A couple of weeks ago I posted about a building (or buildings) called the White Bear in Cornhill, London. This post is about one of the people who lived and worked there. It starts with the same entry in the list of horses contributed to the Earl of Essex’s army (TNA: PRO SP 28/131 part 3 f. 55r, 16 August 1642):

Valentine Stuckly of the white Beare in Cornwall vint[ner] listed one browne bay geldinge, his rider John Courtnye armed wth Carabine a Case of pistolls a buffe Coate and a sword valued in all at £21

I’ve found that his name was spelled lots of different ways, but he seems to have preferred Valentine Stuckey. This narrative of his life is still hypothetical because the record linkage isn’t absolutely certain. I might well have conflated details of two or more men with the same name, but what I’ve written seems probable, and at the very least it makes a good story.

Let’s start in the parish of St Clement Danes in the western suburbs of London. The parish registers record these events (I’ve taken all baptisms, marriages and burials from IGI unless otherwise stated):

• 27 Feb 1602: Androw Stucky married Elsabeth Boyse
• 24 Sep 1609: Vallantyne Stukye son of Androw Stukye baptised
• 18 Nov 1610: Androw Stukye son of Androw Stukye baptised
• 15 Oct 1617: John Stucky son of Andrew Stucky baptised

That could be our man baptised in 1609. Of course it might not be, but the case gets stronger as it goes along. Next there’s a marriage licence:

May 26 1637 Valentine Stuckey, of St Michael’s, Cornhill, Linen Draper, Bachelor, 27, and Anne Cowrtman, of St Bennet’s Gracechurch, Spinster, 21, daughter of Andrew Cowrtman, of the same, Linen Draper, who consents; at St Leonard’s, Bromley, Middlesex

He’s the right age to have been baptised in 1609, and he lives in St Michael Cornhill, so it’s looking good. The only problem is he’s a linen draper, not a vintner, but that’s not necessarily a problem at all. George Willingham was described in the horse list as a painter stainer, but that was his livery company and he was actually trading as a merchant.

Luckily the parish registers of St Michael Cornhill were published in print in the nineteenth centur and are now on the internet archive, so I don’t have to rely on IGI for this bit.

• p. 127, bap 8 May 1638: ‘Wallentin Stupke [Valentine Stuckey], son of Wallentin Stvpke [Valentine Stuckey] & Anne his wife’
• p. 129, bap 26 July 1639: ‘Edward Stukee [Stuckey], son of Wallentine Stvkee [Valentine Stuckey]& Anne his wife’
• p. 130, bap 6 Aug 1640: ‘Elsabeth Stokke [Stuckey], dau. of Wallintine Stokke [Valentine Stuckey] & Anne his wife’
• p. 237, bur 28 Dec 1640: ‘Edward Stukee, son of Walletine Stukee [Valentine Stuckey] & Anne his wife’
• p. 131, bap 13 Sep 1641: ‘Anddro Stokkee [Andrew Stuckey], son of Waulertin Stokkee [Valentine Stuckey] & Anne his wife’
• p. 132, bap 2 Sep 1642: ‘Ann Stkke [Stuckey], dau. of Waulintine Stkke [Valentine Stuckey] & Ann his wife’

So they lived in St Michael Cornhill for a few years, including the date covered by the horse list, and had at least five children, at least one of whom died in infancy. Note the variety of weird spellings. If the nineteenth-century editor hadn’t added regular versions I probably wouldn’t have found this information so easily, or at all.

On 16 April 1649 a Vallentine Stuckye married Mary Charlewood at St Clement Danes. Valentine junior who was baptised in 1638 is still much too young to be getting married so I’m assuming this is his father’s second marriage. It would help if I knew whether this groom was a bachelor or widower. This is the kind of crucial information that’s often entered in original parish registers but routinely missing from IGI. The other problem is that I can’t find a burial for Anne anywhere. She definitely wasn’t buried in St Michael Cornhill, but it’s hard to be sure about other parishes because IGI seems to have particularly poor coverage for burials. But my hypothesis is supported by a couple of other entries for St Michael Cornhill:

• p. 137, bap 6 July 1650: ‘Daniell, son of Valentine Stuckey & Marye his wife’
• p. 243, bur 8 July 1650: ‘Daniell, son of Valentine Stuckey & Marye his wife’

The fact that the baby was called Daniel could have some significance later…

In 1652 some forfeited land of the Earl of Derby at Isleworth was given to a Valentine Stuckey (Lancashire Record Office). On 17 September 1662 Samuel Pepys mentioned meeting ‘Mr. Stucky, of the Wardrobe’.

