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MERE IN 1851

by

M.F.TIGHE

As an introduction to this series of studies of the history of the town, this paper attempts an overview of Mere as it would have appeared to a visitor in the mid XIXc

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The year 1851 is an ideal one for the local historian to study his community. Vast social changes were in course as a result of the Industrial Revolution, with Prince Albert's great Exhibition celebrating the unrivalled prosperity of the country, and while we have grown up to condemn the squalid conditions which prevailed we must never overlook the fact that even the poorest were enjoying a lifestyle usually better, and certainly no worse, than any of their ancestors. The difference  was that there were many times more of them, and those largely herded into towns, where their condition was more noticeable than in the rural deprivation which they had escaped.

The growth of the large industrial towns had created new markets for food, and as a result the impact of Corn Law Repeal was not to strike for another 20 years when the market would be flooded by farm produce from the New World; in 1851 British agriculture was enjoying great prosperity. However, population growth in counties such as Wiltshire & Dorset outstripped the demand for labour, so that rural wage rates in Wessex were  the lowest in the country - we were far from the new industrial towns, where the demand for labour drew off the surplus population, bidding up the price of farm labour.

Railways were spreading across the land, bringing the products of the country, and of the world, within reach of all, and encouraging personal mobility.  At the same time, England had enjoyed 35 years of uninterrupted peace, to be broken shortly by the disasters of the Crimea. Apart from the minor "Swing" riots, and the gentlemanly Chartist demonstrations, the 1830 & 1848 convulsions on the Continent passed us by.  All in all, England was a country of peace and prosperity after nearly a century of change - it was to be another half century before the decline set in.

In the wake of these changes a new bureaucracy had been created, and its records, faithfully preserved, prove a boon to the present day local and social historian. The first really reliable and detailed census was taken in 1851, on the night of Sunday March 30th, and the returns of the enumerators - local people themselves - give an accurate and detailed picture of the people of Mere then.  Three years before, the Tithe Commutation Award had given us the first large scale map of the parish, supported by a schedule giving the ownership and occupation details of every piece of land in the parish.  From these, and from other sources, many in the Wiltshire Record Office, it has been possible to reconstruct a fair picture of  mid XIX Century Mere. 

Let us imagine how the town would appear to a commercial gentleman coming from London to promote his wares to a local shopkeeper in April 1851.  He himself was one of a new breed brought into being by the growth of trade and communications, bringing the products of the new factories to what had been remote communities.

The railway era was well advanced, and had he been going to Bath or Southampton he would have gone by train, which would have offered him little more comfort than the coach, but was faster and more reliable.  However, it would have been little use to him on the final stage of his journey - the London & Southampton Railway had opened in 1838, and in 1847 a branch had opened from East Leigh Farm to Salisbury; work was in progress on the new line connecting Brunel's GWR at Chippenham to Salisbury, and later in the year it was to reach Warminster.  It would be another 8 years before the LSWR would reach Semley and Gillingham. Our traveller therefore would probably be one of the last to come here by stage coach, coming through Hindon and down the relatively new road to Hazzards Hill, on a road reasonably well surfaced by the Wincanton Turnpike Trust.

What would he have seen on his approach to Mere?  The answer is - very little!  We know from Pigot's Directory of 1830 that the three coaches from London called at the Ship between 3 & 3.30 in the morning, and those from Barnstaple and Exeter to London at 10 pm & 1 & 4 am. Mere's position on the route was such that this was inevitable if departures from London &c were to be in daylight.  As a result,there must have been disturbed nights for those living in the Market Place, with the bustle of arriving and departing passengers, offloading of mail, feeding and watering of horses and riders and the attendant arguments every night.

Had he come in daylight our visitor would have seen large arable fields all the way into the town, well farmed by tenants of the Duchy of Cornwall or the Duke of Somerset - our landscape, the pattern of which had been finally determined by the Enclosure Act of 1807, has changed little since that time.  From the turnpike gate at Willoughby Hedge he would have passed two farms, but nothing else on the roadside till Hazzards Hill, where there was another toll gate across the road, with the cottage of Edward Young, a tailor who doubles as gatekeeper - a job he will shortly be losing.  On the right, now called Weavers' Cottage, are cottages owned by John Jupe, of whom we will hear more later, where the looms were still working on the last remains of what had been Mere's staple industry after farming.  There were still 23 men and 25 women employed weaving cheesecloth and bedticking in the town, almost entirely on handlooms; 10 years later the industry was to disappear.

