Investigations of a Dog

This is a brief look at some of my work in progress about women in the London saddlery trade in the English Civil War. It’s based on part of my PhD research, but I’m taking it further now. I’ve tried to make this post as accessible as possible, so it goes into background information about London history and explains some basic things. I’ve also included links to the map of early modern London where I know a saddler’s address (if you follow the link, the place will be marked by a blue star on the map). The map dates from the 1560s, but the City inside the walls hadn’t changed too much by the 1640s.

Saddles are not particularly glamourous but they were vitally important for early modern armies. Every cavalryman and dragoon (ie mounted infantry) had to have one. Buying saddles was one of the many necessary expenses of raising and maintaining an army. The New Model Army is the best documented army of the English Civil Wars. The administrative records in the Public Records Office give a fairly complete picture of equipment purchases from April 1645 to April 1646, allowing us to calculate totals and see who supplied what. In this period, the committee responsible for supplying the army bought 9,379 new saddles, and paid for another 500 old saddles to be repaired. There was enough money in the treasury for the suppliers to be paid very quickly. By using an Access database to link records of contracts, deliveries, and payments, I found that saddlers were usually paid in full within a week of delivering their saddles.

Most of these saddles were supplied by 26 named individuals, who were almost certainly all from London. So far, I’ve found evidence for 22 of them being Londoners, with the other 4 being completely unknown. This immediately shows how much London dominated England’s saddlery trade in the 17th century. A contract could be for up to 100 saddles at a time, and record linkage shows that saddles were usually delivered very soon after the contract was formalised, sometimes only a couple of days. It could be that they made an informal agreement with the committee and started work before the contract was signed, but it still looks like they were able to fulfil large contracts very quickly. It seems likely that these saddlers were running relatively large businesses employing several people and/or using sub-contractors, although I haven’t found much definite evidence of how they operated.

When I first looked into this during my PhD, I was quite surprised to find that 4 of these 26 saddlers were women. Now that I know more about women’s history it’s not really as surprising as I first thought. The old kind of feminist women’s history focused on the oppression of women and emphasised the things that women couldn’t do. In the early 1990s women’s history entered a revisionist phase, with people like Amy Louise Erickson looking at the exceptions to oppression and recognising women’s agency. Erickson’s Women and Property in Early Modern England (London, Routledge, 1993) was a big influence on me when I was writing my thesis and helped to make sense of the evidence I found about female saddlers. However, things have moved on again. With his work on women’s property in the 19th century, Alastair Owens is both synthesising these two extremes and trying to move beyond their narrow focus (if I was trying to show off about jargon, this is where I’d use the word “dialectic”). Feminist and revisionist views of women’s property rights were mostly focused on law, but Owens has stressed the other factors which limited the freedom of both women and men to dispose of their property, for example the expectations of society and the needs of the family. Middle class people in the 19th century seem to have placed the need to provide for their children above their own freedom. In theoretical terms, this could be an example of cultural ideology influencing people’s choices. While Erickson (perhaps unintentionally) gave the impression that being widowed was the best thing that could happen to a woman, Owens qualifies this by pointing out that taking on the family business at her husband’s death would be a duty that a widow couldn’t avoid even if she wanted to. This idea has been around in histories of the family for quite a long time (Ralph Houlbrooke mentioned it in The English Family, London, Longman, 1984), but didn’t feature very prominently in feminist or revisionist work on women’s history.

So the most likely (and perhaps only) explanation for women running saddlery businesses is that they were widows who had inherited a going concern from their deceased husbands. There are other possibilities: they might have run these businesses independently when their husbands were alive; they might have invested inherited money in a new business. However, these possibilities are less likely and I haven’t found any definite evidence of them for any of the saddlers. Taking over the business would not necessarily be a new experience for these women. Erickson pointed out that women could play an important part in helping their husbands to run their businesses.

In the City of London (pretty much the same as the area now known as “the City” or “the square mile”; the built up areas outside the City were still part of Middlesex and Surrey, and are usually known as the suburbs), a widow could inherit certain rights of freedom along with her husband’s business. Only people who had been granted the freedom of the City were allowed to run a business in the City, and they were only allowed to employ other freemen or apprentices (although the City’s authority generally didn’t extend into the suburbs). Admission to the freedom was usually gained by apprenticeship (serving at least 7 years with a master who was a freeman of the City) or by patrimony (for legitimate sons born after their father was admitted to the freedom). In either case, admission was gained through one of the livery companies, which were descended from medieval guilds and governed specific trades. A freeman was both a freeman of the City and a freeman of his company. Although they had separate admission ceremonies, in effect you couldn’t have one kind of freedom without the other. Unsurprisingly, the Saddlers’ Company was associated with the saddlery trade. However, the links between the companies and their trades were starting to disappear in the 17th century. In 1614 a legal precedent confirmed the right of freemen of the City to practise any trade, regardless of which company they were members of, although non-freemen were still barred from trading until the 19th century.

