A note on method

The narrative below is supported by a number of tables; these must be treated with caution, however, for the hazards of survival ensure that we can never be certain that we are dealing with all the evidence that existed; not only that, but many surviving documents have been damaged or simply faded so that interpretation is difficult. Entries in inventories may reveal that there was a debt or a cash holding, but not the amount, and where this happens I have had to include or omit the entry as seems most useful. What has not been done is to ‘complete’ the entry with a guess, tempting though that sometimes is. Most tempting is to try to disentangle components of a composite sum, as when – quite often – the value of the deceased's clothing and the money in his purse were all lumped together. Where clothing is shown separately the values vary so much that any such guess is useless. The tables, then, should not be taken literally to the decimal point, without bearing in mind the deficiencies in the source material: they indicate trends, not precision.

The legislative background

As implied above, the long century from 1570 to 1680 saw major legislative changes which we must examine first in order to understand the legal and financial constraints within which money circulated and debts were created. We must first distinguish bare credit from credit with interest. Not all loans or credit arrangements carried interest. Short-term credit might well, then as now, be built into the price of an object sold, and inventories from Congleton in particular show this in operation when shoe-makers were owed for boots and shoes made earlier but not paid for by the time of the shoe-maker's death. We will return to these. It is unreasonable to expect that long-term arrangements could be made without some recompense for the lender, and before 1571 borrowers and lenders had either to comply with the laws on usury or find a way round them by artificial devices. The traditional medieval requirement had been that to avoid the charge of usury the risk had somehow to be shared between borrower and lender: one could not make a profit out of money itself. Various devices were adopted to get round this limitation, such as parallel payments or repayments greater than the sum advanced, but we do not need to go into this in great detail here as it was a dead issue by the time of this survey. There had been major changes to the laws on usury in the Act against Usury of 1571, which had the effect of defining and legalizing much that had previously been banned as well as generally reducing interest rates.Footnote ¹⁴ Another Act of 1624 made greater changes.Footnote ¹⁵ Even so, not all recompense was made in money and there must have been reciprocal services that could be set against money due. With this background it is not surprising that lending became more overt, though probably no more common.Footnote ¹⁶ The fundamental change in social and legislative attitude introduced by the 1624 legislation was summed up by Jones:

The argument over whether lending was oppressive or charitable and whether the aim was to help or hurt the borrower was consigned to the lender's conscience: in Parliament at least the new-found economists had won the day. How far such reforming attitudes had penetrated rural Cheshire was another matter, and it may be that appraisers and surviving relatives felt that it might be prudent not to publicize the terms of a loan too openly. This could apply not only to well-known ‘professional’ lenders but also to those whose lending was more limited. That raises the question of the extent to which the parties were still resorting to old-fashioned techniques of disguising an interest charge to look like something else. There was the curious arrangement in the mid-seventeenth century by which John Hardy lent Richard Dichfield £5, not to be repaid until Dichfield himself died. Was this an attempt to avoid a charge of usury, similar to the case of Bedingfield v Ashley (c.1575), which depended upon the borrower's daughters being alive at the end of a ten-year period?Footnote ¹⁸ If so, it was anachronistic and unnecessary. Another reason for the relative silence on interest rates is that one of the inadvertent results of the Act of 1571 was to set an interest norm of 10 per cent. If that was expected by both parties there would be no need to spell it out, whereas later, in the new century, rates varied and fell, so that overt statement was necessary. In Jones' words,

The evidence presented here indicates that by mid-century interest rates were very much higher, possibly reflecting a shortage of money after the Civil War.

In the inventories, some appraisers carefully distinguished each debt, naming the other parties and specifying the nature of each debt – by ‘book’ (a term seemingly used to denote loans simply written down in a book without legal documentation), by bond or simply ‘lent’, with presumably little other formal evidence.Footnote ²⁰ Some specified the charging of interest but many others avoided mentioning it, perhaps still feeling that it was a practice better left concealed, although some recompense for the loan must have been obtained. Other appraisers lumped them all together. The amount of cash held at death was another variant which will be examined below.

