Another Mystery Solved

It’s funny in life how one piece of research can suddenly spark off another and within the space of a week another major discovery about the Devon Quarter Sessions bundles has been made. Since the beginning of this cataloguing project, it’s been painfully apparent that a huge amount of the documentation relating to the Sessions bundles has been incredibly disordered, and arranging this material logically has taken a great deal of time and effort, and the assistance of a team of dedicated volunteers. Many of the boxes containing Sessions bundles are, before cataloguing, originally labelled thusly: “1742 Easter+Midsummer and loose.” The ‘and loose’ part of that label is the pertinent bit here. What it means in practice is that the box will usually contain several stacks of documentation more or less thrown together at random, often encompassing material spanning many different years and many different sessions. Witness statements for cases that were before the court several years ago survive alongside constables’ presentments for a completely different Session, for example….occasionally there are whole boxes of this material more or less thrown together at random.

What hasn’t been clear until now, however, is why this material is so disordered. In previous posts I’ve made various comments suggesting that at some point in this material’s custodial history the documents had clearly become disordered, but I’ve not really entertained much hope of discovering why during this year, suspecting that the reasons for the disorder might be lost in the mists of time, or might only re-emerge after considerably more research had been done.

Happily, however, a chance discovery while researching something entirely different has gone a long way to solving the mystery. In 1800, Parliament commissioned a Select Committee to make an enquiry into the state of the nation’s public records, (which itself created a report with the catchy title : “Reports from the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the State of the Public Records of the Kingdom, Etc”), and in an appendix to that report, the Clerks of the Peace of the various Counties of England and Wales gave brief answers to various questions posed about the records in their care. Devon’s Clerk of the Peace at the time was a chap called Richard Eales, junior, and he made some tantalising comments on pp266-267 of the Report regarding the manner in which the records had been kept up to 1800.

Previously to 1773 the Quarter Sessions material had been kept in the records room at the old castle in Exeter, but in 1773 the old castle was taken down, and the records that were held in the record room were ‘thrown together and I have from time to time since I became acquainted with the office (twenty four years) spent with the late clerk of the peace many months in arranging them in some order, and for one hundred and fifty years back the records are now pretty well arranged and deposited in large presses made for the purpose in the record room.”

It would seem then that this innocuous statement is the key to the mystery of the stacks of loose documents that survive with each of the Sessions rolls, and which are composed of such disorganised material. The material had been thrown together in complete confusion around 1773 and what we find in the boxes prior to cataloguing is the clerk’s best guess at restoring some order, done, it has to be said from the point of view of the archivist who inherited the situation, with varying degrees of success!

Eales was clearly a pragmatic sort and some of his other comments, particularly with regard to indexing the collection, are quite informative:
“I am of the opinion, that if the rolls were completely arranged and indexed, it would save great trouble to the clerk of the peace, as they could be sooner turned to and inspected, but I know of no other utility that could arise from it: the Trouble and Expenses attending from such an arrangement would be immense, and I could not undertake to do it, with an additional clerk, in less than twelve months.”

I have to admit to chuckling when I read the above. I wonder what he’d make of this twenty-first century cataloguing project, using electronic computers, cataloguing software, the Internet, IRIS machines for making faded ink as clear as day to the eye again, and all the modern research tools of our era? Food for thought, anyway!

What I like most about the above though is that it gives a satisfying sense of filling in some of the missing pieces about these records. Part of the point of this project is to help us to better understand the records being catalogued, and that includes the history of how the collection itself was kept by past generations. Now we have a very important piece of the puzzle, and can speak with more confidence about how the records came to be the way they are today, with all the challenges and charms they bring to present-day archivists and researchers.

The Mystery Bundle of Midsummer 1747

My last post was concerned with a mystery bundle of indictments tentatively termed a ‘process file’ which came complete with a mystery inscription and very little other indication of what it was and why it was in the Midsummer/Michaelmas 1747 box.

I’ve been doing research on this material to answer some questions about it in order to catalogue it, and I thought you’d like to know what I’ve uncovered so far. In Midsummer 1747, George II issued a free and general pardon and Act of Grace to forgive all treasonable offences and felonies committed against him during the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (where, briefly, it had looked as though his crown might’ve been in jeopardy as the pretender to the Scottish throne, Bonnie Prince Charlie stormed as far south as Worcester). You might expect, with some justification, that a pardon such as this would have had little, really, to do with the sorts of offences the Quarter Sessions dealt with, but apparently it was applied and interpreted very generally and very liberally indeed. Evidence from outside Devon, in the County of Middlesex, corroborates this, and shows this Act being plead to forgive an assault and battery case, for example.

This file seems to be composed of what had been, prior to the Act of 1747, ‘live’ outstanding indictments dating back as far as 1723. After the Act, which was applied from July 1747 (Midsummer Sessions) these indictments became spent. That this was the case is attested by two intriguing sets of records held under series QS/9 and QS/9A. These indices to process files, which reference one another and point to process notes about cases before the court, refer in some cases to the ‘Great Bundle’ and in one or two cases note on the front cover that “after the Act of Grace a new book was made for all offences committed after that time.” While I’ve not yet been able to use the indices to successfully search this particular mystery bundle, I’ve seen copious notes made to cases I’ve seen in previous cataloguing, and once I’ve catalogued this process file the ways in which the indices can be used to refer to the ‘mystery’ bundle will probably become a bit clearer.

