Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 253

Parish books, vestry minutes and overseers’ accounts, like the men whose activities they record, represent the bricks from which that rather roughcast edifice, the early modern state, was constructed. Part of their attraction to historians is that they are as diverse in form and content as they are common in county archives. It is impossible to predict what one will find in such sources, and sometimes they do contain historical gems. Layston, in Hertfordshire, which incorporated much of the small town of Buntingford within its boundaries, contains just such a gem in its parish memorandum book, namely the (rather unprepossessing) ‘advice’ drafted by the vicar, Alexander Strange, to his ‘good neighbours & lovinge parishioners’ on 15 February 1636.

In it, Strange sought a solution to the problem of the in-migration to Buntingford of numbers of poor families, attracted (he thought) by the town’s accessible charities, and the efforts of its neighbours to unload their dependent poor onto the town. He suggested that his loving parishioners shun newcomers as tenants, club together to buy and demolish cottages ‘like to receyve more’ additional poor incomers, and negotiate with non-resident house owners to prevent the accommodation of further undesirable paupers in the future. He wanted to ensure that (the quite extensive) parish charities were restricted to ‘your antient poore & such as have byne... a good tyme dwellers among you’.

Strange’s advice is notable for its breathtaking can-dour, so much at odds with the routine, laconic records of parish pensions and memoranda on charitable gifts that fill the first half of the volume. As Hindle remarks, ‘the “advice” represents a full-blown exegesis of the micro-politics of settlement and belonging, touching almost every aspect of the social and economic life of the parish’. It also presents two historical problems. Firstly, apart from the occasional incautious statement in equitydepositions, few other sources broach its frank, even brutal, remedies. Secondly, it is clearly a draft (albeit in a volume presumably open to the wider vestry), and we do not know how, or even whether, it was ever delivered. However, it is similar to the ‘ratepaying’ hostility to ‘inmates’, paupers and vagrants expressed throughout the country in the early seventeenth century, and encapsulates these feelings in stark terms.

After Strange’s vehemence, the rest of the material in 254 the agricultural this volume impresses more by its sheer heterogeneity than by its capacity to surprise – although his 1607 Assize sermon comes close. Agricultural historians foraging for tithing customs or commodity prices will have short commons here, and will have to content themselves with the perambulations of 1591 and 1708, and Thomas Heton’s eighteenth-century notes on parish lands and income. However, the volume contains detailed records of disbursements to paupers during Strange’s incumbency, a characteristic early seventeenth century ‘scheme to set the poor on work’, and shows the difficulty parishioners had in acclimatizing to the financial burdens of the Elizabethan poor law. Hertfordshire horologists will apparently be gratified to learn that Henry Kennex repaired the parish clock in 1621, while Heton’s conjectures on the clockwork of the heavens as well as his antiquarian endeavours are symptomatic of clerical learning a century later.

While the memoranda tend to dissolve into a miscellany after Strange’s death in 1650, both sections of the book benefit from detailed historical introductions by Hindle (on Strange) and Falvey (on Heton). These place both subjects, and the social history of the parish, in the appropriate historical and historiographical contexts. Similarly, the earlier ecclesiastical history of the parish is dealt with comprehensively in an additional introductory contribution by Philip Plumb, who explains the early medieval origins of the complicated parish structure of Buntingford. For those interested specifically in Layston, or in Hertfordshire more generally, this volume will be an essential resource. For those concerned with the wider social and economic history of the poor law and poverty, parochial government, and the byways of eighteenth-century intellectual endeavours, this volume provides a series of suggestive and apposite examples. While these memoranda are likely to raise the historical profile of the parish of Layston, they will definitely launch Alexander Strange into the fabric of early modern social history.