There are other variations. Whilst not directly relevant some may be noted, simply to demonstrate that we cannot expect scrupulous conformity in the treatment of money and debt. In Congleton there are several inventory entries for ‘glass in the windows’. Although this must have been fixed in situ, appraisers seem to have regarded it as an extra fitting that could be removed or negotiated for separately, not part of the building and accordingly it had its own value. It must be a measure of growing comfort and prosperity. In Hale, many appraisers identified the item selected to be taken as heriot, a tax levied by the landlord to enable the succeeding tenant to take possession. This does not occur elsewhere and may reflect local estate practice: what it does show is that the payment had not been commuted to a money payment, a reflection perhaps of the shortage of coin.

Money supply

In Congleton cash appears constantly in the inventories, in Hale and Bowdon commonly enough, but in the ‘four parishes’ and Malpas rarely. As discussed below, there probably were significant differences in the amount of money available but the variation may in part be either because some appraisers felt that it should not be included or, probably, that surviving spouses had taken care of any loose cash as being the most likely asset simply to disappear.

It is immediately clear that the incidence of cash holdings in the inventories – and by inference the amount of cash in circulation – varied greatly according to time and area. This can be seen in Table 1. It is hard to draw too firm a conclusion from the figures but certain assumptions have to be made, the most basic of which is that behaviour patterns remain constant unless something dramatic happens to alter them, and in this the drop in cash holdings reported in the decade 1641–1650 is significant.

Table 1

Comparison of cash holdings in inventories in the Cheshire recordsFootnote ^a

^a The figures include all references to cash being held, even when included with other assets such as apparel. N=number of inventories; C=cash holdings; %=percentage of cash holdings in the inventories; —=figures not available.

^b From 1617.

Source: Derived from the transcribed/published inventories as listed in the Appendix to this article.

What the decade 1641–1650 does show is a dramatic fall in the number of cash holdings: in Congleton, down from 92.5 per cent of inventories in 1631–1640 to 53.8 per cent, a level comparable with the early decades of the century. Throughout, the percentage of inventories recording cash at death in Congleton greatly exceeded those in the other areas, which is a clear indication of the contrast between the workings of a rural and a more urban economy. In his introduction to Wilson's A discourse upon usury, R. H. Tawney observed that in the uncertain and cyclical world of agriculture ‘the need for advances was not the invention of man; it was inherent in the nature of things’.Footnote ²¹ This was true two centuries later, as was to be observed, à propos the Cotton Famine: in industry the process of profit-making is continuous through the year, while in agriculture it is a once-yearly cycle.Footnote ²² The various small trades in Congleton required cash to operate satisfactorily, while the rhythmic cycle of agricultural settlement allowed for annual set-off and barter. That said, the amounts of cash held even in Congleton were generally small and insufficient to allow total payment of debts had it been necessary. Boot- and shoe-makers seem to have found it particularly hard to obtain payment and several of their inventories list debtors for goods supplied; we will return to these when we consider debts.

The attitude of appraisers towards cash varied. In Congleton especially there was a greater tendency to include cash with the value of the deceased's clothes, thus disguising the value of each, while this was never done in Bowdon. Sometimes plate and coin were valued together and this draws attention to the constant use of the phrase ‘ready money’, with its implication that silver plate could if necessary be converted into usable form either as bullion or more slowly by reminting.

The amounts of cash held on death varied, though in general they were small. A few large sums were reported, such as the £160 held by John Torkinton of Tarvin in 1637 or the £123 held by George Goulden of Hale, tanner, in 1661, described as ‘ready money’ in his chest. The latter was all the more remarkable for it came at a time when the incidence of cash holdings was declining. No other Hale holding came near that amount, the next largest being less than half. In Congleton, the sums were more modest, though more widespread, the largest being that of Roger Kent, inn-keeper, who had £50 in 1665. In the earlier decades the largest was that of John Meeke, saddler, who had £77 14s 0d in 1636. Those in Malpas ranged from £35 15s 0d held in 1680by Richard Foxley, yeoman, who dealt in cheese, to only £12 2s 0d held by John Brindley in the more central decades, in 1639. Bowdon, finally, was almost cash-free, with John Sorocold's £6 being the largest (he died in 1649), until Robert Tipping died in 1662, holding £32 3s 0d.