So it’s been an interesting few days of delving in the archives and the mystery bundle is a mystery no longer! My own view then is that, rather than interpreting this bundle as being evidence that Devon was a seething hotbed of sedition in 1745, we should interpret things a lot more pragmatically. The offences being pardoned here have little or nothing to do with Jacobitism anyway after all, and it has to be borne in mind that this pardon applied everywhere, not just in Devon, and seems to have been liberally interpreted elsewhere too. This 1747 pardon was applied generally, in my view, not so much because Devon had been full of Jacobites who needed pardoning then, but more because there were a lot of outstanding indictments on the books and interpreting the pardon as liberally as possible was probably a pragmatic way of clearing them, as well as clearing the gaols, and freeing up the court’s time, attention and resources for more pressing matters than keeping an eye out for troublemakers who had so far evaded justice (for whatever reason) for minor and petty offences. Convictions in some of these cases, particularly the earlier ones from the 1720s, were probably a remote possibility by the late 1740s anyway; most of the persons involved had probably gone to their graves in the intervening decades. When you consider just how much business the courts had before them in other areas such as vagrancy and highways, the chance to clear the books in this area of the court’s business and start afresh may have been a welcome one.

So the process file full of outstanding material seems to have been deemed no longer relevant after 1747, and for whatever reason the clerks decided the best home for it was with the Sessions bundles. Did they try to place some of the indictments it contained back with their original material? Well, to be honest, I think they did. Because presentments and indictments had been a bit odd from 1743 onwards anyway, I’d started keeping a log of strange material that was appearing that seemed very out of place, and along with a number of the 1740s presentments and indictments, there has been, surprise surprise, 1720s material tacked on to the end of some of the batches of documentation. My thinking is that the clerks were trying to put some of these spent indictments back where they thought they should have been, perhaps made a bit of a hash of things and decided in the end to give up and leave the bundle be.

As with all things like this of course, research by others will no doubt help clarify things further. In the end, this all underlines why cataloguing is such an important task, because it’s the first step to making the material accessible to researchers, who will then be able to come to far more definite conclusions about it than I can with the limited time available to me. It’ll be interesting to see what gets turned up by future researchers, but, tentatively and at least in part, the ‘Mystery Bundle of 1747’ is a mystery no longer.

The Quirks of the Job, part II

Remember a month or so ago when I wrote a post stating that documentation from the 1740s, particularly the presentments and indictments, was getting a bit iffy? Presentments weren’t there when they should have been, material from decades earlier or later had been chucked in at some point in the past seemingly at random, and I speculated that somewhere there’d probably been a huge mix up with the documents and that perhaps some poor clerk had dropped a huge file of material on the floor?

Well it seems the clerks of three hundred years ago may have got just as puzzled as I did with it all and in the end they seem to have given up completely and left a mystery file with the Michaelmas 1747 Sessions bundle. Ladies and gentleman, I give you….THIS:

 

This is what is rather hopefully termed a ‘process file’, found in the Michaelmas 1747 box. The rear of the file has a wrapper with a somewhat cyptic inscription: ‘process file, home to ye pardon, M[ichaelmas] 1747.’ Indictments are present in the file ranging in date from Michaelmas 1747 back to 1723 (possibly earlier, I’m yet to catalogue it). Although loosely sorted into chronological order, the emphasis there is on the word ‘loosely’. There are 160 documents in this stack of parchment alone (just to put that into perspective, an average 18th-century Devon Quarter Sessions bundle has around 180 documents altogether!) and each of them has clearly been removed at some point from its original bundle (because many of them are marked with a former numbering system that doesn’t correlate to the documents around them) and slung together in one great mass of material.

A number of the 1740s bundles have seemed a little bit lacking in presentments and indictments given the amount of business attested to be before the court by the recognisances, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a large amount of that material has ended up here. There are also some notable cases that dropped off the radar that I’d assumed had ended up being tried before the Assizes (the records for which are in the Western Circuit papers at Kew). We never found out what happened to the wreckers of the Dutch Ship, for example. Were they dealt with by the Quarter Sessions after all, and are their presentments and indictments in here?  

No doubt this file will answer a lot of questions but it’ll also pose many new ones, chief among them being, why did the indictments never get placed back with their original material? Clearly there was a purpose to pulling all of this material out, and it seems that in many cases referred to in this file, defedants appeared many years after the original indictment was made, and submitted to justice, indicating that perhaps this file was originally for ‘open’ cases that had yet to be concluded. However, defendants appearing some time after originally indicted, often many years later, as is happening very often in this file, isn’t something that’s unique to this file. In fact, this happens all the time with presentments and indictments in the main Sessions bundles, and usually the indictment remains in the bundle relating to the date when the offence and trial were finally concluded.

