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Gentility
THE PROVINCIAL WOMEN AT THE HEART of this study hailed from families headed by lesser landed gentlemen, attornies, doctors, clerics, merchants and manufacturers. As a group they described themselves as ‘polite’, ‘civil’, ‘genteel’, ‘well-bred’ and ‘polished’. As brides they aimed to appear ‘amiable and accomplished’. Yet they did not pretend to be members of ‘the quality’, the people of fashion, the cosmopolitan beau monde or the ton, although they were not above harping on their exalted acquaintances among the nobility or the antiquity of their lineage when they saw fit. Their possessions were contrived to have a genteel effect, rather than a dazzling elegance, and their entertainments aimed at generous liberality not sumptuous magnificence. The pomp and splendour of a crested coach, six horses and equipage was beyond their grasp. As a shorthand description, I have labelled this group ‘the polite’ or ‘the genteel’. While polite manners could be practised at lower social depths and amplified at greater heights,1 this label captures the moderate social eminence I wish to convey, combined with an emphasis on outward behaviour, while not prejudging an individual's source of income. This choice of terms also reflects the findings of Paul Langford on the collaboration of ‘the landed gentry and the upper elements of bourgeois society … When they did so they constituted that category of the indisputably “polite”, which in the last analysis forms the closest thing to a governing class in Georgian England.’2 Above all, I have deployed these labels because ‘the polite’ and ‘the genteel’ are the only terms consistently used by the women studied here to convey their social prestige. They had no recourse to a vocabulary of ‘upper’, ‘middle’ and ‘lower class’.3
However prominent the polite in Georgian social observations, this social stratum has not been well served by recent historical investigation. One element of it, the English lesser gentry, has hardly been researched at all and is usually written off as ‘parish gentry’, or smothered under the conveniently elastic label ‘aristocracy’.4 Commercial and professional elites have received more attention, but too often they are simply assumed to occupy a place in the social hierarchy one step below a monolithic landed upper class.5 Some of the work on the commercial world has highlighted the massive gentry recruitment to prestigious trades and the extent of intermarriage between the landed and mercantile elites. However, many such studies are designed to establish the Georgian origins of a cohesive nineteenth-century middle class and its cultural identity. Consequently, they exhibit little interest in exploring the extent of sympathy between the upper echelons of that emerging middle class and its landed neighbours. Thus John Smail's painstaking search for the origins of middle-class culture in Halifax leads him to argue that in the eighteenth century the northern middling sort defined themselves against the neighbouring gentry: ‘On the whole, although individuals within this group might aspire to become gentlemen, the middling sort recognized the social superiority of the gentry and the profound cultural gulf that separated them from the landed elite.' A prudential bourgeoisie is perennially contrasted to an aristocracy that is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Thus, Davidoff and Hall's account of middle-class formation in Suffolk, Norwich and Birmingham from 1780 to 1850 sets much store by the ‘oppositional culture’ of the late eighteenth-century middle class, arguing that they forged their collective identity in conscious contrast to an aristocracy that is itself caricatured as thoroughly profligate, indebted, licentious and dissipated. Despite the enormous numbers of lesser gentry, certainly well over ten thousand families in contrast to the two to three hundred that comprised the nobility in this period, their role in this epic battle of commercial versus aristocratic mores is virtually never mentioned. By implication, the lesser gentry should be subsumed into one camp or the other: either they represented the lesser echelons of aristocracy, somehow sharing the world view of noble families with one hundred times their income, or they should be seen as rural rentier bourgeois. As things stand, the lesser gentry inhabit a social no-man's land, apparently lying low while the shots of a cultural war whizzed overhead.6