It is worth comparing cash holdings as a whole, for two decades 1631–1640, just before the Civil War, and 1651–1660, just after the disruption of the War and during the Interregnum. (See Tables 2 and 3.) If Torkinton's large holding in 1637 is excluded from Table 2 the average in the Four Parishes drops to £4 12s 0d, more in line with though lower than in the other areas. The value of clothes when shown separately varied so much that no safe generalization can be made.

Table 2

Cash holdings in the Cheshire inventories, 1631–1640Footnote ^a

^a The figures include only entries where there was cash alone, excluding sums included with other assets.

Source: As in Table 1.

Table 3

Cash holdings in the Cheshire inventories, 1651–1660Footnote ^a

^a —=figures not available.

Source: As in Table 1.

The greater incidence of cash holdings in pre-war Congleton (see Table 1) draws attention to Tawney's thesis: was it an example of the Protestant trade ethic triumphing over older values? There is every temptation to suggest this, but in reality the Civil War divisions in the town followed no obvious pattern. Initially the local Establishment tended towards the King, but later the Parliamentary faction was dominant: neither faction showed distinct economic differences – agriculture versus trade or one trade grouping against another – rather, one suspects, there was the common working out of long-standing jealousies and oppositions whose origins are now lost to us.Footnote ²³ Towns were the foci of conflict whereas the countryside was less immediately affected. Table 1 shows the marked reduction in the incidence of coin-holding in the Civil War decade: Table 3 indicates that not only the incidence but also the reduced value of such holdings continued for some time thereafter. It may be that the supply was indeed greatly reduced or it may be that civil disruption and increased levels of taxation led people to hold less cash or not to admit that they had any. Either way, cash vanishes from this record and it is not until 1680 that we find another cash holding in Malpas, after which they become common.

What cannot be established is how much cash literally went underground during or after the Civil War. Inventories show that in earlier decades people seem not to have been too bothered about keeping cash in their houses. Entries commonly refer to money in purses, chests, desks and suchlike, suggesting little interest in concealment. These references may, of course, be only the tip of the iceberg and more cash was buried, but if so it was hidden from the appraisers and surviving spouses were either concealing it, or ignorant, in which case it would be lost. That could well happen: there is the instructive case of the large Congleton coin hoard thought to relate to John Walker (†1675), a skinner and prominent Royalist who was fined by the Commonwealth authorities.Footnote ²⁴ One of the four burials involved, of 1,144 silver coins, can be dated to shortly after 1649, which would accord with a desire to hide wealth at a critical time. Coins in others were later, though, up to 1670, which testifies to a continuing caution arising from adversity. It was not bred of size alone, for the total value was £172 8s, large but no larger than other amounts which had been kept in houses. A feature of this hoard is the low total value relative to the number of coins: 3,409, many in small denominations and well-used. Walker's inventory gives no sign of significant cash holdings, for although he was owed £240 8d, his apparel and money with a saddle and bridle were lumped together at only £20. How many others buried their wealth in those troubled times? One aspect worth further thought is that the last coins in the hoard were deposited after 1670, even though a few years before the Royal Mint had recalled and replaced small coinage.Footnote ²⁵ Why did Walker, or whoever the depositor was, not recover his hoard and turn it into new and valid coin instead of leaving it to become useless? It may be that over the preceding troubled years old enmities had accumulated that might have been resurrected if it were known that he had ready money. Taking the figures as they are, cash became a scarce commodity from before the Civil War until the Restoration, when it returned to its earlier level.

Who lent?

The crudest generalization in answer to this question is ‘anyone who had spare money’, and here we must return to my initial distinction between loans proper and short-term credit intended to facilitate a business transaction. The second group of lenders is more specialized and we will return to it. It is tempting to try to analyse lenders by social class but the task is made more difficult by the looseness of the definitions given in the records. Thus, for instance, ‘yeoman’ and ‘husbandman’ are used pretty well without discernible meaning. In Congleton and Hale industrial or commercial titles are more common and reliable, and Table 4 shows an analysis of debts from a list prepared by Jill Groves for Hale.

