The Story of England, page 39
Nonconformists
The explosion of radical and dissenting groups after the Civil War is one of the great features of English seventeenth-century history. What contemporary directories of heresy had listed with loathing was now in the open: Quakers, Ranters, Independents, Millenaries, Sabbatarians, Seventh-Day Men, Brownists, Children of the New Birth, Sweet Singers of Israel and so on. Their legacy in Kibworth can be seen in chapels dotted around the village, many now redundant, and in the beautiful slate tombstones in the grounds of the old Congregational Chapel on the A6.
It was after Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 that Kibworth suddenly emerged as a great centre of dissent. We know from the surveys ordered by Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1663, that Kibworth Harcourt in particular was already a centre of Protestant dissent. The episcopal returns of 1669 report a startlingly big community, a ‘conventicle’ of about 200 Presbyterians and Independents of the ‘middle sort of people’ meeting there together – an astonishingly large number, unsurpassed even by larger centres of dissent like Market Harborough. It was reported that these dissenters met in the houses of ordinary husbandmen, Isaac Davenport, Will Johnson and Will Jordan, and the returns list four preachers in particular who preached to this community: Matthew Clark, John Shuttlewood, an ‘ejected minister called Southam’ and ‘a husbandman called Farmer’, along with William Sheffield. In a trend that quickly came to define Nonconformist practice, however, most ministers were itinerant, and of these only Sheffield actually lived in Kibworth. Clark was particularly tireless, ‘preaching up and down in Leicestershire and the neighbouring Parts’. In 1669 he seems to have been preaching at no fewer than fourteen Leicestershire parishes.
The atmosphere was particularly hostile for Nonconformists during the first decade of Charles’s reign. In 1664 the Conventicle Act forbade religious assemblies of more than five people not under the aegis of the Established Church, driving some pastors and their congregations to hold services in the open air. Three times Clark was imprisoned in Leicester jail ‘for the Crime of Preaching’. He was evicted from his ‘very lonesome house in Leicester Forest’ by the terms of the 1665 Five Mile Act, which forbade clergymen from living within that radius of a parish from which they had been banned. He was later fined and excommunicated, and had his possessions seized. A community as large as that in Kibworth Harcourt must have been subject to routine observation, harassment and inquisition. Not for nothing has this period been referred to as the ‘heroic age of Dissent’.
Something of a let-up occurred in 1672 when Charles issued a Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended (though it did not repeal) the penal laws and permitted the construction of registered chapels run by pastors who were officially vetted and licensed. William Sheffield was granted such a licence that year, and his house in Kibworth was recognized as a meeting place.
There were certain groups, however, to which no such forbearance was shown. One, surprisingly, was the Quakers. This sect had been founded during the 1640s by a weaver’s son, George Fox, who came from Fenny Drayton near Kibworth. They called themselves ‘Saints’ (to mark their intended revival of the early Church), ‘Friends of the Truth’ or simply ‘Friends’. But after a judge mocked this group as ‘Quakers’ who ‘tremble at the word of the Lord’, this label was proudly adopted. In contrast to their later reputation, the early Quaker communities were seen as dangerous and subversive, particularly by the Restoration regime alarmed by their rejection of monarchy and the established social hierarchy; but even Puritan preachers who now led Nonconformist groups were furious at the disruption the Quakers caused (and at their rejection and ridicule of all priests and ministers). During the 1650s William Sheffield himself had twice written to the Protectorate to report ‘a great concourse of those people called Quakers’. They acted ‘under pretence of peacableness,’ he wrote, ‘… yet some of them were accidentally seene to have pistols at theire sides under theire cloakes and in their pocketts’; he himself had been threatened with the ‘lowse-house’ (slang for a cage). By toleration for such, he argued, ‘godly people [are] discontented, that the government should be soe much asleep as to suffer such in their insolency, which is falsely called a liberty, for as they manage it, it is not only disturbing but distructive to the civill and Christian libertyes of others.’
