Sunday 18 May 2025

An Insight into the late 18th Century Wymeswold Malting Trade

LAHS Member Dave Fogg Postles examines a reckoning detailing barley, malt and hops trading between Wymeswold and Loughborough.

On 13^th March 1806 an outstanding bill was settled by John Thorp, one of the assignees of John Davys, a bankrupt, to Sarah Thornell, the administratrix of the late Mrs Sarah Kendall.(1) The sum owed amounted to £36 15s 10d and was the balance of transactions between Davys and Kendall for exchanges of barley from Davys to Kendall and malt and hops from Kendall to Davys. Kendall had supplied Davys with commodities valued in total at £72 15s 10½d, but the value of produce in the other direction was less than half that amount (£36). The newly-discovered document consists of two leaves of paper: a receipt (voucher) and a reckoning between Kendall and Davys, counterbalancing their debts.

The account or reckoning between Kendall, of Wymeswold, and Davys, of Loughborough, itemised malt delivered in the first quarter of 1786, through 1794, in the middle of 1795 and the second quarter of 1796 and again in March 1797. She had also supplied hops (specifically North Clay hops) in the early years covered by the bill. In reverse, Davys, according to the reckoning, sent barley to Kendall in December 1794 and January 1795. (The face of the account contains the debt from Davys to Kendall and the dorse that of Kendall to Davys). In these deliveries of malt, the cumulative total exceeded one hundred and eighty strikes. (A strike by this time varied across the country from one to two bushels with eight bushels constituting a quarter. The hops were measured in pounds weight.) The malt was mostly transported by Davys’s ‘man’ who at each collection was entertained with ale and once with a dinner. At other times, local carters performed the work: Healey, Cox, William Cross and William Hickling.

In the opposite direction, Davys conveyed twenty quarters of barley in two equal cartloads, valued at £36, at 36s per qtr. The price was approximately the level on the London market in that year.(2) In fact barley prices remained relatively low at this stage as wheat prices were on the point of a serious spike upwards because of bad wheat harvest. There was a lag before barley was affected as a substitute grain for bread.(3) (Further south, the justices were on the cusp of the Speenhamland system of out-relief, by which wages were supplemented in relationship to the price of grain). On 9 December 1794, the official average price for barley in Leicestershire was 36s 10d per qtr, slightly higher than Rutland barley, but 4s per qtr lower than Nottinghamshire.(4)

Sarah Kendall died in 1805 and administration was granted to Sarah Thornell, her daughter, in 1806.(5) For this purpose, three men were required to take out an administration bond on behalf of Sarah: William Thornell, of Wymeswold, baker; Benjamin Sheldon, of the same, farmer, and Thomas Linaker, of Hoton, another farmer. The bond was sworn in £450, the estimated value of the late Sarah’s personal estate. Sarah Charles of Wymeswold had espoused George Kendall, also of the parish, on 9 October 1758.(6) George predeceased her in January 1793.(7) In the Land Tax return of 1790, George was assessed for 18s 8½d, holding the land himself, one of the smaller landowners in the parish of Wymeswold.(8)

Davys is more elusive. The estate of a John Davys, gentleman of Wymeswold, was ‘peremptorily sold’ after a case in Chancery brought by Cradock. Extending to 236 acres, the lands were in the tenancy at will of John Woollerton and Widow Holmes, producing an annual rental income of almost £165.(9) In the Land Tax return for 1790, Messrs Allsop and Davys had two tenants with a combined assessment of £26 19s 0½d and Davys on his own another two tenants with a total assessment at £10 11s 2½d. There remains some doubt about this identification, however, for default of further information. In May 1794, a boy Owen was baptised in Loughborough parish church, the son of John Davys, gentleman, and his wife Sophia.(10) The Bankruptcy Act of 1731 (5 Geo. II, c. 30) had improved the prospects for bankrupts and debtors through commissions of bankruptcy allowing bankrupts to continue trading and creditors to receive some return. In fact, the number of bankruptcies exploded in the 1790s coincidental with the high price of grain. (11) John Davys is, nevertheless, perhaps identifiable with the John Davys gent. who occurred in the Loughborough parish register in the 1780s and 1790s. If that is the case, he may have used the malt for his own consumption rather than commercial production. (12)

Frustratingly, the two parties, Kendall and Davys, do not seem to recur in the parish registers. Nor is Davys listed in the Universal British Directory of 1793-1798. Only one brewer and one maltster were listed in Loughborough, the former the Harley brewery established in 1785. It is evident, however, that a number of other brewers and maltsters must have been operating in the town. (13)

What can be ascertained is that there was a regular connection in the late eighteenth century between a maltster in Wymeswold (Kendall) and (probably) a brewer in Loughborough (Davys). The relationship may have developed when Davys had an estate in Wymeswold. If Davys had become bankrupt, he had, like many bankrupts, been able to restore some business(14). Sarah as a widow managed the business for several years after the demise of her husband. She had allowed Davys’s debts to accumulate over a number of years before a final reckoning was made by her administrator and she in turn owed an amount for barley delivered to her (15). The commercial connection between the two depended on the extension of credit through trust. That trust was maintained by reckonings between the two, keeping track over time of their transactions.

Dave Fogg Postles © (2025)

Sources

(1) Document acquired by the author by purchase now in the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland DE10899.

(2) Peter Solar and Jan Klovland, ‘New series for agricultural prices in London, 1770-1916’, Economic History Review 2^nd series (2011), pp. 72-87, at p. 77, Figure 2, barley prices.

(3) Solar and Klovland, ‘New series’; Gauthier Lanot and Keith Tribe, ‘Before political economy: debate over grain markets, dearth and pauperism in England, 1794-1796’, History of European Ideas 50 (2024), pp. 1-31.

(4) London Gazette Issue 13730, p. 1214.

(5) ROLLR PR/T/1806/126.

(6) ROLLR DE1728/9.

(7) ROLLR 1728/2.

(8) ROLLR QS62/346/13. Chloe Hoxha kindly arranged copies of this item for me. (The rate was 4s in the £).

(9) London Gazette Issue 13807 p. 880 (22 August 1795). There are no other entries for a Davys or Davis in Leicestershire.

(10) ROLLR DE667/5.

(11) Julian Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business 1700-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)., pp. 35, 45 (Figure 1).

(12) For example, ROLLR DE667/4, p. 188 (baptism of his daughter, 1784)

(13) Universal British Directory (London: British Directory Office, 1793-1798), volume 3, p. 517.

(14) Hoppit, Risk and Failure. Tawney Paul, The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: CUP, 2019) for the worst outcomes of indebtedness.

(15) Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1998).