Table 4

Occupations of lenders in Hale, 1600–1680Footnote ^a

^a —=figures not available.

Source: Hale records as prepared by Jill Groves; See the Appendix to this article for details.

The debts themselves varied in both size and number. Before the Civil War, the average value of debts in Hale was around £95 10s 0d. The largest lender there was a tailor, John Hollinpriest (†1626) who had lent out £1,111 16s 7d but only had £40 in ready money. He was a true moneylender, for his other assets, excluding cash, amounted to only £23, and his name appears in many inventories. Even on his large scale of operation, he appears to have owed nothing and to have financed his lending from his own resources. The smallest lender owed 8 shillings (William Partington (†1619), whose total assets came to £98 16s 2d and whose principal asset was threshed corn worth £38).Footnote ²⁶ These figures show not only the tremendous disparity in wealth but differing uses of cash and debt between different people. We have to remember – yet again – the hazards of documentary survival which undermine all statistical comparisons but, subject to that, the pattern after 1641 (shown in Table 4) is different. There were a third fewer inventories for a start, and the proportions in each group changed: yeomen and husbandmen were proportionately fewer, falling from 26 per cent of total to respectively 16 and 6 per cent. Women rose from 11 to 30 per cent among lenders, although the amounts that they lent did not significantly rise. Spicksley has traced the change (in Lincoln) from fathers leaving livestock and household goods to their daughters in the late sixteenth century towards bequests of cash by the end of the century and into the seventeenth. The purpose was to preserve the family estate but if replicated elsewhere this will have increased the number of spinsters able to lend money to obtain an income.Footnote ²⁷ The largest lender here was William Vawdrey (†1665), gentleman, whose loans of £346 represented half his total assets, while the smallest was Richard Leather (†1672), who was owed 4d out of total assets of £29 18s 4d. Significantly, the value of the average debt holding had fallen to just over £62, well down on the pre-war average. This provides another indication of economic decline as a result of the war and subsequent disruption and taxation. There was still no particular group that lent the largest amounts: the three largest lenders were Vawdrey, a gentleman, with £346; Edmund Newton (†1669), yeoman, with £243 9s 5d, with £8 10s in ready money; and finally George Goulden (†1661), tanner, with £213 11s 0d. These sums represented for Vawdrey and Newton half of their total assets and for Goulden a third. Some lent higher proportions. Alice Royle (†1646) and Ellen Brundrett (†1669), both widows, lent 80 per cent of their assets; Henry Hardy (†1646), husbandman, had lent 75 per cent, but most lent less and the amounts were smaller. It is not surprising that women should lend proportionately more, as the interest from loans would represent more of their livelihood.Footnote ²⁸

There is a marked contrast with nearby, though smaller, Bowdon. The existence of only seven debt-showing inventories for 1600–1640 there makes social analysis of little value but other comparisons can be valid. The largest holding was £27 for a member of the extended Janney family (†1637), which represented 65 per cent of his total assets, while the smallest was £1 owed to one of the ubiquitous Vawdreys (†1634), though this was less than 1 per cent of his total wealth of £162, itself the second-largest estate in value. Average debts were only £12 5s while debts as a whole represented 13 per cent of total assets. For 1641–1680 the same modest levels continued. The largest creditor was Samuel Saunders (†1665), whose £124 lent out represented 61 per cent of his total estate. The smallest was William Aldcroft (†1664), who was owed just £4, out of a modest estate worth £48 8s 2d. Saunders' holding increased the average debt holding to £27 12s but if that exceptional amount is excluded the level drops to £7 18s. Debt as a whole had risen to 32 per cent of assets, though the total estate value was lower than in the first four decades (£678, down from £742). What is striking is that two adjacent areas should show such a contrast.Footnote ²⁹

The incidence of debt holding

In contrast to cash holding, where coin appears often to have been in short supply, especially in rural areas, debt was common. In Hale, at one extreme, debts appeared in 80 per cent of the inventories for the decade 1631–1640 (16 out of 20). Sometimes the testator owed money as well, though that was less common. Sample figures for the same years from Malpas and the Four Parishes show a lower incidence. In the former, five out of eight inventories showed debts to be paid (62.5 per cent), with one testator also owing rather more than he was owed. In the latter, 31 out of 61 held them (49.1 per cent).Footnote ³⁰ We have seen that Congleton had the most active economy and we may see this against debt holding, set out in Table 5.

