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Threshing Out the Common in Community: The Great Tey Riot of 17271

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Jane Pearson
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Extract

What is common in community is … the fact that the members of a community are engaged in the same argument … the same discourse … in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 1998 , pp. 43 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh Mathematical Society 1998

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References

Notes

2. Sabean, D., Power in the Blood (Cambridge, 1984) p. 29.Google Scholar See also Rollinson's explanation of a community struggle ‘bred of fundamental misunderstandings arising from the different historical contexts in which the antagonists moved’. Rollinson, David, ‘Property, Ideology and Popular Culture in a Gloucestershire Village 1660–1740’, Past and Present, 93 (1981) 70–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. I estimate that Great Tey's population was between 400–475 inhabitants by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Only a quarter of Essex villages had a population of over 300 inhabitants at this time. Brown, A.F.J., Prosperity and Poverty: Rural Essex 1700–1815 (Chelmsford, 1996) p. 1.Google Scholar

4. This defence, prepared by an unknown hand, is to be found in the Essex Record Office among papers from the neighbouring parish of Chappel. ERO D/DBm T5B.

5. A twentieth-century descendant of Lay and an eighteenth-century lord of the manor also wrote some observations on the case. Unfortunately, the Assize court records have not survived.

6. Astle, Thomas, An Account of the Tenures, Customs etc. of the Manor of Great Tey: in a letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of Leicester, President of the Society of Antiquaries (London, 1795).Google Scholar

7. Thompson, E.P., ‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture”, Journal of Social History, 7 (1973) p. 393.Google Scholar

8. Thompson, E.P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London, 1975).Google Scholar

9. Neeson, J.M., Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Thompson, , Whigs and Hunters, p. 240.Google Scholar

11. For a description of urban middle-sort input into the formation of public opinion on political and social issues, see d'cruze, Shani, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker’ in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800, ed. by Jonathan, Barry and Christopher, Brooks (London, 1994).Google Scholar

12. Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale, 1990) p. 151.Google Scholar

13. Scott, , Hidden Transcripts, p. 92.Google Scholar

14. ERO D/DBm T5B.

15. The Great Tey manor court records of the long eighteenth century comment, from time to time, on neighbourhood nuisances such as dangerous chimneys, unfenced ponds, roadside diggings and the unlicensed enclosure of the lord's waste. On this occasion the court was directed by a deputy steward, evidently a gentleman. ERO D/DU 304/27–33.

16. Pearson, Jane, ‘The Rural Middle Sort in an Eighteenth-Century Essex Village: Great Tey 1660–1832’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Essex, 1996) pp. 75–81.Google Scholar

17. EROD/DEtM40.

18. ERO D/P 305/12.

19. ERO Q/SO/7 records a successful appeal in 1737 by yeoman John Lay, who had been nominated overseer in Chappel, on the grounds that he was not a householder there.

20. These properties were situated on Chrismondfield, about a quarter of a mile to the north-east of the village street.

21. In 1730 Lay bought Moor Farm for £430.

22. A large, timber-framed stable block standing in Warrens farmyard displays a brick on its frontage with the initials JL and the date 1729.

23. In 1730, Lay bought the village forge opposite Cromes having held the Marks Tey smithy since 1721.

24. In the first two years of Lay's tenancy, the executor spent a total of £55 on renovations. Thereafter the annual bill for repairs was between £5 and £ 10. ERO D/DQs 20. Manor court records reveal that Moor Farm was renovated on Lay's taking on the lease and that he was granted a licence to remove a barn thence. ERO D/DU 304/26.

25. These transactions are recorded in the Great Tey manor court books, ERO D/DU 304/26–27.

26. Brothers Edmund and John Harrington each inherited farms in Great Tey on their father's death in 1698. These farms passed, in due course, to Edmund's two sons, William and John, (their uncle John being childless) and then to the sons of John junior (William being childless).

27. As the eighteenth century progressed these figures were reversed so that, by 1780, 35% of larger rate payers and 47% of smaller rate payers served as homagemen.

