#localhistory

A Saturday, so I came in for only the morning, to finish rehousing a bundle of churchwardens' accounts from the 1780s that have been waiting since August. The box they came in had softened at the base, and three of the folded leaves had fused at a corner — not badly, just enough to require the bone folder and patience. I got them open without loss. The satisfaction of that is small and total.

The accounts themselves are routine: window glass replaced, the sexton paid four shillings for a quarter's work, lime purchased for the churchyard path. But in the margin of one page, in a different hand and a darker ink, someone has written a single name — Hannah Morse — and beneath it, in figures: 2s. 6d. for lying-in cloth. No other mention of her anywhere in the volume. The record is silent on who she was, whether she was a servant to the churchwardens or a parishioner receiving relief, whether the cloth was for a birth or a death or both. Two shillings and sixpence was perhaps two days' wages for an unskilled labourer in the 1780s. Whatever it purchased, someone thought it worth entering. That is the whole of what I can say with confidence.

I ate my lunch in the churchyard. The horse chestnuts are turning. A conker had split open on the path and lay with the two halves separate, the nut still bright inside, the way a locket looks when someone has forced it.

Brought out a churchwardens' account today from 1779 — a small volume, boards worn soft as cloth at the spine, the ink a good iron-gall brown that has kept its contrast. Midway through the disbursements a figure stopped me: two shillings and fourpence for mending the sexton's coat. Not the coat itself, which would be the parish's responsibility in any case, but the mending of it. Someone's hands, someone's needle and thread, and no name anywhere for them. The record is silent on who did the work. I find myself wondering whether it was the sexton's wife, or a woman in one of the cottages near the churchyard gate, or simply whoever was to hand that week.

I walked in this morning through the back streets behind the market, past the fruiterer's where they had crates of early apples out on the pavement, and I thought about prices, as I sometimes do. The mending of a coat for two shillings and fourpence in 1779 — a journeyman carpenter might have earned perhaps eight or nine shillings for a full week then, so it was not a trivial sum. Whether that reflects the difficulty of the repair or simply what a skilled needlewoman could ask, I cannot say.

The volume also records fourpence for a new broom for the church. These entries are easy to undervalue. A broom, a coat, a candle — they suggest a building that required constant small maintenance, and people paid in small coin to provide it.

Pulled a churchwardens' account this morning — 1779, the parish of St. Giles, quarterly repairs. The binding has been giving trouble for months, the spine soft and the front board hanging by its last thread of sewing. I spent half an hour with a folder of Japanese tissue, a small weight, and more patience than I usually manage before eleven. The thing is stable now, which is not the same as repaired, but it is enough.

The entry that stopped me was not the roof lead, though there was plenty of that, but a single line near the foot of the page: Pd. to Eliz. Marsh for washing the surplices & smalls, 1s. 4d. Four quarterly entries, and she appears in all of them. A shilling and fourpence. I looked it up: a skilled male labourer in that decade might expect around eight or nine shillings a week, if the work was steady, which it never quite was. The surplices were presumably heavy when wet. The record is silent on whether she collected them herself or had them delivered.

I find myself wondering if Elizabeth Marsh had children, whether she took in other washing beside the church linen, whether she is the same E. Marsh baptised in 1741 in the register two boxes along. Perhaps. The overlap is possible but I will not call it a match without something firmer.