An outstanding study of a Somerset parish. Based on new research across a wide variety or original sources, this 486 page volume brings to life dozens of aspects of seventeenth-century parish life.
Chapter include:
Chapter One – The parish and its lords
Chapter Two – Watchet harbour, its maintenance, trade and families
Chapter Three – Homes, furnishings, households and families
Chapter Four – Churches, chapels and clergy
Chapter Five – Farming in St Decumans
Chapter Six – Industry and business in St Decumans
Chapter Seven – Antisocial behaviour, crime and punishment
Chapter Eight – Musters and wars
Chapter Nine – Principal families of St Decumans
Chapter Ten – Match, hatch and dispatch
Chapter Eleven – Supporting the poor and migrants
Chapter Twelve – Managing the Wyndham estate
Chapter Thirteen – The offices of constable and tithingman
Adrian –
Review by PAUL SCHOON a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. His research interests include reconstructing early modern rural communities to better understand their social structures and social networks.
It is not often I am forced to employ my kitchen scales when completing a review, but simply describing this work as a large book of 474 pages does not adequately convey its heft. It is a hardcover volume printed at A4 size and has a mass of 1.4 kilogrammes. The sheer amount of information the book contains is almost overwhelming, which speaks to the quantity and quality of material available for this small parish. I counted 3084 citations, almost all of which were primary sources, with a 37-page chapter on farming generating 435 citations on its own. The authors deserve recognition for having made sense of the extant documentation and then translating the results into a coherent narrative of life in St Decumans from 1600 to 1670. Books that look in detail at individual parishes are always to be welcomed, as each one adds to the better understanding of our national story.
It is the sixth volume in the ‘Studies in Somerset’s History Series’ and is based largely upon the Wyndham family archive, most of which is deposited at the Somerset Heritage Centre, though the authors have conducted an exhaustive search, chasing down relevant information wherever it is held. The result is to produce a window into life in a West Country parish four centuries ago: not the obscured window described by Arthur Pollard, where views are obstructed or distorted by the quality of the source material, but a clear pane of glass which allows us to look back in time with a degree of confidence. The parish of St Decumans included the small port and market town of Watchet and the large village of Williton.
Structurally the book is presented in two parts: first an introductory section of 82 pages, in which the authors explain that the story is one of interaction between people, business, and legal and administrative authorities within the parish and further afield. All the necessary contextual material is helpfully placed in this section, which details the sources consulted, lists of all the individuals involved in parish governance, relevant maps, and pedigrees of the key families. Keeping all this information together was helpful, as I found it necessary to keep referring to it while reading the text. Second, the main body of the book consists of thirteen thematic chapters, which are essentially standalone pieces of work, each examining a discrete element of parish life, with essays as wide ranging as the maintenance, trade and families of Watchet harbour, farming in the parish, industry and business, managing the Wyndham estate, and supporting the poor and migrants.
Given the turbulent times covered by this study, I felt that one of the most interesting chapters looked at the military aspects of the parish. Using a set of tithingmen’s and constables’ accounts that would be the envy of most other parishes, the authors have managed to convey something of the stress, upheaval and privations brought about by the lead up to the civil wars and by the conflict itself. As a coastal community the parish was always on the front line, either keeping a watchful eye on the sea, being affected by the blocking of maritime trade, or directly involved in conflict. While notionally supportive of the ship money tax as a mechanism for keeping the community safe, the king’s tripling of the tax was simply too much to bear. The harbour was the home for a few small barks that transported coal from South Wales, yet the parish was being asked to pay for the building and victualling of a ship. Individuals seem to have slowly withdrawn their support for the king and turned more toward parliament. While the parish seems to have avoided the worst of the conflict, the authors have pulled together good evidence that reveal the day-to-day impact upon the parishioners, ranging from the petitions they drafted to prevent the recruitment of the young or old, the onerous need to quarter visiting forces and the exploitation of business opportunities, particularly in the supply of provisions to the combatants.
One element of the structure that I felt did not work as well as it could was in providing a narrative link that weaves the chapters together into a coherent whole, as Keith Wrightson and David Levine did most successfully in their study of Terling. I am probably being a little unfair, because theirs was a book consisting of an introduction and six chapters, which would have been easier to link than the 13 chapters of this work. I also found that some topics fell naturally into several areas; for example, while parish constables qualified for their own chapter, there was much relevant evidence concerning their role to be found in the essays on antisocial behaviour and crime, and on musters and wars, and I found myself flicking between the three chapters trying to meld the information into a single account. Ultimately, this is a minor quibble, as I am not sure that it would be possible to construct a perfect structure for a book so detailed and wide-ranging, and there will always have to be some compromises.
Oh! If only every parish could compile a study such as this, who knows how our understanding of early modern England might change. This is a book that will primarily be of use to those interested in the study of Somerset or the wider West Country, but it would be an attractive addition to any local history collection. For a book of this length the number of typographical errors is remarkably low, which is a tribute to proofing and editing process, with only the headers on chapter 11 standing out (‘paoor’ instead of poor). This work represents a significant investment in time and effort, for which the authors deserve congratulations, and it would be good to see it used by other researchers, as a basis for further work on the parish and the region.