At the level of the parish, however, the image of a profound cultural gulf yawning between the local elites of land and trade bears little resemblance to the teaming interactions of the marriage market and the dining-room. What follows is a detailed case study of elite social contact rooted in one particular area for which rich records survive. Let us turn to the moors and valleys of the Pennine north; in particular to the enormous parish of Whalley, which embraced the towns of Colne, Burnley and Clitheroe.7 The land to the south of Pendle Hill was known for its poor soil, heavy rainfall and long-established textile manufactures. Its economy was heavily dependent on making cloth long before the period covered by this book and was to continue so long after. In the course of the eighteenth century production expanded and the types of cloth produced changed radically. These changes were partly a response to the introduction of new power machinery that is conventionally associated with the term Industrial Revolution. Neverthless, before 1830 work in the area's textile industries continued to be performed mainly by hand. A large number of independent clothiers produced woollen cloth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but from the early eighteenth century the production of woollens was increasingly superseded by the manufacture of worsteds under the putting-out system. The construction of a Piece Hall in 1775 was concrete proof of Colne's success in worsted marketing. In 1781 Colne and Rochdale were considered more important markets for worsted cloth than Manchester.8 However, from the 1780s cotton manufacturing was on the ascendant. The mechanization of cotton spinning made work for an army of hand-loom weavers. The shift was recognized by Aikin, visiting Colne in 1795: ‘The trade formerly consisted in woollen and worsted goods, particularly shalloons, calamancoes and tammies, but the cotton trade is of late introduced, the articles consisting chiefly of calicoes and dimities.’9 By the 1830s the area had become what it was to remain into the mid-twentieth century, the northern frontier of the Lancashire cotton district.
For all their economic buoyancy, eighteenth-century Colne and Burnley were remote from larger towns and the major north–south trade routes. In 1750 the area had no turnpike roads whatsoever and the inaccessibility of this Lancashire frontier was a proverbial joke. All this was shortly to change. A turnpike trust was established in 1755 for the building of a new road between Bradford and Colne (known as the Blue Bell turnpike), transforming the treacherous journey over the Pennines, or ‘the alps’ as they were locally dubbed. By 1770 Colne and Burnley had become local nodes in the turnpike network, with improved roads from Colne to Skipton, Keighley and Bradford and from Burnley to Halifax, Manchester and Preston.10 A Navigation Act authorizing the cutting of the Leeds to Liverpool canal was passed in the late 1760s, but the canal did not reach Colne until 1796.11 These improvements opened up the area to outsiders and increased the mobility of natives, although in 1824 Baines still regretted that ‘there is in this tract much fine romantic scenery which, as it is at a distance from any of the principal roads of the kingdom is less visited than it deserves’.12 In the modern tourist imagination, of course, these blasted moors will eternally represent the outer reaches of ‘Brontë country’.
1 Piece Hall, Colne, Lancashire, 1950. It opened in 1775 as a market place for worsteds, though it was largely supplanted by the Halifax Piece Hall (1779) and the rise of cotton manufacturing. The Piece Hall also functioned as the local assembly rooms and hosted a gala series of oratorios and balls in August 1777. It was demolished in 1952.
2 Emmott Hall, near Colne, Lancashire, c.1890. This rare photograph depicts the home of the gentry family of Emmott. A large hall, originally built around 1600, its classical frontage was added in 1737, with new sash windows introduced in the cross wings at the same time. It was demolished in 1968.
