Preston St Mary 1830 to 1850: A selection of source material for local history research

This new booklet is available HERE.  (https://tinyurl.com/y3lbwp5o)  It includes

• The tithe map of 1838
• The Census of 1841
• Church Registers of Baptisms, Marriages & Burials
• The 'Mary Green Charity'

St Marys Church, Preston

From the FOREWORD:

"This booklet is the first in a series about rural life in the Lavenham area of Suffolk in the early Victorian period.  Using primary documentary evidence, the booklet will provide information about the people who lived and worked in Preston St Mary, and describe features of the farming landscape and countryside.  It will also provide evidence about the landowners many of whom did not live in the village.

Where possible, the census data and the tithe information have been linked.  In this way the exact whereabouts of where people lived and their related land-holdings can be traced.  Detailed maps showing field names and dwelling places provide a useful aid for researching the “hidden lives” of local people.  Researchers “doing family history” will find the parish registers particularly helpful. Each document is prefaced by descriptions and commentaries accompanied by explanatory tables and maps.

Transcribing the documents in their original form proved quite challenging.  Handwriting, for example, was often quite difficult to decipher.  At a time when most agricultural labourers were illiterate, the clerk, census enumerator or clergyman may well have had to make a guess as to spellings based on oral responses.  This has led to some “untidiness” especially in relation to surnames.  For example, Symonds is sometimes recorded as Simms, Hollocks as Hallicks, and Girling as Gurling.  The temptation to tidy up the data has been resisted so that transcribed documents remain as faithful as possible to the originals. 

Supplementary material will be available online at the Suffolk Local History Forum blog where the 1851 Census Returns for Preston St Mary will be particularly useful for readers who would like to check family details especially those related to age and location."

The following files are available in pdf now:

·         Preston St Mary: 1851 Census Returns

·         Preston St Mary 1838: Maps showing major farmers’ land holdings (over 40 acres)

·         Preston St Mary ‘Tithe Map Apportionment’ 1838, arranged by plot number

Forthcoming: Preston St Mary Terriers including 1834 and 1841 (SROB FL616/3/3-9)

From rural Suffolk to industrial Lancashire

Leaving Groton for Lancashire, 1836: The Rudland Family

(For an updated account click here)

Samuel Rudland and Mary Garrard had married in Groton on the 13^th January 1822.  He was 24 years of age and she was 23 years.  Baptism records suggest that they were non-conformists and frequented the Edwardstone Independent Chapel adjacent to Boxford.

OSMap1902

In 1836 Samuel and Mary Rudland and their eight children were sent from the Suffolk village of Groton to work for Henry Ashworth in Lancashire.  The family were part of a national migration scheme that arranged for families who were receiving poor relief, to move to the north where there was a labour shortage in the cotton mills and woollen industry.

On the 14^th April 1836, as they left Groton on their long journey to Lancashire, the Rudland family consisted of:

• Samuel Rudland, aged 38
• Mary Rudland, aged 37
• Cain Rudland, aged 14
• Joseph Rudland, aged 12
• Lucy Rudland, aged 9
• Samuel Rudland, aged 6
• Charles Rudland, aged 4
• James Rudland, aged 3
• David Rudland, aged 2
• John Rudland, aged 9 months

The migration scheme was devised by the Poor Law Commissioners who realised that there were a large number of unemployed agricultural workers who had no chance of finding a job.  They devised a way of moving these people to Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire to work in the cotton mills and woollen industry where there was a shortage of labour.

It is not clear how the Rudland family travelled to Lancashire but other Suffolk families were sent from their home parish to London where they were transported via the Grand Union Canal to Manchester – a journey which was supposed to take four to five days and for which they had to supply their own provisions.

The canal boats left City Basin, Paddington every evening except Sundays and the cost of the passage was:

Adults ~ 14shillings

Persons under 14 ~ 7shillings

Under one year ~ Free

Families were not allowed to bring any furniture with them, except their bedding, but it was suggested that the Board of Guardians who had arranged the journey should send between £3 and £5 to the future employer for the purchase of furniture.

New Eagley Mills

On arrival in Lancashire, Samuel Rudland and his four eldest children were taken into the employ of Henry Ashworth who owned the cotton mill at New Eagley near Bolton.  They were very lucky because Henry Ashworth, a Quaker, was an employer who, by 19th century standards, was both altruistic and forward-looking.

