A HISTORY OF MIDDLESEX 



City sent a petition to the king, in reply, in which many protestations 

 of their humble duty barely veiled a sufficiently round refusal. No 

 grant, they submit, can be made without the consent of the commons, 

 and this is not an opportune moment to make such an application when 

 they have just been put to great expense in fitting out galleys and 

 soldiers for the Irish wars, towards which the two counties had persist- 

 ently refused the contribution to which they were bound. 129 



In 1614 the justices levied by a 'rate and taxation' 200 for the 

 building and furnishing of a house of correction, 130 and at the same time 

 appointed a commission of five gentlemen: Sir George Coppyn, Sir 

 William Smythe, Sir Baptist Hickes, Mr. Edmond Dobbleday and 

 Mr. Francis Mitchell, to collect voluntary contributions from ' well- 

 affected persons ' with what if any success is not on record. The rate 

 was less popular in the county than with the justices, but they made 

 short and exemplary work with grumblers, and in 1615 the house was 

 finished. The justices appointed as governor, at a salary of 40 marks, 

 one John (or Jacob) Stoyte, whose petition for the post is preserved 

 amongst the Caesar papers in the British Museum, 131 in which he asserts 

 that he ' has been trained up most part of his life in the said service.' 

 That sanguine ideal of self-supporting pauperism, which Tudor and 

 Stuart Poor Law administration strove vainly to realize, dictated the 

 order that the inmates must earn their food by their labour, and that, 

 except in case of sickness, they were to have no more than they earned. 

 Stoyte undertook to ' keepe and maintain the exercise of trades of weaving 

 and spinning of cotton, wooles for drapery, and all other manufactures fit 

 for their employment and labour,' and some attempt was evidently made 

 to put them to work, for there are orders for the repair of spinning 

 wheels and hemp mills, and a new mill was to be provided so that more 

 might be employed. The inmates were to have fresh straw every month, 

 and warm pottage thrice a week, and their ' lynnen (if any they have) ' 

 was to be washed. But the house seems to have been little more than 

 a prison, and not well managed in spite of reiterated orders for its better 

 government issued by the justices, and an attempt at some sort of classi- 

 fication of the inmates does not seem to have been realized in practice. 



At Clerkenwell in 1666 a 'workhouse' was built at an expenditure 

 of 2,002 levied on the parishes within the Bills of Mortality by the 

 'Governors of the Corporation of the Poor,' to accommodate 600 blind, 

 impotent, and aged poor as well as able-bodied paupers, 132 in which 

 some advance seems to have been made towards differentiating paupers 

 and criminals at any rate. It proved, however, so very expensive to 

 maintain that it was closed and the county exempted for the future 

 from any workhouse rate by Act of Parliament in 1675. The work- 

 house itself was let for 30 a year to one Sir Thomas Rowe, who 

 turned it into a charity school. 



1M B.M.MS. I2503,fol. 278-84. " Jeaffreson, Midd. Sess. R.'ii, 102, 103, 105, 120, 1 30; Hi, 7. 

 131 B.M. MS. 12496, No. 256 (it is here dated 1626). 



** Hardy, Sess. R. 296 ; Jeaffreson, Sets. R. iii, 337. 



94 



