Category: General history

In preparation for our trip to Germany to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, we reviewed the parish records of the Bavarian village of Röckingen, where our Schrotzberger ancestors hailed from.

The Schrotzberger clan appeared in the parish records from 1736 through the time when our great-great-grandfather left to pursue his career as a butcher in Hamburg in 1845.

That was as far back as we could trace the family . . . until I noticed a comment in Karl Schrotzberger’s booklet History of Röckingen. He wrote about the effect of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648)^{*see note}  on the area, and mentioned that “the records and property of Lentersheim minister Andreas Schrotzberger (an ancestor of the author) also burned.”^[1]

With those words, another door opened into the past. Based on Schrotzberger’s remark, I turned to the parish records from the neighboring village of Lentersheim. And sure enough, another three generations of Schrotzbergers popped up, extending the history of the clan as far back as  1613. For a genealogist, that’s as exciting as it would be for a miner to find a vein of ore and following it underground with pick axe in hand.

But there was more … the ore turned out to be gold. As we were digging around we found a book that gave an account of  Pastor Schrotzberger’s experiences during the Thirty Years’ War that put flesh on the newly unearthed Schrotzberger bones.

Here’s the enlightening, and somewhat amusing, story of the woebegone Pastor Andreas Schrotzberger and his experience during the war, as related in the Geschichte von Kloster Heilsbronn book:

During the Thirty Years’ War, Lentersheim, like neighboring Dambach, was severely afflicted, but not completely burnt down like this one. The then pastor Schrotzberger (since 1613 in Lentersheim) reported the following about the first major tribulations in late autumn 1631: “As soon as I read out the Gospel from the pulpit on Sunday, November 6th, 1631, everyone rushed out of the church  expecting nothing else than what had happened to Dambach. One crawled here, the other there. Towards evening, after numerous warnings from the officials, I went to Wassertrüdingen.”

Schrotzberger fled with his wife and children without having seen an enemy. He stayed in Wassertrüdingen until the troops left. He reported what had happened during his absence and how he found it after his return:

“On November 9, Lentersheim fell into enemy hands for the first time. The well-kept church door was smashed open, the chests, of which there were more than 50, were chopped up and plundered ; but the sacristy remained unstormed for this time. The next day, when the enemy attacked Wassertrüdingen violently, but was driven off again by the grace of God, he turned straight to Lentersheim, vented his anger there, hewed and beat for two hours, opened the sacristy, and from it the great chalice, a silver sponsors, a small silver chalice together with sponsors, 6 pairs of wax candles, also my new surplice…

“Between November 9th and 23rd various roaming gangs invaded, foot soldiers, cavalrymen, soon both at the same time. Once five, another day ten, or even fifteen plunders were held in one day. On November 15, 1,000 soldiers lay here overnight; on the 16th, 2,500 cavalrymen, including a whole company in the vicarage. These cavalrymen kept 200 fires in the village all night, burning 200 new fences, 150 field sticks, 2 cords of wood, countless shafts, chairs, tables, chests, etc. When, on November 24th, I dared to turn again in the name of God to the church and housekeeping entrusted to me, I found such misery in my vicarage that I cannot describe it enough. The feathers from the newly made beds for my daughters lay rummaged about in the yard; house, barn, stable and other doors, windows, shutters, chests smashed, partly burned, the water cauldron gone, as well as 29 sheep, 25 chickens, the rooster, a capon, a pig, 20 geese, my church tunic, which was spun by my previous wife, the clothes of my 4 sons and 3 daughters, a chest full of all kinds of white stuff, knitted in all kinds of ways, drilled, diced, striped, which I’d bought or inherited, a few pieces of money buried under the kitchen container, a big sack full of flour, etc., everything torn apart. It is impossible to describe the confusion and displeasure I found in my bound books of sermons.

“That the foreign and public enemy did such a thing would still be tolerable. But one cannot get over the fact that the local secret enemy has done even greater damage and has thirstily committed his outrage and wantonness. Because every time after a looting, men and women of the village would break into the vicarage in broad daylight and carry away flax, linen and other things. What the riders leave behind, the neighbors have taken up. If I arrived to do a house search, they wouldn’t allow it. It is a great miracle that the house and both haystacks were not destroyed in the fire.”

Pastor and community appear here in an unfavorable light. Neither of them got better as a result of the tribulations of war and neither learned nor forgot anything. Even before the war, Schrotzberger complained about his congregation’s defrauding of tithes, refusal of turnips, cabbage, fruit, chickens, etc. He also sued his tithe holders immediately after the war. His successor Lemmerer characterized himself and his community in the same way as Schrotzberger did.

