four

THE ELIZABETHAN AND
JACOBEAN TOWN, 1558–1642

An Important Local Market and Port

When Elizabeth came to the throne in November 1558, Boston was one of many hundreds of small English towns, with a population of about 2,000, but one that played a most important role in the life of the surrounding area. Its great days as the country’s largest port for the export of wool were long gone, and we have seen that the population was less than half as large as it had been 200 years earlier. But it was still the centre for the export of produce from its hinterland and for the importation of goods for local consumption, both of which were growing steadily in the 1620s and 1630s, and the town’s markets also seem to have been thriving in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹

In comparison with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, its international trade was indeed now negligible. French wine and Scottish salt were the main foreign commodities imported at the end of the sixteenth century, but compared even with the 1530s, when 120 tuns of wine were landed annually, the wine imports were now pitifully small. In 1600–01, which seems to have been a good year, just thirty-seven tuns of Gascon wine were landed. Moreover, grain was the only bulk foreign export in the late sixteenth century. A survey of 1565 noted the recent decline in trade with Flanders, the absence of foreign merchants, and the small number of ships owned by Boston merchants. In that year there were just eight – one of 100 tons, two of 40 tons, one of 30, and four keels of 10 to 20 tons each. This suggests that Boston’s coastal trade was as yet also far too small to compensate for the decline of overseas trade. In Hull, by contrast, where the coastal trade was thriving, thirty-five ships were locally owned in 1550.

The surviving port books give us an indication of the modest size of Boston’s overseas and coastal trade in the second half of the sixteenth century. In 1570–1, for instance, there are thirty-eight entries in the port books relating to overseas trade, and a similar number the following year. There were also seventy-two inward and thirty-five outward loggings of coastal shipping, with just over half of the incoming vessels being Newcastle colliers. Coal was of increasing importance and Boston was the chief means by which coal reached many Lincolnshire towns. By the late 1570s, up to forty coal ships a year were said to be landing at the port. Wheat, barley, oats, beans, beef and bacon were also being shipped coastwise from the port. Although no longer of any international importance, Boston was nevertheless still well placed for the export of the surplus produce of its rich agricultural hinterland.²

The fish trade was also important to the town, although the success of Yarmouth in making itself a great European fish market, in the late sixteenth century, necessarily impeded Boston’s growth as a fishing port. The Assembly minutes make numerous references to the trade, and particularly to Scottish and East Anglian fishermen, who landed large quantities of fish (especially herring) to be salted and sold over a wide area. For the poor, in particular, herrings and sprats were an extremely important part of their diet, and their main source of protein.³

In the 1590s the trade of the port probably sank further still. In 1595 the value of the customs at Boston was only £111 12s 6½d, less than half that of Lynn, and the lowest of the east-coast ports. At the end of the century, for reasons that are as yet elusive, the customs returns briefly shot up to £1,684, but they then fell back again to previous levels. Moreover, the port books of 1601–5 show that there were still only about eight Boston-owned ships, and their average size was little different from forty years earlier.⁴

During the first half of the seventeenth century, however, the trade of the port increased again. Customs duties reached almost £150 in 1610, for 1615–17 they averaged £277, and in 1639 they reached £403. Moreover, the value and quantity of trade carried by Boston-owned vessels particularly increased, so much so that R.W.K. Hinton has described the 1630s as a boom time for Boston’s port. The port books of 1610–18 show that there were by then seventeen Boston-owned ships, four of about 60 tons, and most of the others between 30 and 40 tons, but by 1628–34, when there were eighteen Boston ships, three were between 90 and 120 tons, and six between 50 and 70 tons. When the king demanded ship money in 1635, however, the corporation pleaded poverty, as it often had in the sixteenth century, falsely claiming that it could not afford it because the port had ‘but seven or eight small ships or boats belonging to the port, and not mariners in the town sufficient for this little shipping’.

By this time a wide variety of goods were being landed at the port. As well as French wines there was vinegar and prunes, salt (although increasingly from Newcastle rather than Spain or Scotland), timber in the form of fir spars and deal boards from Scandinavia, starch and rosin. A wide variety of consumer goods came from the Netherlands, including tobacco from 1617, rye from the Netherlands in years of bad harvest, such as 1615, 1616 and 1617, and other imports also came from Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Exports included lead, calf skins, linseed, malt and beer, beans and barley. Boston’s ships traded with Norway and along the continental littoral between points as widespread as the Gulf of Danzig in the east to Lisbon in the west. Between 1601 and 1640, ships docking in Boston’s port usually ranged from 8 to 120 tons, but the largest ship recorded was a London ship, the 200 ton Royal Merchant, which docked in 1601, having sailed from the Italian port of Leghorn (Livorno).

The growth in the port’s trade in the 1620s and 1630s was mainly due to an expansion in overseas trade, in spite of the difficulties which larger ships found in navigating the Haven. From R.W.K. Hinton’s work on the Boston port books, we gain a series of snapshot impressions of the trade of the port between 1601 and 1640. The contrast between the picture we find at the beginning of the century with that of 1640 is quite marked. In the first few years, the mainstay of the port was Scottish ships from Kirkaldy carrying white salt. Scotland was counted as overseas, and the port’s links with other foreign ports was very limited; perhaps half a dozen ships trading with the Low Countries, two or three arriving from Norway carrying timber, and a few trading with France, usually bringing wine from Gascony. In 1602–3, forty-two voyages are logged, of which twenty were inward. Of these, thirteen were carrying salt from Kirkaldy. Moreover, the trade was completely dominated by the Scots; only one of the salt ships was from Boston. Also, none of the ships were large. The largest, the Mary Katherine, was only 30 tons, and the rest between 16 and 24 tons.