The widow of a freeman wasn’t formally admitted to the freedom, but she had a roughly equivalent status which allowed her to continue trading. Apprenticeship records from after the civil war show that female saddlers could take on apprentices, although all of the apprentices were boys. However, women couldn’t advance up the hierarchy of the companies. Their freedom was equivalent to the lowest level of freedom, whereas a man could be promoted and might eventually become the master of the company.That’s the background. Now brief biographies of the women I’m interested in. Figures for saddles supplied and money received are from my old database, constructed from records in the PRO. Details of Company membership were supplied by Eleanor Seymour, archivist of the Saddlers’ Company. Apprenticeships from apprenticeship registers edited by Cliff Webb and published by the Society of Genealogists. Other information from PCC wills and IGI.

Jane Gower:

The best documented (so far). Jane was the widow of John Gower, who was a member of the Saddlers’ Company and traded as a saddler. John was made a liveryman (the next step up from ordinary freeman) of the Saddlers’ Company in 1640. In 1643 and 1644, he was the biggest supplier of saddles to the Earl of Manchester’s army (one of the three armies which was amalgamated into the New Model Army in 1645). He also held the rank of captain in the Earl of Manchester’s infantry regiment. It wasn’t unusual for army officers to have more than one position and to be absent from their commands. John died in late 1644 or early 1645, probably of disease. His will, made in October 1644 and proved in May 1645, made his wife Jane sole executor and left her most of his property. The saddlery business isn’t mentioned as she was left everything not specifically bequeathed to anyone else. Their son, also called John, was to be given £150 when he reached the age of 21. John junior was apparently an only child at this point, although the will provided £100 for any unborn children if Jane was pregnant. There were also small bequests to two apprentices, to be paid to them at the end of their apprenticeships. Jane supplied 180 saddles to the New Model Army, receiving £154.10s. John and Jane lived in the parish of St Catherine Cree, on the east of the City just inside Aldgate, but I haven’t found a street address yet.

Elizabeth Worrall:

Elizabeth Worrall was definitely a widow, but less is known about her. The most likely candidate for her husband is John Worrall who was admitted to the freedom in the Saddlers’ Company in 1632 and promoted to liveryman in 1640. There was a John Worral, son of John and Elizabeth, baptised in St Bride’s Fleet Street in December 1643. Elizabeth supplied 300 saddles to the New Model Army and was paid £247.10s. There is a will of a widow called Elizabeth Wormell from 1681 but I don’t think it’s the same person (variations in spelling and pronunciation mean that it wouldn’t have been impossible).

Elizabeth Betts:

Elizabeth Betts was a widow, but not the widow of a freeman. Nothing is known about her husband, but at some point she was prosecuted by the Saddlers’ Company for trading as a saddler in the City when she wasn’t the widow of a freeman (this is a bit vague because I got it second hand from Ben Coates’s book on London in the civil war; I’ll know more details when I can get to Guildhall Library and look at the Saddlers’ Company records myself). Elizabeth was one of the biggest suppliers of saddles to the New Model Army, selling them 500 at a cost of £327.10s.

Margaret Castle:

I know even less about Margaret Castle (possibly also known as Mary). The archivist of the Saddlers’ Company couldn’t find any records of any man who might have been her husband. The apprenticeship records show a Thomas Castell taking on an apprentice in 1665 (possibly a son or other relative but too late to be a husband). All I know is that Margaret Castle sold 100 saddles to the New Model Army, making £75.

There’s a lot more to it than this, which I might talk about in a future post. For example I haven’t said much about the male saddlers, or about supplying other armies, or what happened after the end of the first civil war. There’s also a lot more that I need to find out about individual saddlers, about the trade in general, the workings of the Saddlers’ Company, and social and economic history in general. When/if I present papers on this, people are likely to ask me about what these saddlers’ political and religious views might have been. So far I don’t know, except for John Gower who was apparently committed enough to serve as a parliamentarian army officer (although it’s not certain how much time he spent with his company or whether he was involved in any fighting). Finding out more will involve looking through parish records, petitions, and records of the City government. It would also be interesting to find out more about women’s involvement in the government of the City and its parishes. The City’s constitution gave certain voting rights to freemen and liverymen, but I suspect that these weren’t transferred to their widows. However, Keith Lindley (Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London, Scolar Press, Brookfield VT, 1997, p. 272) mentioned that some parish vestries gave some women limited rights in the running of the parish.

Bibliography

1. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
2. Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge: London, 1993).
3. Ralph Houlbrooke, The English family, 1450-1700 (Longman: London, 1984).
4. John R, Kellett, ‘The Breakdown of Gild and Corporation Control Over Handicraft and Retail Trade in London’, Economic History Review, 2nd series 10 (1958), pp. 381-94.
5. Keith Lindley, Popular politics and religion in Civil War London (Scolar Press: Brookfield VT, 1997).
6. Alastair Owens and Jon Stobart (eds.), Urban Fortunes (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2000).
7. Cliff Webb (ed.), London livery company apprenticeship registers (Society of Genealogists: London, 1996).