Meanwhile the surviving children from Valentine’s first marriage were growing up. Here’s another marriage licence:

March 13 [1664] John Johnson, of St Martin’s in the Fields, Middlesex, Carpenter, Bachelor, about 23, & Anne Stuckey, Spinster, about 22, daughter of Valentine Stuckey, of St Anne Blackfriars linen draper, who consents; at St Benedict Pauls Wharf

This pretty much has to be the Anne who was baptised in 1642. It also shows that Valentine had moved away from Cornhill by 1664.

Now let’s move on to Mary’s family. Daniel Charlwood, a gentleman of Egham in Surrey, made his will on 31 August 1671, and it was proved on 12 April 1672 (I haven’t transcribed this one yet, and the PDF has a page missing, but it does contain the information I needed). He left huge tracts of land to his grandson Charlwood Lawton and his daughter Mary Stuckey. This makes it very likely that she’s the Mary Charlewood who married Valentine in 1649. There were also bequests to Mary’s daughters, Jane and Hannah. The link with Egham is an important lead. Charllwood Stuckey, son of Valentine and Mary Stuckey, was baptised there on 17 February 1672. There seems to be a family tradition of the daughters keeping the surname going by turning it into a christian name.

Valentine made his own will on 20 September 1687 and it was proved on 8 March 1688. He didn’t give an address but described himself as ‘Cittizen and Vintner of London’, which is clearly referring to his company membership. He made his wife Mary sole executor and residual legatee. The will also mentions these people:

• sons:
  • John Stuckey
  • Charlewood Stuckey
• daughters:
  • Jane Berenger
  • Hannah Stuckey
• relationship not stated:
  • Elizabeth Daintry
  • Anne Johnson
  • Susan Noggins

I haven’t found any other record of John, but Jane and Hannah tie in with Daniel Charlwood’s will, and Charlewood Stuckey was born after it was made. Anne Johnson is probably the daughter from Valentine’s first marriage who was married in 1664. Elizabeth could be the daughter who was baptised in 1640, but I’m not sure. Susan Noggins is a complete mystery. Valentine junior must have been dead by this time, and I’ve found no record of him after his baptism (unless I’m wrong about the record linkage and this is actually his will, but I don’t think that’s likely because he was too young to marry Mary Charlewood).

The really interesting things about the will is the revelation that Valentine was owed £5,700 by Charles II. At first I thought he must have been fabulously wealthy, but actually he had already assigned £3,800 of it to his own creditors which suggests that his financial situation wasn’t too good. He carefully divided the remainder among his family, but did they have any hope of getting it?

Mary Stuckey made her will on 26 November 1688, when she was living in St Martin in the Fields, and it was proved on 3 January 1689. She didn’t mention the royal debt but named her children as Charlewood Stuckey, Hannah Stuckey and Jane Berenger, married to Simon Berenger. She left lands in Egham and in Middlesex. Charlewood was made executor but as he was a minor, Gilbert Wharton was appointed as overseer. Hanna Stuckey married John Wharton on 4 February 1689 at Saint Bride Fleet Street. There’s a will from 1692 for Gilbert Wharton, apothecary of St Paul Covent Garden, which mentions a son called John.