If the parish of Whalley was remote from polite resorts it was not in want of polite families. A host of well-established families inhabited the valley of the Lancashire Ca
lder; their lasting monuments are the wealth of modest mansions still standing in the vicinity of Burnley and Colne. Dispersed at two- or three-mile intervals across the valley's lower slopes, most of these gentry residences had originally been built in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, sometimes by prosperous yeomen, sometimes by the then smaller number of local gentry. In the course of the eighteenth century few entirely new gentry houses were erected, but most of the gentry's existing residences were substantially rebuilt to incorporate up-to-date interior schemes and symmetrical frontages with some classical detailing (see plates 2, 6 and 8, for example).13 With their dynastic pretensions, dignified halls and landed estates, the lesser gentry constituted the enduring heart of polite society in north-east Lancashire; they were well acquainted with each other and frequently intermarried. However, land was not the only litmus test of politeness. On equal terms with local lesser gentry were a number of professionals and their families. The doctors William St Clare the elder and William St Clare the younger, for example, acted as both friends and physicians to the northern gentry for over fifty years. That clerics, lawyers and doctors should be personae gratae in polite society is hardly surprising, given that many of them were themselves substantial landowners and the sons of gentlemen. Indeed, many prominent barristers on the northern circuit were not only the sons of gentlemen, but their principal heirs. In addition, the personnel of elite society extended to commercial families. Often such families were related to the landed gentry, something which was especially likely among the so-called genteel trades such as woollen merchant, wine merchant, wholesale draper and so on. Thus, local polite society incorporated minor gentry, professional and mercantile families; their enmeshed relationship is perhaps the most striking feature of family history in the Pennines. Indeed, many families were so ‘hybrid’ in status, that it seems artificial to assign them a single occupational label. Let us consider in detail the careers and contacts of three northern families who have left copious records: the Parkers, the Barcrofts and the Horrockses.
The Parkers of Alkincoats exemplify the links between the northern gentry and the textile trade. John Parker (1695–1754) was a scion of the Yorkshire gentry, who made his way as a London linen-draper, and married the daughter of an Essex merchant. In 1728 he inherited the Parker estate through a half-brother and so became master of Browsholme Hall in the West Riding, close to the Lancashire border, and of substantial farm lands worth almost five hundred pounds in annual rent.14 His only daughter married her second cousin Robert Parker of Alkincoats (1720–58), and removed thirteen miles across the county border to Alkincoats in Lancashire. Robert was hardly the glittering matrimonial prize that Elizabeth's family had hoped for, unable to support her in the ‘splendour & elegance’ they had envisaged.15 Her relatives complained about his small fortune (the Alkincoats estate comprised only 160 acres and yielded a comparatively modest £290 per annum in rent16), arguing ‘that a Coach & 6 was preferable to a double Horse’. Robert Parker himself conceded to his bride, ‘I can't make a large jointure, keep a coach & deck you out in pomp and splendour’. Nevertheless, Robert Parker was an acknowledged gentleman and county office holder, and, as he reasoned, ‘we shall have a sufficient competency, wch … will make us breath in [the] world’.17 He initiated rebuilding work at Alkincoats in 1751–2 in preparation for his bride's residence, intending, in his own words, to ‘make it a comfortable Convenient House but not grand’. Judging by friendly reactions, he succeeded in his aim, Elizabeth Parker being teased by richer friends that hers would be a ‘a good, though odd house’. As her best friend remarked, she had elected to ‘live in a narrow Compass to pass your days with the man you love’.18
3 Arthur Devis, The Parker Conversation Piece, 1757. Edward Parker and his wife, Barbara, née Fleming, are shown on the terrace at Browsholme Hall, near Clitheroe. The stables, horse and groom to the right of the picture, along with Edward Parker's spurs and tilted hat, all allude to his sporting interests. However, the landscape in the background owes more to Claude than the topography of the forest of Bowland.
4 Browsholme Hall, near Clitheroe, 1808. Though a London linen-draper, John Parker inherited this Yorkshire estate through a half-brother in 1728. The Gentleman's Magazine described the house as an ‘old magnificent chateau, an extensive and venerable pile’.
5 (facing page bottom) Alkincoats Hall, near Colne, 1896. This large Pennine house on the outskirts of Colne, Lancashire, was built in the seventeenth century, refronted in the 1720s or soon after and modernized again in the 1750s. Elizabeth Parker came here some months after her marriage to Robert Parker in 1751. In his own estimation, Alkincoats was ‘a comfortable Convenient House but not grand’. The house was demolished in 1958.
