If you are searching for names, what better than a charity list, giving all the names and occupations of the recipients?

Such lists have survived in the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments for 1811-28 and 1841-46 (WWM R2a-42; WWM A1543; WWM A1412-A1424). They list the recipients of two charities: the St Thomas’s Day Donation and Collop Monday. St Thomas’s Day falls on 21 December. On that day, popularly called Thomassing, Mumping, Gooding or Corning Day, poor people begged money and provisions for Christmas. Collop Monday was part of Shrovetide and was a day of games, dancing and feasts to consume the food that was forbidden during Lent. It was the tradition in South Yorkshire that on Collop Monday poor people begged a ‘collop’ or slice of bacon to supply the fat in which pancakes were cooked on the following day.

Both of these customs were formalised and institutionalised on the Wentworth estate by the 19th century during the times of the 4th and 5th Earls Fitzwilliam. It was to the employees in the countryside and in the industrial enterprises on the estate that the two charities were extended. The ‘Rule of Admissibility’ to the two charities was Any person regularly employed in the Service of Earl Fitzwilliam and employed at that time. Persons employed at that time at a merely occasional job are not entitled. Servants at the mansion were not included.

In 1841 there were more than 1,000 recipients whose names are listed with ticks or crosses beside the names. Heads of department were in attendance to confirm identities. The same list was used on St Thomas’s Day and on Collop Monday in the next year.

Each employee received beef and a small sum of money. In 1841 the biggest group were the hundreds of employees at the estate’s six collieries. In addition there were ironstone miners, employees at Elsecar Ironworks, carpenters, masons, sawyers, gamekeepers, woodmen, gardeners (male and female) and even a ‘boat tenter’ on the lake in the park, a rat catcher and the stable bed maker.

Visit to Ireland
Now let us return to the Irish estate of the owners of Wentworth Woodhouse. One of the most fascinating sets of records in the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments are the accounts left by the estate’s Irish agent, Captain Abraham Nickson, of a visit to Ireland by Thomas Watson-Wentworth in 1713 in order to set new tenancies and renew existing ones on the estate (WWM A758 and A760).

He arrived at Ringsend in Dublin in late August by sailing ship which he had boarded at the mouth of the River Dee near Chester, and there are details of his riding horses being slung ashore. There are then details of an armed party assembled to accompany him on his journey ‘to view his estate’. They were armed with carbines as several recent parties had been ambushed and robbed.

During the visit, which lasted for three months, the agent obviously wanted to impress ‘His Honour Wentworth’, as Thomas Watson-Wentworth was referred to, and he arranged for him to taste Ireland’s unique drink and to see an animal long extinct in England.

On 13 October he noted payment to a Man yt fetched a vessel of Usquebagh from Drogheda for his Honour. ‘Usquebagh’ was, of course Gaelic for ‘water of life’, in other words Irish whiskey.

On 28 October he paid Dennis Duigen for bringing ye Wolf whelp from Collattin to Dub. For his Honr. Wolves had been extinct in England since the late 14th century but did not become extinct in Ireland till the late 18th century.

Rich resource
So whether you are researching and writing the history of a particular area or tracing your family history, don’t forget to consider the value of the archives of the families who owned large swathes of the British countryside and employed (and often housed) thousands of men and women as domestic servants, on the farm and in a multiplicity of industrial enterprises for hundreds of years.

Sometimes the archives may still be stored in a family muniments room at the ‘big house’ but most will be in the local record office where they will have been carefully catalogued. Details of these records may also be available online: try searching for the estate name at http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk as a first port of call.

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, held in Sheffield Archives. I also wish to thank Eric Leslie for his wonderful line drawings.

In In the print edition
Read Melvyn Jones’ article about child miners, in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, available online at www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk