Men of Bad Character: the Witham Fires of the 1820s

Strangers and friends

The local newspaper, discussing arson in early 1829, blamed it on 'persons who travel the country without any visible means of support'.¹⁶⁴ James Cook said he had seen 'two men with dark smock-frocks and black hats' during the fire at Olivers Farm.¹⁶⁵ In the event, no such people were discovered to have anything to do with the Witham fires. But the examples illustrate a common feeling, or even a hope, that crimes could be attributed to strangers. This attitude was often perhaps not so much a reality as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Real residences of suspects are hard to discover, but a study of the Witham Division suggests that between a third and a half of the people prosecuted in 1824 and 1829 came from parishes other than those where the offence was committed.¹⁶⁶

Furthermore, the witnesses and even the prosecutors were very frequently from other parishes, so that perhaps less than a fifth of cases entailed people prosecuting others resident in the same parish as themselves.¹⁶⁷ One specific indication of the tendency to suspect people from other areas, is the regular annual increase in recorded crime at harvest time.¹⁶⁸ This was when farmworkers and others travelled about the county for work, particularly in view of the later harvest in the northern parishes.¹⁶⁹ Needless to say, one place's stranger was often another place's beloved son. This was indicated for instance by the willingness of a Cressing farmer to take back his carter William Killock who was convicted of stealing coal at Heybridge in 1824.¹⁷⁰ And at Witham, Edmund Potto did have his friends, in spite of the general enthusiasm of the prosecutions against him.

The details of the 'moral panic' in Essex during the period of the Witham fires suggest that it was accompanied by something of a change in the attitude of prosecutors, in that there seems to have been a new willingness amongst them to pick on local suspects, from their own sector of the economy, rather than strangers. Some of the thefts were very small, and it is clear from the prosecutors' remarks that they did not consider their own actions as normal, and had to justify them specially on this occasion. One said that 'though the value of the property was small ... were he to overlook this offence, he would subject himself to further losses', and another that 'he should not have proceeded against the young urchins, had he not found it impracticable to protect himself from repeated depredations'.¹⁷¹

The unusual pressures may also be illustrated by the fact that one of the prosecutors of the period was Latimer Dell, a Quaker miller from Earls Colne.¹⁷² As already mentioned, in normal circumstances Quakers were reluctant to prosecute.

The prosecution of the young local farm boy James Cook at Witham was itself perhaps an example of unusual behaviour in a panic; the anxiety which it caused emphasises the fact. The tailor Edmund Potto was local too, but the prosecution against him was conducted much more eagerly than that against Cook. This might seem odd, but there were ways other than geographical ones in which one could be a stranger in the community. Potto had several 'strange' aspects, such as his alleged London connections, and his suggested insanity; an interesting early example which there is not space to discuss further here. At first sight his being outside agriculture seems sufficient to make him a safely 'strange' suspect. The fears of his counsel about the attitude of farmer jurors might suggest that he himself felt this.¹⁷³ Witham's extensive parish boundaries ensured that it had as many as 33 per cent of its population in agriculture, more than for many other towns.¹⁷⁴ Farmers took the lead in many aspects of local society and administration, including prosecution. In Essex in 1824 and 1829 they were very much over-represented as prosecutors compared to their proportion in the population as a whole, much more so than any other occupational group.¹⁷⁵ King also found this in 18th-century Essex.¹⁷⁶ In the 1820s they also tended to prosecute for smaller thefts than other groups, and they might be expected to be particularly hostile to rick-burning.¹⁷⁷

However, Potto's situation is complicated by the fact that he also had tradesmen aligned against him, as both witnesses and prosecutors. What seems to have been his real asset as a scapegoat was not his trade status but his position as a relative of the Thomasin family.¹⁷⁸ They were brush makers and Dissenters, also related by marriage to the Bentall family of ironfounders in the Maldon area.¹⁷⁹ As a manufacturer who employed his thirty or forty workmen in one place, the 'Brush Yard' at Witham, James Thomasin was in a category separate from the inter-dependent agricultural/tradesmen liaison.¹⁸⁰ Other local examples were the silk manufacturers D'Aiguillon of Coggeshall, and South and John Morse of Hatfield Peverel. The former showed his lack of harmony with the old accommodation by his involvement against his workers in court cases for assault at Petty Sesssions, whilst the latter prosecuted local girls there for breach of contract when they ran away from work.¹⁸¹ Like Thomasin, the Morses had a concentrated workforce probably contrasting with the local norm. Their mill had five floors, and a lodging-house with 'ample accommodation for forty or fifty children'.¹⁸² Thomasin appears to have avoided the kind of situation encountered by D'Aiguillon and the Morses, by taking nearly all his employees from outside the county.¹⁸³ They were probably following the Brushmakers' Society tramping route. Brushmakers were paid ten shillings (50p.) a week by this Society when they were out of work, which was what a local farmworker earned when he was in work.¹⁸⁴

