Apprenticing in a market Town; the Story of William Harding of Aylesbury and his apprenticing Charity, 1719-2000, by Hugh Hanley (Phillimore, 2005) Price £19.95
General Background Information
William Harding’s Charity in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, was founded in 1719 and today is still one of Aylesbury’s two most important charities. Although its terms of reference now embrace a wide range of (mainly educational) activities, it was until comparatively recently principally an apprenticing charity providing cash ‘premiums’ to enable poor boys and girls to be apprenticed to useful trades.
For centuries apprenticeship normally entailed a child leaving home in its early teens to live with his or her master or mistress for periods of up to seven years. It was an institution deeply embedded in the fabric of social and economic life and one that had a particular associations with urban life, including that of market towns such as Aylesbury. Yet many aspects of its functioning are still imperfectly understood.
Apprenticing of children was typically arranged by parents able to afford the premium demanded by the master or mistress, a fee which varied in accordance with the nature of the business, trade or profession concerned and with future prospects. By the late sixteenth century the situation was complicated by the introduction under the Statute of Artificers of 1563 of a separate category of statutory ‘parish’ or pauper apprenticeship as part of the Elizabethan poor relief system. It authorised the compulsory apprenticing by parish officers of poor children - many of them orphans - to unskilled and semi-skilled occupations from an early age and for extended periods. At the same time the 1563 Act made it illegal for anyone to practise a trade without having served an apprenticeship. The enforcement of this requirement in the countryside was entrusted to the county magistrates.
Between 1600 and 1800 many apprenticing charities, large and small, were founded throughout the country, forming part of the enormous legacy of local charitable institutions. There has been a tendency to lump them with parish apprenticeship but the two things are essentially distinct. Few have been studied in detail, yet they can tell us a great deal about local society. This study analyses the operation of one such charity in its local context from its foundation to the present day.
Summary of Contents
Part I (chapters 1-2) outlines the life of the founder, William Harding, a yeoman farmer, and traces his descent and that of the family lands at Walton in the parish of Aylesbury through several generations. Born during the Civil War, when Aylesbury was a garrison for Parliament, William was the last of a long line of small freeholders. He never married and left the whole of his estate to endow his charity. This section includes descriptions of the manor of Walton and of William Harding’s farm and farmhouse, as well as references to contemporary politics. Also discussed are William Harding’s money lending activities and the subject of living-in farm servants.
The subsequent history of the Charity to 1956 is told in Part II, which constitutes the core of the book. Three chapters (chapters 3-5) are devoted to the period prior to 1740, which happens to be exceptionally well documented. The first of these (chapter 3) gives an account of the management of the Charity estate by the trustees
appointed in the founder’s will. Information is given (in this and later chapters) about the individual trustees, who in this period included a high proportion of professional men.
Chapter 4 examines the operation of ‘parish’ apprenticeship by the Aylesbury parish authorities in the period 1691-1720, in which William Harding had himself been involved. It appears that the new Charity effectively superseded the apprenticing functions of the parish, though the situation is obscured by the almost simultaneous introduction of a workhouse system and a long gap in the parish records. The concept of ‘the parish economy of welfare’ is discussed in this context.
Chapter 5 analyses the principles and practices of the trustees in relation to the granting of apprenticeships, notably their insistence on ‘proper’ trades, coupled with a distinct preference for choosing masters and mistresses not resident in Aylesbury. The ages of apprentices and the occupations and status of parents and masters are examined and a number of brief case histories are compiled by way of illustration.
In Chapter 6 a complete gap in the Charity’s records, 1741-93, is partially supplied from other sources, principally the record of a series of Chancery lawsuits initiated in the late 1760s by the parish officers of Aylesbury, who complained that the trustees of Harding’s Charity were refusing to apprentice poor children to masters and mistresses living in Aylesbury. In reply, the trustees alleged fraudulent practices on the part of Aylesbury employers, sometimes in collusion with parents.
This chapter also includes the story of the Charity’s connection with John Wilkes (1725 -97), who was M.P. for Aylesbury from 1757 to 1764. Wilkes became a trustee of Harding’s and of the two other leading Aylesbury charities. He also involved himself in promoting a branch of the London Foundling Hospital in the town. Evidence given in the lawsuit reveals for the first time that, in addition to his other known delinquencies, Wilkes misappropriated a large sum of money belonging to the Charity before fleeing abroad in late 1763.
Chapter 7 covers the period 1794-1845, a time of great hardship for labourers in the rural south of England. Runaway inflation compelled the trustees to increase the amount of the premium, while increased demand led to restrictions on the numbers of recipients and the differential treatment of boys and girls in favour of the former. Topics discussed include the repeal of the 1563 Act, radical agitation about misuse of charities and the involvement with the Charity of William Rickford, banker, M.P. and campaigner for the Reform Act.
Chapter 8 describes the effects of parliamentary enclosure of the open common fields on the Charity’s landed estate, 1798-1914, leading to the emergence of Elm Farm.
Chapter 9 covers the Charity in the years 1845-98. Income was now tending to outstrip demand and some of it was being diverted to other uses. Following the 1870 Education Act a large one-off grant was made from the Charity’s funds to existing voluntary schools in order to avert the need for a, non-denominational, school board. Not everyone approved of this action, as is clear from a contemporary pamphlet which is quoted at some length.
In this chapter (and also in chapter 7) occasional 5-year statistics of apprentices’ occupations and destinations are compiled and compared. Use is also made of the 1851 census returns for Aylesbury, showing that living-in with employers was still far from dead at this date (even in the case of apprentices whose parents lived in the same town) and providing some fascinating glimpses of the lives of individual apprentices. The latter part of the period saw a large relative decline in the number of apprentices, while apprenticing to places outside Aylesbury had virtually ceased.
Chapter 10 deals with the years 1898-1956. The arrival in Aylesbury from the late 1860s of large-scale printing had given a new impetus and character to apprenticeship and by the 1920s and 1930s printing and engineering accounted for the majority of apprentices. Meanwhile, partly as a result of the Local Government Act of 1894, there had been a gradual change in the social make-up of the trustees, with small businessmen tending to predominate. The continuing decline in the number of applicants eventually led to a new, broader, constitution for the Charity, into which apprenticing was subsumed.
Part III takes the story to the end of the 20th century. Chapter 11 charts the gradual disposal of the Charity’s lands, culminating in the sale of Elm Farm for development as a housing estate in the 1970s, thereby transforming the Charity’s financial situation, necessitating a further broadening of its terms of reference. Chapter 12
deals with ‘post-apprenticeship’ developments 1978-2000 and describes most of the major projects in which the Charity was involved. While significant in its own right, it can also be seen as an epilogue to the main theme of the earlier chapters.