Most of the Lentersheim parish records had been taken to the rectory in Ehingen, where they went up in smoke with the house. Hence Lemmerer’s complaint about the loss of the register of tithes and the reduction in his income.

In the final years of the war, Lentersheim was not burned down by the Swedes, but was “very dilapidated”, especially the parsonage, for the repair of which, as well as for the maintenance of the pastor, the community refused any help, “since Heilsbronn owns everything.” ^[2]

We’ll be visiting the villages of Lentersheim (population about 400) and Röckingen (pop ~ 850) while we’re in Germany, and gaze at the houses where our families lived, and the churches they attended . . . and in Pastor Schrotzberger’s case, gave sermons which apparently went largely unheeded. As we roam the area we may feel the ghosts of ancestors past — a hair-raising experience, albeit not as scary as those of our good ancestral pastor’s.

* Note: The web site Britannica states, “The principal battlefield for all these intermittent conflicts was the towns and principalities of Germany, which suffered severely. During the Thirty Years’ War, many of the contending armies were mercenaries, many of whom could not collect their pay. This threw them on the countryside for their supplies, and thus began the “wolf-strategy” that typified this war. The armies of both sides plundered as they marched, leaving cities, towns, villages, and farms ravaged.”^[3]

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Footnotes:
[1] Karl Schrotzberger, Die Geschichte Röckingens und seiner Umgebung: The History of Röckingen and Its Environs (Röckingen: Karl Schrotzberger, 1975), p 5.
[2] Georg Muck, Geschichte von Kloster Heilsbronn (Germany: C.H. Beck’sche Buchhandlung, 1879), pp 513-518.
[3] Britannica, “Thirty Years’ War,” https://www.britannica.com/event/Thirty-Years-War.

The Mayflower may be best known for its Separatist passengers who left the Church of England in 1607, went to Holland, then decided in 1620 to establish a colony in North America. They called themselves the “Saints.” We call them the Pilgrims.

But of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, only about half^[1] were “Saints.” The other passengers — the “Strangers” — consisted of English tradesmen and adventurers and their families who were recruited by London merchants to help establish the Colony of Virginia.

Edward Doty — my wife’s 9th great-grandfather — was among the Strangers.  He was one of two servants employed by Stephen Hopkins.

Doty’s master, Stephen Hopkins, had been to North America before. He had the misfortune of being shipwrecked on the island of Bahama while sailing for Jamestown in 1609, then lived four years in the Jamestown settlement, from 1610 to 1614. Upon his return to England Hopkins moved to London where he married in 1617.^[2] It’s reasonable to assume Hopkins hired Edward Doty there, though Doty’s birthplace is unknown.^[3]

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Numerous sources believe the Bahama island shipwreck story was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and that one of the play’s characters, Stephano, may have been modeled after Stephen Hopkins.

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The Mayflower was about 100 feet long and 25 wide, with four decks to accommodate the passengers, crew, and cargo. The gun deck, used as the passenger compartment for the trip, was cramped — a space of about 50 by 25 feet with a 5-foot ceiling — and the passengers were confined there throughout the voyage.^[4]

Halfway across the Atlantic, storms began lashing the ship, “causing the ship’s timbers to be badly shaken, with caulking failing to keep out sea water, and the passengers, even in their berths, lying wet and ill.”^[5] Edward Doty, at age 21 or so, would have been in better condition to weather the voyage’s hardships than some of the others, but must have nevertheless found it trying. So would’ve his master’s wife, Elizabeth, who gave birth to a son, Oceanus, during the voyage.

The second half of the sailing was storm-tossed and caused the ship to lower its sails for days at a time, extending its voyage, and sending it off course.

After over two months at sea, the Mayflower crew,  on 19 November 1620, spotted land at Cape Cod. After trying to sail south to their planned destination at the Hudson River (then at the northern edge of the Colony of Virginia), strong winter seas forced them to return to the harbor of Cape Cod Bay, where they anchored on 21 November.^[6]

Essentially, they landed outside of the purview of the Virginia Company charter granted by the King of England, leading them to establish their own governing document before sending out their exploratory party. That story will be considered in the following post.