By contrast, in 1640 fifty-eight overseas voyages were logged, and thirty of these were made by Boston-owned ships. The latter traded mainly with Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Bordeaux, but ships were also arriving that year from Danzig and from numerous ports around the Danish and Scandinavian coasts: Sonderborg, Asdoll, Copenhagen, Husum, Christiana, Langesund, and Frederickstand. Ships from other English ports also arrived in the port, including the William and Thomas from Liverpool, bringing a cargo of Norwegian deals, balks and spars from Frederickstand, the Trial from Newcastle and the Violet from Lynn, both carrying wine and sugar from Rotterdam. One country not mentioned at all is Scotland, and that is due to the Scottish salt trade dying out. In 1639 just one ship – the George – had arrived, carrying thirty weys of Scottish salt (1,200 bushels or 9,600 gallons) and a hundred ells (about 116 metres) of coarse twill, but none came at all in 1640.

Much of the port’s overseas trade by this time consisted of small ships travelling backwards and forwards to Rotterdam, carrying a variety of goods, all in relatively small quantities, and the port books tell us precisely what they were carrying. The 30-ton Post, for instance, sailed for Rotterdam on 22 January 1640 with a cargo of 4 tons of lead, 15,000 oilcakes and 2cwt of glue, and was back in Boston again on 3 March with a cargo of rough and dressed flax, ‘uncovered’ jugs and dishes, sugar, candle wicks, and Gascon wine and vinegar. A month later and she was on her way back to Rotterdam, again with a cargo of lead and oilcakes, but this time also with two chaldrons (just over 4 tons) of Newcastle coal and a last (about 4,000lbs) of rapeseed, before returning on 7 July with another cargo of flax, sugar, French wine, prunes and currants, a tun of Spanish wine and 20 gallons of Rhenish wine. She made a third journey to Rotterdam three weeks later, again carrying lead and glue, and returning with flax and sugar, and set off for a fourth time in October, this time carrying lead and rapeseed, before returning in December once again with flax and sugar, but also a consignment of candlewicks, pots and rice. The 50-ton Rose Anne and the 20-ton Fortune (both Boston ships) made a very similar series of three or four trips to and from Rotterdam each year. Many of the foreign ships also made at least two journeys per year and their masters and crews were no doubt well known in the port.⁵

The corporation’s plea of poverty in 1635 was simply an attempt to avoid the taxation demanded, but it is more difficult to know how much credence to give to the corporation’s many pleas of poverty during Elizabeth’s reign. Certainly, the activity of the port was much less than it had been at the beginning of the century and there is no evidence of a sustained improvement before 1600. One cause was no doubt the problem of silting in the Haven, which was often referred to in the corporation’s letters to Elizabeth’s Privy Council, and this was probably made worse by fen drainage schemes in the area. Another problem facing the port was piracy. In May 1575 the corporation wrote to the Privy Council to ask for advice about what it should do with four pirates it had taken into custody. It also explained that:

… certen Robbers frequenting the coastes of Lincoln Shyer do now lye att this presente in the Depes or mouthe of Boston havon not onely to the greate discurraging of honest Marchauntes But also to thutter overthrowe of all trade in these partyes.

Equally serious was a loss of trade to smaller ports. In the 1570s it was reported that some small boats carrying Yorkshire coal and Humber turves were bypassing Boston and unloading at Fosdyke and Fleet.⁶

The corporation was very successful in gaining assistance from Elizabeth’s Privy Council, because it enjoyed the friendship and support of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Recorder of Boston from 1551 and later Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer. Burghley was keen to consolidate his political base in Lincolnshire, centred on his home – Burghley House – near Stamford, and he proved an invaluable patron and ally of Boston. Between 1572 and 1573, he played a key role in obtaining valuable grain-exporting licences for the town, after the corporation had written explaining that it badly needed assistance following a severe storm, which had damaged the harbour and staithes. The corporation claimed that:

we are … fallen into such decay, and so destitute of ships and trade of shipping … without some provisions or means to help and better furnish the same … our town [cannot] continue long without utter ruin and decay.

One of those subsequently licensed to ship grain from the port, and a principal beneficiary of the scheme, was one of Burghley’s sons, William, who later also became Recorder for the town. The licence, granted in February 1573, allowed the export of 20,000 quarters of grain over a period of five years, at a preferentially reduced duty. The corporation used it with such enthusiasm that by May it had created a local grain shortage and was driving up prices, prompting Burghley to forward a letter of reprimand.⁷

Burghley was also instrumental in the town’s success in 1573 in gaining the power to have its own Admiralty court, exempting it from the much resented authority of the Admiralty. This meant that the corporation gained admiralty jurisdiction of over 30 miles of coast with its creeks and inlets, from Wainfleet to the Norfolk border, and seawards over the whole north-western half of the Wash. A weekly Admiralty court, presided over by a nominee of the corporation, ensured that the corporation enjoyed jurisdiction over disputes concerning wrecks and salvage rights, and disputes over the ownership of ships and maritime contracts.

Burghley also supported the corporation’s efforts to boost its fish trade. In 1573 it obtained permission from the Privy Council to settle up to forty families of Dutch fishermen in the town. These were refugees who had fled the Low Countries to escape the persecution of Protestant opponents of Spanish rule, which was then being undertaken by the Duke of Alva and his notorious Council of Troubles. In February 1573 a licence was issued, ‘for the help of our borough of Boston’, to allow the settlement of the refugee families in the town, provided each household contained not more than ten people. It was hoped that they would be able to ‘duly apply their fishing to the benefit of this our realm of England, and instruct our subjects here in their manner of fishing’. Many of the refugee families had escaped in their own fishing boats, which they brought with them to Boston. It was envisaged that, in the words of the licence, they would ‘repair to sea … to exercise their trade, and to carry the fish caught and cured after the manner of their own country, to other places along the coast for sale, or to other countries in league and amitie with England’. Dutch refugees had been arriving in England since 1567, when the Duke of Alva and his army had first marched into Brussels intent on crushing all opposition to Spanish rule, whether political or religious. Some refugee families may have already arrived in Boston before 1573 for, in 1569, the corporation had sent two of its members to Norwich to see how refugee families were being settled in the town. How many families did settle in Boston is not known, but it was probably far fewer than the forty hoped for.⁸

The Admiralty seal.