That’s not the end of the story, because the Calendar of Treasury Books shows that Charles II’s debt continued to cause trouble for the next generation of the family. Charlwood Stuckey petitioned the Lord High Treasurer on 23 December 1702 asking for payment, but nothing much seems to have happened. In 1714 there was another petition from ‘Charlewood Stuckey, son of Valentine Stuckey, linen draper to Charles II, praying employment in the Queen’s service on the merit of a debt of 20,074l. 14s. 3d. to his father stated in the Wardrobe and in view of the necessity of selling an estate of 400l. per an. to pay his father’s debts’. Charlewood died without being paid, and in September 1723 his widow Sarah sent in another petition, which was rejected. Charlewood and Sarah had at least two children (again with some weird spellings in the parish register):

• Elizabeth Steeckley daughter of Cheriwood and Sarah Steeckley born 27 Apr 1705 and baptised 15 May 1705 at St. James, Westminster
• Charlwood Stuckey son of Charlwood Stuckey baptised 13 May 1708 St Luke Chelsea

So that’s as much as I know about the long life of Valentine Stuckey. There’s a kind of symmetry here: by contributing to Parliament’s army in 1642 he helped to bring down Charles I, but in turn he was ruined by Charles II.

Nick Poyntz is right about the serendipity of digital searches. This weekend chasing up a fairly minor point for my book took me on a web search adventure with lots of interesting tangents. It all started with an entry in the lists of people who contributed horses to the Earl of Essex’s army, dated 16 August 1642 (TNA: PRO SP 28/131 part 3 f. 55r):

Valentine Stuckly of the white Beare in Cornwall vint[ner] listed one browne bay geldinge, his rider John Courtnye armed wth Carabine a Case of pistolls a buffe Coate and a sword valued in all at £21

I’ve always assumed that it means Cornhill in London, not the county of Cornwall, but some proof would be nice. These days names like the White Bear are associated with pubs, but in the seventeenth century pretty much any kind of business premises could be identified with a sign like this. Kathleen M. O’Brien has compiled a list of sign names from seventeenth century tradesmen’s tokens, including ones which combine a colour and an animal. The list mentions three White Bears, but not in Cornhill. It seems to be a very common name: the horse lists also include White Bears in Bread Street, Fenchurch Street, Distaff Lane and Lombard Street. The one in Lombard Street apparently later became the famous Lloyd’s coffee house.

The earliest record I can find of a White Bear in Cornhill is in the early 1620s, when the printer Thomas Jenner was based there (and he sometimes spelt it Cornewall). By 1624 he had moved to the Royal Exchange, at the west end of Cornhill on the north side of the street. The exchange was destroyed by fire in 1666 and 1838 but the current version was rebuilt on the same site and with the same layout. Jenner still sometimes called his new premises the White Bear, or sometimes just gave his address as the ‘South Entrance of the Royal Exchange’ (perhaps it was on the very spot where Agent Provocateur now stands). Jenner stayed at the exchange until his death in 1673, after which John Garrett took over the business and premises.

The idea that Jenner moved out of the original White Bear could be supported by an Ordinance of Parliament passed in 1649, which lists property confiscated from the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey. Under Birchin Lane in the parish of St Michael Cornhill it lists:

George Dawson, for the White Bear, Two shillings six pence.

Birchen Lane runs from Lombard street in the south to Cornhill in the north, coming out just to the east of the exchange. Even if this building wasn’t actually on the street called Cornhill, it was in the parish of St Michael Cornhill and in Cornhill ward, so could plausibly be described as ‘the White Bear in Cornhill’. And as I found with George Willingham, early-modern London addresses could be quite fuzzy. The entrance of the exchange would probably have been a more desirable location, which could explain why Thomas Jenner would want to move his business around the corner.

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary for Saturday 8 October 1664, ‘after dinner abroad, and among other things contracted with one Mr. Bridges, at the White Bear on Cornhill, for 100 pieces of Callico to make flaggs’. From internal evidence it’s not clear whether Bridges had his premises there or whether they met in a tavern to discuss the deal, but it doesn’t seem to be Thomas Jenner’s print shop. Specifying ‘on Cornhill’ could imply that it’s not the same as the White Bear in Birchen Lane (unless it was on the corner), or it could be referring to the actual hill rather than the street named after it.

A collection of documents in the Buckingamshire archives includes a marriage settlement from 1781 which mentions the ‘Pensilvania and Carolina Coffee House (formerly the White Bear) in Birchin Lane, Cornhill, London’.