For some reason then these indictments were all treated differently, and for some reason, in 1747, this ended. Did the clerks switch over to a new system of filing indictments treated in this way? And why, if they ended the file in Michaelmas 1747, did they not return the documents to their original contexts? Was it perhaps too much of a job? Or, did they start and then give up? I’ve been finding 1720s material in some of the 1740s bundles, seemingly at random, and perhaps this is evidence of the clerks attempting to return some of this material to where they thought it belonged. Perhaps, in the end, the clerks decided it’d be best to leave the file along with the Sessions bundle which related to the latest material contained within it, and start a new file. It seems odd though that they didn’t decide to keep this process file separately to the Sessions bundles, since there was clearly, at some point, a logic to separating this material out from them.

All in all, the reasons as to why this file of material ended up in the Michaelmas 1747 Sessions bundle box are puzzling. The material contained in this file spans well over two decades of legal material, however, and returning all of the indictments to their original bundles would certainly have been a formidable task. For whatever reason the file was left in the Michaelmas 1747 box, waiting to be discovered, and now comes the challenge of cataloguing it.

Cataloguing this material is going to be a very painstaking business. All records will have to be cross-referenced as far as possible, and for each session for which out of sequence material survives in this bundle, notes will have to be made and placed within the boxes on the shelves in the strong room going back as far as the 1720s to ensure that future researchers are made aware that material pertinent to their research survives, of all places, in the Michaelmas 1747 box.

I’ve catalogued around 10,000 documents now and this discovery underlines another important point: no matter how much experience you gain with this material there’ll always be something new and unexpected to discover. And in the end, that’s what makes a job like this such good fun, really!

‘When with the ever-circling years….’

This week’s update is on something of a different tack to the others, more of a reflection on how things have gone so far, and what the future holds. I’m currently in the process of putting the finishing touches to the catalogue prior to fulfilling my own personal objective of putting everything catalogued so far (some 6,400 documents) online by Christmas. The catalogue is being spell checked by volunteers, the boxes are being individually checked against the catalogue to ensure that everything has been given references and that the labels on the calico wrappers around documents reflect the contents of the wrapper…..all those little jobs that are just as much a part of delivering an accessible catalogue as the main task of cataloguing the material itself is.

So where are we up to? In terms of material ready to be placed online, the project has reached 1742, so we have nearly a decade of eighteenth century material available for the public to consult. There have been some notable highlights in this documentation. The shipwreck of the ‘Anna and Helena,’ bulls being run through the streets of Newton Abbot, a ‘skimmington ride’ at Aveton Giffard, smallpox outbreaks, famines, and everything in between.

It’s also been a fun learning curve for me, as I’ve grappled with those lovely documents that defy easy categorisation. Documents like those in which John Polluxfen, while writing very generally about the highways, regales John Fortescue with stories about his latest journeys to Oxford, and gives the lo-down on who’s who, who’s where, who’s ill, and who’s not, and (almost always) claims to have fallen sick ‘just last Saturday’ making court attendance impossible. Is such a document an HI? Is it an NO? Or is it in fact a DI? And will Australia trounce us in the Ashes now that Ricky Ponting’s gone? (Perish the thought!).

We’re now coming to the end of 2012, and since August we’ve been lifting the veil on a lost world. Lost, that is, in many respects, but not in all. One of the things I’ve hoped to achieve with this blog is to show others that the past is not lost to us completely. Throughout Devon, in some places the roads still flood in the same places they flooded in 300 years ago. The world is still governed to some extent by the seasons’ round; farmers still bring in their harvests, the people of the county still struggle against the biting cold in winter. Many of the towns and parishes referred to in the documents still exist today. There are still labourers, farmers, shopkeepers and merchants in Exeter and the surrounding towns and parishes. While we now live in a world of global possibility that our forbears three hundred years ago could scarcely have imagined, it was in their time that many of the foundations of the world we live in today were laid. Surnames persist in parts of the county in which they were present in the 1730s and 1740s; the bridges and highways still need to be maintained, and law and order are still upheld, far more fairly and equitably than in the eighteenth century world we’ve been exploring together.

300 years ago, John Fortescue would have been gearing up for the impending Epiphany Sessions, to be held around 15^th January. Documentation preparatory to the Sessions taking place would have been flooding in to his office or his home in Gandy Street, Exeter, from all corners of the County. Surveyors of the highways and bridges would have been carrying out their inspections. The prisoners in the gaols, or those bound out to return to court in a few weeks, would have been awaiting an uncertain future. Shopkeepers would have been selling their wares, the yeomen farmers keeping watch over their cattle, and those who could afford to might have been preparing for Christmas. John Polluxfen would have been writing a letter to excuse his attendance at court, perhaps, this time, actually ill.

This is the world this cataloguing project gives us a glimpse of, and there’s plenty more to come. Will there be generally unpleasant crimes? Most likely. Famines? Possibly. Shipwrecks? Perhaps. More importantly, there’ll be plenty of unexpected oddities, weird occurrences, and tantalising glimpses of this hauntingly familiar world. I hope you’ll continue to join me in the months ahead as we press on into the past.

A Merry Christmas and happy newy year to you all.

Zen and the Art of Cataloguing

I promised you when I started writing this blog that it’d be a bit of an insight into the world of the cataloguing archivist, besides everything else, and as I have a little bit of time this morning I thought I’d run through what I’m up to today and talk about some of the other tasks involved with a project like this, so that you can get a bit of an idea of what a typical day might involve.