Further help for the town, however, came in 1575, after the corporation had expressed more concerns about the state of the harbour and the difficulties ships were having reaching the quays. Burghley persuaded Elizabeth to grant the corporation a charter which extended its property rights. This, the corporation claimed, would help it raise the money to make the necessary repairs and to mark a new channel into the port. In the following year he helped the town further by organising the admission of a number of Boston merchants to the London Company of Merchant Adventurers.⁹

To show their gratitude to Burghley for his many favours to the town, the entire corporation went in person to Burghley House in 1578, taking with them, as presents for their benefactor, oxen, wethers and fowl. Two years later Burghley made sure that the lucrative grain licence was renewed and in 1592 he persuaded his fellow privy councillors that Boston’s ‘poor estate’ should exempt it from the tenths and fifteenths taxes due that year. His generous patronage continued right up until his death, in 1598. Shortly before he died he did his best to ensure further help for the town by including it on a list of towns judged to be so ‘decayed’ that it should be granted further tax exemptions.¹⁰

For all the problems of its port, however, Boston was almost certainly not as ‘decayed’ as this suggests. Boston’s wealth depended only partly on sea-going trade. It was also an important regional market centre, and the town’s two weekly markets and twice-yearly fairs appear to have been doing much better than the port in the 1580s and 1590s. In 1586, William Camden said of Boston: ‘It is handsomely built and drives a considerable trade, and the inhabitants apply themselves both to trade and the grazing of cattle.’ Camden has sometimes been accused of painting a far too optimistic picture, but he was probably more accurate in his assessment than he is sometimes given credit for. The Assembly minutes give the impression that the trade of Boston’s markets and fairs was expanding in Elizabeth’s reign. A new market cross was erected ‘on the common cornhill on the east side of the water’ in March 1568. By 1573 the numbers of market stallholders had so increased that it was felt necessary to designate very clearly just where different types of stallholders should be located, and to appoint four officials to ensure that this was carried out. ‘Horse, bestes and shepe and other cattell’ would be on sale in Bargate, general merchandise would be sold only in shops and stalls along Barbridge Street as far as the common staithe, and ‘fyshe and herrings’ were only to be sold ‘at the gaite’. In 1575 it was decided that to keep the peace during the fairs it was necessary to pay for ten armed guards to be in attendance ‘with harness and halberts’, and all householders living near the market area were ordered to light the streets between six and nine o’clock in the evening by hanging lanterns in their houses. The growth in trade also meant that the corporation had to cope with more non-freemen attempting to sell goods in the town, competing with local men who had paid the freemen’s fee. Another development, found in many other towns in this period, was that as trade grew, more business moved away from open market stalls and into shops.¹¹

There is also some evidence, as we shall see shortly, that during Elizabeth’s reign the population of Boston was once again rising. It would seem that, for the first time for almost 200 years, the growth of the town’s trades and industries may have been able to attract enough migrants in to boost its population. Four crafts were numerous enough to establish their own separate craft guilds in Elizabeth’s reign, namely the tailors, glovers, cordwainers and smiths, and a fifth craft guild was formed by the bakers and brewers together. At least one brewer, Thomas Sowthen, made sufficient money to become an alderman, although brewers faced fierce competition from ‘country’ producers, particularly from Lynn and Lincoln. One trade that seems to have particularly flourished was that of the retail victualler. In 1577 it was reported by the magistrates, in response to a Privy Council survey, that there were five inns in the town, one tavern, and twenty-seven alehouses. The inns and tavern catered for the better-off members of the community, such as farmers, mercers and merchants and offered food as well as drink. The inns also offered accommodation. The alehouses catered for the poor, and were often simply the backroom of a cottage. They were notoriously difficult to regulate, and attempts by the corporation to ensure they sold only locally made ale and beer proved unsuccessful.¹²

The medieval Market Cross, or Butter Cross, where butter, eggs and other dairy produce were sold. This is not to be confused with the new Corn Cross erected at the northern end of the Market Place in 1568. The Market Cross was taken down in 1730 when a new Butter Cross and Assembly Rooms were built.

The parish registers throw a little light on the occupations to be found early in the next century, particularly between 1608 and 1620. The most common occupation mentioned is that of labourer, and most of the crafts listed are those one would expect to find in any small or medium-sized town, including blacksmiths, fishmongers, butchers and bakers, innkeepers and victuallers, beer-brewers and maltsters, shoemakers and cordwainers, carpenters and joiners, coopers and wheelwrights, and tailors and tallow chandlers. The importance of the port, however, is reflected in the listing of numerous sailors (second only to labourers), a ship’s carpenter, a couple of coal porters and numerous general porters; and also in the relatively large number of references to rope-makers and ropers. Glove making was also clearly important; there are at least nine references to glovers in 1608–09 alone. The town also supported at least half a dozen milliners. References to weavers, and to at least one shearman and a wool-spinner, point to the survival of a small cloth-making industry. The professions are represented by the clergy, schoolmasters, a clerk, a notary, an apothecary, and a scrivener; and there also seems to have been a surprisingly large number of musicians.

One long-established industry not mentioned, but which was still to be found in the surrounding district in the late sixteenth century, was salt-making. This had long ceased to be an important export and most of the area’s demand was now met by imports, but the salt works around Boston were felt important enough to be included in a monopoly over east-coast salt production, which Queen Elizabeth gave to one of her Privy Council clerks in 1586. Another long-established industry was brick making. By the seventeenth century it was becoming increasingly common to build in brick, rather than timber. Most of the old brick pits, some of which would have been in use in the seventeenth century, were filled in only in the 1950s and 1960s. They were to be found between George Street and High Street, between Sleaford Road and the South Forty-Foot Drain, and to the east of Brothertoft Road. The parish registers do not mention brick makers, but bricklayers are listed.

A timber-framed house in Church Lane, which probably dates from the late sixteenth century.