That’s all I’ve found so far. There could be up to three buildings called the White Bear in the same parish at the same time, and there was almost certainly one other than Jenner’s new address at the exchange. If only they’d had geocoding in the seventeenth century…

Coming soon: a brief biography of Valentine Stuckly, which will raise as many questions as it answers. Also on Sunday 10 July I’ll be posting an interview with Andrew Hickey about his experiences with self-publishing.

[Just had an exhausting week in the archives but I found this old half-finished post on my hard drive:]

This week [actually last November] I’ve been reading Wallington’s World by Paul Seaver (probably no relation to the unknown stuntman). It’s all about Nehemiah Wallington (not to be confused with Nehemiah Wharton), a mid-seventeenth-century London wood turner who wrote lots of notebooks, some of which have survived. The notebooks are mostly about Wallington’s puritan faith, but they also include lots of incidental details of his life and family. Seaver analysed the surviving books to see what they could tell us about London tradesmen, puritanism and the English Civil War. Today his approach looks quite dated, but maybe that’s not surprising for a book published in 1985. In the introduction there’s a lot about “inward thoughts” and Wallington’s “mental world”. Although there’s no direct mention of Collingwood, his idealism seems to be a big influence on Seaver’s assumptions: that historians can and should find out what people in the past “really” thought. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning had already been published five years earlier, but I don’t think it was required reading for historians at this time. Greenblatt discussed the difference between inward and outward selves, but also argued that the very idea of the authentic inner man was constructed through writing. Even writing a private diary is an external act which doesn’t necessarily give us access to the author’s mind. Dan Todman pointed out in The Great War: Myth and Memory that a person’s memories can change every time they’re rehearsed. Therefore the act of writing down our experiences can influence our memories of them rather than just neutrally recording them.

In my forthcoming book I’m trying to get away from worrying about what people “really” thought by concentrating almost entirely on external actions (which includes speech and writing). I’m using horses as a case study to show how material objects and actions could be used to construct parliamentarian identities, arguing that it was actions which made the civil wars happen and that opinions without actions aren’t all that important, even if we could find out about them. Wallington makes an interesting case study here because his writings are all about the theory and practice of puritanism. By traditional definitions he was “a Puritan”. But he doesn’t seem to have done very much to help the parliamentary war effort other than paying his taxes. This was partly because he didn’t have much spare money and partly because he seems to have lacked the confidence and social skills to play an active role, but his writings don’t tend to advocate violent revolution. His puritanism seems to have been orthodox, conservative and introspective. While he criticized the cavaliers, he wrote that parliamentary armies were just as bad, and used phrases like “this uncivil war” and “world turned upside down”. His use of the latter phrase and his criticism of Independents and sectaries are surprisingly similar to John Taylor, whose writings were often conservative and favourable to the King. As Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out, trying to classify writers as royalist or parliamentarian can be tricky and counter-productive. Wallington’s writings also suggest that puritanism wasn’t a straightforward cause of the English Civil War. Although Wallington eventually represented himself as assured of elect status, he never represented himself as God’s instrument in the way that Oliver Cromwell did. He took an obsessive interest in God’s punishment of sinners, but apart from a few passive-aggressive letters to his neighbours he didn’t take much direct action against sinners himself. Wallington’s notebooks make quite a contrast with militant preacher Stephen Marshall’s bloodthirsty sermon Meroz Cursed, in which he insisted that everyone had to fight against the enemies of the true church or be cursed.

[Apparently I was going to write something about gender and sexuality here but I can't remember what. Half my readers will be disappointed and the other half will be relieved!]

Party on, Nehemiah…

1. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, New edition. (2005).
2. Stephen Marshall, Meroz cursed, or, A sermon preached to the honourable House of Commons, at their late solemn fast, Febr. 23, 1641 by Stephen Marshall … (London, 1642).
3. Paul S Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-century London (London, 1985).
4. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2007).

