By J. D. Marshall
Students of Warton history are well aware how fortunate they are in having such a local recorder as the remarkable John Lucas. Professor V.G. Hoskins in his 1966 inaugural lecture at the University of Leicester, had this to say about Lucas.1 ‘
… parish histories, when they began to flow in the eighteenth century, tended to be written by parsons and to be mostly concerned with the squire and his relations. There were of course notable exceptions to these generalisations, but they stand out because they are so rare, like John Lucas’s History of Warton in Lancashire, which was compiled between 1710 and 1740 but not published until 1931. Lucas was a schoolmaster and therefore had a wider range of interests and sympathies than the squires and the parsons. ‘
So, there we have it – the History ranges so widely because Lucas had taught at school, and was, of course, a man of much learning and even more curiosity. Members of the Mourholme Society will have an advantage over Professor Hoskins in that some, at least, will be conversant with the much longer manuscript of the History which has not so far been published.
In this short article, I am quoting from the Ford and Fuller-Maitland published and edited version, and am concerned with Lucas’s comments on Funeral Rites as given on page 23-4 of the 1931 edition, and on fols.260 and following of the original manuscript. Lucas’s description of funeral customs is as detailed and graphic as we are likely to find in any local or antiquarian source, and there is ground for supposing that the customs relate to a much wider area of North Lancashire and Cumbria. However, the actual customs may have varied notably from place to place. Mrs Marjorie Rowlings’s ‘The Folklore of the Lake District’ (1976) describes them as follows2:
‘A bidder was … sent round to invite people to funerals … It was an affront to both living and dead to refuse. He also recalls that a small table with a white cloth was placed outside the door of the deceased on the day of the funeral. It held a vase or basin with sprigs of box or yew in it. Mourners took a sprig to drop on the coffin after it had been lowered into the grave. Old people can remember arval bread or biscuits being given to those who attended a funeral Some think the word arval means ‘ inheritance’ while others that it derives from an ancient Scandinavian word for funerals. It is still the custom in Cumbria for the deceased’s next of kin to invite relatives and all who have attended the funeral from a distance to join in a meal or refreshments, after the ceremony.’
Lucas is especially interesting on this very point -and the author of The Folklore of the Lake District did not quote him, or the other authorities who are mentioned in this article. Lucas wrote:
‘The heir of the Deceased plentifully furnishes one, two or more tables, according to his ability, of which the whole Company partake, every one according to his liking. And afterwards there is distributed to everyone a Penny. Wheaten loaf, and a large Shive of Cheese (which they take away with then), and also a Drink of Ale. If the Heir be poor. he had no feast, and I think I have heard that of late years, some have omitted the Cheese’
I shall return to this last sentence. Meanwhile, Lucas goes on to give a description of the further custom whereby ‘Relations and dear Friends help to carry the Dead, especially out of the Church to the Grave.’ Afterwards, ‘Friends and Relations are desired to go to the Alehouse in the Town (which he names) . . . where everyone had a Penny Loaf and Ale allowed, according to the Ability of the Deceased; and this they call an Arval. People afterwards ‘look into the Grave, and throw in the laurels, rosemary and c. they have in their hands’, the evergreens being seen as a symbol of the Resurrection.
Lucas’s commentary is especially valuable as fixing these customs in a given period. But we can go earlier for further evidence. William Stout, in his autobiography, and writing of the year 1692, (from what were evidently prepared notes used on a later occasion) , writes that ‘At this time we would much cheese to funeralls in the country (side) from therty to one hundred pound weight as the deceased was of ability, which was shived into 2 or 3 slices in the pound, and one, with a penny manchet given to all the attendants’. He adds that Naples biscuits were also given to attenders. So, then, the arval custom was certainly used in the seventeenth century. As for the eighteenth, the Browne MSS (at the Kendal Record Office) reveal that at the funeral of George Browne of Troutbeck (1702), payment was made for: ‘Bread 16 doz. at 14 to the dozen dealt whole loaves, 16s. Mr. Robert Wilson arvall cheese 78 1bs‘ This gives an idea of the number of people who might be catered for in the case of a deceased person who was well known in the community, about 200 in the case of George Browne. It should be added that the dialect word shive for a slice is still used in the Lancaster area, and that manchet means a small loaf.