We can probably assume that although there are few clear references in the parish registers, shipbuilding would have employed a small number of local craftsmen. In the 1560s, the Duchess of Suffolk mentioned in a letter that she was having a ship fitted out at Boston, but it is unlikely that there had ever been a large shipbuilding industry in the town. The imports of tar and pitch are never sufficient to suggest more than small-scale enterprise; mainly ship-repair and the building of small ships and boats for short-distance foreign trade and coastal and river trade. The timber imports were mainly for house building and joinery needs. Most of the larger ships listed as being ‘of Boston’ would seem to have been bought from elsewhere, and many would be second- or third-hand.¹³

Although trade was buoyant in 1640, there was also good reason to fear that the long-term future of the port was far from rosy. The silting up of the Haven was a continuing problem and the town sluice was reported to be in a decrepit state, and no longer capable of scouring the river. From 1608 the corporation made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Privy Council to enforce an order of the commissioners of sewers that the cost of repairs should be borne by the whole county, and not only by Boston and the surrounding area. The corporation was fully supported by its Recorder, the Earl of Exeter, the son of Lord Burghley, but the town faced considerable opposition from county interests, and the earl had far less influence than his father had enjoyed, even though his brother, Sir Robert Cecil, was King James I’s chief minister. Consequently, no serious repair work was undertaken and in 1640 the state of the Haven was continuing to deteriorate slowly.¹⁴

Population, Plague and Pauperism

A modest increase in the size of the population in the second half of the sixteenth century is indicated by a church survey of 1603, which counted 1,500 communicants in the town, suggesting a total population of about 2,200, compared to a total of about 2,000 in 1563. This is more impressive than it sounds for during the same period the baptism and burial registers show that in every decade, except the 1590s, burials ran well ahead of baptisms, and for any growth to occur at all there had to be a high level of immigration into the town. The low-lying marshy fenlands that surrounded the town were notoriously unhealthy, and its inhabitants were especially prone to ague fever, or malaria as it is known today. The parish registers show that between 1560 and 1598 there were 946 more burials than baptisms. To achieve the slight increase in population that seems to have occurred during Elizabeth’s reign, there must have been a net immigration of about 1,200 persons. Unfortunately, many were desperately poor and therefore unwelcome, unless they could find work and keep themselves and their families, which many could not.¹⁵

The mortality figures for the town were especially high in the 1580s, when, after a long absence, plague returned to Boston. The first victim was reported in 1585, when the corporation gave orders that Thomas Preston and his family must be ‘shut up’ in their house, as directed by the Plague Orders. This seems to have been effective, for the mortality rates for 1585 and 1586 were not exceptionally high, but in 1587 the plague returned with a vengeance and 355 burials were recorded that year, compared to an annual average of only eighty-seven in the previous decade. The population had little resistance. Harvest failure in 1586 meant that the winter of 1586–87 and the subsequent spring was an especially miserable time for the poor, whose lives were, even in good years, precariously balanced on the edge of subsistence. The Assembly minutes refer to this time as ‘the greate dearthe and harde yere’. During the first seven months of 1587 the number of burials remained unremarkable, with just eleven in July, but the plague was already sweeping through the town and in the next few weeks the number of deaths suddenly leapt. By the end of August the vicar had buried sixty-six of his parishioners, and in September the number went on rising. By the end of that month another seventy-six had died; two or three every day. It could be hoped that colder weather would bring some relief, but there were another sixty-one burials in October, and only in November did the disease begin to relent, with twenty-nine burials recorded. The numbers went on falling through the winter, but as spring returned, so too did the disease-bearing fleas, and the death toll mounted again, reaching a peak in April 1588, when forty-five were buried. After this the mortality rate began to fall and by October the disease had left the town: the numbers of burials per month were back to single figures. However, during these terrible two years almost 600 people had died; about two-thirds as a result of the plague. Whole families had been destroyed. Six members of the Bedience family died within seven weeks; five of the Blackamores were buried between August and October 1587; five of the Tupholme family followed each other into the grave in June and July 1588, and among the last victims were four of the Gibson family and three Rothwells, all succumbing in August 1588.¹⁶

In 1586, the corporation opened a ‘pest house’ on the edge of the town, standing in two acres of pastureland. This seemed to many a more humane approach than ‘shutting in’, which condemned many otherwise healthy family members to a painful death, and when the plague returned in 1587 the corporation opened more ‘pest houses’ in St John’s Row, at the southernmost edge of the town, close to the derelict and partially demolished church of St John. The number and frequency of deaths was so great in 1587–88, however, that some families continued to be ‘shut in’.

Although the greatest number of victims were poor, the disease was no respecter of one’s rank or station, and among those confined to their house in 1587 was the mayor himself, Thomas Gresby. The rats and fleas that carried the disease were to be found almost everywhere in the town and therefore no one was safe. Neither the causes of the disease, nor its means of transmission, were understood. Many saw it as God’s punishment for a sinful world, or as a consequence of planetary movements, and it was commonly believed to be carried in stinking air, known as miasma. Sales of rosemary and other herbs consequently always shot up whenever plague threatened, and in the seventeenth century tobacco smoking became popular among the poor as a relatively cheap means of keeping the infected air at bay.

Memories of the terrible years of the plague in the 1580s did not disappear quickly, although the town seems to have been free of the disease for many decades afterwards. In 1625, however, when news reached the town that there was an outbreak in London, the corporation immediately cancelled the St James’ Day Fair, which would normally have begun on 25 July. This would seem to have been a ‘false alarm’, and the town was also fortunate to escape in 1631, when the plague devastated Louth, just over 30 miles away to the north, but in 1636–7 mortality rates leapt again – by almost 50 per cent – following what proved to be the town’s last ‘visitation’. The fairs and markets were cancelled, and orders issued that pest houses must again be opened in parts of the town ‘where least recourse of people is used’, and watchmen were appointed to ensure that those affected were restrained from ‘goeinge abroad and keeping company with others yt bee sounde’. The corpse of anyone who died in the town had to be inspected before burial, and if they were found to be a plague victim, a red cross would be painted on the door of their house, and the rest of the family also prevented from ‘goeinge abroad’. Dogs and cats were thought to spread the disease and therefore had to be either ‘chayned or tyed upp’ or killed; the magistrates recommended hanging dogs. Any dogs found wandering the streets would be rounded up and killed, and their masters fined.

Once again, the parish registers tell many very sad tales of human suffering and the devastation of families. William Holderness, for instance, was already dying himself when he buried his son John on 8 August 1636, and his daughter Penelope two days later. He survived almost a fortnight longer and was buried on 22 August. John Kemp and his wife Mary both died on the same day, at the end of August, and were buried together, and Christopher Kemp followed two days later. August was the worst month, with sixty burials (there had only been four in July and only fifty in the first seven months of the year) but the mortality rate fell only slowly, with another forty-seven burials in September and twenty-five in October. Often it was the children who died and the parents who survived, especially if they had acquired a degree of immunity from earlier outbreaks. In September, for instance, the Pavin and Bones families each lost three of their children, although the parents seem to have survived. This was not the case for Robert and Maudlin Jackson, however, who were among the plague’s last victims. Between 13 November 1636 and 25 January 1637, eight members of the family died, including both parents.¹⁷

Boston was probably no dirtier than most other towns of comparable size, but it was common for huge piles of human and animal dung to be left piled up in the streets; even butchers’ offal would be left on the streets for some days before it was removed. During the summer the stench must have been appalling. The great piles of filth that were allowed to accumulate were eventually removed by men known as scavengers, who made a living scraping up the muck and carting it out of the town to sell to local farmers, but their visits were not always frequent or regular. Many households were tempted to tip their waste either into the Haven, or, if it was closer, into the Barditch. The corporation’s orders for the cleansing of the Barditch, made in the 1560s, suggest that by this time it had become virtually a rubbish tip, almost completely blocked up with the waste and filth deposited in it. From May 1567, everyone whose house or house plot abutted the Barditch was ordered to: ‘scour and carry away the manure or filth before Trinity Sunday next. One side is to scour and the other to carry away, on pain of a fine of 12 pence per foot.’

Those who dumped their household waste into the Haven could expect either a fine or imprisonment in the town gaol, depending on their social position. In August 1564, an order was agreed, ‘forbidding the inhabitants to throw anything into the Haven, above or below the bridge, on pain of 3s 4d fine on the house holde for each offence and three days imprisonment for servants’. Three years later the order was repeated, but servants were now also threatened with a spell in the stocks during their imprisonment.¹⁸

In February 1613 the corporation made some attempt to improve sanitation in the town by specifying four places where ‘all the dirt & filthe sweepings of the street and houses & Myddyn made by any within this Towne shalbe layde’. Those living along Bargate were ordered to take their waste to ‘the horse pitt usuallye used for that purpose’; those on Butchers’ Row, near the churchyard or in Wormgate were to use the dunghill by Dipple Gowt; anyone living on the west side of the river had to either hire a scavenger or take it to a dung hill on the north-western edge of the town, close to the town gibbet (or ‘Jebbitt’ as the minutes spell it). Those living at the southern end of the town were simply told to remove their filth to ‘a place beyonde the Stillyardes’, but householders in the Market Place had no dunghill allowed them at all; instead they had ‘to keep it in their houses & to provide at their Chardges a schavenger to come twice a Weeke or oftener if need be to carrye it away’. For the next twenty years the minutes make no further mention of this problem, but in 1633 the corporation appointed its own scavengers for the first time. Two men were appointed to the task and each given a red coat as their official uniform.¹⁹

As in many other towns, poverty was a growing social problem in Boston from the mid-sixteenth century, exacerbated by the high level of immigration of poor country people from nearby villages. The problem is first mentioned in the corporation’s minutes in January 1568, when it was agreed that the aldermen and councillors should all contribute to a fund which could be used to put the poor to work, and three of the Assembly members agreed to act as overseers. Many of the town’s poorest inhabitants were, of course, the very young or those too old to be set to work. In December 1570 it was therefore decided that the corporation needed to know who could be expected to work and who could not. Three aldermen and two of the councillors agreed to form a committee which would carry out a survey of the town’s poor and report back. Those deemed ‘ympotent’ would be given relief and a certificate which they could show to the overseers as proof that they were deemed eligible, but the rest could be ‘sent to labor’.²⁰

The corporation’s control of the parish and the finances of the church meant that it was responsible for appointing overseers of the poor, using powers granted by successive Tudor Poor Law legislation. It could also raise a special rate to meet the costs of poor relief and this seems to have been first levied early in the 1570s. In November 1571 the corporation agreed that:

… the names of all suche persons as be wilfull and obstinate in gevyng their charitie toward the releif of the poore in Boston shalbe certefied to the Bysshop or to his ordinarie of the Diocese of Lincoln declarying their untowardness …

Further measures would then be taken ‘accordyng to the statute’.²¹

In years of high grain prices, following bad harvests, the corporation sought to mitigate the sufferings for the poor by accumulating a grain store which it could then dip into and sell grain at a reduced price. This was first begun in 1573, when 120 quarters of barley and 60 quarters of rye were purchased; the poor were not expected to eat wheaten bread. A few years later it also began to accumulate a coal stock for the poor, so that even the poorest could heat their homes in winter. The beneficiaries of this charity were mainly the elderly, deemed too sick or old to be made to work. For the able-bodied who were unfortunate enough to be without work, however, there was less sympathy. In 1578 a house belonging to the church was converted into a House of Correction, where those judged to be vagrants and idle beggars could be both punished and set to work, and in 1595 a children’s workhouse was opened in an old building in Spain Lane. Twenty ‘poore boyes and maydens’, many of them orphans, were to be kept here and taught ‘spinning and workin of Gernsey worke’. Like similar institutions across the country, this would soon become known as the Jersey School in honour of the other Channel Island where the idea was thought to have come from.²²

