In 1629 and 1630 there were two consecutive poor harvests, the latter being 50% deficient across England. This had devastating effects on the poor, whose diet contained large quantities of bread. The King, Charles I, who was ruling without parliament, having dismissed it in 1629, resurrected the Jacobean device of the Book of Orders. These were instructions, issued to all local magistrates, on how to cope with bread shortages and mass poverty. They involved the local JPs, in their divisions of the shire, controlling local markets, trying to provide a variety of bread grains at an affordable price to the poor, and raising poor rates to provide a local subsidy. They were then required to report back to the King’s Privy Council, the main executive arm of government, hopefully once a month, on a variety of issues associated with poverty and law and order. All 17th century governments feared revolution from below, notably when hunger drove the poor to desperate measures. The Book of Orders was therefore just as much about controlling the poor as feeding them.
The device laid down by Charles I and his ministers for achieving these aims was the monthly meeting of magistrates in their divisions. In the National Archives in the State Papers Domestic for the reign of Charles I, are over 100 of the county reports from these monthly meetings sent to the Privy Council, many of them from East Hertfordshire. The County and Borough Quarter Sessions for Hertford and the local parish accounts also contain details on how magistrates operated in trying to carry out the orders of central government within their jurisdictions and how parishioners coped with the problems that arose.
The magistrates managed to prevent the London corn chandlers from buying in markets less than 35 miles from London, to try and protect the local poor. This meant that the chandlers were banned from the markets in Hertford and Ware but could buy grain in Royston. Nevertheless, in the period from September 1630 to April 1631, the price of wheat, which was normally sold at about 3/4d a bushell, trebled in price to 10/- a bushell. In London it even rose as high as 12/4d. This meant that there was a major crisis in the county and this is reflected in reports coming from different parishes and divisions in the first six months of 1631.
In Ware, the constables, overseers and churchwardens, the local parish officials with responsibility towards the poor, reported to the JPs for the Hundred of Braughing, of which Ware was a part, that they had £30 of stock accumulated to set the poor on work. They had managed to get three young people apprenticed but had nine more for whom they still had to find a master. They normally had £80 for the poor rate levied yearly, but had collected more than that since the previous September. A total of £93 had been raised and bread corn was sold to the poor at 4/- a bushell. The local inhabitants had given a further £26 at Christmas, which had been distributed to the poor to buy essentials. As it was on the Old North Road, the main route between London and York, Ware locals also had to keep watch for sturdy rogues and vagabonds coming through the parish, 13 of which had been rounded up, punished and given passes to go elsewhere. The town was clearly well organized, had enough wealth to look after its own poor, but was not going to countenance providing for the vagrant poor from other parishes.
Most of these reports were responses to particular questions that were laid down in the Book of Orders. Magistrates therefore had to show they were responding to the crisis by subsidizing bread but also punishing rogues. They were asked if there were unlicensed alehouses, of which Ware had three, and whether local charities were providing wills according to the details of bequests. The parish officials of Stortford claimed to have no unlicensed alehouses and that they had a stock to set the poor on work to make cloth out of hemp, towe and flax. Some 22 poor spinners had been set to work and 24 children apprenticed. In Sawbridgeworth not only did they not have any unlicensed alehouses, but they had also raised 10/- from fines on drunkards. These sums were used to help the poor, as was a stock of corn which was sold to the poor at the old price of 3/4d a bushell. However, a certain Gabriel Whittacre, his wife and daughter were said “to live idly and are hedgebreakers”, but otherwise all the poor were set to work. For all these towns, keeping the local poor busy by making them work and providing them with cheap bread, would prevent disorder breaking out. Keeping out the poor from other areas was equally important as the weather improved and men sought work elsewhere, the Braughing divisional JPs punishing 16 of them in April, 30 in May and over 50 in June.
