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Debt and credit in Bath's court of requests, 1829–39

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Margot Finn
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Extract

Historians have long recognized the central role of debt and credit for producers, retailers and consumers in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Against a background characterized by persistent shortages of specie, limited banking facilities and erratic transport mechanisms, the speculative impulse that fed the expanding economy drew sustenance from a proliferation of instruments of private credit — notably bills of exchange, promissory notes, and accommodation bills — which, together with an increase of trade credit to retailers and their customers, served to promote and intertwine the industrial, commercial and consumer revolutions. ‘At any one time any business owed and was owed many goods caught up in the process of exchange’, Julian Hoppit observes of the later decades of the eighteenth century. ‘All businessmen were creditors and all businessmen were debtors.’ As trade and manufacture increased in English towns and cities, extended chains of indebtedness multiplied the economic links both between individual producers, retailers or consumers and among these sectors of the economy. Thus in Lancashire innkeepers were the debtors of maltsters, brewers and wine merchants, but were the creditors of shopkeepers, who in turn extended webs of consumer credit to sawyers and carpenters, artisans typically indebted (in their capacity as producers) to the master builders for whom they laboured in Liverpool's shipyards. Based on personal faith rather than tangible securities, these varied forms of private credit were notoriously unstable. Broad-based financial crises fuelled by the failure of private credit became commonplace in the last three decades of the century, and persistently disrupted economic life into the Victorian period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , October 1994 , pp. 211 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was funded partially by the Emory University Research Committee. The assistance of Colin Johnson, the Bath City Archivist, and of Jeffrey Young regarding figures and tabular material is gratefully acknowledged, as are comments on earlier versions of the paper to seminars in London and Leicester.

References

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7 For the borough courts, see Muldrew, C., ‘Credit and the courts: debt litigation in a seventeenth-century urban community’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 46 (1993), 23–38;CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the county courts, see Johnson, P., ‘Small debts and economic distress in England and Wales, 1857–1913’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 46 (1993), 65–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13 Winder, , ‘Courts of requests’, 380.Google Scholar The legislation was 45 Geo. III c. 67.

14 Keene's Bath Directory. Corrected to January, 1829 (Bath, 1829), 39–40;Google Scholar Keane, , Courts of Requests, 106;Google Scholar Second Part of the Appendix to the Fourth Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Practice and Proceedings of the Superior Courts of Common Law, Parliamentary Papers, 25, part 2 (1831–1832), 532–5.Google Scholar

15 The court of record, although empowered to hear debt cases of any amount, issued only forty-five writs in 1823, and only seventeen in 1827. A Return of All Places in England and Wales Claiming Power of Issuing Processes to Hold Bail in Actions for Debt, Parliamentary Papers, 20 (1828), 82.Google Scholar

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17 The court record books for 1785–88,1829–31 and 1837–40 are located in the City of Bath Record Office, Bath Guildhall. As the eighteenth-century records are substantially less complete than the nineteenth-century court books, they are not included in the following discussion.

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23 Only the three statuses of gentleman, spinster and widow appear for defendants. Occupations or statuses are recorded for 91.3 per cent of plaintiffs and 82.0 per cent of defendants in 1829, and 100 per cent of plaintiffs and 99.6 per cent of defendants in 1839. The omission of occupation or status information appears to be fairly random across groups. Thus when checked against the entries in Keene's Bath Directory for 1829, the unidentified litigants in the sample appear in trades as diverse as grocers, farriers, carpenters, tailors, plumbers, drawing and painting masters, and surgeons. As not all litigants can be identified in this manner, and as labourers are not listed in the directory, all calculations of the proportion of litigants belonging to a given occupational group are calculated in this paper as a percentage of the plaintiffs or defendants for whom an occupation or status is given in the court register.

24 A total of 51.7 per cent of the 1829 causes and 45.2 per cent of the 1839 causes were described as concerning either goods sold and delivered or the balance of an unspecified account.

