Thrale history

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out on a row of six cottages on the east side of the High Street, which belonged to the parish. So great was the number of paupers, both in and out of the workhouse, that the parish found itself a further £188 in debt, over and above the £200 borrowed for the building repairs; thus the list of paupers was carefully examined to see if it could be reduced. The parish was up against it, but they granted plum pudding as an extra for the paupers on Christmas Day 1833. This same year a Poor Law was passed through Parliament which reorganised the workhouses, and the effect was to relieve the Sandridge ratepayers of an excessive burden. In 1838 the inmates were transferred to Oster House, St Albans, but the Sandridge House survived another hundred years as a collection of inconvenient dwelling houses, known as Spencer Buildings.

The money for the poor relief was raised by the poor rate. The parish was divided into about twenty-eight farms stretching from Heath Farm to Bride Hail. John Kinder of Sandridgebury was assessed at £296, this being the highest assessment for any single farm, but the biggest local ratepayer was Thomas Kinder who held Pound Farm, Whitehouse Farm and the malthouse; he had a total assessment of £530. Lord Spencer had an equal assessment on the tithes. Thomas Oakley of Waterend was assessed at £264. The farmers were the chief ratepayers, but some of them were quite small. The waterworks on Bernard’s Heath were first rated in 1835. Coming down the scale, one finds the Rose and Crown assessed at twelve pounds, the vicarage ten pounds and the Queen’s Head six pounds. Then came the various shops. Two shoemakers, two grocers, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a baker, a wheelwright, and a beer shop: these were valued at five to three pounds. Lastly came all the labourers’ cottages, which were mostly assessed at thirty or twenty shillings, the two worst at only ten shillings.

By the middle of the century the majority of Sandridge people were still poverty stricken. Wages were slowly rising, but had not yet reached two shillings a day. Poverty and drink made a vicious circle; a man drank to forget the drabness of his home, and he became the poorer by it. Besides Queen’s Head and the Rose and Crown there were three retail beer shops in the village. There was little money to spare for clothes and fuel. A hundredweight of coal cost nearly a day’s pay, and education was not free. But the country had not forgotten the labourers’ revolt of 1830, when starving men marched around, burning ricks, smashing machinery, and demanding a wage of half-a-crown a day. Neither was it forgotten how the revolt was put down by tearing 420 men from their families and transporting them to Australia as convicts. These troubles did not touch Hertfordshire, but they made all men realise the rotten state of our economy.

In these days of want and degradation the elderly Mrs. Marten started the village clothing club for which she added threepence to every shilling subscribed. Ninety four members joined in the first year. Miss Marten’s coal club was less efficient and less popular, and it was not till her brother Thomas came home from India that anything effective was done to keep the people warm. About twenty of the poorest got two hundred weight of coal free and another hundred or so got it at a reduced price. Mr. Winbolt undertook the unpleasant task of begging the money for this enterprise year after year. About six farmers provided horse and cart to collect the coal from the Abbey station St Albans, and some sixteen tons were taken around the parish. One cold winter seventeen guineas were spent on a village kitchen for free soup. There was also a sick benefit club which got into serious trouble by misappropriation of its funds. Earlier attempts at mutual help were the “Society of Good Fellowship” founded in 1807 and still going strong thirty years later, and a friendly society for women organised by the curate, Mr. Ryland, who collected and booked no less than £500 in threepences in five years.

By 1872 the parish was no longer a self-contained unit. A profound change had come over the whole country during the previous forty years. The self -sufficient village had gradually ceased to be and the village shops became stocked with goods from towns or abroad. “One by one craftsmen disappeared, the harness maker, and the weaver”; the village carpenter kept going for some time, and in some places the blacksmith remains with us to this day, the sole survivor of the ancient country crafts. All this “made rural life duller and less self-sufficient in its mentality and native interests, a backwater of the national life instead of its main stream. The vitality of the village slowly declined, as the city in a hundred ways sucked away its blood and brains.”³ The craftsmen in Sandridge were provided by families such as the Pauls, and it would be apt here to give a short account of such a representative family, which played a prominent part in the life of Sandridge. It was in 1781 that the Paul family came upon the stage of Sandridge history. The first William Paul was then twenty-five and is described in the militia lists of that year as a tailor. A year later he was married to Mary, daughter of William Laurence, the village joiner, who made the existing altar rails some time before he died in 1803. As a result of this marriage Sandridge had quantities of Pauls of all ages throughout the nineteenth century. The direct line may be traced thus:

Footnotes

3. G.M. Trevelyan 18, English Social History. ↩︎