Measures were taken against the Quakers during the Interregnum, and more systematic suppression was carried out by the government of Charles II, which in 1662 introduced a Quaker Act, requiring people to swear an oath of allegiance to the king – all such oaths contravened Quaker principles. Such persecution led many Quakers to emigrate to America, among them William Penn, who founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with unprecedented religious freedoms. But a remarkable document in the Leicestershire County Archive preserves the suppression of one Quaker community unrecorded in the official Quaker histories and which based itself in Kibworth parish at Smeeton.
As ever, it is in the official attempts at suppression that traces of these groups survive. In this case the County Lieutenancy Book preserves an order sent out to a Lieutenant Bales, at the head of a militia troop overseen by Captain George Fawnt, on 3 December 1668. It notes information passed to leading men of the county to the effect that ‘there are great numbers of persons commonly called Quakers that assemble and meete together under the pretence of joyninge in a religious worship at Smeeton in the parrish of Kibworth and divers other places […] in the Hundred of Gartree.’ (As we have seen in the case of William Sheffield, informants were plentiful against a group whose conduct offended even the Nonconformist conscience.) Regardless, action was enjoined: muscle was to be provided, with as many troops as seemed necessary, to Mr Oliver, one of the Chief Constables of the hundred, ‘to bring all the said persons or the chief of them before his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace’. Unfortunately the local quarter sessions of the period are missing, so full details of the dissenters, the charges against them and their punishments are lost.
The Kibworth Academy
Kibworth, however, continued to grow as a centre of Nonconformity. In the wake of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ by which William of Orange deposed Charles’s Catholic brother, James II, the 1689 Toleration Act relieved dissenting communities of some of the punitive restraints imposed upon them (though exclusions from political office and the universities would long remain). During the course of the eighteenth century small communities of Independents, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists would establish themselves in Kibworth Beauchamp and Smeeton Westerby. Kibworth Harcourt, however, remained the hub of Nonconformity in the parish. Soon after the regime change, in 1690, a private chaplain called John Jennings, Welsh by birth, who had himself been evicted from a living in 1662 and subsequently gathered an independent congregation at nearby West Langton, relocated to Kibworth. When he died in 1701 he was succeeded by his son, another John Jennings, who established a small but highly influential dissenting academy. When Jennings moved to Hinckley in 1722, the house – in the yard of the Crown Inn – was bought by the congregation, and his pupil Philip Doddridge, then only twenty years old, took the helm. During this period a list of Dissenters in Kibworth, Glen and Langton gives an astonishing 321 ‘Hearers’ and forty-one ‘Voters’ in Doddridge’s congregation.
Three years later Doddridge was asked, by one Reverend Saunders, to provide an account of Jennings’s teaching at Kibworth, which he did in full, from memory and with reference to a letter he found in which Jennings himself had set down his methods. The syllabus he details seems astonishingly diverse and open-minded, not least in comparison with the resolutely unmodernized education provided by the old universities in the early eighteenth century. (The imperative to run academies in the first place was provided, of course, by the exclusion of Dissenters from Oxford and Cambridge – subscription to the Act of Uniformity and the Thirty-Nine Articles being a condition of university admission.)
‘Our course of education at Kibworth,’ Doddridge recalled, ‘was the employment of four years, and every half year we entered upon a new set of studies.’ He then detailed a curriculum, stage by stage, which was remarkably utilitarian and broad-minded in its embracing of the latest modern disciplines as well as theology (which itself was taught in a manner which encouraged freedom of opinion). Science was strongly represented, with lectures on mechanics, algebra, geometry, anatomy, physics and astronomy; modern history reading included not only works on Britain and Europe but the latest studies of Africa, Asia and the Americas; French was studied as well as Latin and Hebrew; logic was taught using a system Jennings had largely derived from John Locke. At all turns, Doddridge observed, Jennings ‘made the best writers his commentators’. When in later years, after the academy had relocated to Northampton, students were admitted for a general education as well as in preparation for the ministry, its popularity and success mounted. Jennings also strongly believed in women’s education, and it is no coincidence that his sister’s daughter, the poet, feminist and anti-slavery writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld, was born and raised in Kibworth. Also a pioneering writer of children’s books, Anna enraged Wordsworth and Coleridge by her anti-war stance, and, though she left the village when she was fifteen, she is one of the most interesting and symptomatic products of Jennings’s Nonconformist curriculum.