I always like to plan ahead in life and my cataloguing project is no different.   The volunteers have sorted out quite a volume of paperwork from the ‘loose documents’ bundles that accompany the main sessions bundles, having organised them by document type ready for cataloguing. Having scoped the amount to be done on Friday last week, I set myself the task of getting through a good chunk of this material on Monday and Tuesday this week, so that there’s lots of space available in the relevant sort boxes for volunteers to begin sorting again on Wednesday.

On a day like today when I’m focusing purely on doing this, the numbers of documents I get through are generally a little bit lower than usual, as there’s more organising of the catalogue to be done, in creating all the different file and item level entries. Generally speaking I’ll already have ploughed through the presentments, recognisances and wrappers for the sessions beforehand, so in reality I’m sort of ‘filling in’ the remainder of the records for that session in retrospect. I prefer working this way as it means I’ll know, roughly, who is before the court and for what reasons, which gives me a good working overview of that session while I’m cataloguing the material.

I’ll frequently be doing material from several different sessions, sometimes in different years, as I go. Today for example, I’ve sorted out a number of dsicharges and highways documents from Epiphany session 1740, and I’m moving on to some Easter 1741 examinations. There’s some Midsummer 1741 documents to come after that, and a little bit of 1742 documentation I’d like to get done too, if I have the time.

Although the volunteer-sorted documentation is my focus today, there are other things I like to get done on a day like today. A day like today gives me a great chance to do some research on matters arising from documents I’ve recently catalogued, for example. Besides interesting things cropping up in the catalogued material, often volunteers will do research using the sessions books and bring up interesting material referenced there, which I’ll then follow up when I have quiet moments, and make public on the blog, especially if we can find supporting documentation from the sessions bundles.

There’s also the matter of dealing with some of the more complicated deeds enrolled before the court, which might require a bit of a quiet moment to catalogue in more detail. One particular deed I catalogued last week had had it’s entire right hand edge chopped away at some point in its past, and as is often the case, most of the salient details seemed to have been written on that edge, which meant I had to be especially careful in working with the material to make sure I’d recorded it as accurately as possible.

Besides all of the above, of course, I like to press on with producing supporting material to the catalogue when I get a spare moment. I’m working on a number of user guides to help explain the remit of the Quarter Sessions and the general scope of the material, and to explain how the material might best be used by researchers. After all, cataloguing is not just about recording the material you have, but also about making it available and useable to the public. As I write these guides I keep a weather eye on the possibility of including aspects of what I’m writing about in talks, classes and presentations in the future.

The role of a cataloguing archivist is a bit different, then, to the role of an archivist working primarily in the searchroom, but I hope, with the above, to explain a little bit about what the role really involves on a day to day basis. There are other things I could talk about too and will do in future updates, but I felt that some of you might like to know a bit more about what it’s like to do a job like this. As you can probably tell from my updates I really enjoy the scope of this kind of work; no two days are ever the same, and I think most archivists I know, whether they’re cataloguing, working in the search room, doing outreach, or running research enqiries, will tell you that the variety of the job is one of the main attractions to working in the profession.

But besides that, in what other profession do you get to learn so much on a daily basis and get such a connection to the world of the past? I hope from the above, and from the rest of this blog, I can show you why this job is so enjoyable, and if anyone reading this is interested in becoming an archivist, or is in training, or is looking to volunteer one day, I can heartily recommend it. You won’t regret getting involved.

18th century trades…

Found in one of the Quarter Sessions bundles and looks to be the genuine 18th century article, made of linen and hand-stitched!

Above, well, (if it displays above!) is an eighteenth century linnen ribbon, found in the bundles and used to tie them together. Hand-made and stitched, it is a fine example of eightennth-century textile workmanship, and examples of material of this kind come out of the records every now and again, having remained in the bundles for three centuries, to all intents and purposes untouched by human hand for all that time.

Clearly, someone, somewhere, was making linen items that were being supplied to the court, but the court had other suppliers too. Perhaps the most prolific is Mr Score, a printer who supplied the updated statutes to the Sessions, printed tables of clerk’s fees and conducted other printing work for the justices of the peace. His trade was lucrative and the income regular; accounts material, where it survives in the bundles, almost always includes items concerning Mr Score’s bill. Things like this, as you catalogue, become little familiarities you look forward to encountering again, little reminders that behind the drama and often crushing social injustices that the Quarter Sessions highlight so vividly, life was continuing as normal for many, and the routines of life were continuing as they had done for centuries previously. Masons worked on the castles and brideswells, glaziers repaired damaged windows, carpenters outfitted the court chambers, and created beautifully-carved mahogany seats with sumptous crimson damask cushions for the justices to be seated on. The bills for these tradesmen’s work survive, often giving precise detail as to when the work was completed; I’m yet to discover whether the seats I’ve mentioned here survive in the castle, but if I find at some point that they do, I’ll let you know.

