Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.

Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.

First of all, another possible female saddler. Sarah Rawlinson was the widow of Nathaniel Rawlinson, who had some huge contracts to supply the New Model Army. I haven’t found a will for him yet, but Sarah’s will says that he left her all his estate. So far I don’t know whether she carried on running the business.

Most saddlers seem to have had good relationships with their wives. It’s not unusual for a testator to name his wife as sole executrix and leave her the residue of his estate. Not William Deacon. He instructed his executors to make sure that his wife didn’t embezzle anything from his estate and to deny her any legacies other than her customary widow’s third if she didn’t co-operate!

William Chevall left only one shilling to his niece, saying that he would have left her more if she hadn’t got married without his permission!

Thomas Harrison, who lived in the parish of St Botolph’s Aldgate, wasn’t a major player in supplying armies with saddles during the First Civil War, but he was very wealthy. His will shows that in 1650 he had shares in two ships, and was due £700 for one of them. He had loaned £300 to parliament to support the war effort, and left £100 towards his own funeral expenses. He also seems to have had a feckless son-in-law. This is the only saddler’s will I’ve come across which actually mentions saddles.

The Pease family were well known in the saddlery trade. William senior and William junior both became master of the London Saddlers Company. They also controlled a property empire in London and the surrounding counties, so their saddlery business might not even have been their largest source of income. William senior had nine children at the time he made his will, and divided his freehold, copiehold, and leasehold lands between his daughters as well as his sons. Many testators were confident of their own salvation, but William junior was more confident than most, expecting “a crowne of glory in the Kingdome of Heaven amongst the elect”.

John Munnings, one of the biggest harness makers, was unusual in that he didn’t bother commending his soul to god at the start of his will. He divided most of his estate, including leases on various property, between his wife and daughter.

Richard Beighton‘s will reveals that he was born in Warwickshire, something which would be almost impossible to find out from other sources. He also held lands in Middlesex and Hertfordshire, and had a cousin called Alice Cooper.

Nicholas Collard wasn’t a saddler but his complete will happened to be on the same page as one that I was interested in so I transcribed it anyway. He died in debt and his executors refused to carry out their duties, so administration was granted to his chief creditor instead. (I’m quite pleased with myself for understanding enough Latin to work that bit out.)

Feeding an early-modern army was a major logistical problem. The New Model Army had a centralised supply system to take care of most things (weapons, armour, clothing, horses, saddles) but food was a big exception. Aryeh Nusbacher has noted that the quantities of food supplied through centralised purchasing were far too small to keep the army fed (see “Civil Supply in the Civil War”, English Historical Review (115, 2000, pp. 145-60), which summarises some of the most important points in his PhD thesis). His answer to this problem is that food was mostly supplied by private victuallers who brought food from London and sold it directly to the soldiers. This makes a lot of sense, because compared to the population of London (estimates for the civil war period are usually between 200,000 and 300,000), feeding an army of 20,000 was not such a big deal. In contrast, most of the areas where the army campaigned were unlikely to have enough food supplies to support the army. Ben Coates (The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50, 2004, ISBN: 0754601048, pp. 91-2) questioned this view, partly because Ian Archer pointed out that it would have been difficult for the victuallers to find the army when it was on the move. Having spent years studying military operations and logistics I would suggest the opposite: it would have been difficult to miss an English Civil War field army.

Victuallers setting out from London would have known at least which general direction to go in. Nusbacher suggests that they used existing road networks wherever possible, and shows that before the war carriers had well established routes and timetables. There is no surviving evidence that the authorities explicitly informed victuallers of the last known position of the army, but it’s at least possible that they did. It would certainly have been in their interest to make the provision of supplies as easy as possible. Commissaries in the Eastern Association almost certainly arranged in advance to buy horses from the public in certain towns on certain days. The authorities would have had a good idea of the whereabouts of the army because Fairfax, Cromwell, and the Commissioners Residing in the Army were in regular contact with Parliament and the Committee of Both Kingdoms. Even if this information was not officially made available, word most likely got around. There were many newsbooks and pamphlets containing the latest news of the army (or claiming to — not all were entirely accurate!).

Since the army needed a constant supply of food, victuallers could probably expect to meet other victuallers and carriers who were on the way back to London. There were many other people besides victuallers coming and going from the army. Official convoys were often sent out with money, gunpowder, weapons and other supplies, and usually strong escorts of cavalry. Remounts bought from the Smithfield horse dealers regularly had to be taken to the army, as did impressed soldiers. Communication between Parliament and the army commanders depended on messengers carrying letters backwards and forwards. All these sources of information would help to ensure that the victuallers were going in roughly the right direction.

When they got closer to the army there would be many more clues to help them track it down. It’s very difficult to miss such a large concentration of men, vehicles, and animals. The full establishment of the New Model Army was 14,400 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, 1,000 dragoons, and an artillery train with 30 guns, 132 wagons, and just over 1,000 draught horses. With officers and artillery personnel that comes to over 21,000 men and 8,000 horses. In practice the infantry never reached full strength during the First Civil War and were sometimes at not much more than half strength, but the cavalry and dragoons were usually closer to their establishment. Even 10,000 men and 4,000 horses would be quite conspicuous. Moving a force that size along unmetalled roads would leave very obvious tracks, and local people could hardly fail to notice an army in the vicinity. Scouts often asked country people for information about the movements of armies and preparations for campaigns (see The Journal of Sir Samuel Luke, Oxfordshire Record Society, volumes 29, 31 and 33 for many examples).

There was a good chance of making contact with the army because units would usually have been quartered over a wide area. While infantry tended to be relatively concentrated (although even when kept close together 7,000 or more men necessarily take up a significant amount of space) mounted units would be more widely dispersed. Where evidence is available it appears that cavalry usually followed a rule of one troop (a unit of up to 100 men plus officers in the New Model Army) per village, which means up to 70 villages would be needed to support the New Model cavalry and dragoons. Most of the detailed evidence comes from units in their home areas. Less information is available for armies on campaign near the enemy, and it’s likely that they might have quartered closer together if there was an imminent threat from an enemy army. Nevertheless, the quarters of such a large mounted force could have spread over several miles. Furthermore, cavalry spent much of their time patrolling the areas surrounding the army in order to locate the enemy and protect friendly quarters from raids. There was a good chance that victuallers would meet cavalry patrols on the road. It’s even possible (although I have absolutely no evidence) that patrols were sent out to guide and protect victuallers, since they were vital to the survival of the army.

For all these reasons, I consider it unlikely that victuallers had much trouble finding the New Model Army. A strong counter argument is that civil war generals often didn’t know where the enemy was. The Edgehill campaign is the most well known example, but I tend to think scouting on both sides had improved by 1645. Most of the points I’ve made here are conjectures and are not very well supported by definite evidence, but I think it at least gives an idea of the scale of seventeenth-century warfare and some of the logistical issues involved.

Bibliography

1. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
2. Aryeh J. S. Nusbacher, ‘Civil Supply in the Civil War’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), pp. 145-60.
3. I. G. Philip (ed.), Journal of Sir Samuel Luke (1950), 29, 31 and 33.

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).