28. ERO D/DBm T5B.

29. Brown, , Prosperity and Poverty.Google Scholar

30. Brown, , Prosperity and Poverty.Google Scholar

31. Pearson, , ‘Rural Middle Sort’ p. 77.Google Scholar

32. Thompson, , ‘Patrician Society”, p. 385–386.Google Scholar

33. ‘ In … 1496, John Warren surrendered … the herbage of a parcel of land, containing one rood, for the enlargement of a common playing place pro archentibus licitis, ea intentioneper “dominant istius maneri ex antiquo sic concessum”’. (Astle, Account of the Manor of Great Tey, p. 14).

34. ERO TP/195/11 (Holman m.s.). See also Morant, P., History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, 2 vols (London, 1768) 2, 207.Google Scholar

35. The property was, nevertheless, fit for a carpenter to lease. ERO D/DU 304/26.

36. Pearson, , ‘Rural Middle Sort’, pp. 44–49.Google Scholar

37. Some of the smaller farmhouses were also tenemented by the mid-eighteenth century. If the tenant was pauperised, the rent was quite often paid by the overseer to the Tey farmer who owned the copyhold. ERO D/P 37/12/1.

38. A lease, dated 1733, between John Lay and William Read, tailor, specifies that the tenant was to keep the fencing in good repair. ERO D/DPb T32.

39. ERO D/DBm T5B (comment written in the summary on the reverse side).

40. ERO D/DBm T5B.

41. The fair stayed two days. The manor court was held on the Monday and, after the workhouse was opened in 1752, the inmates had the days as a holiday, their work room being used by the court. ERO D/P 37/12/7.

42. Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify this accusation from the records since the first rate listing for Great Tey is dated 1729. ERO D/P 37/12/1.

43. During these years he had served as churchwarden in Great Tey continuously except for the year 1720/1721 (when his brother Robert held the office).

44. The first page of the book states this fact. ERO D/P 37/12/1. Marks Tey's overseer account book predates Great Tey's, commencing in 1674. From 1718, perhaps coincidental with John Lay's departure, the Marks Tey accounts deteriorate in detail. ERO D/P 305/12. John Lay's attitude to the poor may perhaps also be gleaned from his will, which was unique in the annals of the parish for leaving forty shillings ‘unto such poor labouring men of the parish of Great Tey who shall not receive collection at the time of my decease'. ERO D/DPb F13.

45. There are two examples, dated 1709 and 1747 of Great Tey overseers indicted for false accounting. ERO Q/SBb and D/P 37/12/1.

46. They were Solomon Grimston, gentleman manor steward, Reverend Mr Pollard, resident rector since 1714, Mr Thomas Harvey, tenant farmer, overseer and churchwarden, John Harrington, yeoman freeholder, overseer and churchwarden, Avery Saunders, village builder and John Betts, labourer. The last three were baptised in Tey.

47. ERO D/DPb Z2. This letter, from Major Tudor Lay to Great Tey Parish Council, is dated 1909 in the Essex Record Office index.

48. Astle, , Account of the Manor of Great Tey, pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

49. ERO D/DPb Z2.

50. In 1911 a village butcher learned a similar lesson. When he attempted to lock the Playfield gate, to prevent the fair from entering the field, a disturbance was created that alerted the local press.

51. From 1700–1829 manor court records reveal a mean of farm sales per decade of 3.6. Between 1740 and 1749 there were 11 such sales in Tey. Between 1700 and 1739 the mean number of bastard children baptised per decade in Tey was 3.7. In the next decade 16 were baptised (to eleven mothers). The average annual poor rate raised increased by £20 from 1740–9 in comparison with the previous decade.

52. The overseer accounts include an estimate prepared by a Chappel carpenter to convert the poor house to a workhouse. The workhouse seems not to have been ready to open until 1752. The cause of the delay is not recorded. ERO D/P 37/12/1.

53. ERO D/P 37/12/7.

54. The agreements to raise the necessary loan and the contract drawn up for the workhouse master carry twelve and eight of their signatures respectively. ERO D/P 37/12/1, D/P 37/18.

55. Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common (London, 1991).Google Scholar

56. Snell, K.D.M., Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change in Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1974)Google ScholarHorn, Pamela, The Rural World 1780–1850 (London, 1980)Google ScholarReed, Mick and Wells, Roger, Class Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside 1700–1880 (London, 1990).Google Scholar