Toddington Manor to 1719

In 1528 Sir Thomas Cheney (c. 1485-1559), of an ancient Hertfordshire family, married Anne Broughton, heiress of Toddington Manor. Cheney was in the royal service and managed to increase his estate in Toddington and Harlington as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries. In c.1545 he built Toddington Manor House. From a drawing on a map of Toddington of 1581 it appears that the house was built round four sides of an inner court. It was three storeys high with turrets on the four corners. Opposite the great court was the central gatehouse. On the other side of the inner court was a lesser gatehouse leading into the back court which had a number of domestic buildings round the outside.

It is described accurately by J.H. Blundell as “Cheney's Palace”. It certainly has the effect of one, even if it was never actually called it. In 1671 it had 45 hearths, the fifth largest house in Bedfordshire. It was visited twice by Elizabeth I and once by James I. The 1644 inventory contains two rooms called the Queen's Room and Leicester's Room (after Elizabeth's favourite). Cheney had clearly intended to build a house large and impressive enough to entertain royalty.

Henry, Lord Cheney, Thomas and Alice's son, held Toddington till his death in 1587, when it passed to his widow Lady Jane. In 1614 the house passed to Thomas Wentworth, her great nephew. In 1626 he was made Earl of Cleveland and, because of the expense of life at Court, got heavily into debt. An order was made for their payment.

The Wentworths were Royalists. The Earl was imprisoned 1642-1648 and both father and sons were exiles with Charles II in 1650. Inevitably, the Parliamentarians seized their estates. Most of the furniture at Toddington was confiscated, taken up to London and “sold for the use of the State”. An inventory was made of the rest of the goods, valued at £64 11s 2d. Because so little had been left, the Countess of Cleveland was allowed to keep them and did not have to pay for their value.

A number of rooms had only been left with the bedsteads. Lady Cleveland's own room was left mainly intact, partly because most of the fittings were so old. It was hung with five pieces of old arras.

‘The nation throughout the first months of 1756 lived in abject terror of an invasion. Few troops were ready to meet such a descent, for votes cannot improvise trained officers and men, and the folly of the Administration had done its worst to discourage enlistment.’ So wrote Sir John Fortescue of the early panicky days of the Seven Years’ War. One of the responses to the threat came from some landowners who raised local forces of their own, promising the volunteers that they would not be required to serve abroad. In practice, some of the Somerset volunteers raised by Lord Ilchester and Lord Digby were driven on board transports despite their protests, and shipped to Gibraltar. Fortescue added, ‘Never was there more brutal and heartless instance of the ill-faith kept by a British Government towards the British soldier.’ Another response came from the government itself, which tried to get a Militia bill through Parliament in 1756. This first attempt failed, partly because of the opposition to it in the House of Lords by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, who was soon to resign from office.

Lord Hardwicke andhis family figure so much in the story that follows that the main members should be introduced. Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke lived just to the east of Bedfordshire, at Wimpole on the road to Cambridge. His oldest son, another Philip, used the courtesy title of Lord Royston and lived at Wrest, Silsoe, with his wife Jemima, Marchioness Grey. Royston was a Member of Parliament for Cambridgeshire. Another of Hardwicke’s sons was Charles Yorke, the Solicitor-General, who was also to be Lord Chancellor in 1770, although he died three days after his appointment. Hardwicke and Royston were very close, the son often asking the father for advice. It is interesting to note from the existing correspondence that Royston clearly preferred the counsel of the recently retired Lord Chancellor to that of the brother who was still a member of the government as one of the law officers of the Crown.

One of the other principal characters in the present story is Thomas Potter, M.P., whose life story was chequered. In 1757 the government tried once more to get a Militia Act onto the statute book.

No full study of the problems of law and order in Georgian times in Bedfordshire has yet appeared, and the writer hastens to add that he makes no claim that the present work amounts to such a study. Rather, it is a collection of five essays touching on some of the matters which such a study would have to consider in depth. The explanation for the present limited work goes back to 1977, when the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society (jointly with Phillimore & Co. Ltd.) published the writer’s A Study of Bedford Prison 1660-1877. During the course of his research for that work the writer came across many interesting incidents and characters connected with the prison, or involved with other links in the law and order chain which has prison as its final, or penultimate link. He was obliged to resist the temptation to pursue every single item which interested him, but he resolved to follow up some of the more fascinating ones in due course. The essays contained in the present volume are a part of the result of that follow-up and may accordingly be regarded in the nature of an appendix to the prison history. Three other essays by the writer on allied topics have already appeared elsewhere, and may be of interest to the reader concerned with the history of the prison and the lives of those involved with it.