So, Lucas was describing a funeral custom which was not peculiar to Warton, and he fixes it safely in a given time. Mrs. Rowling, in The Folklore of the Lake District, in the preparation of which she used some oral questioning of old people, makes quite clear that this custom lasted into the lifetime of people who were alive in this century: ‘Old people can remember arval bread or biscuits being given to those who attended a funeral‘. Accordingly, we should not be surprised that yet another diarist or commentator, this time from early nineteenth century, also comments on the arval custom. This is William Fleming of Pennington, about whom members of the Mourholme Society have already heard; and on January 20th, 1812, William entered the following in his Journal and Commonplace Book:
‘This morning, I attended the funeral of Henry Fell. There was first brought into the Room a Cup of Chocolate and Biscuit or Dry Toast for each Person and immediately after these were removed each Person was served with a Glass of Wine and Sweet Biscuits’.
Earlier, however, he had stated in one of his 1806 entries, that:
‘It is a singular Custom, still followed at Dalton by the more respected Inhabitants at Funerals, to Divide the people who attend the Interment into three Classes: the First Class consists of the richest and nearest Relations who have a warm Dinner provided… The Second consists of the Poorest and more distant Relations, together with their richer Acquaintances or Friends, who partake of a cold Dinner, and the third, of the Farmers and people in the Town, who are not Relations … who have Bread and Cheese’. (Vol.4, fol. 1063; a microfilm of this source is held in the University of Lancaster Library).
We learn from these entries that the customs could vary with the social position and wealth of the deceased, and as for the ‘third class’, John Lucas had hinted that there was some social segregation in Warton when he explained, in the passage quoted, that:
‘Nor are the Poor forgotten, but all that come (and great numbers I have seen upon this Occasion, many whereof would rather go 7 or 8 Miles to a Penny-Dole, than earn Six Pence in the Time by more Laudable Industry) are put into some large Barn or Yard, and as they come out receive everyone a Penny or more according to the Charity or Circumstance of the Giver …. ‘.
No wonder that funerals were well attended! Was such expenditure connected with the deeply-founded feeling that a man or woman might hope to fare better after death when the person concerned had performed acts of charity? (‘Fire Insurance’, as we know, is the unkind expression for this state of mind). Or was it simply a matter of the fairness of the family name? For after all, the relict and survivors in the family circle had to make all the arrangements and do all the ‘bidding’ or inviting, and they had to spend a very large sum of money. It is possible. to find how much was spent in literally thousands of cases, by looking at the lists of items in probate inventories. Many copies of these have been made, as regards the Warton district, and it should be possible to estimate the average spending on funerals at different times in different social groups. Indeed, I actually did such a calculation for the parish of Hawkshead, with the following results:
1691-1720
1691-1720 Group No in Group Gross Total Inventory (mean)3 Mean Funeral Expenses Professions 4 £52.19 £6.06 Upper Peasantry 33 £211.45 £6.41 Middle Peasantry 31 £61.73 £4.65 Lower Peasantry 44 £22.78 £3.20 Crafts Without Land 7 £78.74 £3.43 1720-1750 Professions 3 £655.43 Upper Peasantry 47 £286.77 £8.39 Middle Peasantry 22 £69.38 £4.85 Lower Peasantry 51 £22.85 £4.01 Crafts Without Land 13 £69.62 £5.03 John Lucas’s comment, written in the second of these periods, was ‘I think I have heard of late Years. some have omitted the Cheese‘ In point of fact, there is no evidence at all that people were spending less on funerals, and even the Lower Peasantry who were often very humbly placed, might spend a sixth or more of the value of their total assets on a reet good do where the funeral expenses were concerned. Some of these average funeral figures represent something of the order of £1000 in current values and this thought suggests that the changes have not been very great, for many of us will have faced catering and other bills of that size. However, we have been looking at a society which was much poorer in the first place, and this makes the expenditure all the more remarkable.