Table 5

Incidence of debt holding in Congleton, 1611–1680Footnote ^a

^a N=total number of inventories; D=inventories mentioning debts, including cases of debt owed to testator; %=percentage of cases of debts mentioned compared with inventories. Note that the total numbers of inventories may not correspond to the totals given in Table 1 because of variations in the information provided.

Source: As in Table 1.

The amounts lent varied greatly as a percentage of the total value of estates. Many were small lenders, such as Alexander Vawdrey (†1674), of Hale, whose debtors of £1 10s 0d amounted to 1 per cent of his total assets. At the other end of the scale, the £21 14s 0d owed to George Hardy (†1674), also of Hale, represented 80 per cent of his assets. Of larger amounts, Lawrence Leicester (†1616), gentleman of Hale, was owed just over £450 out of total assets of £486, 92.5 per cent. Most serious lenders spread their risks by lending to many people. The inventory of William Bosson (†1618), of Congleton, showed good debts ‘with specialty’ of £102 2s 0d; desperate debts ‘with specialty’ of £19 6s 8d and debts ‘without specialty’ of £35 8s 10d.Footnote ³¹ The last were listed, revealing 60 names over a range of places, as far afield as Radnor (25s).Footnote ³² Some of the loans had been advanced by his wife. Another high-percentage lender, at over 90 per cent, was Richard Higginson, will be referred to later on.Footnote ³³

We cannot establish the extent of debts owed by deceased individuals with any confidence. Out of 20 records from Bowdon where the deceased were creditors, 5 reveal them as debtors also, either because there are accounts or because they were listed in either wills or, quite wrongly, in inventories. In all five cases money was both owed and owing. All but two were simple debts and those were in relation to a quarter's wages owed to servants. The accounts show the difficulties faced by executors: Sibell Eaton, widow of John Barrington (†1625), lodged accounts in 1628 which revealed the need for two lawsuits to recover debts, one of which displayed the weakness of enforcement identified by Briggs (see above, page 247, and reference). Mr Janney, the Vicar of Bowdon, owed £3 (probably: the inventory is damaged), but after going to court Sibell was advised to compromise for 10s, of which she ruefully noted in her statement that only 3s was paid. Her largest cost was the maintenance of ‘the deceadent's child’ for nearly three years for which she appealed to the court for an allowance. There were clearly great difficulties in obtaining settlement from Janney, even after court judgement had been obtained in her favour. The other question, now insoluble, was whose child the minor was. Was it from a previous marriage of his? Was it theirs? She referred to the child as ‘the decedent's’ but that need not necessarily be the full truth. With the exception of Barrington, debts owed to other deceased exceeded those owed by them, and even in Barrington's case the inventory is too damaged to establish the totals with confidence.Footnote ³⁴

Debts owed by a testator appear occasionally in the Hale records. John Bradley (†1604), of Ringway, was clearly insolvent. His assets, with nothing owed to him, amounted to £35 1s 2d, but he owed 20 debts (including £9 11s 0d to the ubiquitous Hollinpriest), amounting to £38 17s 5d. These were listed as an adjunct to the inventory. William Ashley (†1611), also of Ringway, recorded in his will that he owed Hollinpriest (who was also one of the appraisers) £37 6s 0d, with another £1 owing to Edmund Newton, whilst debts owing to him amounted to £5 4s. 0d. Since the value of his inventory came to £48 3s 6d, Hollinpriest must have been watching his own interest with a little relief. Ashley's list of debts contains a curious phrase, indicative of the complexities of rural arrangements:

John Burges of Hale to be paid within several dayes next after the date of this p[rese]nte £1 13 4.