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Footnote(s)
[1]. FamilySearch Blog, “Mayflower Passenger List and Other Mayflower Passenger Facts,” https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/mayflower-passenger-list/
[2]. He was married at St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, the same church where our ancestors William Estall and Leah Hott were married a bit over 100 years later, in 1721.
[3]. In his 2006 book The Mayflower and Her Passengers, Caleb Johnson acknowledges that Doty’s birthplace hasn’t been determined, but believes Doty may have come from a family in East Halton, Lincolnshire. (See also Caleb Johnson’s MayflowerHistory.com, “Edward Doty,” http://mayflowerhistory.com/doty/)
[4]. The passengers were living here not only for the 66 days of the voyage, but for the previous two months as well: setting sail from London in mid-July, waiting on the south coast of England for the arrival of the Pilgrims from Holland, lading of the ship, repairs to the leaking Speedwell, and experiencing the false start and return to port that delayed their departure. In addition, many passengers also stayed on the ship after arrival in the new world, some as long as six months, as their settlement was being built.
[5] Wikipedia, “Stephen Hopkins (Mayflower Passenger),” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hopkins_(Mayflower_passenger)
[6] Ibid.

Edward Doty, our distant ancestor, had the distinction of not only coming to North America on the historic Mayflower voyage of 1620, he also signed one of America’s seminal documents: the Mayflower Compact. Before we get overly excited, though, we need to mention a couple of things.

One is that no copy of the original document survives. Therefore, unfortunately we can’t see his signature. But considering he signed other legal documents, including his will, with “his mark,” he appears not to have learned how to write and we wouldn’t see much in the way of a signature anyway. Nevertheless, all accounts of the document give him credit for being among the 41 men who signed the pact.

The other thing to consider is that the document was drafted by the Saints, or Puritans, rather than by the Strangers, or non-Puritans. So Eddie, a Stranger, wasn’t necessarily a proponent of the document.

With those caveats, let’s take a look at what we know of the document and its significance.

When the Mayflower arrived at the North American coast it found itself at Cape Cod, about 260 miles north of its planned destination near the Hudson River. The planned landing was in the northern reaches of the then Virginia Colony, covered under the Virginia Company charter granted by King James I of England. The ship attempted to head south to this planned destination, but winter storms, dangerous shoals, and dwindling food supplies forced it to return to Cape Cod Bay where it dropped anchor near present-day Provincetown on November 21, 1620.

Seeing as the ship landed outside of the Virginia Company charter, there was rumbling among the Strangers that they were not bound by the charter, and they threatened to leave the group and settle on their own, as documented in William Bradford’s journal, below.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannia, “To quell the conflict and preserve unity, Pilgrim leaders drafted the Mayflower Compact before going ashore. The brief document bound its signers into a body politic for the purpose of forming a government and pledged them to abide by any laws and regulations that would later be established ‘for the general good of the colony.’”

Although the original document didn’t survive, a transcription is found in William Bradford’s journal, below.

Two of the main features of the Mayflower Compact are its implicit principles of self-government and common consent. Furthermore one could argue that in forming a “civil body politick” we see the separation of church and state, and in  “just and equal law” we see the seeds of the country’s judicial system. One could argue that together these are the cornerstones of an American-style democracy, and that the Mayflower Compact was the first document to lay out and put into action some of these core principles in the New World.

The signing of the document has been the subject of a number of depictions, but my favorite is the The Mayflower Compact, 1620, painted by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris in 1899. In it a young man in working class dress is seen signing the document with a quill pen. Given that Edward Doty was a servant, i.e., was working class, and about 21 years of age, I like to think, perhaps fancifully, that the painting captures the moment Doty put his mark to the document.

With Eddie being a Stranger and possibly even among the “discontented and mutinous,” it’s not clear if he signed enthusiastically, willingly, indifferently, or under duress.

In A Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth, the editor notes that not all of the man-servants on board the Mayflower signed the Compact. “It is possible that such of the servants only as, on the one hand, specially deserved the honor, or, on the other,  especially needed the restraint, of becoming parties to such an agreement, were invited to sign it; to the former of which classes one might fancy John Howland to belong, and to the latter, Edward Doten [Doty] and Edward Leister.”^[2]

As I look at the painting I wonder if the painter intentionally captured various looks of smugness, suspicion, and relief on the faces of the Pilgrim witnesses as Doty (again, my fanciful speculation) signed the document.

The following post will look into Doty’s checkered life in the new world, from the time he helped man the Mayflower exploratory party in 1620 to his death in 1655.

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Footnote(s)
[1]. England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1751, essentially adding 10 days on the current calendar to old Julian calendar dates. The Compact was signed, therefore, on 21 November 1620 according to modern calendars.
[2]. Henry Martyn Dexter, ed, Mount’s Relation, or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth (Boston: John Kimball Wiggin, 1865), pg 9.

Before we congratulate ourselves at having an ancestor who sailed to America on the Mayflower, let’s take a look at Edward Doty’s life in the New World. It may not prove quite as heroic as we’d hope.