Doddridge himself thrived on Jennings’s example and relished his time in Kibworth for the leisure it gave him to study and reflect, in addition to his work teaching and ministering to his congregation (which included the composition of numerous hymns, some of which, like ‘Oh Happy Day’, remain popular among Nonconformist communities even now). When in 1720 a friend consoled him for the assumed tedium of being ‘buried alive’ at Kibworth, Doddridge memorably contradicted his correspondent:
Here I stick close to those delightful studies which a favoring Providence has made the business of my life. I can willingly give up the charms of London, the luxury, the company, the popularity of it, for the secret pleasures of rational employment and self-approbation; retired from applause and reproach, from envy and contempt, and the destructive baits of avarice and ambition. So that, instead of lamenting it as my misfortune, you should congratulate me upon it as my happiness, that I am confined in an obscure village, seeing it gives me so many valuable advantages to the most important purposes of devotion and philosophy, and, I hope I may add, usefulness, too.
Grievous crimes and carnal concupiscence
There was much of profound interest, then, and of a modern cast, in the religious and intellectual life of Kibworth during the early eighteenth century. One less appealing aspect though was the enforcement of morality. It had long been a tenet of the Church that behaviour contravening the Christian moral codes endangered the salvation not just of the individual sinner but even of the wider community. In the absence of criminal sanctions for such moral lapses as pre-marital sex or adultery, punishment took the form of ritual humiliation by the church congregation. Cases were referred to the Leicester archdeaconry – and in Leicester Cathedral to this day there remain the furnishings of the consistory court in which such ‘crimes’ were addressed.
In the county archives numerous cases survive from Kibworth, as from across the archdeaconry, which attest to the importance of such moral policing in early eighteenth-century English society. The majority of such ‘crimes’ were cases of defamation or pre-marital ‘fornication’ – with the guilty couple almost invariably subsequently marrying, either by choice or through family and community pressure. Less frequent but not unusual were instances of the more serious lapse of adultery. In 1702, for instance, Esther Sturges of Kibworth was charged with committing adultery with another villager, William Swinglar. Her penalty was to appear on successive Sundays in January and February 1703 in the parish church of Kibworth, and in the neighbouring churches of Burton Overy and Great Glen. There, at the beginning of morning prayer, she was to ‘stand upon a stool before the desk in the face of the congregation then assembled’, dressed (in the winter cold) in nothing but a white sheet, and holding in her hand a white wand – the sheet a symbol of a return to baptismal purity, the wand an acceptance of the rod of discipline. In this humiliating position she was to recite her humble confession:
Whereas I Easther Sturgis not having the fear of God before mine eyes but being led by the instigation of the devil and mine own carnall concupiscence have committed the grievous crime of adultery with the above-named Wm Swinglar to the great dishonour of Almighty God, the breach of his most sacred laws, the scandal and evill example of others and the danger of mine own soule without unfeigned repentance for the same I do humbly acknowledge and am heartily sorry for this my heinous offence. I ask God and the congregation pardon and forgiveness for the same in Jesus Christ and beseech him to give me his Grace not only to enable me to avoid all such like sin and wickedness but also to live soberly righteously and godly all the days of my life and to that end I desire all that are here present to joyne with me in saying the Lord’s prayer. Our Father which art in Heaven …
On the back of the charge sheet, which was passed to the village rector or curate, a note was made confirming that the confession had been made in the prescribed manner, before the sheet was returned to the archdeacon for filing. In the case of John and Sarah Monck, and John and Mary Reddington, whose penance was carried out on the same day in April 1719, a note was made by Will Vincent, the rector of Kibworth, that the confessions could not be recited sooner ‘upon the account of the women’s lying in’: both couples by then had married.