And if the same be not paid by then accordinge as the same is here sett downe, then the Barg[ain] agreed upon betweene the said Burges and William Ashley to stand good in lawe.Footnote ³⁵

There was plainly some side arrangement intended to guarantee recompense in lieu of repayment, presumably involving some physical assets that could be seized.

Proportions of good and bad debts

This, like many other issues, is confused by the differing attitudes of appraisers. There was always a measure of subjectivity in their approach, not only in what was included in an inventory but in the judgement that they had to make about the realistic value of debts. Some may have chosen the easy way out and simply recorded what they knew, without assessment, such that none of the Bowdon inventories makes a distinction between good and bad debts, while only two of the Malpas ones do in a meaningful way. These are, however, quite informative (see Table 6). John Carter's doubtful debts amounted to nearly a quarter of his estate of £1.006 13s 2d, while Hopley's were a little less, at 20 per cent of £183 3s 10d. Unless recovered, these were serious losses from the estates. Once more, the Congleton inventories provide more detail, though even so the picture is far from complete. The decade 1631–1640 will serve as an example (see Table 7).

Table 6

Good and bad debts in Malpas, 1615 and 1664Footnote ^a

^a —=figures not available.

Source: See the Appendix to this article.

Table 7

Good and bad debts in Congleton, 1631–1640

^a ‘Sperate’ debts were those where recovery was expected; ‘desperate’ debts, more obviously, were those where recovery was felt to be unlikely.

^b By implication.

^c Described as some ‘sperate’ and some ‘desperate’.

^d £0 7s 1d was probably ‘desperate’.

Source: As in Table 1.

Lenders seem either to have exercised good judgement in the first place or to have been able to remedy their mistakes, for with one exception ‘sperate’ debts greatly outnumber the ‘desperate’ in value. The biggest lender of all, James Lingard, must have known exactly what he was doing, for the £25 in ‘desperate’ debts was minute in comparison with the whole. Wilkinson was more unfortunate than the figures suggest.

Malpas does provide one interesting example of how a testator tried to ensure that his debts were paid. Thomas Wilbraham (†1665), yeoman of Malpas, owed Lord Brereton for some land that he had bought and whose possession he wanted to ensure. In his will he therefore set out that ‘It is further my mind and will that as fast as money can be raised of the land and also money gotten in that is owing it shall be paid to the Lord Brereton for the last fourscore pounds that is to be paid for the land.’Footnote ⁴³ He was in total owed £40 14s 0d which, if recovered, would go some way to pay the debt, but there were no physical assets to sell as his total estate amounted to only £174 13s 6d, all in current agricultural produce. Presumably the land had been bought on easy and loosely defined terms.Footnote ⁴⁴

Recovery of debts

There is little indication in any of the records of how executors intended to enforce recovery, other (one may assume) than by pressure and recourse to law, if thought worthwhile, but a hint appears in a cryptic phrase in the inventory of Raphe Broster (†1644), of Tattenhall, where among the debts listed as due by bond, the appraiser noted £9 0s 0d ‘owing by Mr Bostocke layde down for him to the Sherriffe’. The threat of legal action was always an option.Footnote ⁴⁵

Reference will later be made to two bonds, from Robert Woodall of Handforth (£4 10s) and John Royle of Etchells (15s 1d), that were reckoned worthless because they had been neither dated, sealed nor acknowledged. Other debts also had caused or would cause trouble. Edmund Simpson (†1611), yeoman of Bowdon, seems to have fallen out with his sister, Jane Sherman, or perhaps with his brother-in-law acting in her name. The inventory records:

Jill Groves speculated about the exact details of what the two men were to do, either to make a judgement or to enforce payment, but for our purpose neither matters, for the phrase must mean that some court action had been started.Footnote ⁴⁶

Who borrowed and why?