25 In 1831, the weekly charge for keeping a labourer, his wife and two children at subsistence levels was estimated at 12s, of which 1s 6d (12.5 per cent) represented rent. Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 282.Google Scholar

26 The range of causes entered per session was 71 to 90 in 1829, and 88 to 143 in 1839.

27 Of the judgements rendered for 1829,44.9 per cent were denoted ‘settled’, ‘neither appeared’, ‘nonserve’, or ‘plaintiff did not appear’; the corresponding figure for 1839 was 54.1 per cent. A similar, but far more pronounced, tendency in early modern civil litigation is discussed in Muldrew, ‘Credit and the courts’, 27, who notes that in the borough court of seventeenth-century King's Lynn only 4 per cent of cases continued to judgement. See also Sharpe, J.A., ‘“Such disagreement betwyxt neighbours”: litigation and human relationships in early modern England’, in Bossy, J. (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 1983), 167–88.Google Scholar

28 Bath Guardian, 22 03 1839.Google Scholar For legal opinions on the purchase of necessities and luxuries, see Donnison Roper, R.S., A Treatise of the Law of Property Arising from the Relation between Husband and Wife, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London, 1826), vol. 2, 110–11.Google Scholar

29 These figures clearly underestimate the proportion of suits brought for food and drink provision, as suits brought by yeomen, spinsters, and widows — excluded here from the calculations — were often for beer, bread and meat. Trades included in the calculation are: bacon-factor, baker, beer-seller, brewer, butcher, buttery jobber, cheesemonger, confectioner, cook, dairyman, fisherman, fishmonger, fruitier, ginger-beer maker, greengrocer, grocer, innkeeper, maltster, milkman, miller, poulterer, shopkeeper, tea-dealer, tripeseller, victualler and wine merchant.

30 Yeomen were more likely than drapers to settle out of court in both years. Of all suits initiated in the sample for 1829,44.9 per cent were settled out of court; 51.7 per cent of yeomen's suits but only 32.1 per cent of drapers' suits were settled in this manner. In the 1839 sample, 54.1 per cent of all suits, 56.3 per cent of yeomen's suits and 39.6 per cent of drapers' suits were settled out of court.

31 The census figures for this period are not wholly reliable, but they indicate, if anything, a decrease in unskilled male labour in Bath over time. The census of 1831 categorized just over 20 per cent of all adult males in the city as labourers; in 1851, one-sixth or just under 17 per cent were so designated. Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 268Google Scholar, and idem, ‘The industries of the city of Bath in the first half of the nineteenth century’, Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archæological and Natural History Society, 108 (1963–1964), 133.Google Scholar

32 Brougham, Henry, speaking in the House of Commons in 1828, noted that it was usual for a gentlemanly debtor in need of credit to ‘send for his butcher and his baker, and get bailed’, although such ‘a gentleman could not, after that, complain so well of the meat, or the bread, or the bills during the next half year.’ Speeches of Henry Lord Brougham, upon Questions Relating to Public Rights, Duties and Interests, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1838), vol. 2, 410.Google Scholar Similar relations obtained at the lower end of the credit spectrum as well, where shopkeepers ensured the continued custom of workers both by an extensive trade credit and through their role as substantial landlords. See Crossick, G., ‘The petite bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Britain: the urban and liberal case’, in Crossick, G. and Haupt, H.G. (eds), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1984), 82–4.Google Scholar

33 All tables profiling the suits of the six selected groups exclude suits brought by gentlemen, spinsters and widows, as these status groups represent a multiplicity of occupations (or the lack thereof) and cannot be ascribed with any consistency to a particular type of purchase.