The last twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign was a dreadful period for the poor. The plague was accompanied by harvest failure, and there then followed a whole series of poor harvests, in which grain prices were driven up to famine levels. During the plague years of the 1580s a series of special assessments and collections had to be organised by the corporation to finance the running of ‘pest houses’, and to give food, medicines and other assistance to the victims shut up in their houses and cottages. During the years of ‘dearth’ that followed in the 1590s the corporation’s grain store had to be restocked with grain brought from Hull. The first decade of the new century brought better weather and better harvests, but when corn prices leapt again, in 1615, the corporation was able to help at least some of the poor by selling rye at a reduced rate.²³

Begging and idleness were always to be discouraged. In 1601 it was agreed by the corporation that beggars could be set to work in a corn mill so that they would not ‘bestowe theire tymes idelie’, and during the next thirty years there are constant references in the corporation minutes to various sums of money being expended by the overseers in setting the poor to work, both children and adults. In 1611 ‘widdow Stevenson’ was paid 40s to ‘set upon worke such poore Children as shalbe sent unto her by the Maior and Justices’. In June 1614, £4 0s 4d was paid to one of the bailiffs ‘for diverse necessarye things about the Jersey Schoole and other needful things aboute the poore’. In 1616 the corporation authorised the purchase of more bedding for the Jersey School, and hard winters and high food prices between 1615 and 1617 seem to have increased the numbers kept in both the Jersey School and the House of Correction. In May 1617, £100 was lent ‘for the running of the Jersey School’, £50 for the ‘Jersey man’ and £50 for the man in charge of hemp dressing, and in the following year another £40 had to be spent buying wool for the children to spin and knit.

It was hoped that both institutions could be made self-financing, and expenditure on both the Jersey School and the House of Correction was usually described as a ‘loan’. There is no indication, however, that this was ever the case, and nor was it the principal object. The corporation of Boston was much more concerned about maintaining public order and teaching the young good habits. In May 1619 it was reported that Huggs, the man appointed to manage both the Jersey School and the House of Correction, had suddenly ‘departed’ and as a result, ‘the poore ffit to be sett on worke doe nowe wander abroade, and idle and unrulie persons doe growe more insolent and dissolute than formerly they did’. All agreed that it was essential that both should be properly re-established, that neither children nor adults should be idle, and that ‘incorregeable and sturdie persons within the Wapontake of Skirbeck … shalbe received into the House of Correccion at Boston there to be dealt wth and keept accordinge to the Statute’. Two members of the corporation were sent to Norwich to find a man with the right experience to ‘keepe the Jersey Schole’ and a William Ustenson was soon appointed. But in the following May the corporation was still hoping to appoint ‘a Maister of the house of Correccion and allsoe for some to instruct poore children in knyttinge and spinninge at the Jersey School and … other needful things about the same as that vagrants and idle persons may be putt and the poore sett to work’. It would seem that by this time both institutions were being kept in the same building, in Spain Lane.²⁴

A few of the town’s elderly poor were housed at this time by the corporation in an almshouse in Skirbeck, known as the St Leonard’s Hospital, and bread, small quantities of money, coal and clothing were handed out, particularly at Christmas, the expenditure being financed by numerous charitable gifts of land and money given for this purpose in earlier years. The corporation was also often willing to remit the fee for a craftsman or shop keeper applying to become a freeman of the town if he was willing to take a pauper child as an apprentice, and tenants of the corporation might be offered a reduced rent if they agreed to give a home to an orphaned child who would otherwise be placed in the Jersey School. Former members of the corporation, and the children and grandchildren of former members, could also apply for some financial assistance if they had fallen on hard times; they were usually treated generously.²⁵

A persistent problem for the town – or an ‘inconvenience’, to use the words of the town clerk – was the large numbers of very poor people, living on the edge of subsistence, who came to the town from surrounding villages looking for work and then became ‘chargeable’ on the parish when they could not maintain themselves or their families. This was especially a problem in winter, when there was little work to be had on the land. In December 1632 the Assembly minutes noted that ‘from time to time this Towne is charged & burthened by the secret comeing in of poore people out of their Townes into this Towne to dwell’. Such poor and desperate people, it was agreed, had to be found and driven out. The town was divided into five wards, and in each ward at least two aldermen agreed to be responsible for the regular inspection.²⁶

Puritanism, John Cotton and America

The Assembly minutes dating from the five years of Mary Tudor’s reign (1553–58) suggest that at this date the corporation’s main concern was that the outward performance of religion should be an expression of corporate unity, as it had been in the earlier years of the century, and before. In May, 1558 the corporation resolved that:

… all the aldermen of this borrowe shall at all tymes in the churche sitt in Our Lady’s quere with the maior, or in the high quere on pryncipall feastes when the maior shall sett ther, upon such paynes as in the howse shall be sett and taxed. And all the comen councell of this towne to sit in the church in St Peter’s quere, on the north side thereof every holyday from tyme to tyme on payne as aforesaide, and so none of the howse to walke in the churche to the ill example of others.²⁷

The impression given by the minutes is of a corporation keen to demonstrate its unity and its loyalty to the Crown, whatever the colour of its religion. During the next twenty years, however, the corporation became an increasingly puritan Protestant organisation, deeply concerned to promote and protect what it saw as godly religion and the godly life of the inhabitants of the town.

We have seen that the first seeds of this movement towards Puritanism in the town were evident in the latter years of Henry VIII’s reign, and they were much encouraged during Edward VI’s reign. They may not have lain entirely dormant, however, during the years of Mary’s rule. It is quite possible that Protestant services in English continued in secret, as they did in Coventry and some other towns. One who may have conducted such services in Mary’s reign, and who was certainly preaching in the town from the time of Elizabeth’s accession, was the Protestant minister Melchior Smith. In November 1561, Smith left Boston to take up the appointment of vicar of Holy Trinity in Hull, and he later told the High Commission court, which was investigating complaints about his Puritanism, that he had been maintained in Boston by a Protestant congregation whose ‘love was suche towards him that willinglie they wolde here none preache but this respondent’. He had been maintained by the congregation’s voluntary contributions, some of whom must have been among the town’s wealthier inhabitants, for Smith claimed that some had contributed as much as £5 per year, ‘and somme more and somme lesse according to their abilities’.

