Vicars' lives in Georgian England
Country Counting House
All historians would agree that fascinating details of life in previous ages can be gleaned through such scraps as, for instance, shopping lists of Victorian housewives, inventories of Renaissance Venetian merchants, supply manifests for the Roman soldiers at Hadrian's wall in second century CE Britain. The value of these documents lies in their perspective. History is written by the victors; memoranda are written by rank-and-file individuals, with no eye on posterity. Particularly rich, and yet seldom mined, are account books. True, ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets with lists of goods and receipts for purchases are a primary source of knowledge of the ancient Near East. But as we approach contemporary times, we rely less and less on shopping lists, and more and more on the great documents that declare our history. Still, carefully interpreted, today's electronic to-do list could reveal more about the life of its writer than any number of social analyses.
So it is with ?Country Counting House?. The Reverend A. Tindal Hart has located the account books of two eighteenth-century English vicars and subjected them to exhausting scrutiny. From his close reading of pages and pages of ledger entries, Hart has reconstructed lives that would otherwise be lost forever. The payoff here is that we gain an insight into the real lives of Anglican clergymen, and see them as quite other than the absent-minded, well-meaning, but bumbling parson of too much mildly anti-clerical fiction; or the unctuous, hypocritical vicar so scathingly portrayed by Jane Austen.
Hart selects the records of several clergymen of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to examine the details of clerical life in the country parishes. There is no polemic in an account book, no attempt to look better than circumstances would allow. They are the unadorned entries of men keeping track of their income and expenses. For example, Richard Knightley, rector of Byfield in 1689, records in the list of his servants' wages, ?Ann Barlis . . . Her wages in my father's time 40 shillings?but I intend to give her two pounds, ten shillings? and a little further on, ?be it remembered [Jane Smith] put five pounds into my hands, for which I am to allow her five shillings and interest yearly?. Hart comments, ?she placed [her hard-earned money] in her master's hands, whom she felt she could trust? (p. xvii). Knightley lived up to Jane's expectations.
Squire Payne, the first of Hart's principal subjects, is a man with a large family to provide for, and he does well by them. His accounts show frequent expenses for his sons and daughters, and a regular allowance of five pounds to his wife for her personal expenses. We see many entries of six pence paid for letters in an age before the postage stamp, when the recipients, rather than the senders, paid the cost of mailing letters. We learn from Payne's account books that his trusted retainer, Sam Kippax, regularly received amounts of ?pay out,? presumably for authorized purchases and expenses. ?Sam accompanied his master everywhere he went, whether on visits to his friends . . . on his archidiaconal visitations or his London journeys? (p. 57). Sam is a significant person in Squire Payne's life, and, on his master's death, ?with his name on Squire's will as a witness . . . he disappears for ever from our ken? (p. 57).
Payne's account books provide the names of long-forgotten, never remembered workers whose only memorial now exists in these ledger entries. The minutiae of daily life are visible on every page. Expenses for ?April 4 [1719]. Given Nat 1 shilling, a man for catching my mare, 1 shilling, [total] 2 shillings? (p. 31). A few pages later is the tantalizing entry, ?June 19. Token to Miss Peggy in lieu of bees, 1 pound l shilling? (p. 35). Who Miss Peggy was, and why she received of Squire Payne the equivalent of a guinea in lieu of bees will remain always a mystery, but her ghost, with her apian companions, shimmers briefly in these pages.
And so it goes with these gentlemen's account books. Charity donations, educational costs, building repairs, clothing allowances, and a hundred miscellaneous expenses that everyone incurs during the course of a year are recorded here. On the basis of this information, we can construct the lives of the recorders.
The other major figure of Hart's investigation is Henry Mease, who makes his appearance as a young man of 27 in the year 1710. Mease's account book lists numerous expenses for his personal appearance: ?Barber to St. Thomas' Day, 16 shillings? and a little later, expenses for a velvet smoking cap (pp.101-102). Mease treated himself to various stimulants and ales. On March 31, 1713, upon hearing of the Peace of Utrecht, Mease records expenditures for ?hungary? water and snuff, ?at the Proclamation of Peace, 7 shillings, 8 pence? (p. 103).
Henry Mease's account book ends in 1735, though he was to live for more than a decade after that. Hart notes laconically, ?of those years our knowledge is very meager? (p. 114). Indeed, our knowledge of Richard Knightley, Squire Payne, Henry Mease, and the rest is meager. But the fact that they, and their families, servants, hired workers, fellow clergy, the poor to whom they gave aid, the warp and woof of their daily lives have been rescued from oblivion by the diligent, painstaking investigations of the Reverend Mr. Hart puts us deeply in his debt.
?Country Counting House? is not a book for everyone. But for those with a desire to reach into the personal documents of ordinary men and women of an earlier time, and discover there the quotidian events that comprise their existence, there can be few books more compelling. It is well illustrated with contemporary photographs of places mentioned in the text, as well as illustrations from the period. Hart amply allows his readers cause to agree with his statement that ?the Queen Anne and early Georgian incumbents were not all poverty-stricken, servile, rapacious, and of an equivocal social status. There were plenty of prosperous, well-connected, highly cultured rectors? (p. 131). We are privileged to meet some of them and their social network in this book.