The first was a biographical sketch of Sir John Kelyng, which was included in the Society’s miscellaneous volume in 1980. Kelyng, who presided at John Bunyan’s trial in Bedford in January 1661, turned out on a fuller investigation to have been even more odious than one had suspected. Bunyan had given a vivid thumbnail sketch of his own judge in Pilgrim’s Progress when he portrayed Lord Hategood presiding at the trial of Faithful. Kelyng’s behaviour at Bunyan’s trial was typical of the man, who bullied prisoners and others throughout his career. He died in 1671 whilst Bunyan was still in custody, and according to Lord Campbell, a later Chief Justice and lx)rd Chancellor, ‘he expired, to the great relief of all who had any regard for the due administration of justice’. Strong words, but amply justified. Unfortunately Bunyan did not live to read them.

Bedford in 1841

The most obvious way to improve one’s lot in Victorian rural England was to leave it. The fact that most larger towns and villages grew in population while smaller villages usually went into decline after mid century in spite of a high birth rate and a declining death rate, indicates that people did leave in considerable numbers. Most of those leaving Bedfordshire villages left for local towns and for London. There was some attempt to encourage families to migrate to the industrial north, although some contemporaries complained that it was difficult to get men to go even as far as Northampton or Birmingham. Those who did move found that wages were on the whole better in the north, but some were caught out by unforeseen troubles, such as the cotton famine during the U.S. civil war.

Emigration overseas was frequently in the foreground of attention. The poor law authorities encouraged farm labouring families to emigrate to the United States and, later in the century, there was an increasing official emphasis on Canada and on the Australian colonies and New Zealand. Australia, however, had to overcome a deep seated prejudice because of its past association with transportation. Emigration was one issue where both the civil authorities, such as the poor law unions, and the farm workers’ own trade unions saw eye to eye, and which both promoted as a means of reducing the chronic over population of rural districts.

Migration

The incumbent of Cranfield encouraged unemployed labourers to move to Mellor in Derbyshire. James Kay, M.P., reported on their changed conditions, 1836.

Mellor, in Derbyshire. Mr. Clayton’s mill.

Mr. Clayton expressed great satisfaction with the docility and good conduct of his new work-people. He would not have one Irish-man at Mellor on any account. His mill is in a secluded situation, and he has taken great care to select good hands. He thinks he could not keep Irish workmen in subordination, and considers them decidedly inferior workmen. His new hands from Bedfordshire are very gentle in their manners, and have acquired a knowledge of their employment with great rapidity. Mr. Clayton is quite satisfied with their whole demeanour. The Mill is situated in a most romantic valley, and the cottages of the work-people are scattered over the neighbouring hills, in very healthy situations.

In 1772 Josiah Thompson also collected information about the number of dissenting congregations in England and Wales, as part of the political campaign to exempt nonconformists from the subscription required by the Toleration Act. He had access to a copy of the Evans List (App. 1), but made his own enquiries. Unfortunately he did not obtain information about the numbers of hearers and voters in each congregation.

This information is taken from the copy of the List in Dr Williams's Library (MS. 38.5). There are other copies extant. The following abbreviations are used by Thompson: B - Baptist, C - number of congregations, M - number of ministers.

Although nineteenth century England was the world’s first industrial society, agriculture remained the largest single male occupation at mid century and farm workers formed the largest occupational group. As long as industry was powered by steam, it was confined largely to the midlands and north. The population of an inland, rural county like Bedfordshire remained almost entirely dependent on agriculture and the most typical Bedfordshire man was one who earned his living on the land.

It is not always realised that societies where most of the working population are engaged in cultivating the land in return for wages, are, historically speaking, rather rare. Most agrarian societies in the past have either been based on some form of serfdom or slavery or have been peasant societies where the typical countryman cultivated the land on his own account with the help of his family. Even within the British Isles during the nineteenth century, peasant communities were the rule in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and some remote parts of England. Only in the progressive, prosperous south and east of England was most of the land cultivated by farmers who employed labour on a considerable scale.