There remain a number of other items for brief mention. People really did make an outlay ‘according to ability‘ (to use an expression employed by both Lucas and Stout), but, as the Hawkshead figures show, the poorly off ‘lashed out’ relatively greater sums than did the better off. This suggests that community pressure was quite heavy, and that people were frightened by the tongues of the neighbours, or were at least very prudent in keeping up appearances. It is also a very common human failing to wish to look at least as well as one’s neighbour, even if one pays heavily for the effort.
As to the origin of the word arval, the Oxford English Dictionary is somewhat cautious on the subject, but tentatively relates it to the Old Norse, erfi-ol, “funeral feast’, although a later form suggests that the meaning was ‘inheritance banquet’. The custom is certainly a very old one, but, as the great mediaevalist G.C. Coulton remarked in another context, “we do not know, we only suppose’. Meanwhile we can give thanks to John Lucas for the graphic information he supplies on this subject, while at the same time refusing to rest content with what he says. It is always necessary to look outside one’s own corner for further enlightenment.
- W.G. Hoskins, English Local History; the Past and the Future (Leicester University Press 1966) pp.5-6 ↩︎
- Readers will also find Dr. W. Rollinson’ Life and Tradition in the Lake District. especially p.53, interesting on this point ↩︎ ↩︎
- The average value of the probate inventories in the group including credits but not taking debts into account. ↩︎
Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 13 1990
H.J.
“H. J.” knew Morecambe when the trams on the front were horse-drawn, and he retired to this area over a quarter of a century ago. But his origins and main career were in farming in Lincolnshire. He recalls in this first article aspects of his childhood and family and village life and of farming in the Fens in the early part of this century.
“I was born in Sempringham Fen in 1903 and baptised at Sempringham Priory. My father was a farmer and moved to Rippingale at that period. My parents were happy, hard-working people, and my father was a churchwarden for many years. When he was first married, he had a mill and baking business at Pymore in Cambridgeshire. Before going out with the bread he would fill the mill with corn and leave the brake on. If the wind got up. my mother could let the brake off and the mill would start grinding. He said that as he went on his round it made him very happy to look across the flat fields and see the old mill going. When working for a Mr Pocklington near Sleaford at the turn of the century. he had to go to Boston to fetch the five-ton “cross” on which the sails of Heckington mill turned. His two-horse cart was bogged to the axles in mud, but he hired another horse with the shilling he always carried. The cross had to be lifted inside the tower by block and tackle and father had to climb the tower and fix the sails. Heckington remains the only eight-sailed mill in the country This was one of the stories we children made father tell over and over, in the candle-light; there wasn’t much reading then.
I went to school when I was three, leaving at twelve. At seven I had whooping cough, and remember the doctor arriving in his carriage and horses, and his top bat, from Billingborough, five miles off. The milk had to be delivered before school, and my father bought me a four-guinea cycle when I was ten. We three boys also had to fetch the cattle after school from a mile away. It was a communal field; and, when turned out, the cows found their own way to their farms.
The school yard was gravel, and there weren’t any rubber balls then. The schoolmistress would make us a stocking ball filled with bits of stuff, and we would kick it to pieces quite soon. We had two or three outings a year. The Sunday school went to Skegness by train. The village school drove in farmers’ wagons over to Grimsthorpe Castle for tea, a riding school and sports. We had another holiday when the horses and hounds came by train to hunt the fox; our schoolmaster liked riding, and so we got that day off, too.
In 1913, I and others were posted outside the school to give warning of the approach of B. C. Hooks flying over in his aeroplane, a thing none of us had seen. Next year, at the start of the war, we ran the best part of a mile to see the strange sight of a convoy of army lorries. In the middle of the war, after an air-raid alarm at a dance, we saw the first Zeppelin brought down over Boston.
In 1915, I left school and worked on my father’s farm, under the head waggoner’s orders. We learnt ploughing, harrowing, drilling and, later, stacking and thatching. Those were happy days, particularly when working with the horses. Ploughing was very, very pleasant. I had kept up my sport and had a professional offer when I was eighteen, but I wanted to farm.