I’ve just started to appreciate another advantage of taking digital photos of documents in the National Archives (a.k.a. PRO): comparing original signatures. That’s not exactly a revolutionary discovery, but I actually used it this week and it was quite exciting. I’ve mentioned John Gower before in posts about my work on saddlers. I had two collections of facts which I thought probably refer to the same person, but I hadn’t conclusively proved it.

The archives of the London Saddler’s Company show that a John Gower was a freeman of the company, and was admitted to the livery in 1640. The will of John Gower, citizen and saddler of London, was written on 18 October 1644 and proved by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 9 May 1645. This will mentions that John’s wife was called Jane, and that they lived in the parish of Saint Katherine Creechurch. Jane Gower went on to sell saddles to the New Model Army in 1645.

Financial records of the Essex county committee and the committee of the Eastern Association at Cambridge show that they bought lots of saddles from a John Gower. He is sometimes described as Captain Gower, and in at least one case money was received on his behalf by his ensign. It’s quite likely that this is the same Gower who commanded a company in the Earl of Manchester’s foot regiment.

On the balance of probabilities and assumed that these records all related to the same man but I wasn’t absolutely certain. This week I was sorting out some photos from my last research trip, including warrants issued by the Essex committee (SP 28/227). I noticed that John Gower had signed receipts on some of them. I already had photos of his original will (PROB 10/648) so it was easy to compare them.

This is a receipt for money for saddles bought by the Essex committee:

And this is part of the will:

They look pretty similar to me so now I’m fairly certain that it is the same man. The signature on the will looks very shaky, presumably because he was terminally ill when he wrote it.

As well as the practical benefits of record linkage, this is also a way of connecting with the reality of the past. If the same signature appears on two different documents belonging to different organisations and created at different times, the most parsimonious explanation is that John Gower was a real person who signed the documents in the course of his life. His home must have been destroyed in the great fire, if not before or after, and as far as I know none of the saddles that he made survives today. Saddlers Hall was destroyed by fire on more than one occasion, and nearly all of the company’s 17th century plate was sold or lost. These signatures are probably the only remaining physical traces of John Gower.

Nehemiah Wharton was a servant from London who joined the Earl of Essex’s army at the start of the English Civil War. From August to October 1642 he sent a series of letters addressed to his master, George Willingham, a merchant at the Golden Anchor in St Swithin’s Lane. These letters have survived (although how they ended up in the State Papers is anyone’s guess) and were published in the 19th century (no free online version available, but the British Library has published a reprint as part of their digitization project). I’ve been looking at them for evidence of horses and social status. Wharton mentions another of Willingham’s servants, usually referred to as Davy (or Barry in one place, but I’ve assumed it’s the same man), who was serving in the army with a horse. The letters don’t give any further details of the man and horse, but it seems likely that Willingham had voluntarily contributed a cavalry horse under the scheme known as the Propositions and sent his servant to ride it. The UK National Archives have an account book of cavalry horses listed on the Propositions (SP 28/131 part 3), and as it’s a very important source for my work on horses, I’ve made a transcript of it. There is an entry for George Willingham, on 15 July 1642 (folio 19):

George Willingham of Londonstone painter stainer entred one gray horse, his rider David Avyes armed wth a Carbine, a case of pistolls a buffe coate and a sword all valued by the Commissaryes at 27 – 00 – 00

This is close but there are a couple of potential problems because the address and occupation don’t quite match. This doesn’t rule him out completely. London stone was just around the corner from St Swithin’s Lane in Cannon Street, so they could be referring to the same place (see the Agas map). Although London citizens tended to be identified by occupations, their trades could change, and the company through which they were admitted to the freedom of the city didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the trade they were pursuing. George Willingham could be a freeman of the Painter Stainers Company and trading as a merchant. What we need is another source to confirm or deny the link between Wharton’s letters and the Propositions list.