Opposite these cottages he sees a group of fairly low buildings around a courtyard; these are the maltings and small brewery of Charles Lander, one of a local family of millers and maltsters, who also operate the Town Mill.  The brewery is quite a recent innovation, but is only to have a short life - there is a strong Temperance movement in Mere, and it is not going to prove an economic proposition.

Having arrived in the Market Place, still dominated by the old Market House, falling into decay, our traveller has the choice of five inns in which to stay, all of them dependent on the coaching trade, though on the census night only the Ship recorded visitors staying - presumably weekend trade was slack!  The Ship, base of the coaching trade, is much as we see it to-day; its landlord is John Toogood. Opposite is the George, now the Talbot, which has not yet acquired the mock tudor facade we know - it is a plain stone building, but with a large range of outbuildings which have all gone. On the side of these facing the Ship is the still functioning brewhouse, and in a small shop beside it Albert Bioletti, Mere's only foreign resident, has his hairdressing business.  Born in Paris, he is the son of a servant who accompanied his French Officer employer into captivity in Wincanton, and stayed on there as a jeweller.  Sadly, Albert who lodges in Pettridge Lane, only has a few months to live.

The Angel is another well established house, site of all the local auction sales; we do not know what it looked like, as the entire site was redeveloped, with a much smaller inn, later in the century, but with its outbuildings it occupied a very large area.  The White Hart, where the Chinese takeaway is to-day, is the newest house to be an inn; it is a large double fronted house with bay windows, with substantial warehousing and so on, which was once the home of James Harding, a wealthy textile merchant and became an inn when the turnpike was brought through Mere instead of passing over White Sheet Down.  Like the Swan, a few doors down, it is soon destined to fall victim to the decline of trade on the cessation of coaching; both will be bought by temperance sympathisers, demolished and redeveloped.

When our traveller looks around, his general impression may not be all that different from what we see to-day.  It is known from various sources that a large proportion of the houses in the town were built or rebuilt during the second part of the century, but the survival of local vernacular styles, and the continued use of local stone (which is very soft and calls for frequent renewal) makes dating very difficult.  As now, he would see a grey stone built town, with the houses abutting directly on to the street, and then there was no brick in evidence - even the brick quoining we see is a product of the late XIXc. In 1851 there were two builders in the town, but not one bricklayer working for them; rather there were still 20 masons, a reflection of Mere's isolation from the rail network.  For the same reason, there would have been little or no slate on the roofs; there was still much thatch, despite all the fires which had occurred, and the town had 6 thatchers still working. Other roofs were of stone or tile; at Knowl, near Barrow Street there were 5 tile makers.  As well as these trades, there were 6 sawyers, 31 carpenters, 5 glaziers and 2 plumbers - in the absence of drains and main water these last must have been engaged mainly in roof work.

One house still standing which our traveller would see is that next to the White Hart, now a bakery; here lives the 86 year old John Jupe, with one of his spinster daughters. He comes from a very old local family, and when he was young entered the linen manufacturing trade, following in the footsteps of a former owner of this very house, Henry Hindley, who took over the international business of his former employer and neighbour, James Harding. People such as this had been the catalysts of the centuries old linen weaving trade, which was essentially a cottage industry with the merchant at its centre. Jupe's wife, Anne, was a Maggs from the well known Bourton family, and their children will shortly benefit from the will of her very rich batchelor uncle. As well as three daughters, only one of whom married, they have three sons; they, and their married sister Anne, all now in their 50's, represent all the threads that made for the town's prosperity and it is worth examining them individually.

On the corner of North Street and the Market Place is the shop of Charles Card, grocer and draper, husband of Anne Jupe. He has been there for some 40 years and has established himself as the principal shopkeeper of the district. He is also manager of the branch of the Wilts & Dorset Bank, which is part of his shop, as a result of his own venture into banking in his early years of trading.  A separate paper in this series traces the subsequent developments of Card's shop into a large department store.

John, the eldest son, has followed many others in the family into farming and rents 1,050 acres at Mere Down, where he is in partnership with Charles Card and employs the latter's son Alexander as his assistant.  They live a bachelor's life, with one living-in domestic; next year the partnership will be broken, and Mere Down will be taken by Henry Baker, father of T.H.Baker, Mere's first historian, who will follow his father on the farm.

