Droitwich

Droitwich, on the River Salwarpe in mid-Worcestershire, was a town of some 1,500 inhabitants in the mid-seventeenth century. Compton Census, 170, 180. Still known then by many as Wyche or Wych, the borough consisted of most of the united parishes of St Andrew and St Mary-de-Witton and those of St Peter-de-Witton and St Nicholas, with a portion of Dodderhill parish as well; there were two churches, of St Nicholas and St Peter. A charter of 1624 confirmed the borough government as two bailiffs, a recorder, two justices, a town clerk and the burgesses. Political rights in Droitwich had since Roman times been linked to the salt industry of the borough. The regulation of the industry by the town’s chamber was not only intended to maximise benefits to the proprietors and control admission to the limited supply of salt, but was also important as a means of funding the activities of the council itself. Even before civic brewhouses and the like became common in early Stuart towns, the salt trade at Droitwich was an ancient, continuous example of a borough industry.

The salt industry was located at two separate parts of the town, Upwich and Netherwich. The unit of production of salt was the bullary or ‘phat’, and there were 372 freehold bullaries in Upwich and 32 in Netherwich in this period. Worcs. Archives, 261.4/BA 1006/677. In the late seventeenth century, 150 proprietors controlled output from these bullaries. A bullary was essentially a borehole located in a larger pit. Salt water was drawn from each bullary and taken to separate boiling houses called ‘seals’ for the process of evaporation. With the approval of George Wylde†, father of John* and George Wylde*, experiments took place in 1616 using coal and iron boiling pans, and by 1624 the larger proprietors had shifted to this technology, with brick furnaces and chimneys appearing in the town to accommodate coal burning. Others persisted with the traditional method of evaporation, using lead pans and timber fuel. The annual cycle of salt production was as regular as any agricultural process. Bullaries were sub-divided into quarter shares or multiples of quarters, and the whole operation was regulated by the corporation. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 33, 500, 670, 677; E.K. Berry, ‘The Borough of Droitwich and its Salt Industry, 1215-1700’, Birm. Univ. HJ vi. 42-4, 48; P.F.W. Large, ‘Economic and Social Change in North Worcestershire during the 17th Century’ (Oxford DPhil. thesis, 1981), 191.

It was natural that ownership of the bullaries should have provided the currency for civic developments and political rewards. Retiring bailiffs were usually rewarded with shares in a number of pits. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/689. When the county committee in 1648 levied charges on the leading citizens, they were compensated with grants of bullaries. In 1650 the citizens spent £800 in buying the town’s fee farm rent, an annual payment of £100 from the salt profits, and those who laid out the money were rewarded with 8 bullaries, which had formerly been given to the two bailiffs to support their period of office. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/684, 684a. A proposal in 1656 to make the Salwarpe navigable was priced by the entrepreneurs at £750 payable by the town; the corporation agreed to fund it with a 21-year levy on 8¾ bullaries. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/684. Ownership of the bullaries allowed admission to the political process of the borough. The bailiffs were elected from the burgesses, and a prerequisite for a burgess-ship was to own a quarter share of a bullary. This in itself did not bestow the status of burgess automatically. Transmission of political rights was by inheritance, adoption or creation. A ‘born burgess’ had to be 21 years old, an eldest son, who could grant his siblings or children a quarter bullary. The bailiff and burgesses could grant a burgess-ship to someone who possessed that sized stake in the salt industry.

By the sixteenth century, the corporation was drawing a distinction between ‘town’ and ‘country’ burgesses: between those who were residents of Droitwich, active participants in the borough government, and those who by inheritance and other means enjoyed political rights without residence. Among this latter group were the lords of manors which had anciently been entitled to salt from the borough. Ombersley, home of the Sandys family, was one; Mickleton in Gloucestershire, patrimony of Endymion Porter, was another. Berry, ‘Borough of Droitwich’, 45-6; Large, thesis, 195-6; F.T.S. Houghton, ‘Salt-ways’, Trans. Worcs. Arch. Soc. liv. 9. For the citizens themselves, of course, there lay an even more important distinction between those who worked in any capacity in the salt monopoly, and those whose political status allowed them a say in controlling it. With the possible exception of Endymion Porter, the MPs of the mid-seventeenth century were country burgesses who held a number of bullaries in the borough. The burgesses who ran the salt industry and who occupied the office of bailiff, participated much more fully in salt ownership. Edward Barratt and Thomas Gower, who both held the office several times, were the greatest proprietors, with 83 and 62 bullaries respectively. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 34, 652.

