The Cotswold History Blog

If you read many social history books, they will paint a tale of doom and gloom, of sick children and starving families, where reaching adulthood was an achievement. Mortality rates in urban areas can certainly make depressing reading; and many rural families also suffered.

Yet those who reached adulthood could then go on to live long lives. The local papers are full of stories of Cotswold folk reaching their hundredth birthdays, although the coverage usually implies that this was an unusual feat. One case was a Tetbury local who died in September 1800:

“Died. Lately, at Tetbury, in this county, Ambrose Bennett, aged 106 years and 10 months: he had been a common soldier nearly 60 years, and fought in many battles in the reigns of Queen Anne, George II and his present Majesty.”

(Gloucester Journal, 29 September 1800)

Ambrose was born in 1693, during the reign of William and Mary, and thus lived in three different centuries. With his experiences of battle, his long life must have been a rather interesting one.

Before the establishment of the modern police force in the 19th century, many communities tried to work together to bring criminals to justice.

The Gloucestershire Association for Prosecuting Felons was just one of many similar associations across England, set up to enable the prosecution of suspected criminals, and to reward those who were willing to give information that would lead to a suspect being identified.

Members of the community would subscribe to the association, paying an amount of money into the group’s coffers that would then be used for expenses associated with prosecution. This was necessary; there were charges for warrants to be issued, costs involved in appearing in court as either a prosecutor or a witness, and so on.

The Gloucestershire Association for Prosecuting Felons was formed on 26 November 1795, and it covered the following crimes:

“for apprehending and prosecuting at their [members] expense all and every person and persons, who shall feloniously break open or take from the Dwelling-house , Outhouse, &c of them or any or either of them, or shall steal, cut, destroy, main or damage any of the goods, horses, cattle, sheep, lambs, pigs, corn, hay, timber or other Trees, Implements in Husbandry, or any other thing the property of them or any or either of them within the county of Gloucester.”

These crimes represent the most common ones in the Cotswolds; thefts, often of valuable livestock or farm products; and stealing wood, something commonly done by the poorer members of society.

The association also set out what it would do with suspected felons and how it would reward people, with an interesting scale of payments:

“for more effectively detecting and bring such offender or offenders to justice, a reward of 20 Guineas will be given, on conviction, for any offence for which the person or persons shall receive sentence of transportation for 14 years; a reward of 10 guineas for which the person or persons shall receive sentence of transportation for 7 years; and a reward of 5 guineas for which hte person or persons shall be sentenced to receive any less punishment, to the person or persons who shall discover such offender or offenders; and an accomplice will on conviction be entitled to the same rewards, and proper steps taken to procure a pardon.”

The members of the association were drawn from the upper and middle levels of society, headed by the Earl of Berkeley, with various army colonels, vicars and farmers also represented, from across the whole county.

They met at regular intervals, often in local pubs; in May 1797, for example, they met at the Old Bell pub in Dursley. It wasn’t until 1839 that the Gloucestershire Constabulary was formed – the second oldest rural police force in England. Until that year, local people continued to try and combat rural crime by working together.

“Bourton on the Water, Glocestershire. J. Collet informs the Public, that his school opens again July 24th 1797, on his usual terms, viz 17l per annum, Teaching, Board, Lodging and Washing included. Entrance ONE GUINEA.”

(Gloucester Journal, 26th June 1797)

One morning, in the summer of 1797, 30-year-old spinster Ann Evans, of Hulkerton, near Tetbury, left her father William’s house in order to go to Cirencester.

It was a Wednesday, the 14th of June, and it may have been market day in Cirencester. Ann was doing some errands for her father, and it took her until 3pm to complete them. She then set off to walk the four miles to her married sister’s house at Barnsley, looking forward to having some tea and conversation before returning home.

Ann was spotted in Cirencester that afternoon, getting ready to leave for Barnsley. She never arrived.

Her family was a close one, and the alarm was soon raised. Her uncle, John Evans, who lived at Cricklade Street in Cirencester, offered a reward for her safe return – but nobody came forward with any news. Various members of the Evans family and their circle retraced the route that Ann should have taken – walking on tracks, over corn and grass fields, and near quarries. Still no sign.

A member of the Evans clan had recently died, and Ann was wearing her second mourning gown, of black and white fabric, with a blue striped petticoat underneath and a white apron. She was of average size and fresh-faced, wearing a black bonnet that hid her hair.

Some two weeks after her disappearance, her family were becoming frantic. They placed an advert in the local newspaper, pleading for information, and for local farmers and residents to scour their fields and quarries to find her. They strongly suspected that she was lying dead, either of natural causes or murdered, hidden near a hedge or in a field, but were desperate for closure.

The advert made clear that Ann wouldn’t simply have run away from her family:

“she was a very sober discreet young woman, bore an excellent character and is therefore supposed to be trepanned or murdered” (Gloucester Journal, 3 July 1797)

The past tense makes it painfully clear that her family bore little hope for her safe return. They had, after all, made “every search and enquiry” that they could think of, and this plea for others to help the search was very much a last ditch attempt to locate her.

But there is no mention made in later papers of Ann Evans being found, either alive or dead, and one wonders whether the Evans family ever found out what had happened to their beloved Ann; or whether she simply vanished into thin air that June afternoon.