As I grew up. I took to carrying a gun, and to poaching: a rabbit-netting party was great fun. I was courting a farmer’s daughter at the time, and a neighbour was seeing another of the girls. Meeting at the gate one night, we thought we saw a pheasant in a tree; so we shot. it with my friend’s gun. Then we found it was the farm’s bantie cockerel, and threw it over the wall. One of the girls afterwards said. a fox had got their bantie cockerel; but we never let on.
When I was still a boy we had to go and tempt the pigs on to the stubble, a miserable job that had to be done after harvest. My mother’s turkeys – she had about sixty – had to be driven from the farmhouse up to the field to feed on the stubble as well. At Christmas, they were to be sold, and mother used to kill them all. Then all the men had to stay at home and pull the birds. That was a rotten job, too, but we’d nit to do else at that time.
Our pigs were about 35 stones, with good wide backs and quite a bit of fat; they were fed on barley meal. After the killing, the pigs were left to drain – and the smell of blood upset the horses when they came in, and they would quickly crowd into their stable. The pig was left all night on the ‘cratch’, a narrow table about five feet long. The bristles were, scraped off with a sharp instrument which looked like a candle-holder. Then the chines were cut; the large ones, after salting, were kept a year or two and then stuffed.
The salting troughs were wooden, about 5ft x 3.5ft and lined with pitch. The flitches were salted and turned weekly for a month. The hams were first rubbed with brown sugar and a little saltpetre round the knuckle. After a month, they were hung on the bacon hooks which were in all kitchens in those days. They dripped a bit of salt for a week and were then dry: it was often a year or two before they were eaten. My mother cut the small chittings ready for sausage skins, soaking them in salt, water, turning them inside out and scraping them with the side of a wooden spoon. The lard was obtained by cutting the fat into chip-sized pieces and rendering it down. (It was a treat to eat the scraps on toast). The red meat was minced for sausages, and the white meat was made into pork pies and taken down to the bakers for baking. There would be about twenty of them: they were delicious. Then, apart from the haslet (oddments wrapped in the “apron”) and brawn (boned, stewed and put in basins), there were the “fries”. These were odd bits of pork meat, with liver, heart and kidneys. We children used to take the fries round to the elderly people – and we’d get a penny each, which supplemented our weekly pocket money of a penny.
My father bought me a farm when I was twenty-two, in the 1920s. It was a bad time. We didn’t lose money, but it was quite a few years before we made much. I had two cows. One was a hard milker, the other was easy, but kicked the bucket over when you’d finished. That’s where I think I got the rest of my education. For, as I sat there milking these cows and looking at a whitewashed wall, I got to thinking I wasn’t very clever if I was going to do that all my life. So, I got someone in to do the milking and spent more time in the office. This farm was in Rippingale, and I rented another four miles away in Hawthorpe (which the owner sold to me after a row about draining). By the 1950s I was farming 1000 acres, and also managing 1500 acres for a friend who was in a nursing home with T. B. for a year.
In the days when horses provided most of the power on the farm, and workers provided the skills in ploughing, harrowing and harvesting, everything was done in rhythm. I feel it was much more interesting than today when so much is mechanical. But there were some important machines at the beginning of the century. One was the cultivating machine or steam plough. This consisted of an engine at either end of the field, and a plough dragged up and down by a wire, which could be a quarter of a mile in total length. There was generally a pond in each field, and it was the waggoner’s job to see the engines were supplied they let off a whistle that could be heard for miles when they needed water. The plough would start in the early hours and run continuously till dark, even to ten or eleven o’clock. There was a team of four, one man for each engine, and one for the plough, the fourth was a relief driver and cook. They lived in their own caravan.
The other big steam-driven engine was the thrashing machine. It would take an hour to set it up and get the drum level. The wagoner had to be up at half past four to open the ash-box and load the coal, so that the machine would have a sufficient head of steam by the time the men came at half past six. A team of two ran the machine, and eight to ten men were needed for the other work. A dam was built in the dyke to hold the water, and the boys of the farm were allowed to miss school to carry the water. Thrashing was often done in winter, and it was very cold. This was in the days before wellingtons, and our legs were always wet. When a farm in the village was thrashing, it would get all the boys running back from school to kill mice and rats; this was good fun. Later on, I had a thrashing team of my own, and did contract work.
The men who came to help the thrashing team each had his own job to do. Thrashing was tedious work, and the least liked part was working at the end with the chaff or pulse: this was filthy. The more popular part was weighing and carrying the sacks of corn, even though the wheat was in sacks weighing eighteen stone, that is, over two hundred weight; we just accepted the weight. There was a contrivance for getting the sack onto the shoulders – the hard part. This was a wooden platform which raised the sack by a hand-wheel and chain. We would thrash and shift as much as 50-60 quarters a day, a quarter being two sacks.
The experience came in useful when I went on a cruise to Tenerife on the Fred Olsen line. People who’d been before said I’d be sea-sick, but it was the others who were ill in the Bay of Biscay. My father had told me about carrying the eighteen stone sacks on to barges at Boston. The only way to carry them was to go with the boat, he found that if you fought against the boat, you’d lose the sacks. So with the boat – if you fought against it, you’d be sea-sick. Or perhaps I was just lucky.
Steam-rollers were other early machines I remember because they were built in Grantham and displayed their horse trade-mark. The first tractor I saw was at Gillingate Station in about 1915: it was an American ‘Titan’. It collected a large crowd of farmers returning from Sleaford Market, who found many ways of saying that the farmer who’d bought it was barmy, tractors would never replace horses. This tractor happened to be put on to plough first a sixteen acre field near us. After ploughing half the acreage it broke down and was left in the middle of the field for two years. Then it was towed away, repaired and used for sawing wood. (I recall also, from early days, that when the Kirkstone Pass Inn near Ambleside gave up using horses, beer and supplies were brought up by a Foden steam wagon.)
I have been thinking more about being at school. There were about eight of us in each class, but each teacher had three classes in the room – the Infants (three to five year olds), then those from six to ten years, plus a few odd ones in Class 7 at the top. (I was in Class 7 when I left at twelve.) You went up by merit and some never got beyond Class 3. Each room had a fireplace near the master’s desk and the only ways to get in the front, near the fire, were by being a monitor or by misbehaving. Most children had a tin in their pocket and, if the master went out of the room, there was a mad rush to get some cinders in the tin. I didn’t live more than a quarter of a mile from the school, but some had to walk (no buses or bicycles) a good three miles from the Fens. We often rolled our hoops or trundles up the road to school; if one got broken, the blacksmith would pop it in the forge till it was red-hot, and join the break.
Three of the schoolmasters remain in my mind. The first was an older man, and he retired when I had been in the school about five years. It was a church school, and his pay was low. He was engaged to teach and play the organ in the church on Sundays.
The next one was young. He was very good, and a sportsman, playing football and cricket. I remember (as children do) that he once came to see an aunt of mine who was visiting us, and he gave me twopence to go to bed. In 1914, naturally, he went into the army.
The one after him was rather peculiar, and we felt very sorry for him. He talked to himself, and had a drink problem, and I think he left quite soon.
Nobody stayed away from school because of a cold; and at home nobody bothered much either. We were just given a dose of rhubarb and sweet nitre. In any case we had a dose of Epsom salts every Saturday morning, except that on every fourth Saturday it was brimstone and treacle. Sprains were treated by mother rubbing with a mixture of white oils that she would make up herself. It was also used for the horses.
It seems strange now how seldom we were ill, seeing that we were wet through most days during winter, having no rubber boots or mackintoshes. Our boots were sturdy boots of leather, with two rows of nails round the rim of the sole and four down the centre. We left them by the fire at night, and it was a struggle to get them on in the morning. I remember too, that when we started school again after the harvest, in which all the boys had been working, we would have on new corduroy breeches, and the smell was awful, especially from the very dark brown corduroy.