Beyond the trades supporting and supplying the Quarter Sessions, of course, the community was full of other tradesmen and artisans. Britain was not yet fully industrialised of course, but the first stirrings of industry were soon to make themselves felt. The Industrial Revolution, when it finally arrived in earnest, didn’t arrive in a vacuum. Britain, as with every other nation, was a land populated by craftsmen and tradesmen in addition to those working the land as their forbears had done for generations. The Quarter Sessions records give quite a good indication of just how many craftsmen and tradesmen there were operating in society, and the sheer range of occupations undertaken by them, since in the vast majority of recognisances and a good many presentments, the occupations of those named in the documents tend to be given. There were soap boilers, perriwig makers, clock makers, masons, glaziers, tailors, mariners,  brewers, innkeepers, cordwainers, sergeweavers, weavers, woolcombers, bricklayers, apothercaries, surgeons, barbers, hotpresters, shopkeepers, and the wonderfully titled ‘haberdasher of hats’ to name just a few.

As with many things I find when cataloguing these records, there’s an interesting project in there for any reasearcher bold enought to attempt it: wouldn’t it be interesting to collate all these various trades and professions, quantify them in terms of numbers for each trade over a given period, and build up a picture of their distribution throughout the County, using the records of the Quarter Sessions? Well, it’s a thought, anyway!

Shipwreck in Bigbury Bay!

For the first time in three hundred years, first hand accounts of a shipwreck in Bigbury Bay, Devon, have emerged into the light of day.

On Tuesday 21 March 1738 the Dutch hoy ‘Anna and Helena,’ captained by Adrian Wagnaer of Amsterdam, bound from Bordeaux to Flensburg in Denmark with a cargo of around 140 tons of wine, brandy, prunes, coffee and indigo, was blown off course by a violent storm, into Bigbury Bay, a renowned death trap for ships, about three miles from Kingsbridge, Devon, becoming stranded on Thurlestone Sands. Having received offers of assistance from several of the local neighbouring gentleman, among them William Ilbert esquire and John Roose [Rooxe], several local men were employed to begin preserving the cargo, ships anchors, sails and cables.

However, as is common with incidents of shipwreck in this period, a very large mob formed, stated by the captain to have been in the region of two or three thousand strong, several hundred of whom began breaking through the sides of the vessel with hatchets, axes and other edge tools, smashing holes in the deck, and destroying the stern post, to ensure that the vessel would be unable to be refloated. They then began to plunder the cargo, and when, amongst others, John Roose intervened, one John Vivian, a servant to a Robert Lakeman of Churstow, yeoman, struck his horse on the nose with the haft of his axe, nearly dismounting him, and threatened to murder him if he stepped further forward. In the meantime the mob got hold of the captain and several of them including John Lishions of South Milton, shoemaker and Thomas Lishions the younger of the same, labourer, his brother, with James Jarvis of the same, beat him so severely that even when he gave evidence a month later he was still suffering from his injuries and still carried the marks of his ordeal.

The mob, greatly emboldened by the success of John Vivian and an accomplice, Arthur Lachcraft [Luckcraft], a servant of one Andrew Lidstone of South Huish, gentleman, began plundering the vessel wholesale, such that the men of the customs for the port of Dartmouth and all others who had been employed to save the cargo could do nothing but preserve around 14 hogsheads of wine, and two of indigo. The plunderers even took one of the sails of the ship, allegedly dividing it up between themselves. Over the rest of the day and night and into the following afternoon the mob continued to plunder the vessel; on the afternoon of March 22^nd a customs officer named Daniel Shath, attempting to apprehend a looter carrying a hogshead of brandy, was struck a severe blow on the forehead and received a grievous head wound as a result.

To some extent, there’s nothing particularly unusual in these events. Similar reactions to stranded or wrecked vessels on behalf of local inhabitants in coastal areas occurred throughout the country in this period, and for many there were a number of grey areas concerning what exactly constituted salvage, plunder, the taking of wrecked cargo from a wrecked vessel, or intervening directly, as is the case here, to directly prevent a stranded vessel which was hitherto intact from being re-floated and its cargo saved. It should be borne in mind that the vessel was loaded with what were in the eighteenth century very high value luxury goods, and, as was the case throughout the country, for a population frequently living in endemic poverty, in a society where theft of food for survival was commonplace, the arrival of what was effectively an eighteenth-century mobile warehouse full of luxury items was simply too much of a temptation to resist. Here, however, the similarities with most wrecking end, because this event turns out to have caused nothing short of a full-blown diplomatic incident with the States General (what we now call Netherlands).

On 26 March 1738 Philip Pentire [Pentyre] wrote a letter to a Mr Van Hop, then Envoy Extraordinary of the States General, giving an account of the wrecking of the vessel and the plundering of the cargo by the local inhabitants. Mr Van Hop, in an extraordinary move, apparently took the letter straight to the King, and wrote a strongly-worded letter to Lord Harrington demanding an explanation for the barbarous treatment of the ship’s crew, and demanding to know what steps had been taken to bring the culprits to justice and to ensure that future incidents of the kind did not happen again.

As you can imagine, the King was not, as far as can be discerned, at all pleased with this state of affairs, and there follows a flurry of administrative delegation as everyone from the King down to the justices of the peace pressed their subordinates to ensure justice was served. Lord Harrington enclosed a copy of Van Hop’s and Pentyre’s letters to Mr Cruwys, a justice of the peace in Devon, with instructions that the local justices of the peace were to make enquiries and bring the culprits to justice, and in the meantime to keep him appraised of the situation so that he could inform the King as to what progress was being made. Cruwys sent these instructions to Mr Fortescue, deputy clerk of the peace at Exeter.