In 1851 agriculture is still the mainstay of the local economy; of a population of just over 3,000, 900 more than 50 years earlier, 520 are directly engaged in it as their principal occupation - allowing for their families, this accounts for well over half of the working population.  20 farmers are listed, nearly all renting their holdings, which amount to 7,500 acres - the whole parish. They state that they employ 266 hands, and another 20 men also appear as family members working on the farm.  Here the census throws up an apparent anomoly: while the farmers only declare 226 hands, the returns include 438 agricultural labourers, plus 36 paupers, mainly aged. What did the other 170 do? Probably the farmers only declared those in regular employment, and depended on the pool of others for seasonal and casual work - these would also have been available for any other kind of unskilled manual work in other trades.

What is clear is that such a pool of labour for casual work must have contributed to keeping wages at what was notoriously a level which we today just cannot imagine - the weekly wage of a farmer's labourer in South Wiltshire ranged from 6s to 8s a week, less than half what his counterpart in Lancashire would earn.  So a large part of the inhabitants of Mere would have little to spend in the 20 or so shops which were now open and life must have been very hard.  It is no wonder that there was a constant stream of emigration by the younger people of the area - either to the industrial areas of this country or to America and Australia.

The farms themselves varied immensely in size; those on or near the chalk - Zeals, Chadenwick, Manor and Mere Down, were around 1,000 acres each. By contrast, in the "cheese" country South of the town they ranged between 100 & 300 acres, with 9 holdings being of 50 acres or less.  The "chalk" farms were mainly arable and sheep, with dairying prevailing on the "cheese" land.  The more specialised farming occupations (apart from 16 dairymen/women) are little represented - only 2 shepherds appear (plus a 93 year old pauper!); this is probably merely a matter of definition, with skilled men being lumped in with the labourers; one cannot believe there were no carters, for instance. This could be read as a symptom of the low regard in which "Hodge" was held by his more literate "betters". It is noticeable that a number of the farms are themselves in the middle of the town proper, and that in all the streets of the town agricultural workers are living.

Though so heavily dependent on its agricultural surroundings, Mere was not really a market town.  There had been a revival of the market in 1800, and a weighbridge had been built behind the George, but Shaftesbury and Warminster were the prime markets in the area.  There were, however, a number of trades heavily dependent on the farms - 2 millers and three harness makers, and more important economically 15 blacksmiths and 3 edge tool makers.  If our traveller goes down Pettridge Lane to Edgebridge he will find the workshops of James Down, whose family have been making scythes, axes, spades &c on this site since at least mid XVIc.

If from Edgebridge he crosses the road to Lords Mead House, he will come to the home of John Jupe's second son, Henry.  Henry has followed his father in the linen trade, and is now the last tick and cheesecloth maker in the town.  His factory is in the old corn mill adjacent, which he has extended into a five bay two story mill powered by a large water wheel.  Here the flax, now almost all imported, is dressed and spun, and some 5 men and 30 women are employed producing on 500 spindles the yarn from which the ticking is produced  The actual weaving is not a factory job here yet - 20 men and 15 women appears as weavers, working either in their homes or in small sheds; they weave Jupe's yarn and he deals in the finished product. In 4 years time Henry will inherit the mill and house from his father, but the trade is dying fast, and by 1860 he will have closed it down.

Our traveller is now seeing the final stages of an industry which had been the mainstay of the area for a couple of centuries but had been ousted by the larger powered factories of the North of England, Scotland and Ulster.  Its employees here are poorly paid, but even so the loss of their jobs will be a blow to the town.  The 45 people employed in flax working living in the West of the parish in Zeals almost certainly work in the much larger Maggs mills in Bourton; these also are in a declining market, and there are also in Zeals a significant number of mechanics, working in Maggs & Hindley's foundry & engineering works which is taking the place of the flax mills there.

Returning up Water Street, our traveller comes to the Grange, the home of the youngest son, Charles. He followed a different course, and as a young man became a silk throwster. In partnership with his bachelor cousin Ambrose Butt, and backed by his uncle Henry Maggs, he has taken over Hinks Mill, a mile downstream from Lords Mead, and built a large spinning factory there, powered by an even larger wheel.  He has recently moved from Salisbury St., probably Dewes House, to the Grange, which had previously been a farm, and has adapted the farm buildings to be another silkworks.  Only last year a silk throwster at Crockerton went bankrupt, and Charles took over that large factory also. As the years go by he will be taking over Henry's Lords Mead Mill and will build a factory at Warminster, before closing down entirely in 1894.  He has become a man of great influence in the district, the major employer, and a great benefactor of the Congregational Church.