The dominant family in Droitwich in the first half of the century was that of Wylde, resident at the Herriotts, a house and estate in the parish of St Peter de Witton. In rates for purveyance in the 1630s, Wylde was consistently the highest rated citizen. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 33, 533, 591. There is no evidence that any election in the period 1640-60 was contested. When Wylde stood for election to the Short Parliament, he was drawing on his own status as the town’s first recorder, from 1624, as well as on his property interests and inherited burgess-ship. BA 1006/ box 34, 680. As a prominent lawyer, Wylde had helped the borough in various ways from London. BA 1006/ box 32b, 473; box 33, 519. His father, too, had been ‘a great furtherer of the said town’. BA 1006/ box 33, 500. Samuel Sandys of Ombersley stood very much as Wylde’s junior partner. His family owned a number of bullaries, but this alone hardly accounts for his parliamentary debut. Though the family history of Sandys had been marked by conflict between Sandys’s grandfather and his tenants, he could nevertheless doubtless draw on a considerable local interest to rival Wylde’s. Large, thesis, 57-65, 75-9. The burgesses voting in the Short Parliament election, on 12 March 1640, included Sir John Pakington* and Sherington Talbot, later a force behind the king’s commission of array. At this point evidently they had no suspicions of John Wylde. C219/ 42 pt. iii. 83.

There were some aristocratic influences on Droitwich, which may have come into play to determine the second election of 1640. The Talbots, earls of Shrewsbury, and the Windsors of Hewell Grange were patrons. In 1633, the 9th earl of Shrewsbury (George Talbot) and Thomas Windsor, 6th Baron Windsor, with other members of their families, signed orders regulating the operation of the pit at Upwich, and on the same day, granted a burgess-ship to Thomas Coventry†, 1st Baron Coventry, together with a quarter of a bullary. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 34, 680; Croome Court MSS, box 13, grant and deed, 5 Sept. 1633. More ordinarily, Shrewsbury and Windsor presented gifts to the town for feasting, and they and the bishop of Worcester continued to do so down to 1641. BA 1006/ box 33, 622. While these peers had little or no influence over the return of John Wylde, they probably account for the election to the Long Parliament of Endymion Porter. The election was reported by the local chronicler, Henry Townshend, to have taken place on 21 October. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshended. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 48. Apart from the ancient status of Porter’s manor of Mickleton as one which enjoyed salt rights at Droitwich, the only known connection between Porter and the borough was Windsor, who had been second-in-command of the fleet which brought home the royal expedition to Spain in 1623, and who may have shared Porter’s crypto-Catholic outlook. W. Prynne, The Popish Royal Favorite (1643), 12 (E.251.9). Both men’s wives, living in St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, were presented for recusancy in December 1640. Mdx. County Records ed. Jeafferson, iii. 151. A figure sympathetic to both Porter and Wylde was Sir William Russell, sheriff of Worcestershire, who appears to have been enfranchised at Droitwich. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 34, 680; CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 124, 254; E.B. de Fonblanque, Lives of the Lords Strangford (1877), 57-8.

Wylde himself went to claim the more prestigious county seat in this election, and his major role in the Commons subsequently cost him his influence in the borough at the start of the civil war, when the bailiffs obeyed the instructions of the earl of Shrewsbury to remove the armaments from the town. Wylde took a kind of revenge by having the Commons issue a warrant on 9 August 1642 for the arrest of the bailiffs, and on 20 August engineered the expulsion of Sandys from the House. CJ iii. 711a, 729a. Porter remained technically in the House until 3 March 1643, but between then and January 1647 the borough was not represented at Westminster. If this troubled the burgesses and citizens there are no complaints traceable in the borough records.