Evidence of townsmen embracing Puritan religious views is also to be found in many of the wills made by Boston men and women from quite early in Elizabeth’s reign. The first very clear Calvinistic preamble to a will, which was later copied by others, dates from December 1560, when the butcher, William Moore, began his will by leaving his soul to Almighty God, his Father, hoping by the merits and death of his Saviour, Jesus Christ, to be of the number of those elected to perpetual salvation. A few years later, other townsmen were asking for sermons to be said at their funerals, and left money to pay for them.

The first evidence of the corporation’s sympathy for such views came in 1568 when one of the aldermen, Henry Foxe, who was very probably a relative of the martyrologist, left money in his will to finance the post of mayor’s chaplain, or borough lecturer. In the same year the corporation carried out his wishes by appointing James Kay as the first lecturer ‘to serve the maior and burgesses in preaching and otherwise’. He was to have £10 per year, plus his meat and drink at the mayor’s table.²⁸

By the 1570s the corporation seems to have come to the view that it had moral and religious responsibilities for the town that went beyond its control over the appointment of the vicar and lecturer, and responsibility for the fabric of the church. A desire to use its judicial powers to raise the moral standards of the town are seen in one of the clauses it had inserted into the charter granted by Elizabeth in 1573. One clause gave the corporation the power to punish ‘all whoremongers, whores, bawds, panders, and procurers, and all others whatsoever, living lasciviously and incontinently; and also all persons dishonestly and maliciously railing uponne every light occasion, which … are commonly called scolds’.²⁹

The loss of the court records mean that we cannot know how serious a problem prostitution was in the town, or how effectively or vigorously the justices strove to combat it. However, the corporation soon had an opportunity to further demonstrate its wish to raise moral standards by condemning and fining one of its own aldermen for adultery. In January 1574, Alderman Christopher Awdley appeared before the Assembly to confess his sinful behaviour, ‘most odious before God and also so shamefull in this worlde to the discredet of this howse’.³⁰

The growing influence of Puritanism in the 1570s can also be seen in the corporation’s changing attitude to the theatre. In May 1567 it had agreed to pay the schoolmaster 8s for the cost of putting on a play, and 10s for the visit to the town of the Cambridge ‘wates’ (musicians employed by the Cambridge burgesses), but in 1578 it took the decision to prohibit the performance of all plays or interludes (short dramas or pieces of music) in the church, the town hall or the schoolhouse.

The corporation’s belief, instead, in the value of sermons was demonstrated two years later in 1580, when it agreed to extend the role of the borough lecturer. Up to this time he had been required only to preach a sermon at the burial of all aldermen, common councillors, and their wives. From now on, however, he also had to preach one Friday in each month and every Friday in Lent.³¹

During the 1580s and 1590s, the corporation also used its position as rector of the parish church to appoint, and then protect, as far as it could, puritanical Protestant clergy who might fall foul of the High Commission, which – following the Queen’s directions – did not share its enthusiasm for Puritanism. In 1583, the vicar, James Worship, had to appear before the High Commission, but refused to concede that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to the word of God, and was subsequently suspended. However, he continued to be paid and supported by the corporation, and in 1590, when he was again in trouble with the High Commission for having taken down the loft in the parish church where the great organ had formerly stood, the corporation again refused to dismiss him. At the time of his death in 1592, he was still the vicar of St Botolph’s.³²

Boston has been described, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as ‘a Puritan stronghold’. The majority of the corporation remained determined to defend its ‘godly preachers’, and did so, in spite of James I’s well-known dislike of Puritans. At the beginning of his reign the Boston vicar, Thomas Wooll, was summoned before the Bishop of Lincoln’s officials ‘for not wearinge the surplis nor signinge with the signe of the crosse in baptisme’. When Bishop Chaderton’s officials conducted a visitation, in the summer of 1604, they received short shrift from Wooll. ‘The surplis hath bene tendred him’, they reported, but ‘he in scorne thereof, as it seemeth, maketh it his cushion to sitt on.’ The bishop, however, was reluctant to act against Wooll or any other Puritan clergy in his diocese. Wooll was only one of sixty-one ministers reported in 1604 for refusing to wear the surplice, or for their omission of ceremonies enjoined by the Book of Common Prayer. The king was keen for Chaderton to take a firm line against them, but in the end only one, Alexander Cooke of Louth, was ultimately deprived of his living. Chaderton had no wish to purge his diocese of ‘men of great learning’ or to confront determined patrons, whether they were town corporations or Lincolnshire gentry. Once government pressure was relaxed, in 1605, the bishop was happy to turn a blind eye to such nonconformity, and his successors, for the next twenty years, followed a similar policy of toleration and official connivance.³³

The corporation found, however, that a little bribery could also be very helpful. When it chose to present the 27-year-old Revd John Cotton as Wooll’s successor to the incumbency in 1612, Bishop William Barlow at first considered refusing to institute Cotton on the grounds that he was too young ‘to be over such a numerous and such a factious people’. He changed his mind, however, after Cotton’s supporters on the corporation had had words with one of his officials, Simon Biby, whose well-earned nickname, ‘Simony and Bribery’, fully explains the success of their intervention. Cotton, as the corporation probably already knew, held similar views to those of his predecessor, and, like Wooll, he also benefitted from the combination of a pliant diocesan establishment and enthusiastic support in the town, among both the corporation and his parishioners generally. In 1616, he was charged with nonconformity but escaped censure through the efforts of Alderman Thomas Leverett, ‘a plain man … yet piously subtile to get such a spiritual blessing’ who ‘so far insinuated himself into one of the proctors of that high court, that Mr Cotton was treated by them as if he were a conformable man’.³⁴

