People, places and identities

Themes in British social and cultural history, 1700s–1980s

Alan Kidd, Melanie Tebbutt, Alan Kidd, Melanie Tebbutt

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780719090356
• eBook ISBN: 9781526107589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book of essays on British social and cultural history since the eighteenth century draws attention to relatively neglected topics including personal and collective identities, the meanings of place, especially locality, and the significance of cultures of association. Themes range from rural England in the eighteenth century to the urbanizing society of the nineteenth century; from the Home Front in the First World War to voluntary action in the welfare state; from post 1945 civic culture to the advice columns of teenage magazines and the national press. Various aspects of civil society connect these themes notably: the different identities of place, locality and association that emerged with the growth of an urban environment during the nineteenth century and the shifting landscape of twentieth-century public discourse on social welfare and personal morality. It is of interest that several of the essays take Manchester or Lancashire as their focus.

1

Administrative practices and the ‘middling sort’: place, practice and identity in eighteenth-century rural England

Alistair Mutch

One of the quintessential sites for a particular form of English identity is the country churchyard. Here the social structure of the village is preserved in death with, for the eighteenth century, the poorer villagers being notable by their absence. The surviving headstones mark the resting places of the more prosperous, those we have come to know as the ‘middling sort’.¹ In the Vale of Belvoir on the Leicestershire/Nottinghamshire border there was a particularly strong tradition in the mid to late nineteenth century of finely carved slate gravestones.² When these are compared to the records of parish office holding there is a considerable correlation with those who held the office of churchwarden. For example, at Screveton, Pevsner and Williamson note a particularly fine example of a slate headstone with masonic emblems by Wood of Bingham.³ William Gibson, who is commemorated by the stone, was a churchwarden from 1795 to 1801. In another Nottinghamshire churchyard, Langar, is a Grade 2 listed headstone to Gervas Howe who died in 1783. He, too, was a long-serving churchwarden. The cluster of family headstones commemorating the Howes lies close to the south porch of the church, but this is as far as our churchwardens get, for the interior of churches is reserved for the memorials to incumbents and landowners. However, churchwardens leave their marks here in other ways. In Langar it is in an inscription on one of the beams supporting the roof of the nave, which associates William Wells and Henry Wright as churchwardens with the re-roofing of the nave in 1750. At the west end of another church, that at East Bridgford, is a series of tablets bearing the details of charitable donations to the parish, including one recording:

Mr JOHN WILSON bequeathed by will dated Jan^r 20 1792 to JOHN WILKINSON & Jno MILLINGTON Churchwardens and their successors in the same office, the sum of Forty Pounds the interest arising therefrom he directed to be given in Bread yearly on the 12th of January to the poor of this Parish. Mr THOS HOLLAND Bequeathed by will to JOHN WILKINSON and HENRY STOKES, churchwardens and their successors in the same office the sum of 40 pounds. The interest arising therefrom to be given to the poor of this parish at the discretion of the Churchwardens Jan^r 1st 1828.

Similar plaques and headstones could be found in many rural churches, so much so that they fade into the background, being part of the taken-for-granted furniture. This chapter seeks to bring them into sharper relief by using them to tell us something about the nature of the ‘middling sort’ in eighteenth-century rural England. The work of Henry French has shown the importance of parish office holding in the identity of the parish elite. He notes that ‘there can be little doubt either that parish office was the administrative experience par excellence of the “middling”, or that it reinforced certain values’.⁴ However, he tells us very little about the content of this experience. By contrast, Keith Snell has explored the role of the parish overseer in some detail, albeit for the nineteenth century. This is part of an agenda to ‘infuse cultural meaning into administrative history, to extend such history to show how it has many cultural and social causes and ramifications’.⁵ In this chapter, I seek to show, drawing upon archival and printed sources, that the practices of parish administration, specifically those associated with the office of churchwarden, reproduced and reinforced a particular form of authority. That form of authority was very much a personal one shaped and guided by custom. So, the East Bridgford bequest is one to personally named wardens, rather than to a corporate body. This was a form of accountability which rested very much on the personal character of the office holder and, in this, reproduced a very Anglican form of authority. That is, while the Church of England had a strongly hierarchical form of authority, as exemplified in the figure of the bishop, it was one which also allowed a considerable degree of autonomy in practice.⁶ The incumbent holding his benefice as a freehold was subject to little effective discipline in practice and the same could be said to be true of the churchwardens. This reinforces a particularly English focus on character, as opposed to system or education, in the formation of leadership.⁷ This discussion, therefore supports that of French on the importance of gentility as a status to be aspired to.

Records of accountability

The discussion presented here is based on two types of sources. At its core is a systematic analysis of the surviving churchwardens’ records from 20 parishes in the deanery of Bingham, Nottinghamshire.⁸ This area was selected for analysis because of its largely rural character in the eighteenth century. Lying to the south of Nottingham, it was affected by the industrial development of that town with the growth of framework knitting later in the century.⁹ However, it remained largely agrarian, with only small towns at Bingham and Radcliffe on Trent. Some of the pastoral land close to the Trent was an early target of enclosures to support stock rearing, but much of the land lay in open fields until the second half of the century. Even with the enclosure movement, agrarian practices in the area remained conservative.¹⁰ Likewise, the religious complexion of the area was overwhelmingly Anglican, with Methodism only starting to make limited inroads at the end of the period.¹¹ This makes it a good area to study the nature of administrative practices that might obtain in rural parishes, shielded as it was from urban or commercial influences. This study was guided by the nature of practices to be examined, rather than by the survival of records. The parishes all belonged to the same administrative unit of the church and so offered the possibility of transfer of practices. In many other studies, which have focused on rich investigations of specific parishes, much has been guided by the availability of records.¹² However, this means that we are unsure about how representative such parishes are of wider practices. Examining a set of contiguous parishes, as Pitman did for Norfolk for an earlier period, allows us to draw some conclusions about how common certain practices were in the local area.¹³ The disadvantage of selecting this focus on one connected group of parishes is that we are at the mercy of the survival of records. Of the 55 parishes in the Deanery, only 22 useable sets of papers survived and very few of these were continuous runs. In addition, very little record of any formal vestries survives, with the records being overwhelmingly in the form of sets of accounts. This body of material enabled some useful conclusions to be drawn, pointing in particular to the personal form of accountability noted above, but the limitations created by the form of the records and the local focus of the investigation need to be corrected by the use of other forms of evidence.

That form of evidence is the surviving and published diaries of the period. The most famous of these is the diary of ‘Parson Woodforde’.¹⁴ Incumbent of Weston Longville in Norfolk from 1776 to 1803, these diaries are famous for their detail, especially of Woodforde’s eating habits! Their meticulous recording of the mundane details of everyday life suggests that they might be a valuable source of information on parish life, specifically on interactions with parish officers. They have been published in full and an analysis of them for details of parish life helps to supplement the findings drawn from Bingham. Of even more value, however, is another published diary, that of Thomas Turner of East Hoathly in Sussex.¹⁵ Turner, a shopkeeper, was both a meticulous diary keeper and a conscientious parish officer. His diary takes us into the world of the vestry and provides a valuable secular counterpoint to Woodforde’s clerical concerns. These two major sources have been supplemented with the other published eighteenth-century diaries, mainly from clerics, that are used in the major works of church history of the period.¹⁶ Of course, there are many limitations to diaries as a source. They are inevitably selective in what they cover and many are of the form of commonplace books or journals, rather than diaries. In addition, many show the marks of retrospective completion. However, in what they record, or perhaps more importantly don’t record, they give us an insight into priorities, as well as, sometimes, content which complements the material drawn from the accounts. In the discussion that follows, therefore, the evidence from the diaries is interwoven with the analysis of the accounts in order to explore whether the patterns found in Bingham were of wider relevance. A brief outline of the key findings from this analysis is presented before some key themes are selected for further discussion.

Practices of accountability

On the 20 April 1778 Woodforde notes in his diary, ‘I sent a note to the Gentlemen at the Heart at their Easter meeting, nominating M. Burton my Churchwarden.’¹⁷ This brief note encapsulates much of the ‘ideal type’ of the selection of parish officers – the meeting at Easter and the selection of two churchwardens, one for the incumbent and one for the people. In East Hoathly Turner records a clear pattern for the selection of parish officers: churchwardens and the overseer of the poor at Easter and surveyors for the upkeep of roads in the parish in December. He does not mention the other parish officer, the constable, perhaps because this was regarded as of much lower status and was the office most likely to be occupied by those below the rank of farmer. In the hierarchy of office the churchwarden was at the apex, although in many cases the role was blurred with other functions, notably the care of the poor. The main functions were the maintenance of church discipline, the care of the fabric of the church and the support of the incumbent in the provision of materials (such as those for communion). However, in many cases these functions overlapped with others. Many churchwardens’ accounts in Bingham record matters such as the provision for the poor, most notably in the supply of materials for the poor to work on. This was taken furthest in the parish of Shelford, where from 1729 the separate sets of accounts were replaced with one unified set under the control of a ‘parish officer’ who combined the roles of churchwarden, overseer and surveyor. Here, too, accounts were presented every six months. This was atypical, but it reminds us that it is dangerous to assume that the ‘typical’ pattern as laid down in works such as Tate obtained everywhere.¹⁸ A closer examination of practices across a particular set of parishes and over time enables us to test this pattern.

For Tate, the post-Reformation church settled on a pattern of annual office holding, with two wardens being selected at a vestry of the substantial inhabitants at Easter. Although not specifically laid down in the legislation, by custom one of the wardens represented and was selected by the incumbent, the other by the people. They served for a year and presented their accounts to the meeting in the following year. They were responsible for getting agreement to the setting of a church rate, if needed, to cover expenditure, and for its collection. They were confirmed in office by the archdeacon at his half-yearly visitation, which they were required to attend. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt
• 1 Administrative practices and the ‘middling sort’: place, practice and identity in eighteenth-century rural England: Alistair Mutch
• 2 Local history enthusiasts: English county historical societies since the nineteenth century: Alan Kidd
• 3 Memorial mania: remembering and forgetting Sir Robert Peel: Terry Wyke
• 4 Fifty years ahead of its time? The provident dispensaries movement in Manchester, 1871–85: Martin Hewitt
• 5 Daddy, what did you find to laugh about in the Great War? The cotton cartoons of Sam Fitton: Alan Fowler
• 6 Voluntary action in the ‘welfare state’: the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child Pat Thane
• 7 The continuing tradition of civic pride: municipal culture in post-war Manchester: Peter Shapely
• 8 From ‘marriage bureau’ to ‘points of view’: changing patterns of advice in teenage magazines: Mirabelle, 1956–77: Melanie Tebbutt
• 9 ‘Hoping you’ll give me some guidance about this thing called money’: the Daily Mirror and personal finance, c. 1960–81: Dilwyn Porter
• Index