Stogumber's Poor: 1601-1834

So for instance in 1766 the Overseers in Stogumber listed the expenses of taking William Hughes and his family to Yelverton in Devon, a journey which took 3 ½ days there and two days back. This wasn’t the only family removed from the parish that year; also expelled were Bett Branfield who was taken to Porlock, the Larcombes Family to Clayhanger, and Surages family to Huntspill. On the other side of the coin the officers had to go to Wiveliscombe to fetch William Rosseter back to Stogumber

All this moving people about the place was not cheap. As well as the expenses of physically transporting people about, the overseers also had to pay out legal expenses to secure the orders which gave them the authority to make these removals, or they had to pay the reciprocal expenses of parishes which had ordered people back to Stogumber. But this had to be weighed against the cost of keeping people in the parish who had become chargeable to the parish.

Clearly all these parishes wanted to minimise their expenses and were keen to move on problems as it were – and this was a game in which some parishes were more successful than others – for every winner there was a loser.

The driving force were the overseers of each parish, but the people who issued the orders for removal and settled appeals against such orders were the magistrates – these were often members of the local gentry such as the Trevelyan’s, the Wyndhams, the Carews and so forth.

Such people were unlikely to want a large number of poor and unsavoury folk in their immediate neighbourhood, particularly when they were building magnificent and gorgeous houses such as Crowcombe Court. Moreover the poor rate fell not on landowners but on the occupiers of land or property – so large landowners were only liable to pay the poor rate for their immediate holdings in the parish in which they either lived or farmed themselves.

– and so a pattern emerged of villages with a large, single, powerful and politically well-connected dominant, resident landowner having quite a different social complexion to villages such as Stogumber which had absentee landowners and many smaller, independent landowners, or tenants who lacked such clout.

The former are now referred to as having been closed villages and the latter open villages. Places such as Crowcombe were essentially closed to undesirable elements taking up residence there.

In the opposite column are two people who managed to make themselves quite at home in Stogumber but would not have found a ready welcome in a closed village.Stogumber was a place in which an absconding soldier found a ready acceptance, or a vagrant sea roving man thought a convenient place to bring his heavily pregnant wife.

Open villages were associated with a large number of alehouses and disorder –Stogumber had six alehouses at one point – and that was just the licensed premises – there were also prosecutions for the selling of ale from unlicensed premises or tippling houses. Open villages also tended to be places where the reach and authority of the Church of England was relatively weak, and where there were a large number of non conformists. Stogumber had a very large and prominent Baptist community. Open villages tended to be poorly planned, sprawling, with cheap housing compared to closed villages which had fewer houses, were more compact and had an altogether tidier appearance.

And so it is argued the poor law came over time to have a major influences on how different villages developed and the social character that grew from these developments

The sale of Mary Bacon and her children.

A problem with the whole concept of settlement was that people might be removed to places of which they had but the most fleeting and distant of associations, or indeed to which they had never been. It is this which lies behind one of the more well known incidents in Stogumber’s past when William Bacon sold his wife and children in the market place to Robert Jones in 1785

William Bacon was born in Sampford Brett but in 1745 when he was fifteen he obtained a settlement in St Decuman’s by hiring himself for a year’s service. Three years later when he was 18 he married a Stogumber girl called Mary Gadd – who was pregnant – in Stogumber church.

At least that’s what it says in the church register and what Stogumber’s overseers maintained but William Bacon on the other hand said that he knew of his own marriage only by hearsay since he was "carried to Stogumber church by the officers of the parish", and "being very high in Liquor he doesn’t know whether he were married or not".

In other words Stogumber’s overseers seemed to have arranged a shotgun marriage to get a pregnant girl who was about to become chargeable to the parish off their hands and onto St Decuman’s books.

Immediately after the marriage William Bacon left Mary and moved to Bridgwater and then Spaxton where in the fullness of time he became quite wealthy and gained a new place of legal settlement and also a common law wife and several children. Mary meanwhile went to live with Robert Jones a labourer in Stogumber and had a further 10 children with him.

And that was the end of that – at least for the next 36 years.

At which point the overseers of the poor in Stogumber got a legal order to have Mary Gadd and her children – one of whom was single and pregnant herself - removed from Stogumber to go and live with the husband she had not seen for nearly four decades , in a place where she had never been, and with her husbands new family.

On 20th December – the day the removal order was due to take effect – in a desperate attempt to avoid the removal order taking effect, William Bacon came from Spaxton to Stogumber and met Robert Jones in the market place, where he agreed to sell Mary and the children to Robert for five shillings . The transaction duly took place.

There are aspects of this story that are quite amusing to us now, but we should not forget that these were desperate measures being taken by desperate people – none of the parties involved wanted this to happen.

The magistrates were unrelenting and shortly after Christmas 1784, Mary and her children Mary aged from 20 to 9 were removed to Spaxton.