It started out well. Eddie was among the first explorers sent out from the ship to find a place to build their colony. A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth relates that, “Wednesday, the 6th of December, it was resolved our discoverers should set forth … So ten of our men were appointed who were of themselves willing to undertake it, to wit, Captain Standish, Master Carver, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, John Tilley, Edward Tilley, John Howland, and three of London, [i.e., Strangers:] Richard Warren, Stephen Hopkins, and Edward Dotte.”^[1]

The First Encounter

The exploratory party sailed along the shore in the mid-December cold, where the water froze on their clothes making “them many times like coats of iron.” After landing, the explorers came upon a group of native Americans who weren’t exactly a welcoming party. “Anon, all upon a sudden, we heard a great and strange cry … One of our company, being abroad, came running in and cried, “They are men! Indians! Indians!” and withal, their arrows came flying amongst us. … The cry of our enemies was dreadful … their note was after this manner, “Woach woach ha ha hach woach.” Our men were no sooner come to their arms, but the enemy was ready to assault them.“^[2]

The Saints and Strangers survived the attack and went on to establish a settlement at Plymouth, but the conditions were harsh, and almost half of the Mayflower’s passengers were dead within the first few months. The remaining colonists began building houses and farming in the spring, and by autumn of 1621 they had a sufficient harvest to hold a three-day feast with ninety of their now-friendly native neighbors in attendance.

The First Thanksgiving

As related by William Bradford in his journal, “They [the colonists] began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty.  For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. ”

A letter sent to England described the first New England thanksgiving:

“Our harvest being gotten in …  amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.”^[3]

Edward Doty, of course, was among the colonists in attendance, probably in the company of his master Steven Hopkins’ family.

Perhaps less cause for celebration is Eddie’s questionable character. One Plymouth historian, Caleb Johnson, calls him a troublemaker. “He had a quick temper that often got the better of him, and he was very shrewd in his business dealing, to the point of being fraudulent in some cases.“^[4] That appears to be a fairly rosy assessment.

The First Duel

His first run-in with the law came in June of 1621, with “the first duel fought in New England, upon a challenge of single combat with sword and dagger between Edward Doty and Edward Leister, servants to Mr. Hopkins; both being wounded, the one in the hand, the other in the thigh, they are adjusted by the whole company to have their head and feet tied together, and so to lie for twenty-four hours, without meat or drink, which is begun to be inflicted, but within an hour, because of their great pains, at their own and their master’s humble request, upon promise of better carriage, they are released by the governor.“^[5]

When Plymouth began keeping court records in 1632 we see Eddie made no less than 23 appearances over the next twenty years for welshing on debts, slander, non-payment to his servant, fighting, fraudulent and deceitful deals, assault, trespass, and theft.

Yet Caleb Johnson says that “despite his regular appearance in Plymouth court … he carried on a regular life in Plymouth; he was a freeman with a vote at the town meetings, he paid his taxes, and he accepted the outcome of all court cases and paid all his debts. And all the while, he was raising a sizeable family. The court periodically made land grants to him, just as it did for other residents, and he participated in all the additional land benefits of being classified a ‘first comer’.”^[6]

Doty, therefore, was a complicated, and flawed, character. He stayed in Plymouth until his death, contributing to and yet disturbing the common good. From our distant vantage point he probably makes a better ancestor than he made a neighbor to his contemporaries.

In the following and final post, we’ll look at Edward Doty’s family life and his death in his mid-50s.

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Footnote(s)
[1]. Henry Martyn Dexter, ed, Mount’s Relation, or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth (Boston: John Kimball Wiggin, 1865), pp 43-45.
[2]. Ibid, pp 52-53.
[3]. Ibid, p 133.
[4]. Caleb H. Johnson, The Mayflower and Her Passengers (Xlibris Corporation, 2005), p 132.
[5]. Thomas Prince, A Chronological History of New-England (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826, a new edition of the original published in Boston by Kneeland & Green in 1736), pp 190-191. (https://archive.org/details/achronologicalh00halegoog)
[6]. Johnson, The Mayflower and Her Passengers, p 135-136.

After Edward Doty completed his indentured servitude to Stephen Hopkins he was free to marry and start a life of his own in Plymouth Colony.

Apparently his first marriage was short lived. There are no records of the marriage, his wife’s name, or of what happened to her. William Bradford in his journal Of Plimoth Plantation only mentions that Edward Doty had seven children by “a second wife.”

That second wife was Faith Clarke, whom Doty married in January 1635.

Edward was about 36 years old at the time. Faith was only 16, a native of Ipswitch, England, who had arrived with her father at the colony late the previous spring on the ship “Francis.” Together Edward and Faith had nine children between 1836 and 1853.