In lowland England, the peasantry had long disappeared by the nineteenth century. In an arable county like Bedfordshire, rural society had become divided into three classes – landowners great and not so great who drew a rent; farmers (some owners,others tenants) who managed the land in return for profits from the sale of produce; and a much more numerous class of wage-dependent labourers. It is with this last class that this book is concerned.

Bedfordshire is an appropriate county in which to make a study of the Victorian farm worker. Being one of the corn-growing counties of the eastern half of England, the classic pattern of landlord, farmer and labourer was highly developed and accepted with little interchange or social mobility between classes. The farm-labouring way of life in Bedfordshire was relatively undistorted by outside influence. North of the Trent, farm-workers’ wages were influenced favourably by the presence of industry and coalfields; in the pastoral counties of Wales and the west there was less rigid distinction between master and man on the land; while further south the influence of London made itself felt in terms of higher wages and greater opportunities.

INTRODUCTION

‘Four yeers omitted by reason of the civill warre in the nation, which also occasioned civill warre in this parish between the parson and parishioners untill Alexander Nesbett was Inducted rector heerof Feb: anno 1646.’ Parish register ofTingrith, Beds.

The last twenty years have seen exciting developments in historical writing on the seventeenth century. That period in which the Civil War was a dominant event retains an enduring interest; it is live, vibrant, controversial. In recent years major works of scholarship have been produced which have modified the received interpretation of these years, and have demonstrated the continuing vitality of its historiography. What were the causes of the war? What was its impact on society? How enduring were the changes it brought about? These are some of the questions that still remain fresh.

As recent historians have reviewed these and other questions, local studies have played an important part in providing the evidence for reinterpretation. It was the famous ‘storm over the gentry’ of the 1950s that demonstrated the need for detailed local case-studies to test general hypotheses. Professor Everitt’s work on Kent was something of a milestone; the first of a new school of county studies which continues to flourish twenty years later. His concept of the ‘county community’, founded on study of the localities, has proved very influential as an approach to the national history of the mid-seventeenth century. Of course the concept has been refined, modified, criticised: what has survived is the judgement that local history is not just an illustration of central policies in action, nor yet an antiquarian study in which national history can be ignored. The relationship was two-way and dynamic, as the works of Dr Morrill, or Professors Holmes, Underdown and Ashton demonstrate well.

Many county studies have been published in the last twenty years, and more remain unpublished in the form of research theses. Bedfordshire now remains one of the few English counties which has not received attention within the framework of the last two decades’ scholarship. Its comparative dearth of records may be the cause of this.

Yet despite this drawback the attempt is worth making. It has not been done before.

The Act of 1835 and the Inspectors

The time which Lord John Russell spent as Home Secretary, 1835-39, constituted the most crucial four year period in the history of the prison system. In those years the decisions were taken which led to the construction of the prisons which today still partly determine our penal policies by their mere presence. Russell’s background fitted him admirably for the job of a reformer at the Home Office, and he was well aware of this. Tn all times of popular movement the Russells have been on the “forward” side’, he wrote to his brother Francis, by then 7th Duke of Bedford, on 13 October 1841, ‘At the Reformation the first Earl of Bedford, in Charles the First’s days Francis, the great Earl, in Charles the Second’s William Lord Russell, in later times Francis Duke of Bedford— my father—you—and lastly myself in the Reform Bill’. His friend Sydney Smith had the following to say about Russell’s confidence: ‘I believe Lord John Russell would perform the operation for the stone, build St. Peter’s, or assume—with or without ten minutes’ notice—the command of the Channel fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died, the church had tumbled down, and the Channel fleet been knocked to atoms’.

Russell himself wrote very little about his days as Home Secretary when he was responsible for some of the prison problems of the day and, perhaps for this reason, his biographers have not paid much attention to his connection with the prisons either. However limited his knowledge of prison matters may have been, Russell was aware of many of the problems of crime and criminals on his appointment: he had been a Member of Parliament and a Minister, and he had chaired a Select Committee on the subject in 1827—the one to which Philip Hunt had given extensive evidence. Apart from this Russell was a shrewd observer who managed to keep a balance between town and country interests. In his autobiographical work he mentioned the problem of poverty and the early inadequate relief provisions.