Interestingly, my own research indicates that Harrington had also been in touch with the Treasury and customs regarding this wreck, as calendars of their letters from April 1738 demonstrate, but until now these seem to have been the only records available regarding the wreck. Now, for the first time in three hundred years, the full story of this ill-fated vessel and its wreck and plunder on the eighteenth-century Devon coast from first hand eyewitness accounts, has been brought together thanks to the records that survive from the Devon Quarter Sessions.

Cataloguing update: The Documents III: Apprenticeship material, Convictions, Rates, Notices and General Administration

Apprenticeship material (category ‘AP’) documents apprenticeship indentures created or discharged by the court in session. Usually (though not always) a poor child of a parish, being maintained through the parish poor rate, is placed by the churchwardens and overseers of the poor of the parish with a person in the community who takes them on as an apprentice and undertakes to teach them their trade. The potential flaws in such a system can probably be guessed at, and there are frequent cases brought before the courts by apprentices who claim that their masters have failed to feed or clothe them adequately, or have beaten them to excess, and instances of apprentices running away from their masters are not uncommon. In one notable case the apprenticeship of Joseph Hendy of Plympstock to Edmond Ley, a yeoman of the same parish, was discharged because Ley was not only violent and abusive towards Hendy, but he also ‘went about with pistol and sword, asking Hendy to supply him with powder and shot and threatening to kill him’ if he refused. (QS/4/1734/Epiphany/AP/8). Running away from one’s master, of course, was no small matter, and could have dire consequences. In 1738 Philip Edbury of Crediton was presented for harbouring and entertaining his daughter, Anne, who had run away from her master, James Reed junior. Reed had it proclaimed by the town crier that Anne had left his service without permission and that no-one was to entertain or harbour her. The reasons for Anne’s fleeing her master can only be guessed at but the efforts of her family to come to her assistance resulted in criminal proceedings.

 

Convictions (category ‘CO’) are not what they might appear at first glance. Usually only a small number of these documents are found in a bundle if at all, and they are not notices of conviction as we might more widely understand them today. Instead, they document convictions for profanity or the swearing of oaths, for which the convicted might be fined a certain amount to be contributed to the upkeep of the poor of the parish where the offence took place. More details of the offence, such as where and when it occurred, if it happened on a Sabbath or during the hours of divine service are given at times. These are interesting little documents, which together with presentments for disorderly alehouses which permitted tippling on a Sabbath, or presentments for working or carry on a trade on a Sabbath or during the hours of divine service, help to demonstrate a society that was still very much upholding the ordering of society by norms of expected religious observance.

 

Rates (category ‘RA’) One of the duties of the Quarter Sessions, as we have seen, was to conduct civil administration, and there were several rates which it was the duty of the jurors of the Quarter Sessions to establish during the sessions. These rates were the rates of the price of corn, rates for the price of land carriage, and rates of wages, which quite literally dictated how much an individual in a given trade was permitted to earn. For a historian or researcher of the economy these documents should be particularly interesting but they also have important social implications too, because they demonstrate the extent to which the economy and, by extension, the standard of living of persons within the various strata of society was governed and administered centrally. They are demonstrative of attempts to regulate the economy but also by extension to maintain a social order.

 

Notices and General Administration (Category ‘NO’). It’s something of an in-joke within the archive profession that archivists aren’t meant to create a ‘miscellaneous’ category….but within the Quarter Sessions bundles there are certainly plenty of documents that appear as ‘one-offs’ and don’t have a category of their own into which they can easily be placed. Where, for example, should one place a document detailing an order of the Privy Council to transport mariners to the Royal Navy’s dockyards on the south coast for impressments into the Navy? (QS/4/1734/Easter/NO/2). What about the printer’s bills for the books of statutes, and the calendar of clerk’s fees? This category serves to bring together all such kinds of general administrative documentation with which the court was presented. Within it, you’ll find the occasional heart-rending petition, such as that for the various prisoners languishing in Exeter’s County jail in 1738 who had been sentenced to transportation, some of them many sessions ago. Such prisoners were entitled to an allowance paid by the sheriff for their upkeep while awaiting transportation, yet for seven weeks the allowance had not been paid, leaving the prisoners on the brink of starvation. (QS/4/1738/Michaelmas/NO/4).

 

Likewise, in pursuance of an act for the release of insolvent debtors, an individual in the County jail imprisoned for debt applied to be relieved at the Michaelmas Sessions. In order to do this a formal notice had to be published, and as a result, a copy of the London Gazette for August 1738 with the appropriate notice survives in the Michaelmas 1738 bundle, which besides other things, documents a battle between the Russians and Turks in the Russo-Turkish war of 1736-9. At first glance you might mistake this document for a relatively modern newspaper, and once again, its survival in the bundles gives another interesting ‘one off’ that adds a real flavour to the overall material.