Henry Ashworth treated his textile workers with a great deal of respect and he provided good quality homes for them in the Bank Top area.  He also built a schoolroom, a social club and a library to ensure that his workforce and the children were educated.

OSMap1906

Samuel Rudland and his family would have been drawn to Lancashire by the prospect of regular employment, better wages and improved living conditions.  The extent to which these prospects materialised were recorded by an anonymous correspondent of the London based, Morning Advertiser newspaper.  In March 1846 (ten years after the Rudlands arrived in Lancashire) the newspaper published an account with the aim “to ascertain how far these promises of better wages and better food in Lancashire had been fulfilled.”

The correspondent had first interviewed Samuel Rudland in 1844 and noted that the family had increased to eleven (Isaac Rudland had been born in 1843).  He recorded that the whole household brought in an income of £2. 15s. per week but pointed out that though this was “not a very liberal income” it was much more than that which they earned in agriculture in Suffolk in 1836. 

Samuel Rudland (the father) per week	8s 0d
Eldest boy, 14 years of age	2   0
Next younger boy, at cow-keeping, aged twelve	1   0
Parish allowance, one peck of flour, worth at that time	1   4
	12  4

It was also emphasised that Samuel Rudland in 1844 was still only a labourer and that a skilled operative in the cotton mill would have earned considerably more. 

Rents for the workers’ cottages ranged from 1s. 6d. a week to 3s. 6d. Sixty one cottages out of 155 were rented at 2s. 10d. per week.  If this large family was paying 3s 6d per week to rent one of the larger properties available, then this would have represented just above 6% of their total income.

The Morning Advertiser’s correspondent not only provides us with invaluable information on the Ashworth’s workers’ wages and rentals but he also gives us a detailed first-hand description of the workers’ cottages which is worth reproducing in full: 

“Now these cottages were not only good, but the greater part of them were superior to any dwellings of working men which I had ever seen, or have since seen, if I make an exception of a few other rurally situated factories and the dwelling of the workers, which I visited subsequent to that in Lancashire.  They generally consisted of four rooms, with back kitchens, wash-houses, etc.  They were scrupulously clean, with flower garden in front and rear.  They were all fitted up with ovens and fixtures of the most substantial and useful kind.  The people had all good furniture.  Most of them had stuff-bottomed chairs in their parlours, carpets on the parlour floors, chests of mahogany drawers, time-pieces or eight-day clocks, little piles of well-bound books on the top of the chest of drawers, companions of the looking-glasses, which all stood there in their ornamental frames.  A barometer against the wall; a pair of globes; some very respectable pictures, chiefly engravings, were also seen ornamenting some of the parlours.  While in the other rooms there were such articles of furniture as the parlours would lead us to expect.  On the Sunday the people were all well clothed and orderly; no drunkenness, no lounging about in dirt and idleness; the women were smartly dressed, some of them perhaps a little too fine.  I did not go into many of the houses at tea time on Sunday, but in those which I did enter at that time, I saw sets of china on the tables.  There is butchers’ meat in these houses every day in one shape or another.  In only one instance at Eagly did I find the mother of a family working in the mill. She was a widow, with two young children.  She hired a woman to keep the children and the house.  Her earnings in the mill were 13s a week.”

Sometime between this interview in 1844 and 1851 Samuel Rudland died.  There is no record in the archives of his death but the 1851 Census Returns for Bank Top, Sharples, Bolton, lists Mary as a widow.  At least four children were still alive and living at home at this time:

			Condition	Age	dob	Occupation	Place of birth
Mary	Rudland	Head	Widow	54	1797		Boxford, Suffolk
Cain	Rudland	Son	Unmarried	27	1824	Carder (Cotton)	Boxford, Suffolk
Joseph	Rudland	Son	Unmarried	23	1828	Wheelwright	Boxford, Suffolk
Charles	Rudland	Son	Unmarried	18	1833	Blacksmith	Boxford, Suffolk
Isaac	Rudland	Son		8	1843	Scholar	Sharples, Lancashire

(Note: Some dates do not tally with the emigration list of 1836.  See above)

What happened to the family members after 1851 is unclear.  Further research is required. 

However, one tantalising lead for Charles Rudland does present itself.  In 1856, a Charles Rudland, blacksmith and a Jane Rudland, servant [sic] set sail from Liverpool for America.  They arrived in New York on the 27^th September.