Just as those who had money lent it, so too those who needed it borrowed. It is not surprising that in small and closed communities it was usually only the debtor's name that was given. There are two exceptions to this: one is family members and the other is the relatively few people who were most distant, in another county or, in one case, another country.

Most borrowers lived locally and would be well known to all of the executors, the appraisers and the community at large. There was no need to identify them more clearly, and one wonders why family members, who would be even better known, were identified by their relationship. Various studies have suggested that it was a demonstration of family solidarity – the willingness of one member to help another and so strengthen kinship groups – but, for whatever reason, both wills and inventories spell it out. One example will suffice: Roger Lloyd (†1665), of Wigland (near Malpas), was owed £6 by his son, also Roger Lloyd. Those living further afield needed better identification, even if they lived within Cheshire. So the inventory of Randle Brown (†1608), yeoman of Cuddington, identified two of the three: Randle Moyle of Shocklach, £10; Roger Dayes of Bangor (? on Dee), £20; and presumably a local man, Randle Batha the younger, £10. Given the closeness of the county border it is not surprising that some Malpas debtors lived in Shropshire, like John Baker of Whicksall in Shropshire who owed £1 7s 8d to John Baker of Oldcastle (†1629). These are understandable but why did William Hopley (†1615), yeoman of Malpas, lend £10 to a Mr Astery, a Bedfordshire man? Hopley features in Table 6 above, where the debt was included in the ‘hopeful and good’ category, so the connection must have been sound. Lenders in Hale also mostly dealt with neighbours but there was a smattering of debtors from further away. One who was either unfortunate or had poor judgement was William Bradley (†1639), whose appraisers reported debts ‘which ought to be discharged [because there are] not hopes of recovering any of them’. These included three bonds from Edward Simpson of Timperley (£5 19s 3d) and one bond for £1 10s 0d from Edward Kelsall of Cheadle. Another two bonds from Robert Woodall of Handforth (£4 10s) and John Royle of Etchells (15s 1d) were reckoned worthless because they had not been dated, sealed or acknowledged (see above).Footnote ⁴⁷

What were the terms of lending?

Interest

Although the legislative changes since 1571 had permitted the charging of interest, the paucity of references to it suggests that it took some time for it to become respectable in rural areas. Bowdon inventories do not explicitly mention interest until 1658 when Margery Harding's listed four amounts of interest due. The entries are curious for, whilst specifying the amount of the debt and the interest, only the latter was included in the total. So the entry for one debtor reads, in Jill Groves' transcription,

Also Ralph Strettell of ye parish ofAshton upon Merseybank 1 Martij 1657 bound in iiij^li with condicion for paym[en]t w[i]th Intereste of . . . . . ij^li [£2]Footnote ⁴⁸

It is not clear from the entries whether the £2 interest was included in the £4 bond, or whether it was an extra charge but, whichever was the case, it is odd that the appraisers only included £2 rather than £4 or £6 in the total estate. The other three entries were treated in the same way. Interest was not apparently universal for the fifth debtor, Joshua Person, who seems simply to have owed £1 10s without interest. But it may be that he was subject to an older custom and may have actually been lent a smaller amount.

None of Widow Harding's Bowdon debts makes clear when the money was advanced, only when it was due, but if we assume them to be loans for a year, the interest rate was high. The calculation depends upon how the figures are interpreted but Table 8 was prepared on the assumption that in her four entries the interest was an extra charge and not included in the amount stated in the bond: in other words Strettell would have to repay £6, not £4. The alternative would have vastly increased the interest rate. This looks like a formidable rate but there are indications that the widow was not necessarily charging interest upon an annual basis but was regarding it more as a fee for the use of the money, irrespective of the length of the loan. We may infer this from the fact that the Warburton and Hardy loans were not due for repayment until June 1658 (inventory dated March 1658), but that Strettell's had been due for repayment in March 1657 yet the interest, and therefore the rate, remained the same. If this was the thought process, it suggests that the legislative changes had not yet entered mainstream thought, in Bowdon at least.

Table 8

Widow Harding's interest rates, in her inventory of 1658

Source: See the Appendix to this article: Groves ed., Bowdon wills, part 2, p. 12.