 

So, last few posts are a  general breakdown of most of what you’ll tend to find in the Quarter Sessions bundles. There are other classes of document such as ‘bastardy bonds’ settlement and removal orders, and gaol calendars to name but a few, which are being dealt with a little differently and I’ll come to those in a future update (I think I’ve probably given you enough to plough through for now!). But hopefully today’s set of updates will help to give anyone interested in consulting this material something of a flavour of what can be found and how it might help their research, as well as an indication of just how varied and interesting the world of the Courts of Quarter Sessions, by virtue of their wide remit, could be.

 

As you can probably tell from the above, working with this material is absolutely brilliant; you can never tell from one day to the next what strange and wonderful, quirky or downright odd details might emerge amongst all of the otherwise relatively routine of the court’s business. If there’s one thing for sure though it’s that there’s never a dull moment with the Quarter Sessions!

Cataloguing update: The Documents II: Highways, Discharge Papers and Informations and Examinations

Highways material (category ‘HI’) is probably the next most numerous class of documentation, and is composed generally of highway repair orders, orders for the repairs of bridges, and certificates that they’ve been repaired after inspection by one of the County’s surveyors. Notices that a parish has been presented because the highways are unusable frequently survive, as do all manner of supporting documentation. For anybody interested in the development of the road network within the County, the state of the County’s bridges or eighteenth century civil administration in general, these documents are a must-see. Within the documentation there are often estimates for the cost to repair or rebuild given bridges; an estimate for the construction of a new bridge in Topsham indicated a cost of £300, (£25,749 in 2005 money, according to TNA’s currency calculator!).

 

Discharges (Category ‘DI’) are documents detailing the discharge of persons from recognisances, or from duties or offices that had been assigned by the court. The eighteenth century justices system was one of private prosecutions pursued by private individuals. It may be that two aggrieved parties reached a settlement out of court, and the complainant would write to the justices to ask that the charges against the defendant be dropped and that he or she be released from his or her recognisance. Requests for discharge from offices are relatively uncommon though, for example, in Michaelmas 1734 Henry Butson requested discharge from his office of constable of the hundred of East Budleigh on the grounds of his deafness (QS/4/1734/Michaelmas/DI/3). Requests for discharge from jury service are rather more common and some of the excuses proffered can be quite interesting.

 

No doubt there were frequently valid reasons for absence though the veracity of the sudden appearance of health complaints might be difficult to prove….and for the Epiphany Sessions 1737/8 on 9 January 1738, Robert Colman requested that he be excused from attendance at the court because ‘the undersherrif hath issued out a warrant against me and designs to have me took to the Castle at the castle if I appear, for that reason I humbly desire to be excused this time and the next assizes I design to take off the indictment’. (QS/4/1738/Epiphany/DI/5) What the justices made of that one is anybody’s guess!

 

Informations and Examinations (category ‘EX’) are some of the most interesting documents in the sessions bundles. Informations are effectively the witness statements given by persons purpoting to have witnessed a crime or event with which the court is interested. Examinations are the results of questioning of the accused. Frequently these documents provide fascinating detail and they are well worth a ready; for reasons of speed and brevity of cataloguing I often tend to simply give the names of the persons giving the information and perhaps the alleged offence to which they are related, but for particularly out of the ordinary cases or events I will often give a more detailed description. One fascinating document I unearthed the other day was the examination of one James Matthews, (QS/4/1738/Epiphany/EX/3) in which he seems to have recounted his life story, including his birth in Dublin, his moving to Spittalfields in London for five years, his settling down and starting a family in Gloucester, his work on the Bristol-Ireland shipping routes and a journey to the West Indies aboard a vessel from Ireland. Finally he details the wrecking of his vessel and how he came to be landed from the wreck in Cornwall, and maintains that on 4 April 1737, near Caraline Bay Bar (where he was shipwrecked) he was struck blind by lightening. I’m yet to determine where ‘Caraline Bay Bar’ is, so if anyone out there has more information I’d love to hear from you, but the detailed first-hand account of this shipwreck, just one of the shipwrecks I’ve uncovered in the documentation, is fascinating. I have further documentation about another shipwreck emerging from the ‘EX’ class of documents for the bundle I’m currently working on at the moment, so stay tuned!

Cataloguing update: The Documents I: Recognisances, Presentments and Indictments

Good morning everyone! As promised, this week’s first update will be dealing with the subject of what documents tend to appear in the Quarter Sessions bundles, and how they can be used. I’ll also be mentioning some of the more unusual ‘one-offs’ that I’ve found so far as well!

I say first update for the week because I’ve been away on leave so I’ll be treating you to an extra update to make up for it; and it’ll be an update with a decidedly nautical theme so if ships and shipwrecks are your thing, stay tuned!

But first, on to the documents. There are a good many of main types of documents, and I’m going to detail some of these in separate posts for easier reference.

Recognisances (category ‘RE’)Probably the most numerous document of which the rolls are composed is the ‘recognisance’ (catalogued under my scheme as ‘RE’). These documents are effectively a bond for the appearance of an individual in court at the following sessions. They come in two main varieties, recognisances for people accused of crimes, and recognisances for witnesses. In general, an accused person (or sometimes several accused people) will be the first named person on the document, and they will be bound in a certain amount of money for their appearance. Usually, other people, often related or tradesmen in a similar or related profession, stand as sureties, usually bound in a lesser amount.