In May 1631 these JPs reported to the Privy Council on the grain supply in the area. They showed that a whole variety of bread grains were still available, including 552 quarters of wheat and 424 quarters of barley, as well as rye, oats and meslin (mixed wheat and rye sown and harvested together). The JPs Thomas Leventhorpe of Sawbridgeworth and Sir John Watts of Mardocks near Ware, had also accumulated 374 quarters of malt, made from barley, which was an essential ingredient of ale. In the following September the High Sheriff, John Boteler, reported to the Council, among other things, that four rogues had been punished at Standon, 10/- given weekly to the poor along with five dozen loaves of bread. He had received a certificate the month before from Sir Thomas Dacres of Cheshunt and Sir Richard Lucy of Broxbourne, JPs for the Hundred of Hertford, which painted an optimistic picture in terms of falling grain prices and the availability of work at harvest time. They claimed that there were then no able bodied poor, only the old and infirm. One reason was that 134 poor children, who would otherwise have been a burden on the rates, had been apprenticed, their new masters having to provide food and accommodation for them. Child labour was not seen to be a problem. The magistrates commented that, as regards those who were not yet fit for service, “order taken for the setting of them to such worke as they are able to undergoe according to their severall years towards their better maintenance & provision of living.” In another report this view was reiterated, since those not old enough to be apprenticed “we have caused to be set to spinning and such small work as is most meet for them, according to the tenderness of their age, that idleness may not fasten in them.”
Cheshunt too took advantage of the scheme for pauper apprenticeship, which enabled the magistrates, churchwardens and overseers to get poor children off the parish rates either at a younger age, or for longer, or to different masters than would have been the case in a normal seven-year craft apprenticeship. Dacres and Lucy apprenticed 12 year old William Cullens to Nathaniel Coles, Tanner, for nine years until he was 21, and Anthony Andrewe, a poor child aged 17, to a yeoman for six years “by virtue of the Book of Orders”. He was thus becoming a farm labourer with virtually no pay, but board and lodging for six years. However, he was provided with two suits of clothes, “both decent and manly.” Whether these young people were exploited by the system is open to question, but Rachell Steward of Cheshunt, a poor child, was apprenticed for ten years in ‘housewifery’ to Anne Blacksedge, an illiterate widow of the parish. In March 1633 Robert Needham, a poor child, was apprenticed to Henry Cock, Yeoman, for a total of 12 years, and in March 1634 Elizabeth Nicholson to Widow Joan Robson for 13 years. Young men normally came of age at 21, but under the Book of Orders, pauper apprentices could serve their masters until they were 24 if male or 21 if female, unless of course they ran away, which some did. Clearly, some men and women would have benefitted from the cheap labour provided by these paupers and poor Elizabeth Nicholson may only have been aged eight when apprenticed to become what was possibly just a household skivvy.
Even small communities were expected to keep their youngsters out of trouble. A report for Brickendon in July 1631, which is in the Hertford Borough Records, noted that: “Penelope Ockamye, daughter of John Ockamye, a Moare, lyveth ydely at home with her father”, but that four other children had been apprenticed, including William Hancock to Henry Browne, a Hertford Tanner, and two girls – one to a husbandman, the other to a yeoman, presumably as farm servants.
A return of the constables and overseers of Hertford Borough also reveals the destinations of the wandering poor who had been punished and sent on their way. Some went only to places in the Home Counties, such as Lewes in Sussex, Swallowfield in Berkshire, and various places in Kent, whilst another was sent back to Warwickshire and two as far as Lancashire. Although 39 local youngsters were apprenticed to men in Hertford, one found a master in Hoddesdon, another in Hatfield. Significantly fines levied on local people for drunkenness and swearing foul oaths in public, amounting to £5.3s.0d, were used for relieving the poor in Hertford, as was the money raised by selling the grass from the Meads.