Their seventh child, Isaac, born in 1648, married Elizabeth (née England) and our family line is derived from that couple.

Edward, who had his share of spats — financial and otherwise — with his neighbors, also had a run-in with Faith’s father Thurston Clarke. In January 1642 there’s an entry in the colony court records “concerning the differences betwixt Edward Dotey and Thurstone Clarke,” stating that Clarke was to pay Doty five bushels of Indian corn and six shillings, though it’s not clear what the nature of the “differences” may have been. Apparently Eddie’s querulousness extended to the domestic front as well.

Nevertheless Edward was a good provider, as evidenced by the will he wrote in 1655 three months before his death in August at the age of about 56. He left behind a dwelling house and three tracts of land in New Plymouth, Coaksett, and Punckquetest to be divided between his wife and sons, “together with all Chattles [oxen, cows, swine] and moveables that are my proper goods.”

I mentioned earlier that when he signed the Mayflower Compact he did so with his “mark.” Had a copy survived, the mark may have looked like the one he made on his will, the two swooping lines highlighted below.

Now, 400 years after Edward Doty landed in New England on the Mayflower, and 399 years after he celebrated America’s first Thanksgiving with his fellow settlers and native Americans, we have something to be especially thankful for too — that we have a personal connection to that historic time in American history.

For those who may want to mark the 400th anniversary with a souvenir, or who have a child or grandchild born in this quadricentennial year, relevant national mints have produced special coins and medals to commemorate the Mayflower’s sailing from England, the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims, and the native Americans of the area.

The United Kingdom’s Royal Mint produced a 2020 bi-metallic £2 coin and the United State’s Mint is producing a silver medal with Mayflower-related images. The UK coin is available now and the US medal will be available on November 17th, 2020. [Click on the images to enlarge.]

The U.K. £2.00 Coin

The U.S. Silver Medal

Our great-grandfather, William Edward Estall, was born in London’s Shoreditch parish in 1852, the eleventh of Henry and Elizabeth’s twelve children.

We know William was poor, based on his living in the impoverished East End. But how poor was he? Was he among the completely downtrodden of the area or was he simply among the common working poor?

We can answer these questions and better define his poverty by looking at  some contemporary sources.

Background

William’s father was a silk weaver, a respectable if not particularly remunerative trade. Many working class boys learned their trades from their fathers. Unfortunately William lost his dad at age 13, but even if William had been fortunate enough to learn from his father, it was a trade in severe decline due to industrialization and the lifting of protective silk tariffs, leaving its practitioners and their neighborhoods in poverty. William and his brothers — left without relevant job skills — became general laborers.

In 1871, when William was eighteen, the census recorded him as a labourer, son of a charwoman.

He tried to improve his career prospects by joining the British Army when he was 22 years old. The plan didn’t work as he’d hoped. He was discharged after four years of a twelve year enlistment due to chronic health issues including colic, contusion, fevers, boot ulcer, epilepsy, inflammation of fluids, and palpitation.

With no apprenticeship, no military prospect, and no education, William again turned to manual labor, working at various times as a builder’s, water-side, dock, ground, and general labourer. These occupations were recorded in census, military, marriage, and his children’s birth records.

His residences around Bethnal Green were similarly recorded, both before he entered the Army and after he reappeared in the parish in 1890 at age 37. [After the Army he lived for the better part of a decade in Lower Sydenham working as a labourer and raising a family with a common-law wife.]

With that background, we turn to Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps of 1898-99, specifically to the map of the Bethnal Green area, to see the conditions of the streets upon which William lived.

Poverty defined by his residences

Charles Booth and his staff walked the streets of London’s working classes between 1886 and 1903 in the company of police officers knowledgeable of their patches, making detailed observations on what they saw and heard. The notes they made were the basis of maps in which streets were color coded for the incomes and social classes of their inhabitants.

Plotting William’s residences, we see that the streets he lived on were mostly color coded light blue. Light blue indicated the street was “Poor.  18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family.” Based on this, it appears William’s weekly wages fell in that range: between 18 and 21 shillings a week.

Poverty defined by his employment

Further clarifying his income is his history as a labourer. In the late Victorian era general laborers made only about 60% of what an artisan or a skilled laborer such as a bricklayer, carpenter, or mason earned,¹ meaning William was on a lower rung of the working class.