British History Online has a published list of London citizens from 1638, but it doesn’t cover St Swithin’s parish, which is where St Swithin’s Lane and London stone were. But the National Archives do have a will for a George Willingham, Painter Stainer of Saint Swithin, City of London, proved in 1651. That looked very promising, so I downloaded it (if I’d known I was going to need this last time I was at Kew I could’ve printed out there and saved £3.10). I’ve put a transcript of the whole thing on the Your Archives wiki. In the will, Willingham describes himself as “Cittizen and Paynter stayner of London”, so he was free of the Painter Stainers Company, but not necessarily following that trade. He mentions having children called John, Samuel, Ebenezer, Hannah and an unnamed daughter married to John Colyer. Wharton mentions Elizabeth, Anne, John, and Samuel in his letters, which roughly coincides with the children in the will. According to IGI, George Willingham married Anne Eaton at St Dunstan, Stepney, on 21 September 1624. They had these children baptised at St Swithin’s London Stone:

• John Willingham, 28 February 1629

• Ana Willingham, 24 June 1627
• Ebenezer Willingham,11 October 1642

Therefore Ebenezer wasn’t mentioned in Wharton’s letters because he hadn’t been born yet (the last letter is dated 7 October 1642). I can’t find a baptism for Samuel, but IGI isn’t complete. Given the wild variations in 17th century spelling, Ana and Hannah are probably the same person. The will also includes a bequest to “Mr Abraham Moline my deere and approved freind”, who could be the Mr Molloyne mentioned in Wharton’s letters.

The details in the will are enough to link the letters to the Propositions list and resolve the ambiguities. On the balance of probabilities, all three documents relate to the same person. Without the will it would be hard to link the other two documents together and reconcile the differences between them. This all adds up to proof that David Avyes was a servant and that his horse and arms were supplied by his master. (It doesn’t prove that he was decayed, or that royalist cavalry were any different. See my post about Cromwell and Balfour for some problems with the “decayed serving men and tapsters” myth.) Willingham must have been very rich. He bequeathed £700 to each of his three sons and left the residue of his estate to his daughter Hannah, explicitly stating that he intended her to have at least as much as the boys. That kind of wealth is consistent with trading as a merchant. He could easily afford to give away a horse and arms worth £27. The value of his contribution and the early date (July was a long time before contributions became compulsory) suggests that he was quite enthusiastic about the parliamentary cause. His will has some strong hints of puritanism. He asked for his body to be “decently buried without pompe and ringeing”, and bequeathed a book of sermons and a confession of his faith to his daughter. There’s no mention of any servants in the will, so it doesn’t help to solve the mystery of what happened to Nehemiah Wharton. Since his letters stopped in October 1642 he could have been killed at the battle of Edgehill, but as far as I know there isn’t any definite proof.

…and then I found a job. But I am not in any way miserable now. In fact I’m quite pleased and excited. I now have a contract to do freelance data entry work for the Life in the Suburbs project. This will involve working from home transcribing parish registers of St Botolphs Aldgate (where the saddler Thomas Harrison lived) and Holy Trinity Minories. I’ll be under the supervision of Gill Newton, who has done some really exciting work developing a phonetic algorithm to match similar sounding names. The hours are short and flexible, the pay is really good, and the work is very well suited to my skills, experience and interests. This should make my life much easier in lots of ways.

Obviously I won’t be blogging about anything that goes on in the project, or posting any of the data, so you’ll just have to wait until the results have been published to see what the researchers have found. Apart from that there probably won’t be much change to my blogging – or at least my posts won’t be any less frequent than they already are.

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.)

This is just a quick roundup of some online resources that I’ve found recently.

Greenwit at Blogging the Renaissance linked to People In Place, the website of a major research project about families and households in early-modern London. As well as background information and details of their methodology, they have made some of the raw data available, including lists of people who lent money to the parliamentarians during the civil war. This is a really exciting development and I hope more projects will be doing this kind of thing in future.

Edward Vallance has compiled a list of online Protestation Returns.

Adam Roberts at The Valve pointed out The Medieval Bestiary, a site devoted to representations of animals in the middle ages. There is a huge amount of interesting information here and the site is also really nice to look at. From this I discovered that the idea that horses actively and enthusiastically take part in war goes back to the 7th century, and that Pliny mentions horses defending their riders in battles.

[Edit: And you can see a selected Weird Medieval Animal from the bestiary every Monday at Per Omnia Saecula]

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).