The silk industry is another which is not well paid. Though Charles Jupe has become prosperous, it is in the context of an industry which is leading a precarious existence in the face of foreign competition, where bankruptcy is constantly facing the millowners.  In Mere he is employing some 170 hands, of whom only 20 are men, while 110 are girls under 20 (the fine nature of the fibre demands the dexterity of young hands),  The girls are earning between 3 & 7 shillings a week - little enough to us, but as they are nearly all daughters of the farm labourers we have already met, their meagre contribution to the family budget must have been most important.  Few of them continue to work after marriage - their places are taken by the children who soon follow, starting work at 11.

So of our population of 3,000 we find some 750 employed in work paying bare subsistence wages.  On top of this, there are 48 inmates in the new Union Workhouse, recently completed to the design of Sir George Gilbert Scott, and a considerable number of paupers receiving out relief.  No doubt our traveller would have found little to note in this, as it was a fairly general condition throughout rural areas - we are squarely in the era of Disraeli's "Two Nations".    However, in our eyes, it is difficult to relate this poverty with the evidence we have of a considerable degree of affluence.  Not only were there at least 20 shops in the town, but one of these, Cards, was soon to blossom into a major store and others were soon to open. If rebuilding had not already started, the town was on the brink of substantial redevelopment, with old houses being refurbished and a number of new ones being built by local entrepreneurs.

What was the source of this apparent prosperity in the face of poverty? Some of it must lie in the importance of Mere as a commercial centre for the surrounding district, with a number of respectable houses and well to do farmers.  It is also interesting that even then there were quite a few in the town of independent means, including 32 heads of family of what might be termed the rentier class; already Mere was attracting a number of retired folk & minor gentry, including a retired Indian civil servant.   14 families fell into the professional and official category; there were 6 ministers of religion and 9 schoolmasters (though 2 of the latter were paupers!).  These, the larger farmers, and the tradesmen would have been the families which employed most of the 100 who gave their occupation as some form of domestic servant.  Few households had large retinues of living-in staff, and probably in most cases they were employed one to a household;  46 households had one or more resident domestics on the census night.

Leaving the Grange our traveller might return to the Market Place by way of Dark Lane. In Boar Street he would pass the Congregational Chapel - not the present building, which Charles Jupe was to build in 1869, but its predecessor next to it, now used as a furniture store. In the middle of the road, opposite the present Post Office, he would have been faced by the mediaeval buildings of Standerwick's tannery, a century later to be a casualty of "traffic improvement".  If the evening was drawing on, he would have had the benefit of the gas street lighting, installed in 1839; few small towns had this amenity so early - indeed, main water and drainage were not to come for another half century.  The lamp standards were cast by the famous Coalbrookdale foundry, with modifications by the celebrated local inventor, Lander. One of them can be seen to this day at the rear of the Library.

Turning into North Street, then called Back Lane, and passing behind the warehouses and stables of Card's shop. our traveller would have seen the "candle house", a small building whose name reveals its use, which might well date back to Stuart times when Richard Pitman, a mercer, also made candles.  Despite the newly installed gas supply, the vast majority of homes would still have depended on candles for their lighting.  A little further down stands the Primitive Methodist Chapel, only opened five years earlier with the financial assistance of Mary Jupe, a daughter of John.  Beside it, at the back of a cottage, is a small stone building housing the original gas-works, which still stands to-day; it was to remain in use till the larger works was built in the 1860's. 

In most towns, gasworks were sited near a railway or canal, but of course this option was not available in Mere, and all the coal had to be brought by cart from the Somerset coalfields near Radstock - no easy task over poorly maintained country roads.  Coal transport was obviously very important - in addition to two general carriers, Mere had 8 men giving their occupation as coal carriers; they seem to have been a virile breed - 2 of them had bastardy orders made against them and in one case the constable and his assistant seem to have had considerable trouble extracting payment - their accounts survive for the trip, including considerable amounts of beer provided for their counterparts in other parishes.

Beyond Back Lane, turning up Upper Water Street, he would have found open fields along what is now North Road - the more substantial houses there are of a later date - but along the Shreen Water there was much the same higgly-piggledy development as we see now, though many of the little houses have been rebuilt since.  The old silk houses, which had been badly damaged by fire, were newly refurbished and occupied as cottages; beyond them, near Well Head, still stood the old Poor House.