At the time of our grandmother’s birth in 1891 he worked as a dock laborer which paid around 6 pence an hour.² There were 12 pence in a shilling so he made half a shilling per hour. Doing the math of an 18-21 shilling weekly income (from Booth’s map) means he likely worked between 36 and 42 hours a week, considerably below the working class average of between 55 and 66 hours a week (five 10-12 hour workdays plus a half day Saturday).

His abbreviated work schedule wouldn’t have been of his own choice. As an unskilled manual laborer he was at the mercy of seasonal and economic fluctuations — if ships weren’t available to load or unload cargo, for example, he was out of work. Furthermore, there were more laborers looking for jobs than there was work available. As reported in an 1897 newspaper, “At taking on time [time for engaging men for jobs] at certain wharves, where the foreman would come and stand at the iron gates of the wharf entrance, there would usually be a crowd of from two hundred to three hundred men. Probably seventy or eighty would be required. … The scrambles were frightful.”³

Nor would William have been favored for steady, full time dock work . . . that would have been reserved for the very fittest. William, being both older (in his late thirties and early forties) and seemingly constitutionally unhealthy, would have fallen into the category of “casual” labor, engaged for a few hours for a particular job.

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“This casual labour system became so general that only a small section of port workers had anything like regular employment and the rest had to take their chance of getting a few days or a few hours work as circumstances might call for….”         — from “The position of dockers and sailors in 1897″ ⁵

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William, then, was working both for lower wages and for fewer, unpredictable hours than typical working class men. And given that he had several children and a wife to support he may have been on the high side of Booth’s definition of a moderately sized family and the low side of the income spectrum for the light-blue coded streets of his neighborhood.

Poverty defined by his cost of living

According to “Life on a Guinea a Week”⁶, the average cost of living for a single male clerk in London in 1888 was about 31 shillings a week, which included costs for rent, food, drink, clothes, candles, soap, and miscellany. William’s estimated income of 18-21 shillings would cover only a little over half of that.

Charles Booth described this level of ‘standard’ poverty (18-21 shillings a week) as “means [which] may be sufficient, but are barely sufficient for decent independent life.” He suggested this income level for a moderate-sized family might keep them going, but they were highly vulnerable to illness, accidents, family size increasing and loss of work or hours.⁷

Given that William was prone to illness, was rapidly growing his family, and worked at unsteady jobs, speculation on my part is that William’s income may have been supplemented by his wife in order to shelter, feed, and clothe the burgeoning family. Sarah was a seamstress before she married William and may well have continued to do some piece work from their flat to keep the family afloat.

William would have been paid with bronze and silver coins, and if he was lucky, they would have jingled in his pocket on the two-mile walk home from the docks.

A couple of pence would buy a pint of beer (I’m pretty sure William and Sarah, like most of their neighbors, were imbibers), and 3-6 shillings would pay for weekly rent in working class housing. Food, including bread, vegetables and fruit, flour and sugar, cost about 14 shillings a week for an average clerk, so Sarah had to squeeze the most out of every coin spent at the vendors’ barrows on nearby Green Street. Their clothing was probably mended if not made at home, further stretching their budget.

Though the money was meager, they apparently made do, as there were no records of workhouse visits or outdoor relief (payments to poor people without the requirement to enter a workhouse) while they were married. Perhaps telling, though, is that William was employed for a considerable stretch by the area council, which may indicate he received some informal relief in the form of pay for ground or general labor.

William’s economic vulnerability caught up with him in 1900 when he lost his wife to disease. After her passing he spent over a year in the workhouse hospital for bronchitis. When he got out he dropped his children off with his former common-law wife in Lower Sydenham, undoubtedly in hopes that she would care for them while he returned to Bethnal Green looking for work. The only records we have of him thereafter were three workhouse visits for more hospitalizations and finally his death at age 53 in 1906.

Taking the measure of William Estall

By Charles Booth’s calculations, 31% of people in London in 1901 were living in poverty and 30% were living in crowded conditions. Considering the streets William lived on (coded light blue) and the size of his family (a wife and up to seven children at home), he fell within the 22.5% of Londoners who were ‘standard’ poor and within the 4.4% of Londoners who were crowded into rooms holding 4 or more people. By that measure, William was poor — but not among the 8% in the very poor or semi-criminal classes. Nor, of course, was he among the 52% who were comfortable or the 18% in the middle or wealthy classes.

Despite the meagerness of what was in his wallet, William kept a roof over his family’s head and food on the table, no small achievement.

In sum, William wouldn’t be the subject of an abysmal Jack London story or a broken down character in a Charles Dickens novel. He was just a working family man who doggedly made ends meet on low wages and inconsistent hours.  Charles Booth concluded that the greatest cause of poverty — accounting for 63% of its occurrence⁸ — was low pay and irregular earnings. William Estall could have served as the poster boy. Yet he wasn’t alone. He was one of many who survived, maybe just barely, on something under a pound (£) a week on the light blue shaded streets of London’s East End.