As the leading salt producing town south of Cheshire, the economy of the town was protected from the ravages that befell other boroughs in the region. The burgesses spent £100 as a contribution to royalist fortifications at Worcester in July 1644. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 34, 680. They petitioned the Oxford Parliament in October the same year to explain why they were unable to enforce the royalist excise tax. BA 1006/ box 33, 630. From 1645 they supplied the nearby Scots army, and the parliamentarian forces outside Worcester, the Newport Pagnell garrison and the Hereford garrison with salt and other provisions. The worst outrages noted in the bailiffs’ accounts were those perpetrated by royalist prisoners who ‘abused the whole town’. BA 1006/ box 33, 631, 633, 635, 637, 638. The order emanating from the Evesham garrison on 26 June 1645 for the inhabitants of Droitwich to raise and despatch £200 or be treated as delinquents does not read as if it was addressed to loyal friends, and on 4 August 1648, the chamber discussed the great sums imposed by the ‘Parliament party’ on the owners of bullaries in the town. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 34, 684. After the surrender of Worcester, John Wylde was again the leading figure in the borough, receiving the customary courtesies from the citizens in the exchequer house in 1646. BA 1006/ box 33, 637.

The writs for the Droitwich seats were moved on 11 November 1646, the circumstances at last being favourable for an election, as the region was under the control of Parliament. CJ iv. 719a. As governor of Worcester, Thomas Rainborowe was an obvious choice of Member as the leading parliamentarian in the region without a seat; Edmund Wylde’s election was simply a tribute to John Wylde’s standing. Serjeant Wylde lacked a male heir, and the much younger Edmund was as near as the old lawyer could get to producing a new generation of the family for the seat. As with other Droitwich elections in this period, there was no contest for the places: the election was reported by a newspaper in its news for 15 January 1647. Perfect Occurrences no. 3 (15-22 Jan. 1647), 18 (E.372.3). After Rainborowe was murdered at Pontefract, it was presumably John Wylde who persuaded George Wylde, his younger brother, to stand as a replacement. C219/43 pt. iii. 80. Wylde was received into the House on 15 December 1648, soon after the purge supervised by Colonel Thomas Pride*. His election was apparently referred to the committee for elections, but nothing further seems to have come of the case. Perfect Occurrences no. 803 (15-22 Dec. 1648), sig. K1v (E.526.42).

The only change of note in the constitution of the town during the 1650s was that the fee farm rent was acquired by the corporation for £800. It was intended to provide the bailiffs with support for their expenses during their years of office, and was acquired for the town by John Wylde. Worcs. Archives, BA 1006/ box 34, 684. Plans to make the Salwarpe navigable, prompted by a wish to extend the markets for the sale of Droitwich salt, were mooted in 1655, but had to wait until after 1660, when they were promoted in Parliament by Sir John Pakington. BA 1006/ box 34, 684; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Droitwich’. Under the Instrument of Government the borough lost its parliamentary representation, but there is evidence that within the borough itself, the wounds of the civil wars were in the process of healing by the mid-1650s. In August 1654, the burgesses agreed to enforce an order restoring the price of Droitwich salt to its former rate, reversing a previous relaxation of price controls in an attempt to drive out Cheshire salt from the region. The order was signed by the earl of Shrewsbury, four other members of the Talbot family and Sir John Pakington, who were evidently playing a part in what was a concerted attempt to win new home markets for the monopoly. BA 1006/ box 34, 680. Samuel Sandys was exercising political rights in the borough by January 1659, when he signed an order acknowledging an admission to the burgess-ship. BA 1006/ box 34, 684 p. 4. Sandys and Pakington, resident as they were at nearby Ombersley and Westwood may have been developing an interest in Droitwich at the expense of the absentee Wylde, who from Hampstead was finding it difficult to collect his rents by the later 1650s. Soc. Antiq. Prattinton Coll. Top. xiii. p. 9.

When the elections under the old franchise were held in 1659, Wylde returned to Westminster on his own interest, having spent the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell* out of central office. Again Wylde chose a young man as his partner, the untried Edmund Salwey, grandson of Humphrey Salwey*, with whom Wylde had worked closely during what he evidently considered the glorious years of the Long Parliament.

Wylde’s interest had weakened considerably during the 1650s, and when elections for the Convention took place in 1660, Samuel Sandys and the 2nd Baron Coventry† (Thomas Coventry), brother-in-law of Sir John Pakington, were filling something of a vacuum. Pakington was one of the signatories of the order of 5 July 1660 resigning the fee farm rents to the king, and Sandys signed the order compensating from bullaries those who had made up the rent arrears. Shortly afterwards, the chamber voted to present the king with gold plate worth £200. BA 1006/ box 34, 684 p. 5. The evidence of the borough records suggests that Sandys, Coventry, Pakington and the Talbots maintained a level of supervision of the borough after 1660 which had not been sustained before the civil war.