I never remember any of us ever thinking of breaking anything or doing any damage. But we did go birds-nesting always leaving some eggs in the nest, (water hens eggs and wild ducks’ eggs were delicious.) Also, we knew which of the orchards were the best for early pears or plums; and at harvest time we would go into neighbouring orchards and pinch apples. I had an idea that if I was on the look-out for anyone coming, it was not stealing!
Much of what I have been looking back on applies to the broad arable lands of East Anglia rather than to the stock-farming of the north-west. But there are many aspects of farming and country life in the earlier part of the century which were common to both.
Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 13 1990 and Issue 14 1990
S. P. Hilling
Officially opened 6th September 1980. This hall was extensively renovated through the generosity of villagers, friends and grants from various organisations.
The story behind this simple inscription on a brass plate inside Warton Village Hall is one of hard work and dedication by a number of Warton village residents to restore to working condition a very dilapidated old building.
Marked on an 1846 Tithe map of Warton is a Malt House. It is sited on Back Lane. This lane itself was very important both as a cattle route through to the pastures behind the Village and as a way to Senset Well. It was also used by parishioners as a way to Warton Church.
Shortly after the 1914-18 war the residents of Warton village purchased the Malt Kiln for £300, and renamed it “The Parish Room”. These rooms were their only village meeting place until 1937 when a hall was built next to St. Oswald’s Church. Unfortunately, meetings and business shifted to the more modern Church Hall and the Parish Room fell on bad days.
From 1952-1970 Lancashire County Council leased it during the week as a dining room for the old Archbishop Hutton School until this too was cancelled because of the new school being built. Its main source of income was withdrawn, it was poverty stricken and without deeds.
In August 1970 the committee of the Parish Room appointed Miss A Morley, Miss B. Smalley and Miss M Newman to act as their trustees. In 1973 a solicitor was engaged to search for the deeds, without success and they were replaced in February 1975 by a Declaration. The building was then Statutory Declaration. The building was then registered as a charity under the name ‘Warton Village Hall’.
At the start £1000 was given by the Harold Bridge’s Trust and the work began, under the guiding hand of the trustees and with helpful advice from the Community Council of Lancashire, to transform and extend and to raise money to meet the cost. This, at approximately £44,000, would no doubt have horrified the original purchasers of the Malt Kiln.
Well wishers quickly gathered round the committee, and under the guidance of. Misses Morley and Smalley, worked with enthusiasm to raise money for the ambitious improvement scheme. In February of 1977, after many coffee evenings, jumble sales, dances, a weekly draw and a hundred club, the sum raised was approaching £1,500. By April 1977, with the addition of a £3000 interest free loan, they were able to submit to the Community Council an application for a 75% grant for the year 1978-9, confident that by the time the villagers proportion of 25% was due, the money would be raised.
The grant was received, but the lowest tender for building alone was £45,000. By severe cuts and hard bargaining this was reduced to £35,000. Work began in October 1978 and was completed by August 1979. Another £12,000 was needed to pay the architect’s fees, and to supply furnishing and equipment for the hall. The Lancaster District Council most generously donated £4,000 and £5,000 from their lottery fund. An interest free scheme was launched which produced over £1, 000 and the “Friends of Warton Village Hall” transferred £5,000 to the management’s account. The contractor and architect were paid and Warton Village Hall started life free from debt.
The official re-opening took place on Saturday 6th September 1980 and was performed by the then Lord Mayor of Lancaster Cllr. Abbot Bryning accompanied by the Mayoress. The event was followed by a weekend exhibition of Country Crafts.
Today the Village Hall is host to many activities. Local Education classes are held, a thriving Leisure Club exists with Keep-Fit, Indoor Bowling, Badminton and Dancing, an Art Group, Embroidery classes, many discos are held, Warton Drama group performs and a school of dancing is held each week.
From its sorry state of 18 years ago, Warton Village Hall’s refurbishment has added a new dimension to village life and is a tribute to those people who dedicated their time and effort to its cause.
Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 13 1990