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End Notes:
1. Arthur Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century, (1900: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England), p. 70.
See also The Victorian Web, “Wages and Cost of Living in the Victorian Era,” http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages2.html
2. Clarion Newspaper Company, “The position of dockers and sailors in 1897 and the International Federation of Ship, Dock and River Workers.”
3. Ibid.
4. George R. Sims, editor, Living London, Vol. 1, (1901: Cassell and Company, Limited, London, Paris, New York & Melbourne), p 171.
5. “The position of dockers and sailors”.
6. The Victorian Web, “The Cost of Living in 1888,” from an article entitled “Life on a Guinea a Week” in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 23 (1888), p 464.
7. Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics, Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps, (2019: Thames & Hudson Limited, London, England), p 30.
8. Ibid, p 41. Reproduced from a table from Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, Poverty series, Vol. 1 (1902-03), p 147. The other causes of poverty were small profits (5%), drink (7%), drunken or thriftless wife (6%), illness or infirmity (5%), large family (9%), and illness or large family combined with irregular work (5%).

Jack the Ripper

The infamous Jack the Ripper was a contemporary of our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings.

Jack’s bloody rampage occurred in the autumn of 1888 in London’s East End. At the time Sarah was 28 years old, an unmarried working class mother who was also living in the East End.

Research into Sarah’s life logically invites a look at the story of this famous criminal’s spree — if for no other reason than to get a glimpse into conditions in this sector of London in the late Victorian age.

So it was that I picked up the critically acclaimed book about the Ripper’s victims, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. The book examines the lives of the five working class victims, how they grew up, how social conditions affected them and other women of their era, and how their individual circumstances brought them to the impoverished East End.

Their stories provide some insights into Sarah Hutchings’ world as well. Ms. Rubenhold exposes the moral double standards applied to women vs. men, the living conditions in public housing, the difficulties of poverty, and in general the challenges of being a unprivileged woman in Victorian London. The book is a sad, but recommended, read.

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The book has another, though indirect, connection to Sarah Hutchings.
A leading newspaper’s interview with the book’s author was written by Sian Cain, who currently lives in the flat that Sarah Hutchings occupied in 1891. The interview is at The Guardian newspaper’s web site.

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Sarah Hutchings

As mentioned in an earlier post, an Estall family historian believes Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute — a suspicion based on the fact that she had three children out of wedlock to unnamed fathers while frequently changing residences in London’s impoverished East End.

After reading The Five, I came to realize that Sarah was indeed a prostitute, or at least considered one by many people of her era. Here’s a passage from The Five:

    “From the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s through the period of the Whitechapel murders, very few authorities, including the Metropolitan Police, could agree as to what exactly constituted a ‘prostitute’ and how she might be identified. Was a prostitute simply a woman like Mary Jane Kelly who earned her income solely through the sex trade and who self-identified as part of this profession, or could the term prostitute be more broadly defined? Was a prostitute a woman who accepted a drink from a man who then accompanied her to a lodging house, paid for a bed, had sex with her, and stayed the night? … A woman who had sex for money twice over the course of a week, before finding work in a laundry and meeting a man whom she decided to live with out of wedlock? … A young factory worker who had sex with the boys who courted her and bought her gifts? … A woman with three children by three different fathers who lived with a man simply because he kept a roof over their heads?
    “Some of these women might be classed as professional or “common prostitutes,’ while others might be called “casual prostitutes’ or just women who, in accordance with the social norms of their community, had sex outside of wedlock. But as the Metropolitan Police came to recognize, the lines separating these groups were often so blurred that it was impossible to distinguish between them.”¹

Another author, Judith Flanders (The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London), clarifies that
      “the word ‘prostitute’ was not used entirely the way we would use it today, i.e. to refer only to women who sold their bodies for sex. In the 19th century, many people used it more widely, to refer to women who were living with men outside marriage, or women who had had illegitimate children, or women who perhaps had relations with men, but for pleasure rather than money.”²

Under Victorian mores and definitions, then, it would seem that Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute, though there is no evidence (for example, a criminal record) clarifying whether a professional or moral one.

A Difficult Life

Sarah worked at various times as a barmaid, a stay former [corset maker], a machinist [sewing machine operator], and a fur sewer. These were low paying occupations, though the last three seamstress-type jobs may have allowed her to work from home while caring for her children.