In 1870, the US Census records a Charles Rudland, blacksmith and his wife Jane Rudland living in Portage, Wisconsin.  They had five children:

*************

Note about the Poor Law Commission’s Migration Scheme, 1835-37

The scheme did not last long because soon after the arrival of migrant families the cotton mills and woollen industry went into a decline and many people became unemployed again.  Some made the long journey south to their home parishes but others remained in the north. In 1843 there was an investigation into why the scheme had failed and among the papers relating to this enquiry was a list of around 4,000 people who had migrated – over half of them had come from Suffolk.

Between 1836 and 1837 over 2,000 paupers – men, women and especially children were taken from Suffolk to work in factories in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Christopher

Review: Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851: BURY ST EDMUNDS

(Timmins, T.C B. (ed.), Suffolk Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851, Boydell, 1997)

Unitarian Chapel, Churchgate Street

The Returns for the nine places of worship in Bury St Edmunds form a small part of the results of a countrywide Religious Census, an official government survey of all identified places of religious worship in existence, carried out on Sunday 30 March 1851. Forms were distributed and collected by the enumerators for the ordinary population census, which was being conducted at the same time.

The early nineteenth century was a period of general anxiety over the state of religion in the country. Industrialisation and rapid urbanisation were raising fears that religious provision was failing to keep pace with the growth and changing distribution of population. At a time of political conflict and unrest, the Government was alarmed that the working population was swelling the ranks of the dissenting denominations or, even worse, losing touch with organised religion altogether.

The Government published a report on the Census results in December 1853 and it was widely analysed, abridged and republished in books, newspapers and periodicals.  The data revealed considerable regional and local differences, and, more alarmingly, the alienation of ‘labouring myriads’ from the churches. (Quoted by Timmins, Suffolk Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851, xiv).  It was noted “that a large portion of the people of this county [Suffolk] are habitual neglecters of religious ordinance” and that nearly two-thirds of the population of Bury St Edmunds were absent from public worship.” (Glyde, John, Suffolk in the Nineteenth Century, Simpkin Marshall & Co., 1856, 279).

In Bury St Edmunds in 1851 there were nine recorded places of worship; three Anglican churches and six nonconformist chapels.  Their situation is shown on the map below.

A	St Mary's Church	F	Northgate Independent Chapel
B	St James's Church	G	Unitarian Chapel (Churchgate Street)
C	St John Evangelist Church*	H	Friends' Meeting House (St John's Street)
D	Wesleyan Chapel (St Mary's Square	I	Particular Baptist Chapel (Garland Street)
E	Independent Chapel (Whiting St.)

It is worth noting that White’s directory of Suffolk in 1844 mentions a second Particular Baptist Chapel in Westgate Street founded in 1840 and a Primitive Methodist meeting place in Garland Street built in 1820.  Neither places are mentioned in the 1851 Census which suggests that either they had ceased to exist when the census was carried out or that the Returns are incomplete.  Timmins (1997) suggests that they were missed out by the Census Enumerators.

Bury St Edmunds consisted of two parishes: St Mary’s and St James’ and the Census recorded them separately and the results are summarised in Table 1 and 2. 

Table 1: Bury St Edmunds (Parish of St Mary) 1851 Religious Census (Total population 6,557)

	Church and chapel attendance (including Sunday Scholars)
	Morning		Afternoon		Evening
St Mary's Church*	1112	17.0%	651	9.9%	1014	15.5%
Wesleyan Chapel**	152	2.3%			96	1.5%
Independent Chapel (Whiting St.)***	323	4.9%			288	4.4%
Unitarian Chapel#	112	1.7%			80	1.2%
Friends' Meeting House	26	0.5%	24	0.4%
TOTAL	1725	26.4%	675	10.3%	1478	22.5%
*Joint Sunday School with St James Church
**Includes scholars
***Includes scholars in morning
#Includes scholars in morning

Table 2: Bury St Edmunds (Parish of St James) 1851 Religious Census (Total population 6,668)

