieval Stamford. Stamford Survey Group Report 2, 1974. Published by University of Nottingham. pp.76-7 [4] Hartley and Rogers [5] Wood, Anthony à. Historia et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis, 1674, Vol.1. First published in English by John Gutch. Oxford, 1792; I: 432 [6] Royal Commission on Historical Monuments England (RCHME). An Inventory of Historical Monuments. The Town of Stamford. London: HMSO, 1977. p.144 [7] Madan, F. The Name and Arms of the College, including the Brazen Nose and the Stamford Migration. Brasenose College Quatercentenary Monographs. Vol.1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. pp.15-20 [8] Madan [9] Blore, Tho. An Account of the Public Schools, Hospitals, and other Charitable Foundations, in the Borough of Stanford in the Counties of Lincoln and Rutland. Stanford: Drakard, 1813. pp.23-24 [10] RCHME, pp.32-34 [11] Ball, Linda. Grey Friars or White Friars?: In search of Stamford’s Friaries. North Chailey: Chalybeate Books, 2021 [12] RCHME, p.144 [13] Hartley and Rogers [14] Smith, John F H (ed.). Stukeley and Stamford, Part II. Tribulations of an Antiquarian Clergyman, 1730-1738. Lincoln Record Society. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2023. p.82 [15] RCHME, Plate 67 [16] Nevinson, Rev C. History of Stamford. Stamford: Henry Johnson, 1879 [17] Wood [18] Twyne, Brian. Stanforde in Lyncolnshyre. Bodl. MS Twyne 22. fol. 92r (p.152) [19] Hartley and Rogers [20] Simpson, Justin. Stamford Parish Registers. (Extracted from the Reliquary Quarterly Journal and Review). p.216 [21] Peck, Francis. The Antiquarian Annals of Stanford (Academia tertia Anglicana). London, 1727. XI VII [22] Hartley and Rogers [23] Peck [24] Sheehan N J (b). The Brazenose Site in Stamford. http://stamfordlocalhistorysociety.org.uk/brazenose-site-stamford [25] Hartley and Rogers [26] Stukeley, William. Designs of Stanford’s Antiquitys, 1735. Plate 70; Designs, 75 [27] Hartley and Rogers [28] RCHME, pp.4-5 [29] Hartley and Rogers [30] Peck [31] RCHME, p.150 [32] Drakard, John. The History of Stamford in the County of Lincoln. Stamford: Drakard, 1822. p.609 [33] Lincolnshire Historic Environment Record. Site of Brazenose College, Stamford. HER number 30625. www.lincstothepast.com . Accessed 11.12.2011 [34] Clark, Michael. Archaeological Recording at New Carpark Stamford School, Stamford. Site of Brazenose College Stamford, SAM 256. Lindsey Archaeological Services, 1995 [35] Clark [36] British Listed Buildings. Brazenose College Gate. Retaining Walls of College www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-193786-brazenose-college-gate [37] Rogers, Alan. The Medieval Buildings of Stamford. Stamford Survey Group Report 1, 1970. pp.42-43 [38] Sheehan, N J (c). Stamford’s Brazenose Gateway. Lincolnshire History and Archaeology. Volume 50 (2015). December 2018. pp.105-16 Previous Next