The amounts by which persons are bound vary, but they are frequently over ten or twenty pounds, (which was an impossible figure for most people to pay) thus ensuring most people would simply have no choice but to turn up to court at the next sessions. Sometimes, the primary person on the bond is not the accused, but a relative, often a spouse. Often, though not always, details of the offence are given; frequently an individual is bound to appear ‘to answer for such things as he stands indicted by Nathaniell Drake of Crediton concerning an assault and battery” for example.

Often individuals are ‘bound over’ to keep the peace towards a certain person, or ‘to be of good behaviour’ for a set period. These kinds of agreements were a useful method of keeping a lid on disputes between quarrelling individuals until tensions cooled, and if the dispute continued the individuals concerned could be held to account for failing to keep the peace that they had agreed to uphold.

The other kind of recognisance which tends to appear, usually bundled separately to the main bundle, is the group of recognisances for witnesses. These oblige persons to present their evidence against the accused, and otherwise tend to follow a similar format to the first kind of recognisance, though I have found that in general there are rarely sureties asked; frequently only one individual is named and made to put up security for their attendance in court at the next session.

So why are recognisances useful? Well, not only do they give names and often help point out the familial relations between individuals, but they also usually (though not always) give professions of the named individuals, and there are a huge variety of professions appearing already. Peruke makers, periwig makers, clockmakers, tailors, husbandmen, yeomen, sergeweavers, worsted combers, blacksmiths, butchers, white bakers, to name but a few….yesterday I even had a ‘haberdasher of hats’ appear in my records!

For a family historian, or a historian of labour, the 18^th century economy, social historians to name but a few, these are extremely useful details. They help to give an impression of the variety of occupations that existed and whereabouts they were found, and they frequently demonstrate families either in the same or related occupations. They can help to pinpoint what exactly it was that your ancestor did professionally, and firm details of that kind of information is not always easy to come by in family history research.

Presentments and Indictments (category ‘PR’). The next extremely important document to consider is the ‘presentment’ so called because, as the document is worded, the jurors ‘present that [ Joe Bloggs ] did X at X place’ and give details of the allegation being investigated. Presentments are classed under my catalogue as ‘PR’ and this category also covers indictments. Presentments are the first stage of a formal accusation. In general, if the jurors decided that there was indeed a case to be answered, they would endorse the document as a ‘true bill’ in which case the presentment became a formal indictment. For whatever reason this rule is not always followed hard and fast; the presentments for which ‘no bill’ was found tend to be bound together, but within those that a true bill was found for, there are often documents that aren’t endorsed either way. Villiage and hundred constables could also present persons to the court, and constables presentments, or returns of constables of the hundreds which document that they have nothing to present, are also catalogued with the main sequence ofp resentments, as are Grand Jury and Petty Jury presentments.

In one of those cases where archival documents might fit comfortably into two categories (thus providing headaches for the archivist!) towns and parishes were frequnently presented for failing to repair their highways. These presentments are usually bound up with the ‘criminal’ presentments and have been catalogued accordingly, but the rest of the documentation about the highways, including the orders for the repair of a given road or bridge, and the notice sent by the court to the parish that they had been presented at the sessions, are catalogued under my broad ‘highways’ category, HI.

Presentments are fantastic documents, and one of my favourites. Not only do they give frequently intricate detail about an offence, such as ‘QS/4/1738/Michaelmas/PR/10’ which documents an assault on a justice, and exactly what words were said by the defendant whilst carrying out the assault, for example. They are also one of the classes of documents that betray the Quarter Sessions’ medieval roots. The standard formula of words for an accused person is that they ‘with force of arms and bows and arrows at X place did X’. The ‘force of arms and bows and arrows’ bit is, by the eighteenth century, a standard legal form of words that had been used since time out of mind and isn’t to be taken literally, but it derives ultimately from the time when disputes really were settled in that manner, by the great landowners, at least. As such they are in effect a meaningless pomposity at this stage which help to give an unintentionally ridiculous air at times to allegations; the denizens of eighteenth century Devon are portrayed as stealing cider or legs of lamb ‘with force of arms and bows and arrows.’

Presentments, then are the bread and butter of the Quarter Sessions bundles, and as you can imagine I always look forward to cataloguing them. There’s always an interesting case or two which are out of the ordinary; this week alone I’ve had several cases of assault and battery on a justice of the peace, theft of beehives, theft of ten gallons of cider, and a bull chase through the streets of Newton Abbot! In one particular document a burglary was presented, and all of the stolen goods listed ,which effectively detailed absolutely everything the unfortunate victims owned. For many kinds of research this sort of detail is essential, since it clearly documents the standard of living of a section of society, and the kinds of goods and luxuries they had access to. Through the presentments I’ve been able to glean details of eighteenth century pastimes, the types of goods on sale to people, I’ve viewed petty rivalries and fallings out between professionals (such as the assorted shoemakers who cut up Squire Smith’s display of shoes at the open fair in Crediton, see QS/4/1738/Epiphany/PR/48), and much more besides. They offer a fascinating view into the lives and pre-occupations of the eighteenth century, and they’re a joy to work with.