	Church and chapel attendance (including Sunday Scholars)
	Morning		Afternoon		Evening
St James's Church*	1150	17.2%	852	12.8%	283	4.2%
St John Evangelist Church**	266	4.0%	340	5.1%
Northgate Independent Chapel***	350	5.2%			308	4.6%
Particular Baptist Chapel#	602	9.0%	519	7.8%	621	9.3%
TOTAL		35.5%		25.7%		18.2%
*Includes Scholars (also from St Mary's) morning and afternoon
**Includes Scholars morning and afternoon
***Includes Scholars in morning
#Includes morning scholars

Table 3 combines the figures for the two parishes and provides a summary which is not distorted by the fact that the Sunday School scholars shared by the two main Anglican churches were presented under the St James figures

Table 3: Bury St Edmunds (Combined parishes of St Mary's and St James' 1851 Religious Census  (Population 13,225)* Church and chapel attendance (including Sunday Scholars) Morning Afternoon Evening St Mary's Church 1112 8.4% 651 4.9% 1014 7.7% St James's Church 1150 8.7% 852 6.4% 283 2.1% St John Evangelist Church** 190 1.4% 340 2.6% 0.0% Wesleyan Chapel (St Mary's Square 152 1.1% 96 0.7% Independent Chapel (Whiting St.) 323 2.4% 288 2.2% Northgate Independent Chapel 350 2.6% 308 2.3% Unitarian Chapel (Churchgate Street) 112 0.8% 80 0.6% Friends' Meeting House (St John's Street) 26 0.2% 24 0.2% 0.0% Particular Baptist Chapel (Garland Street) 602 4.6% 519 3.9% 621 4.7% Total 4017 30.4% 2386 18.0% 2690 20.3% *This figure does not include the inmates of the Gaol, the hospital, and the two workhouses **Morning scholars excluded from total (190+76 scholars)

There was considerable dispute at the time over the quality of the returns to the Religious Census.  Today, historians are advised to handle the statistics carefully especially as the Returns record attendance at services rather than at churches.  Subsequently it is impossible to tell precisely how many individuals attended a place of worship on Census Sunday if it had more than one service which is the case for every church and chapel in Bury St Edmunds at this time.  To allow for this historians have come up with various ‘corrective formulas’.  Watts (1995) suggests a formula “based on totals for the best-attended services for each denomination… with the addition of a third of the total for attendances at the least well attended services”. The application of this ‘statistical correction’ for the Bury St Edmunds denominations is shown in Table 4.

Table 4: Bury St Edmunds (Combined parishes of St Mary's and St James' 1851 Religious Census) using Watts' ‘corrective’ formula

	Estimated attendance
St Mary's Church	1329	10.0%
St James’s Church	1244	9.4%
St John Evangelist Church*	403	3.0%
Wesleyan Chapel (St Mary's Square	184	1.4%
Independent Chapel (Whiting St.)	419	3.2%
Northgate Independent Chapel	453	3.4%
Unitarian Chapel (Churchgate Street)	112	0.8%
Friends' Meeting House (St John's Street)	26	0.2%
Particular Baptist Chapel (Garland Street)	794	6.0%
Total	4964	37.5%

Respondents were also asked to give average attendance over a whole year.  The response from the incumbent of St Mary’s – “Number of attendants on 30th March was considered below average” – may well have been typical for most places as the weather was inclement on that day. He also had difficulty in estimating averages and states “Exact average cannot be given through want of data” which may have been a fairly common difficulty.  This did not deter other respondents who gave averages not far off the census day figures.  The exception was Cornelius Elven, the Minister of the Particular Baptist Chapel who provided rounded figures considerably in excess of those on the day: “Average – morning 700+200 scholars; afternoon 800; evening 500.”  Using our ‘corrective’ formula this would give an attendance of 8.8% of the total population rather than 6%, a significant difference. It should be noted, however, that some Anglicans looked askance at these figures and accused Dissenters of packing their services to inflate their attendance totals and of rounding up their estimates of attendees, though this may have been a mere matter of ‘sour grapes’.  