Returning to the town centre, our traveller would have wished to see the Church.  Going along Church Street, he would have found a different scene from the one we know.  On the corner of Angel Lane lived Charles Rumsey, MRCS & licentiate of the Apothecary's Society; he had 2 indoor servants and a groom.  Beyond his house, nearly all of the cottages were occupied by families of the labouring class, as many as 12 to a house; obviously there has been much rebuilding and amalgamating of houses since.  Also in Church Street are Benjamin Westcott and his family, straw bonnet makers, two carpenters and a smith. The site of the Grove Buildings is a line of old thatched cottages; near it is the original National School, and a schoolmaster who is also minister of the Independent Meeting House of East Knoyle. Presumably he was master of the British School, connected with the Congregational Chapel.

One great difference in Church Street is that immediately opposite the church is a working farm.  Robert Dowding farms 30 acres, employing 8 men, and is also described as a dairyman.  The farm buildings include an enormous mediaeval barn fronting Castle Street; the whole ensemble gives the town centre a truly rural air, backed by Castle Hill, quite bare, with no trees or scrub as it is constantly grazed.

Outwardy the Church differs little from what we know, though the churchyard is crowded with tombstones.  All the inhabitants are still buried there, as the cemetery has not yet opened.  Inside, however, there is an air of untidiness and decay;  the cornice with its angels is smothered in whitewash, and over the screen, in place of the rood loft, is a large unsightly gallery pew.  Other galleries surround the nave. The Church of England is only just coming out of the period of indifference and pluralism of the XVIIIc - until 1846 the vicar of Mere was resident in Hampshire, leaving the parish to the care of curates. However, the Revd Thomas Blundell has recently become vicar and will start the process of revival of the Church. He lives in the old vicarage; his successors will live in a new one at Bramley Hill.  In the Chantry House, not long vacated by William Barnes, lives the curate of Bourton; the parishioners there have built a new church, but as yet have no vicarage.

At this time the parish of Mere still included the whole of Zeals; the overall population of the two now is not much different from that of 1851.  Zeals was a separate little community, almost entirely agricultural, but with its own small shops and an inn which brewed its own beer; formerly linen weaving had been a mainstay of its life.  One suspects that in many ways Zeals had always a greater affinity with its neighbour Bourton, in Dorset, than with Mere.

Between Mere and Zeals is Zeals House, in all respects the "big house" of the parish.  Significantly it heads the census schedule, the first name being Chafin Grove, 70 & unmarried, Lord of the Manor; he has one widowed niece there, but Miss Julia Chafin Grove, the great benefactor of the parish, is not there on the census night.  His life style is indicated by having resident butler, footman, cook, housemaid, under housemaid and coachman; in estate cottages are a gamekeeper and a gardener, and living out are two errand boys employed at the house.  Nearby lives a Miss Faugoin and her widowed sister, daughters of an attorney who was steward for the Hoares at Stourhead; they have cook, housemaid, house servant, errand boy and coachman.  Other domestic servants appear in Zeals, and may well have worked for one or other of these families.

The Groves and Faugoins seem to have been the only families in the parish to have such entourages and to qualify for the status of gentry.  It is their names which one encounters as the benefactors of all the local good causes, but the town, as distinct from Zeals, does not seem to live in their shadow. The Zeals estate is a large one, but lies right at the West of the parish; most of Mere is in the Manor of Mere, owned since Norman times by the Duchy of Cornwall, or by the Bath or Somerset estates.

For most of the Hanoverian period the Duchy had "farmed" the Manor to the Schutz family, who played no part whatsoever in the life of Mere, leaving the conduct of their investment to stewards.  As a result, there was no local involvement by those who elsewhere would have been regarded as the squirearchy, so, although the town has never been an independent borough, local political and social power has been firmly in the hands of the farmers and the commercial interests.

What, then, are the impressions our traveller will take back with him to London?  He will have seen a little community, in many ways remote from the busy world of Victorian England, where most of the inhabitants wear tough serviceable clothes made locally - the men in fustian trousers or breeches and often in the traditional smock, made of the coarse local linen.  The town has 37 shoe makers or cordwaimers, 12 tailors, 4 hatmakers and 42 needlewomen or dressmakers, so that it is still largely self-sufficient for its everyday needs. Few will have had fancy hairstyles.  Many would still have been illiterate, though schooling was improving fast.

He might well have encountered certain difficulties of communication. 95% of the population had been born in the West Country, most of them within 10 miles of Mere, and few would have been exposed to any form of standard English.  As a result nearly all would have spoken the Wessex dialect of which we still hear shadows to-day, but far broader and with a plethora of expressions and usages which have disappeared.  Indeed, the local dialect would have been more akin to that of Dorset than that spoken in other parts of Wiltshire.  To one used to cockney tones it would have been almost a foreign language.