The Story of Boston by Richard Gurnham

Author:Richard Gurnham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780750956949
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Old Church House in Wormgate, a good example of the ‘Artisan Mannerist’ style popular in the mid-seventeenth century. It is still the Parish Office.

As well as being a little larger by the end of the century, the appearance of the town had also changed, in so far that more houses were now being built in brick or, if they were timber-framed, the infilling was now usually of brick rather than mud and stud. Old Church House in Wormgate, still standing today, is an example of a seventeenth-century brick house, and there are also a number of examples of timber-framed buildings with brick infill. Also, far fewer houses were now roofed in thatch. In 1606 the corporation had attempted to stop any new buildings being built with thatched roofs and insisted that only tiles or slates must be used, to reduce the danger of fire. As late as 1677 this prohibition had to be repeated, when the constables were issued with hooked fire staves and all inhabitants who could afford it were also told to make sure they had leather buckets for fire-fighting duties.19

Attitudes to music and entertainment were also changing. In October 1670 the corporation agreed to reinstate the town waites, the musicians traditionally employed by the corporation to provide musical entertainment at the fairs and on other official occasions when requested by the mayor and aldermen. It was decided to appoint five musicians, to be paid an annual salary of £10 plus 40s each for their liveries, ‘as formerly used by the ancient waites of this Borrough’. The growing Puritanism of the corporation in the late sixteenth century had led to the disbanding of the corporation’s musicians as well as a ban on the performance of plays and interludes in the town; and for many years the Cambridge waites, who had once come to the town every year, were paid by the corporation to stay away.20

Attitudes to the poor, however, had not changed. At the first meeting after the restoration of Charles II the corporation felt it necessary to record in the minutes that the division of the town into six wards, with two aldermen responsible for each, would be continued ‘for the keeping out of strangers, preventing of Inmates, surveying the house of coreccion, keeping the poore on worke, suppressing of disorders & debauchmentes … & all prophanes’. The Jersey School is not mentioned in the minutes after May 1654, and by 1660 it may have been closed down or absorbed into the House of Correction in Spain Lane. An inventory for the latter, submitted to the corporation in May 1670, illustrates the unsympathetic attitude of officialdom towards the able-bodied poor. ‘Two hemp blocks, two weavers’ beams, three old wheels’ give a glimpse of the work to which the poor were set, but the inventory also lists a whipping post and a pair of stocks, for the poor had to be punished as well. It is perhaps not surprising that by the end of the eighteenth century the House of Correction would become synonymous with a prison.

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