Despite these caveats about reliability and accuracy, the figures in the tables provide a snapshot of religious practice in Bury St Edmunds in the middle of the nineteenth century and presents the local historian with a useful starting point for assessing the role of religious practice in a local community within the context of regional and national trends. (See Table 5)

Table 5: Bury St Edmunds congregation sizes compared with figures for Suffolk and England & Wales

Watts' estimates of church and chapel attendance	England & Wales	Suffolk	Bury St Edmunds*	Bury St Edmunds**
Church of England	19.7%	33.0%	25.7%	22.4%
Independents		8.6%	6.3%	6.6%
Baptists		8.0%	7.2%	6.0%
Quakers		0.1%	0.2%	0.2%
Unitarians		0.3%	1.0%	0.8%
Wesleyan Methodists		2.9%	1.3%	1.4%
Primitive Methodists		2.2%
Other non-conformists		0.2%
Total non-conformists	18.6%	22.5%	16.0%	15.0%
Total attenders	40.2%	55.8%	41.7%	37.4%

*Watts based his figures on the total population of Bury St Edmunds (13,900) which include the inmates of the Gaol, the hospital, and the two workhouses but who could not have attended the places of worship listed.

**These figures for Bury St Edmunds (based on a population figure of 13,225) do not include the inmates of the Gaol, the hospital, and the two workhouses.

Local historians might be interested in investigating the strength of the Anglican Church in Suffolk and in Bury St Edmunds compared with England and Wales as a whole.  It is also noticeable that attendance at church or chapel is considerably lower in Bury than in Suffolk generally. 

Contemporary social commentators, like Glyde (1856), were passionately concerned about the population's religious propensities:

“… that a large portion of the people of this county are habitual neglecters of religious ordinances. … That the main portion of these non-attendants belong to the artisan and labouring classes, the testimony of all observers will prove. On the middle class, as a body, the various forms of Protestant worship have a strong hold. Removed alike from the passionate temptations of the homeless artisan, and from the mental activity of the man of letters, the rural gentry and urban trades people are, partly from earnest conviction, and partly from the wholesome conservatism of moral habit, the best attenders upon public worship.”

Glyde ventures some opinion on the reason for this neglect:

“By many it is thought that one of the principal causes of the dislike of the labouring class to religious services is the maintenance of class distinctions in our religious structures. The injustice and inconsistency of "well-to-do Christianity," with its pew rents, and cushioned enclosures, has doubtless done much to deter many of the working classes from attending public worship, and to impress them with the idea that religion is purely a middle class propriety or luxury. But still we think that much of the absenteeism is traceable to a want of disposition among the labouring class to mingle on the Sunday with those from whom, during the week days, they are separated by a broad line of demarcation.”

Nearly thirty years ago, a thorough-going survey of Protestant nonconformity in Suffolk was carried out by Clive Paine (See Dymond & Martin, eds., 1988).  He was particularly good on describing the distribution of the different dissenting denominations across the county but his statistics on the strength of nonconformity in Suffolk are open to challenge.  For example, he states:

“The 1851 census shows that an estimated 5 per cent of Suffolk’s population attended nonconformist meetings in 50 per cent of its parishes.”

If Watts’s estimate of 22.5% is correct, Paine’s 5% seems a considerable under-estimate.  Even in Suffolk’s towns where “habitual neglecters of religious ordinances” (Glyde’s words) were strongest, we get considerably higher figures:

Bury St Edmunds          16%

Mildenhall                     34%

Ipswich                         18%

Woodbridge                  27%

Moreover, Paine seems determined to under-play the importance of non-conformism generally:

“Our admiration for the dogged persistence of nonconformists should not blind us to the danger of exaggerating their actual and relative numbers, at all periods.”

He seems to base his argument on the relatively small showing of the Methodists (only 5% of the total population in Suffolk) compared with the C of E’s 33%; a ratio of about 1:7.  But when the other nonconformist denominations are included the ratio becomes more like 2:3. 

Paine also points out that over 200 Suffolk parishes contain no recorded place of dissenting worship but forgets to allow for the fact that nonconformists often walked miles on a Sunday to attend a chapel in a nearby village if there was no meeting place available in their home parish.

The total numbers of nonconformists waxed and waned but it is indisputable that their churches and chapels not only radically transformed the lives of numerous individuals and families but completely reshaped the religious landscape of the nineteenth century in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and the nation as a whole.

Bibliography

Dymond, D. & Martin, E. (eds.), An Historical Atlas of Suffolk, SCC & Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 1988,

Glyde, John, Suffolk in the Nineteenth Century, Simpkin Marshall & Co., 1856

Rodell, Jonathan, The Rise of Methodism: a study of Bedfordshire 1736-1851, Boydell, 2014

Timmins, T.C B. (ed.), Suffolk Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851, Boydell, 1997

Watts, M., The Dissenters, Vol. II, Oxford, 1995