Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 120

The parish of Buckminster with Sewstern is situated in north-western Leicestershire on the county boundary with Lincolnshire. This fine edition of two volumes of parochial records provides a useful source for insights into village-level governance, which touched on issues ranging from poverty and taxes to common fields and vermin. The editor, Alan Fox, provides a short but helpful introduction to the sources, in which he notes the growing responsibilities of parishes in this period, as has been shown at a broader level by historians such as Joan Kent, Steve Hindle, Barry Reay, Keith Snell and Henry French. He concisely summarizes the principal contents of each volume and glosses some of the more obscure terms one encounters in the transcriptions. The introduction also includes references to numerous other printed editions of vestry books and parochial accounts.

The Town Book (1655–1767) is essentially a stripped-down version of the sort of vestry minutes one is likely to encounter elsewhere. It consists almost entirely of the annual appointment of the four chief parish officers – churchwarden, overseer of the poor, constable and surveyor of the highways – and the yearly balancing of their accounts. It should be noted that the latter does not include figures for the total amount spent or received, or itemized disbursements. It does, however, also include occasional references to setting rates, binding pauper apprentices, repairing the church and letting church land. This source will be useful mostly to genealogists, but the long lists of officers could also be used as a foundation for an attempt to reconstruct a prosopography of the parish elite, as Henry French has done for an earlier period.

The account book (1755–1813) of the constables and surveyors of the highways has much more detail thanks to its itemized disbursements and receipts. Many intriguing items are mentioned, if only very briefly, such as payments for conveying prisoners, examinations of paupers, attending ‘statties’ (hiring fairs), repairing roads, maintaining watercourses, and much else besides. Historians of agriculture may also find useful the fact that these accounts mention sub-officers, including a ‘neatherd’ (common cattle herdsman), a pinder (who impounded stray livestock) and a mole-catcher, as well as scores of individual bounty payments for catching foxes (1s. each), crows (2d. each) and sparrows (2d. per half dozen). The other type of payment that occurs extremely frequently relates to beggars, vagrants and other poor travellers. These can be found on almost every page. Occasionally the accounts offer a bit of detail such as the terrible case of May Wright in November 1807. She was ‘a woman found almost sta[r]ved in Grantham Lane’, whom the constable attempted to revive with ‘gin and ale’ and accommodated for five days. Her condition was so terrible that the blanket he gave her ‘was obliged to be burnt and her other things washing and cleaning’ (p. 184). Mentions of other poor travellers are much less detailed, but there are a remarkable number of payments to poor men, women, children, soldiers, sailors and even ‘turkey slaves’. It would be possible to follow the example of David Hitchcock’s work on Grandborough in Warwickshire in Rural History 23 (2012) and quantify the large numbers of mobile poor people who received help from the Buckminster constables in this period.

Taken as a whole, this edition presents a wealth of material that might be useful to historians interested in local social and economic life. The earlier Town Book is more limited in its potential uses, but the volume of accounts covering the later eighteenth century is rich in detail. It will be especially valuable because, as Fox notes in the introduction, the work of constables and surveyors of the highways is under-researched when compared to overseers of the poor and churchwardens.