Sometimes, entries from 18th century newspapers read more like the introduction to a Jane Austen novel than a Jane Austen Novel. Take this entry from the Gloucester Journal of 17 April 1797:

“Glocester, April 17 – Tuesday last was married at North Nibley, in this county, Mr John Parradice, of Wick, to Miss Sarah Knight, of North Nibley, an agreeable young lady, with a large fortune.”

A groom named Paradise (almost), and a pleasant, rich lady; this story has the potential to make a rather good novel.

On 21 May 1766, a poor couple from Chipping Campden were returning home from Cheltenham, where they had been seeking work. They were tired, and on reaching Winchcombe, decided to stay the night at the Rising Sun inn, to refresh themselves before continuing their journey the next day.

They duly spent the night, and left the following morning. It wasn’t until the 25th that the innkeeper, widow Elisabeth Herbert, went to clean the room where the couple had stayed – and found her best cloak missing. It was a bright red cloak, hard to miss, and she immediately suspected her previous visitors of having stolen it.

Elisabeth sent her son Edward, a glover, out to see if anyone could identify the couple. Luckily, the area was a close-knit one, and he soon found a man who had recently given the couple a bit of work. He named them as Arthur Mayes and his wife Sarah, and said they had told him they were from Campden.

Edward Herbert duly went to his local magistrate, Benjamin Field, to tell him what they suspected had happened. Field issued a search warrant, and the couple, who by this time had reached their hometown, had their home searched – and the cloak was found. They were taken before Field on 28th May to explain themselves.

Sarah Mayes told the magistrate that the couple had spent an uneventful night at the alehouse, but that on waking up the following morning, her eye had been caught by the bright cloak hanging up on the wall. She quietly, and on impulse, took down the cloak, hid it in her possessions, and carried it away with her. Her husband, she said, “was no way privy to it” and had no idea that his magpie wife had been possessed with this sudden desire to own something bright and exotic. It was a rare thing of beauty in Sarah’s colourless life.

Case taken from the depositions given to Gloucestershire Justices of the Peace – Gloucestershire Archives reference Q/SD/A8

On the evening of 3rd April 1884, a convivial dinner party was held at Bradwell Grove House, the seat of William Henry Fox near Burford in Oxfordshire.

One of the guests was a local vicar, the Reverend Daniel Ward Goddard, aged 72 but still a central part of the local gentry; an active Oxfordshire magistrate, chairman of the local highway board, and an Oxford graduate who was known for his involvement in social life, his amiable character and kindheartedness.

It was a pleasant evening, and the vicar did not get up to leave until 11pm, the time at which he had asked his groom, Josiah, to meet him, in order to accompany him on the short walk home to his vicarage at nearby Holwell.

Shortly after leaving the Fox residence, however, Daniel said that he felt unwell – “I can go no farther” – and asked Josiah to run home to fetch his carriage. Josiah fled, leaving his employer sitting on a low wall. When Josiah reached the vicarage, he told the wonderfully named Sarah Duck, who had been Daniel’s housekeeper for over 20 years, what had happened, and while he got the carriage ready, she ran back to where Daniel had stopped.

“Who is it?” Daniel asked; “Sarah,” she responded, “Are you ill?” He grabbed her hand, and tried to walk, but was unable to, and being stronger than Sarah, she was unable to support him, and he gradually sank to the ground. Sarah leaned over him and loosened his necktie. Josiah then turned up with the carriage, but as he and Sarah lifted Daniel into it, they realised that he had quietly died.

On the Saturday following his death, an inquest was held at the village schoolroom; Daniel had previously let its schoolmistress lodge with him at the vicarage. The coroner, Mr Westell, found that Daniel had died of heart disease.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal duly covered the inquest, and noted how news of his death – “the melancholy event” – had been greeted in Burford with a “feeling of painful surprise” by locals who knew and liked him.
The paper eulogised that his death would be a “serious calamity” to those people:

“for we think it impossible to estimate the high esteem in which he was held by all classes… The kind and able way in which he had performed his public duties was fully appreciated and we know that his loss will be keenly felt.” (Oxford Journal, 12 April 1884)

I was fascinated by the beauty and thought-provoking quality of some of the memorial inscriptions I saw recently at Cirencester – so here’s a brief slideshow of some of the ones that caught my attention.

Do you recognise any of the names on here as your ancestors?

It’s always good when a local council recognises the importance of community history. Chipping Campden is one town council that does; appropriately for a council based in a place with, to me, a fascinating history – from the strangely inappropriate beauty of its Old Police Station on the High Street, to the notorious murderess Harriet Tarver, executed for killing her husband in the town in the 1830s.

The recognition of the town’s history is shown on the Chipping Campden Online website, run by the town council. An entire section of the website is now devoted to the Campden Voices project, and it is designed to record local people’s memories and photos of the area.

Campden Voices was formerly hosted on a different town website, but its move, earlier this year, to the town council website, is a logical one, emphasising its community base.

Campden Voices has sections for memories of the First World War; town characters; and family history. There is also a section devoted to handicrafts, complete with trustees’ reports on the Court Barn Museum and its development (the museum was unfortunately in the news recently after a burglary, which resulted in the theft of many items, but reopened earlier this month).

The Campden Voices online presence is, at present, a bit bare, but I hope that it will regularly be updated. If it is, and is properly encouraged, it could provide a great forum for people to record their perceptions of the town’s history, and their part in it.