Inventories from other areas indicate that some lenders had more rigorous attitudes. Richard Higginson (†1663), of Altrincham, a small market town not included in this survey, clearly intended to enforce due payment. At his death he was owed 37 debts by bond and 3 without specialty, amounting to £320 15s 3d of his total assets of £337 10s 7d, or 94.9 per cent. His other assets were cash of £16, his clothes worth 13 s 4d and a Bible worth 2s. His appraisers seem to have included the interest and the capital together in the total, but there was an additional element, as we see in one typical entry.Footnote ⁴⁹

William Bradley of Hale (see also above) set out formidable conditions. The appraisers set out the terms:

Edward Simpson of Timperley in the county of Chester, husbandman, and Thomas Simpson his father, a debt due to the said deceased by bond, in the penaltie of five poundes for the payment of lijs viijd att a day past … £2 12s 7d

By the said Edward Simpson of Timperley debt[or] stand bound in the sum of four pounds for the payment of xls … [£2].Footnote ⁵⁰

… and so on for the other debts listed. Despite the association of Simpson's father with the debt and the penalties attached of double the sum loaned, all the debts were deemed irrecoverable. The appraiser felt so strongly about the inadequately completed loans that he attached a note to the effect that they ought to be excluded from the ‘desperate debts mencioned in the said inventory w[i]th w[h]ich this accomptant cannot charge himself with’.Footnote ⁵¹

Charles Foster revealed some rare evidence from the Tabley estate, where the solicitor Thomas Jackson was the manager in mid-century at £4 a year. His papers have enabled Foster to trace the family over three generations, including details of Jackson's lending.Footnote ⁵² Four loans were described in his Memorandum Book. Unlike many of those we have looked at, these were all long-term, as summarised in Table 9. Lady Leicester defaulted and Jackson had to pay on her behalf, whereupon he secured a bond from her for the payment of £8 a year for seven years. The book records other occasions when Jackson was bound for or with other people, which was a common arrangement but was subject to a penalty of customarily double the value of the loan.

Table 9

Thomas Jackson's loans at his death in 1655

Source: Charles Foster, Seven households: life in Cheshire and Lancashire, 1582–1774 (Northwich, 2002).

In a later passage Foster gives details of the activities of Sarah Fell, towards the end of our period. She received money as well as lending it, for Susannah Fletcher deposited £100 with her in 1673 at 5¾ per cent. She made a number of small trade loans, one to William Benson, a cloth merchant who borrowed 10s in 1677 for a week. No interest was charged but Foster suggests that ‘he no doubt recompensed [her] some way’, instancing as a parallel her purchase of 150 needles for her tailor, Matthew Fell, at a cost of 1s 8d.Footnote ⁵³ Such mutual services must have commonly eased the formalities of trade but they are all too often lost to us.

Ralph Kelsall (†1619), of Hale, had widespread connections. He lent money separately to Anne and Joan Nuall (Newall?) of Chapel-in-le-Frith, once to Stockport, five times to Didsbury, five times to Ashton-on-Mersey and once in Gorton. These amounted altogether to £12 3s. It is from Hale that we have the most distant loan. Ellen Brundrett (†1669) was owed money by 15 people, among whom was Robert Brundrett of Dublin, for £10. He was presumably the Robert Brundrett named in her will as her son but it is not clear whether he was resident in Dublin and trying to invest borrowed money to advantage, or whether he was on an extended business trip. The former seems more likely.Footnote ⁵⁴

Debts were seen as a form of asset that could be bequeathed by the testator to, usually, another family member. In 1662 Thomas Goulden, inn-keeper of Bowdon, specified in his will that ‘I doe hereby give and bequeath the sum of seaven pounds due to me by bond from the above named James Neild and William Arstall of Dunham Innkeeper, unto my wife Elizabeth Goulden.’ This was in addition to another debt of £5 from Neild alone, also bequeathed to her. Other debts were specifically allocated and the implication is that they were not due for repayment and the recipients would have to wait their turn.Footnote ⁵⁵