In the relationship between most of the local tradesmen and farmers, and between the Dissenters and Anglicans, there seems to have been an underlying element of emulation. This meant that the tradesmen sought to copy rather than to compete with farmers, and the Dissenters to copy the Anglicans. Thus the feelings towards the other group may have been hostile, but they were not simply competitive. The tradesmen victims of the fires had their land and their corn-stacks as well as their shops, mills and maltings. The father of their solicitor in the case, James Howell Pattisson, had already moved from Dissent to Anglicanism in 1826.¹⁸⁵ The family of one of the prosecutors, the miller Hoffgaard Shoobridge, was shortly to switch from Quakerism to Anglicanism; one of his relatives became a churchwarden in the 1840s.¹⁸⁶

However, Thomasin, a Dissenter, does not seem to have entered wholeheartedly into this kind of behaviour. His son did eventually acquire a very large house away from the brush yard and attempted to have himself described himself as a 'gentleman' in the 1861 census return. But it may be significant that he was unsuccessful in this, as one of the registrars deleted the description and described him as a 'brushmaker'.¹⁸⁷ He also bought property in Witham, but, as far as can be discerned, not agricultural land like that of the tradesmen. Except for the meadowland required by all for horses, his Witham property was urban.¹⁸⁸ The Select Vestry was the main seat of parish power; normally people served on it several times or for a period, Anglicans, Dissenters and Quakers alike, but Thomasin was only a member for one year, in 1827; the circumstances are not known.¹⁸⁹ His relationship even with the Dissenters may have been strained, as he was in a group which temporarily split from their Meeting in 1823.¹⁹⁰ Furthermore in the 1830s his wife's ironfounding Bentall relatives were active in the Maldon area with the Dissenters' new rival, the Methodists.¹⁹¹ It is therefore interesting that in due course, the first leading Methodists in Witham itself were also to be manufacturers, and they came from outside Essex like Thomasin's workers.¹⁹² When one of them left the Witham Dissenters for the Methodists in 1848, he spoke of the greater concern of the latter for the 'poor and needy and outcasts of Society'.¹⁹³ And in 1850 James Thomasin's son was himself providing a room for the Methodists in Witham, though it is not clear whether the Thomasins themselves were ever actually members.¹⁹⁴ Davidoff and Hall quote Methodism, and investment in houses or buildings rather than land, amongst the features distinguishing the lower from the higher ranks of the middle class at this time.¹⁹⁵ It could be, therefore, that the Thomasins were merely too low in status to be acceptable to the farmers and tradesmen. But this does not appear to have led them simply to seek self-improvement and acceptance, as it did with many others. It seems that they may have been seen as not so much inferior as different. Thus in the 1829 trials, James Thomasin showed no interest in placating the traditional local middle class, and instead produced a formidable array, including medical opinion, in defence of Potto. Admittedly he was able to secure a number of local supporters for the defence, as well as the imported medical opinion, but some were either his relatives or his brushworkers, including the local secretary of their Society, James Mount.¹⁹⁶

The episode therefore reinforces considerable hints that Thomasin and his family were detached from the local community or even unpopular. This relationship between manufacturers and others may have been peculiar to towns with a large agricultural element, like Witham, and to villages, such as Coggeshall and Hatfield Peverel, which had difficulty in reconciling themselves to the silk mills. Witham's 'gentility', perhaps partly arising from its 18th century 'spa' period, may also have added to the problem. In 1831 the parish had, in addition to its sizeable farming interest, as many as seven per cent of its adult males in the census category of 'capitalists, bankers, professional and other educated men'. This was matched in some towns in the area, such as Maldon and Colchester, but others, such as the neighbouring industrial centres of Braintree and Halstead, had a very much lower proportion of such 'capitalists'.¹⁹⁷ In the 1820s, Essex towns with a high proportion of such people tended also to have a high prosecution rate, illustrating their severe attitude to deviants.¹⁹⁸

It was noticeable that after the brush yard and the drill yard closed in the 1870s, Witham was to have no major manufacturing employer of men until 1919.¹⁹⁹ Local tradition holds that this was due to deliberate exclusion tactics by local employers and property owners.²⁰⁰ This may seem far removed from the problems of arson in the 1820s. But if it is true, it does echo the attitudes of that period which seem to have been highlighted by some aspects of the Witham arson trials.

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