Such ceremonies seem to us now the stuff of repressive fundamentalist fantasies, but they were performed routinely in England during the eighteenth century, as similar rituals had been for hundreds of years previously (Esther’s penance, for example, unmistakably echoes that of Roger and Alice Dexter in 1389 (see p. 226)). After a more live-and-let-live attitude in the late medieval and early Tudor period, where pre-marital sex was widely accepted among ‘engaged’ couples, these rituals became more common after the Reformation as congregations sought to return to the ‘purer’ practices of the early Church. By enforcing them, it was believed that the Church could thus secure a forgiveness of sins for the penitent by the community. During the course of the eighteenth century, however, such moralizing zeal waned under the influence of new ideas and a more relaxed religious climate. Cases of penance continued in Kibworth church until late in the century, but they became less frequent, and had disappeared altogether by the early nineteenth. The religious fears and tumultuous passions which had driven the events of the Tudor and Stuart periods had begun, finally, to subside.
16. Agricultural and Industrial Revolution
Between the early eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth the society of Kibworth, as of England as a whole, once again went through dramatic change. This change had its roots far back in time, in the agrarian crises and labour disputes after the Black Death when a society of communally organized peasants gradually became a commercially minded society of yeoman farmers under a county gentry, their economy increasingly tied to urban and industrial centres beyond their immediate horizons. A sign of the times was the coming of the turnpike road between London and the west of Scotland, built in 1726. Now the A6, this road followed the old road through Market Harborough and Leicester which had been created in the twelfth century. At first it was paved with gravel and small stones, later with granite sets, with little toll houses, some of which survive today. When a fast and regular public coach service to London began in 1766 there was a revival of coaching inns in the village, and the London road (Main Street in Kibworth Harcourt) soon had eight coaching hostelries with accommodation, yards and stables. With that the modern age was on the horizon.
At this point Kibworth was still a cluster of agricultural communities but its society had already been transformed from the late-medieval village. Harcourt in particular was a typical ‘closed’ village, with a small circle of gentlemen and yeoman farmers, a growing number of tradesmen and craftsmen, a few husbandmen or small farmers, and a group of landless labourers for whom housing was provided by their employers. The old and retired tended to live under the same roof as the younger generation, but there was still the need for a gradual increase in housing for the poorer members of the community (who will loom much larger in the village story during the eighteenth century and whose names we come to know now through the records of the Poor Law commissions and the charitable clauses in the huge number of surviving wills). For these people new houses were built on the few remaining patches of waste land and along the verges of the road; one group, which became known jokingly in local speech as ‘the City’, comprised small houses of mud and thatch on the edge of the village. Here, for example, lived the Perkins family in the late eighteenth century. These people were not migrants, newcomers or seasonal labour. They were the indigenous poor who from now will be a constant in the story, typical of the new British proletariat.
But the visitor to Kibworth would still have seen the same shape of the village recognizable since the thirteenth century. The hamlet at Smeeton, with its well-built brick farmhouses, was smaller than it had been in the fourteenth century. Beauchamp, with its Tudor manor farm and its new grammar school building, still straggled along the high street with its workers’ cottages down by the fishponds below Church Hill. In Harcourt the Polles were gone now, but the Parkers and Brians, Oswins, Carters, Rays and Haymes continued. The Colmans too still thrived. Providing literate village ‘registrars’ during the Commonwealth, they no longer held significant land but Will Coleman will be an important figure in the many wrestlings of the parish with the Poor Laws in the early nineteenth century – and indeed the family still live in the village today. The aspect of all three villages was much more of red brick now, with chimneys everywhere (for fireplaces burning coal), but Main Street was still lined with big medieval and Tudor farmhouses along the northern side, facing a row of neat little cottages down to the village pump. Here stood the grand late-seventeenth-century Old House where the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld grew up and where the dissenting academy in the eighteenth century offered a curriculum that would have been the envy of the universities.