34 In nineteenth-century usage, the term ‘shopkeeper’ denoted ‘small, non-specialized retailers who lacked capital or social standing’, while ‘grocer’ referred to a provisioner of higher status and wealth. Phillips, M., ‘The evolution of markets and shops in Britain’, in Benson, J. and Shaw, G. (eds), The Evolution of Retail Systems, c. 1800–1914 (Leicester, 1992), 63.Google Scholar For the grocer as a ‘purveyor of luxuries to the rich’, see Winstanley, M.J., The Shopkeeper's World: 1830–1914 (Manchester, 1982), 8–9.Google Scholar

35 The court clerk's annotations for gentlemen's suits detail several instances of horse and gig hire as well as one suit to recover the cost of coach hire from Bath to London.

36 Cobbett, W., Rural Rides, ed. , G.D.H. and Cole, M., 3 vols (London, 1930), vol. 1, 276–7.Google Scholar

37 Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 275–81Google Scholar, notes the range of women's experiences as widows and spinsters in Bath. In the sample months of August-September 1829 and 1839, widows and spinsters together constituted 8.8 per cent and 6.5 per cent of all defendants. None of these women were designated by trade, but the wider samples for 1829–30 and 1839–40 denote some women as laundresses, butchers, servants, dressmakers, pastry-cooks and shopkeepers.

38 The building trades occupied 14.5 per cent of Bath's adult male population in 1831; one in eight of Somerset county's masons lived in the city. Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 268.Google Scholar

39 Over half of the deaths associated with the epidemic of 1831 occurred in the Avon Street district, an area with especially low rentals. Mortality in most of the city's working-class districts in the 1848–49 epidemic was four to fives times higher than that in the affluent Bathwick region. Ibid., 289–91.

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45 The so-called ‘Tippling Act’ of 1750, 24 Geo. II c. 40, protected debtors from most publicans' claims in the small debt courts.

46 Winstanley, , Shopkeeper's World, 12Google Scholar, notes the diversity of some shopkeepers' goods. The only goods regularly itemized beside entries on suits by Bath's shopkeepers are, however, bread and meat.

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48 McKendrick, N., ‘Home demand and economic growth: a new view of the role of women and children in the Industrial Revolution’, in McKendrick, N. (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974), 152–210Google Scholar, provides the most strident argument along these lines. Lorna, Weatherill makes more modest claims for women as consumers of table linen, looking-glasses, and the new decorative goods in ‘A possession of one's own: women and consumer behavior in England, 1660–1740’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 131–56.Google Scholar

49 There were 167 adult women for every 100 adult men in Bath in 1821, and 197 women for every 100 men thirty years later. Spinsters outnumbered bachelors in the city's population by a factor of more than two to one by 1851, and widows were almost four times as numerous as widowers. Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 275–6.Google Scholar In Keene's Bath Directory for 1829, women represent just under 20 per cent of all commercial entries for the letters A-E. Although concentrated in the laundry and dressmaking trades, they also include plumbers, a paper-maker, a printer, a pawnbroker and a chimney sweep.

50 Lemire, , Fashion's Favourite, 96Google Scholar, notes that domestic servants, with close proximity to more affluent consumers, were the most fashion-conscious of all wage-earners; McKendrick, ‘Home demand and economic growth’, underscores the impact of women's wages and employment on consumption; Campbell, C., The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987), underlines the role of romanticism.Google Scholar

51 An exception is Beverly Lemire's analysis of the importance of salesmen (sellers of second-hand clothes) in ‘Consumerism in preindustrial and early industrial England: the trade in secondhand clothes’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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53 This is persuasively argued by Muldrew, C., ‘Interpreting the market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England’, Social History, 18 (1993), 168–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 Tallymen or ‘Scotch drapers’ were, significantly, the largest single group of plaintiffs in the county courts, a circumstance which suggests that the rise of drapers as plaintiffs in Bath's court of requests formed part of a wider trend in civil litigation. See Rubin, G.R., ‘The county courts and the tally trade, 1846–1914’, in Rubin, G.R. and Sugarman, D. (eds), Law, Economy and Society, 1750–1914: Essays in the History of English Law (Abingdon, 1984), 321–48.Google Scholar

55 Brooks, , ‘Interpersonal conflict’, 395.Google Scholar