Robert Parker's premature death in 1758 left her a widow at thirty-two, with three small sons under five. After seven years of widowhood, however, Elizabeth Parker sensationally eloped to Gretna Green with John Shackleton (1744–88) of nearby Stone Edge, Barrowford. This local woollen merchant was an outrageous seventeen years her junior; twenty-one years old to her thirty-eight. By her actions Elizabeth forfeited her brother's society for at least six years and was barred from the Browsholme threshold. Thomas Parker, the son and heir, came into the estate upon his majority in 1775. Despite a mooted career in the church or the army, he took up no profession. Upon his marriage in 1779 to the nineteen-year-old heiress Betty Parker of Newton Hall, Yorkshire, his mother removed definitively to John Shackleton's newly built mansion, Pasture House at Barrowford. At his death in 1788 John Shackleton's will reveals a substantial landowner bequeathing numerous copyhold properties in the Lancashire and freehold lands in the nearby West Riding. Although acreages are not recorded, he had at least thirty-three tenants.19
Elizabeth Shackleton's younger sons turned, like their grandfather before them, to the textile trades in London. To their mother's distress, they were found to lack the intellectual capacity for university and the Church. In 1770, aged fifteen, John was bound as apprentice to a draper on Fleet Street, although Elizabeth Shackleton had first to arrange the sale of a wood to raise the fee. Two years later, with yet more deft accounting, Robin was apprenticed to a wholesale hosier, Mr Plestow of Bishopsgate, London. In May 1779 the two brothers set up together as hosiers in partnership with Mr Plestow amid a shower of blessings from their mother, but John Parker later took the name of Toulson, in order to inherit property in Skipwith, ten miles south of York, from his mother's cousin Jane Walton, née, Toulson. He ended his days as a landed gentleman. Thus, for generations the land/trade ‘boundary’ was crossed and recrossed by individuals in the same family.20
6 Pasture House, near Colne, Lancashire, 1977. This mansion was built for the manufacturer John Shackleton in 1777 in the height of modern fashion. The house exhibits some Palladian effects; the semi-circular windows are thought to resemble those at Chiswick House.
By contrast, the history of the Barcrofts of Noyna throws more light on the links between the gentry and the professions – in this case, the army and the law – and also on the floating status of the unmarried gentlewoman in lodgings. The Miss Barcrofts were the offspring of the prominent barrister John Barcroft of Gisburn and the Lancashire heiress Elizabeth Barcroft.21 At their father's death in 1782, the five Miss Barcofts inherited a meagre one thousand pounds between them and a younger brother. One sister married a Colne lawyer and another a Colne gentleman, but the three remaining girls never married, vacillating for decades between lodgings and family. By 1834, as spinsters and widows, all the sisters were again living together in middle-aged sisterly society at Park House in Colne.22 The Miss Barcrofts lost both of their brothers in the 1790s. The heir, Captain Ambrose William Barcroft, perished in a shipwreck in 1795, leaving an infant daughter Ellen, who was reared by her Barcroft aunts in Colne. In 1816 the heiress Ellen Barcroft married a second son, Edward Parker, who practised as a solicitor in Selby. In 1832 Edward Parker inherited Alkincoats and Browsholme through his elder childless brother and ab
andoned the law.23 Here again, the distinction between the gentleman and the professional was far from clear. To what single social category should this family be assigned?
The social mingling that characterized genteel society also came to embrace the families of at least some of the wealthier factory-masters of the area. The Horrocks cotton dynasty hailed from the Bolton area in southern Lancashire. John Horrocks began his career in textiles as a master putting out raw cotton to hand-spinners in the vicinity of Bolton. (Quaint tradition has it that he employed his three younger sisters winding yarn on paltry pay, and when they struck for better wages he bought them off with new silk dresses.) In January 1791 he rented a small warehouse in Preston and began manufacturing muslin, leaving his elder brother Samuel in control of the Edgeworth business. Thereafter, his Preston enterprise developed very rapidly. By 1798 he had erected six factories, a hundred workmen's cottages in New Preston and had established a London office. Phenomenal success crowned his efforts – the business made a profit of £55,000 in 1799 alone – enabling him to enrich his kinsmen whom he integrated into the enterprise. At his premature death in 1804, at the age of thirty-six, John Horrocks left an estate worth £150,000.24
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