George Rosen’s essay, “Disease, Debility, and Death,” from the book The Victorian City: Images and Realities, addresses the vulnerability of women holding jobs like Sarah’s:

“The precarious economic situation of women workers, based on low wages, was depressed even further in some trades by seasonal unemployment, particularly in those connection with fashion and dress. Barmaids provided another large contingent of prostitutes, while still others were recruited from among seamstresses, laundresses, charwomen, and factory workers.”³

Sarah also had three children to single-handedly feed, clothe, and attend to while working long hours and making wages likely insufficient to support herself. As explained in Revisiting Dickens,
       “Neither form of seamstress [individual or dressmaker’s employee] would have earned enough on a regular basis to feed her family. Most couldn’t feed themselves, let alone their children.”⁴

Saved by the Ripper?

As I read these stories and related them to Sarah’s experiences, a question arose:  was Sarah aware of the the widely reported crimes of Jack the Ripper and if so, how did those gruesome articles affect her?

Jack’s murderous spree covered the period from August through November 1888 when he attacked and eviscerated five women. Newspapers at the time covered the murders in bold headlines and graphic drawings. There could hardly have been anyone in London’s East End who wasn’t spooked by the specter of a butchering madman stalking prostitutes.

But it wasn’t just prostitutes Jack victimized. One of the insights in The Five is that Jack the Ripper didn’t appear to be targeting prostitutes per se — Ms. Rubenhold makes the case that three of the five Ripper victims weren’t prostitutes at all. She also points out that there were no signs of struggle or yelling for help, indicating the victims were probably asleep at the time of the attacks. The commonality, then, was that his victims were poor working class women generally sleeping rough (outdoors) on city streets or alleyways easily accessible to attack.

Sarah conceived her last illegitimate child in October, 1888, shortly after a double Ripper homicide. It’s fair to wonder if the Jack the Ripper headlines made her question her safety. There is no way of knowing what stopped her string of illegitimate births — fear of attack, growing maturity, falling in love, a desire for financial stability — but we know that after her third illegitimate child she began a long-term relationship with a man she would marry in 1891, William Estall.

Though there are many unanswered questions, one thing can be said for certain. Jack the Ripper proved to women of his time that it’s better to lose your heart to a lover than it is to a madman.

And his crimes may,  just may,  have convinced Sarah to take a different path in life.

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Sources:

1. Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), p 290.

2. Judith Flanders, “Prostitution,” British Library: Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/prostitution.

3. George Rosen, “Disease, Debility, and Death,” from The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, (London: Routledge Degan and Paul, Ltd., 1973), 657.

4. Revisiting Dickens, “Prostitution in Victorian England — Presentation Page,” https://revisitingdickens.wordpress.com/prostitution-victorian/

If double dating evokes images of romance, be forewarned. This isn’t about romance, though the example of “double dating” below is, sort of. Let me explain.

Double dating — not the romantic kind — was sometimes used to show the difference between a civil year and an historical year in England. England used to observe the civil, or legal, year as running from 25 March to 24 March of the next year … this despite the fact that January 1^st was celebrated as the New Year festival.

This confusion finally ended in 1752 with the passage of the The Calendar (New Style) Act.

The act:

• Changed the start of the civil (or legal) year from 25 March (Lady Day) to 1 January.

• Adopted the Gregorian calendar, advancing the calendar by 11 days.

Dates in English parish records prior to 1752 may show dual (or double) dating. Since the civil calendar year ran from 25 March to the subsequent 24 March, dates in the registers from January 1^st to March 24^th would sometimes show two years to reflect the civil year and the historical year.

For example, the parish register of St. James, Clerkenwell, London, records the marriage of one of our Estall ancestors, William, to Hannah Skegg on Jan 21^st 1716/17. The date fell in the civil year of 1716 and the historical year of 1717.

Since in our current era we observe an annual start date of 1 January, it makes sense to use new-style (historical) years when dating our ancestors’ life events. Some genealogy programs allow for recording a double date, while using the new-style year for calculating ages. I follow this practice when dating our English ancestors.

Bottom line: Dating was complicated in England’s past. Double dating may have allayed some of the confusion … though perhaps not to modern eyes. All of this, obviously, was before the advent of Match.com — which makes dating simple!

Notes:

• British colonies, including the Americas, were also affected by the Calendar Act.

• Scotland, unlike England, had begun its civil year on the 1^st of January since 1600.

Sources:

• Wikipedia, “Calendar (New Style) Act 1750,” accessed 1 Mar 2020.

• GENUKI (UK & Ireland Genealogy), Mike Spathaky, “Old Style and New Style Dates and the change to the Gregorian Calendar: A summary for genealogists”