The borough authorities as well as providing food for the poor and to those afflicted by the plague (who were put in the Pest House), also gave loads of wooden faggots to keep the poor warm in winter. A list indicates how much was spent each year in the early 1630s: 28 loads @ 8/- a load in 1631, 33 loads in 1632, rising to 70 loads in 1633, totalling nearly £19 out of borough funds. Individuals such as Thomas Gardener of the Inner Temple, gave some of his rental income to the poor at Christmas 1630, and the Borough also lent money to poor freemen: “upon securities to make them stockes for the mayntenance of their trades…” These included loans of £2 to a shoemaker and £3 each to a glover and to a smith, which loans by 1635 totalled £21. This came out of the rent for “The Chequer” which also helped apprentice youngsters to the tune of £22. Hertford, because it had jurisdictional privileges as a borough and other sources of income, was better placed than some other towns and most of the surrounding villages, some of which had little or no stock and few wealthy families to support the poor.
As well as the magistrates working in their divisions and parishes, they also met in Quarter Sessions to ensure that the system of poor relief worked across the county. One aspect that particularly concerned them was where individuals claimed or asserted a claim to be legally settled, as settlement gave a person the right to receive poor relief. In January 1630 they had to make a judgement about a certain Susan who had been ordered to be removed from Wethersfield in Suffolk to Stocking Pelham in Hertfordshire, where she had been supposedly legally settled with Edward Wasdell. However, this was found to be false and her last place of legal settlement was in her parish of birth, which was Sible Headingham in Essex. The constables of Stocking Pelham then had the job of taking her back to Wethersfield, so that neither the county nor the parish would be responsible for her welfare.
Even within the county the inhabitants of one parish did not want to support the poor of a neighbouring parish so that the same day as Susan was ordered to be removed to Suffolk, it was reported that, though John Cannon had been taken up by the constable of Great Munden as a vagrant and punished and then sent with a pass to Aspenden where he had been born, the inhabitants there had refused to provide him with any relief. However, the following April the JPs changed their minds and decided he should return to Munden as it appeared he did have a legal settlement there after all. The parishes continued to dispute the matter and in the July it had to be referred to the Judges of Assize to decide. No one wanted an extra mouth to feed in early 1630, particularly if he also had a large family.
The County Justices also had to implement the law in regards to those who broke the regulations on regrating and forestalling, which related to the buying and selling of corn on the open market, particularly where they crossed county boundaries. Two men from Essex were said to have unlawfully bought wheat and barley at Stortford market, which corn was ‘stayed’. They were bound over by Thomas Leventhorpe and when discharged, their punishment was that 26 bushells of wheat and three of barley were retained by the magistrates to be distributed to the poor.
Magistrates also had to deal with bastardy cases that crossed county boundaries. Anne Crouch of Ware had a bastard child by Anthony Mugge, son of Robert Mugge of Tottenham in Middlesex. As Mugge senior was supposed to have caused his son to leave the area, he was bound over to pay the overseeers of the parish of Ware £4 “to discharge both Mugges.” In the case of a bastard nurse child farmed out by the reputed father, a London mercer, to a Much Hadham couple, the couple had died in 1634 leaving five small children of their own to the mercy of the parish. The parish sought out the mercer to reclaim his child, but he proved difficult to find. Where the father was local, as with James Parrat, the reputed father of a Little Hadham child, he was ordered by the magistrates to pay the local overseers 2/- every Saturday afternoon for 12 years for the child’s maintenance. On appeal, he was allowed to reduce this to 1/6d a week but bound in the sum of £40, which he would forfeit if he refused payment.
To pay for all the additional expenditure during the early 1630s the poor rate in most parishes had to be increased. This sometimes involved a reassessment of the land and wealth of the inhabitants, which is what occurred at Little Munden. On 26 February 1631 a new rate was agreed by which every inhabitant paid 8d for every score of acres he or she held. Thus Thomas Rowley, with 48 acres in the parish paid a total of 2/9d, but the following year, when the rate was raised to 10d a score of acres, paid 3/6d poor rate. Those with very little land paid no more than 2d. These reassessments were useful and relatively fair at the time, but later, since they were classed as “common payments”, they were used by Charles I as the basis for the notorious and much resisted “Ship Money”, which alienated many Hertfordshire people from the King, particularly when sheriffs attempted to collect it every year between 1636 and 1640. They also created problems at the time where inhabitants disputed their assessments, as happened at Sawbridgeworth in 1630.
