I’ve got a story to tell you about Barlick. It goes back 500 years and is a rollercoaster ride of birth, life, love, death, betrayal and ultimate survival. It’s taken me thirty years to get to the stage where I feel I know enough to go public with it but my usual public health warning applies; what I shall tell you is my knowledge now, it may change slightly as I learn more. There will be mistakes and wrong assumptions but essentially, the facts are accurate. There’s another warning with it as well. It deals with matters directly related to people still alive today and some of the details might be uncomfortable. Please forgive me for this, I shan’t go into any more detail than is necessary to glue the facts together.
The big problem with anything like this is where to start. How do I set the scene? This week’s introduction is just this, it lays the foundations and gives enough background to help you understand what was driving these people.
We have to go back quite a long way, 1348 in fact. This was the year the Black Death reached England. Scientists are still debating exactly what the Black Death was and how many variants there were. Being a simple-minded bloke I don’t need that much detail. All we need to know is that it was a virulent infection carried by the Rat Flea and was almost always fatal, sometimes within 24 hours.
Our best estimate of the population of England in 1348 is about five or six million souls. In the years 1348 and 1349 half of these died from the Black Death. That was bad enough but it got worse. It recurred again five times between 1361 and 1413. Children were still being born and in economic and demographic terms the population should have recovered faster than usual because less people were competing for resources. The Black Death ate the increase faster than children could be born and the end result was that in 1450 there were only about two to two and a half million people left alive in England.
Whole villages and estates were abandoned. There wasn’t enough labour to till the fields or keep normal life going, rents were not paid and the customary service a peasant owed to his lord couldn’t be performed. The physical fabric of English society was torn asunder. There were even more dangerous consequences, the peasants saw the priests and the lords dying and this shook whatever faith they had in the power of God and the chain of being. This was the deep tap root from which Dissent, Nonconformity and eventually even the Industrial Revolution sprang.
The landed classes realise immediately that there had to be a change in the way they treated their peasants. The world had been turned upside down, labour was at a premium and held the power of survival. The peasants had to be paid and released from the worst of the ancient duties to supply free labour so many days a year. This didn’t go down well, but the bullet had to be bitten and the extra costs absorbed if the gentry were to survive. If they didn’t, the peasants did the unthinkable, they upped stakes and left for somewhere where conditions were better. It was the start of a wage economy and a mobile workforce..
As is always the way, there was a reaction and the Establishment started to look for ways to curb this insubordination and mobility. A range of Statutes was passed by the land owners who controlled Parliament in an attempt to curb the power of the labourers and craftsmen and rein in wage inflation. Also, ways had to be found to replace the lost revenues to the Crown from impoverished estates and Parliament gradually moved towards extracting money from the lower classes to make up the shortfall.
One problem that had been recognised for many years was the fact that in order to tax people you have to be able to identify them. This process had started with the Normans in the eleventh century and gradually the use of surnames to identify families became common place. Most surnames started as ‘Son of’, some sprang from place of dwelling, location or trade. By the fourteenth century this system was quite well established and a simple form of direct tax was introduced, in times of need everyone named on the tax register paid one shilling. In 1380, Richard II, faced by a shortage of money to finance his court and the French Wars decided that a third Poll Tax in four years would be a good wheeze. This turned out to be a tax too far.
In May 1381 a tax collector turned up at the village of Fobbing in Essex to enquire why the tax hadn’t been paid. The villagers threw him out. In May he returned with a band of soldiers but the good people of Fobbing had been busy, they had organised themselves and were able to call for reinforcements from their neighbours. The soldiers and the tax man were thrown out again. This was the start of the Peasants Revolt. (Incidentally, I’ve always wondered whether this is the origin of the phrase ‘fobbing off’.) The key factor here is that under feudalism the peasants would never have dreamed of opposing their superiors. Something had changed forever.
Right, that’s the historical context. The Black Death signalled the end of the Middle Ages, the death of feudalism, the rise of the yeoman farmer and the beginnings of Nonconformity. This gives us a clue to the mind set of the people in our story, they were independent, believed in the possibility of advancement and acted in their own best interests and nobody else’s. Let’s have a look at surnames based on dwelling in this area. I’ve never come across anyone named Barnoldswick, Salterforth or Earby, but there are plenty of Stocks, Thorntons, Brogdens and Bracewells.
Now then; the Bracewells, there’s a name to conjure with in terms of the history of Barnoldswick. This is what I have been working round to. I’ve decided that I am ready to have a crack at it and that’s the story I want to tell over the next few weeks. Watch this space!
SCG/23 February 2004
Bracewell Church