Even though the grain crisis was over, in the March of 1633 the JPs for the Hundreds of Hertford and Braughing were still reporting to the Privy Council on local conditions. The King was a control freak who liked order and hierarchy, and allowed magistrates to appoint a Provost Marshall to round up the rogues and vagabonds and set up a House of Correction in which to punish them. By then Leventhorpe, Lucy, Dacres, Watts and Thomas Fanshawe of Ware Park, were reporting that the market towns of Hertford, Hoddesdon, Ware and Stortford had plenty of corn of all sorts, their Provost Marshall had apprehended a total of 136 rogues, and 49 children had been apprenticed. More positively, the “weekly pencon to the impotent poor is dulie and carefully continued according to their several necessities.” However, they also commented: “Those that are willing to labour are set on work, those that can, but will not, are sent by us to the House of Correction.” This house was “amply furnished and duly imployed according to instructions”, the governor receiving a quarterly salary from the county. Thus military style officers were used for controlling the wandering poor and special institutions were set up for punishing them.
The people of Bengeo seem to have been more generous than others. In the Churchwardens accounts for 1632-3 it is recorded that they gave 6d to a soldier, who was passing through, and also 6d to an Irishman “for his relief”. In 1633 they levied over £33 on the poor rate, using part of the sum to pay for clothing “for a bastard childe”, for a load of faggots for fuel, for rent for three widows’ houses, and for repairing the almshouse. The Churchwardens in Bennington spent £18 in 1630, the worst year, just over £9 in the following two years, but £30 in 1636, the year that plague hit Hertfordshire. It was not just the official poor rate that helped the poor but also gifts via the church. The same year the parishioners at St Michael’s in Stortford raised £7.5s.7d at their feasts, which was given to the poor in bread and cash and a further £3.12s.9d out of the common plate was given “to diverse poor people visited with the poxe and others sick and lame.” The poor were particularly hit when both the plague and the smallpox infected them at the same time.
However, the people of Braughing were more concerned that bastard children did not become a burden on the parish. To try and avoid this, they established what became known as the poor maids’ marriages fund. Individual wealthy men gave money to the fund and, if it could be proven that a poor wife did not bear a child within the first nine months of marriage, she must be deemed to have been a virgin maid at the time of her marriage and thus could benefit from the fund. Thus Joan, the wife of Edward Smith, who applied to the fund on 31 March 1630, was to be given £1 by the Overseers of the Poor if “she be not delivered of a child betwixt this and the first of July next.” This appears to have been an incentive, as four young married women benefited from the fund between Easter 1632 and Easter 1633 and continued to do so up to the Civil War.
So the local communities in East Hertfordshire dealt reasonably effectively with the grain crisis of 1630-31 and, following the lead of central government, established monthly meetings of local magistrates who were prepared to spend time and money relieving the local impotent poor, finding work for the idle or unemployed, and punishing those who were not from the area and sending them on their way. The aged were looked after, but the young were put to work and the lazy or apparently idle punished. The pauper and illegitimate children probably suffered most, but immorality was punished alongside criminality. All of this followed in the spirit of the Elizabethan Poor Law, but it also reflected the obsessions of Charles I of keeping the poor in their place and in good order. Unfortunately for him, his policies of the later 1630s undid much of the good of the earlier period and came to alienate so many in the shire that few sided with him in the Civil War of the 1640s.
Sources of Reference
The National Archives
State Papers Domestic, Charles I (SP16 various volumes for 1629-34)
Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies
Quarter Sessions Book Volume 2A (QSB2A) folios for 1629-36
Hertford Borough Records (Various Volumes)
Deposited Parish Records D/P including:
17/12/1 Bengeo Account Book
18/5/1 Bennington Churchwardens Accounts
21/5/2 Bishops Stortford Churchwardens Accounts
23/8/1 Braughing Vestry Minutes
29/14/1 Cheshunt Apprenticeship Indentures
71/5/2 Little Munden Rate Book
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