Under Cotton’s leadership, Boston became a little island of Puritan nonconformity. Cotton would not accept any ceremonies not specifically instituted by Christ himself, and it would seem that the majority of his parishioners were happy to follow his lead. Ceremonies, including kneeling, were abandoned, and Cotton devised his own catechism and orders of service, rather than those set out in the Book of Common Prayer. He also had the medieval stained-glass windows, with their biblical scenes, taken out and replaced with plain glass; the elaborately carved stone font cover was replaced with a piece of black wood ‘in the likeness of a pott lid’, and he encouraged some of his most zealous followers to organise iconoclastic raiding parties on the church on ‘darke winter nights’ to destroy medieval statues. According to Revd Robert Sanderson, the minister of Boothby Pagnell, the goings-on at Boston were the talk of ‘all the country far and near’, but until 1621, Cotton remained undisturbed by the diocesan authorities, and would probably have remained so if his zealous followers had not gone too far and hacked off the crosses on the royal arms on the mayoral mace. Even now, however, the bishop, George Mountain, refused to take any decisive action. Cotton was suspended but told that he would be restored ‘upon once kneeling at Sacrament with him the next Lord’s Day after’. Cotton refused the offer but the bishop did not carry through with his threat. Cotton was restored to Boston without any promise of conformity, and continued to ‘enjoy rest’ there until 1632, when he – and all other determined Puritan ministers – found himself confronted not with a tolerant and pliable bishop, but rather by the utterly implacable Archbishop Laud, who would tolerate no Puritans in the Anglican Church.³⁵

Bishop Williams of Lincoln, like Mountain and Chaderton, had a great respect for the abilities, dedication and learning of men like Cotton, and believed that it was better to engage them in argument, in the hope of modifying their position, rather than to drive them out. In January 1625, Cotton wrote to Williams, ‘My Honourable and very good Lord’, thanking him for recognising that his ‘forbearance of the ceremonies was not from wilful refusal of conformity, but for some … scruple in conscience’ and for allowing him time to consider his position further, and he ended his letter by asking for yet more time, which Williams was happy to allow. Perhaps in gratitude for Williams’ toleration of Boston’s nonconformity, and in the hope of maintaining his tacit support, the corporation consistently chose to support Williams’ nominees to represent the town at Westminster. For three elections in a row in the 1620s the corporation secured the election of one of Williams’ nominees for one of the borough’s two seats, rather than ‘two of their owne free men now dwellinge amongst them’. They would also have done so again, in 1628, had they not been prevented by the great popularity of a local gentleman, Sir Anthony Irby, who had to be chosen instead, having recently become something of a hero in the town because of his opposition to the king’s demand for a forced loan, for which he had served a brief spell of imprisonment.³⁶

In 1632 the Court of Ecclesiastical High Commission received a complaint that some of the leading citizens of Boston were taking communion without kneeling. Archbishop Laud saw this as an opportunity to strike against Cotton, bypassing the authority of the obstreperous Williams. The informant was therefore persuaded to implicate Cotton, who was then summoned before the court. Cotton had powerful friends, including the Earl of Dorset, who had been so moved by one of Cotton’s sermons that he had resolved to abandon ‘certain past times on the Lord’s Day’. Even such friends could not dissuade the determined archbishop, however, and when it was clear that he was to be deprived of his living and prosecuted, Cotton, together with a group of his parishioners, chose to leave the country and sail for New England. Among those who left Boston with him in May 1633 were two of the town’s aldermen and their families, Atherton Hough and Thomas Leverett, the same gentleman who had been so helpful to Cotton seventeen years earlier. They were not the first group of Boston puritans to leave for the New World. A large party of Cotton’s friends and parishioners had left in 1629, some of whom were to be among the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Nor were they to be the last. Altogether, about 250 of Boston’s most able and best-educated citizens left to seek a new life in the New World in the 1620s and 1630s.³⁷

When Cotton left Boston he travelled first to London, where he adopted a false name, fearing arrest by the Court of High Commission, and then, with his wife, who was heavily pregnant with their first child, he and his other companions escaped the country in July by taking a ship for the New World from the Sussex coast, eluding the officers of the court who were seeking him. He arrived in New England early in September, at a small settlement that the native people called Shawmut, but which the first European settlers had called Trimountain, owing to the view of three hills. Just over a month later, on 15 October, he was ordained into the colony’s church and given the title ‘teacher’. The first church building was a small and simple wood and thatch hut, a striking contrast to St Botolph’s. He was to rapidly become the dominant figure in the little settlement, whose name was changed to Boston during his lifetime, partly in his honour, and in 1641 he was to play a key role in drafting the code of laws and constitution of the colony.³⁸

Shortly before he left Boston (in England) in 1633, he wrote a final letter to Bishop Williams, thanking him for the concern, respect and patience he had shown him over many years while they had discussed their differences regarding the ceremonies required by the Book of Common Prayer, and he expressed his own respect ‘for other men’s judgement and learning and wisdom and piety’, even if he could not agree with them. This respect for the views of others, however, was not in evidence in the new Boston of New England. Cotton, and his fellow minister in the new Boston, Revd John Wilson, were quite convinced that they were creating ‘God’s institutions’ and not ‘men’s inventions’ (as they dismissed the Church of England) and were, therefore, entirely justified in persecuting and punishing any settlers who failed to accept their authority or their interpretation of the Scriptures. As a devout Calvinist, Cotton consciously set out to recreate in the new Boston the theocracy that John Calvin had established in Geneva 100 years earlier; what his fellow Calvinist, John Knox, had seen as ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on Earth’. Consequently, those who held a different view, and dared to express it, could expect harsh treatment: to be handed over to the local magistrates with Cotton’s recommendations to be fined, whipped, or imprisoned.³⁹

Although Cotton had come to dominate the town by 1633, and for twenty years had the support of a majority of the corporation, there remained many in Boston – and the corporation – who did not share his particular puritanical brand of Protestantism, and who welcomed (and indeed may have instigated) the action finally brought against him by the Court of Ecclesiastical High Commission. The leader of this movement in the town for most of the time of Cotton’s incumbency was a highly respected local doctor, Dr Peter Baron, who had settled in the town in about 1606, when he had paid £5 to become a freeman of the borough. His father had been Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge but he had been forced to resign his position at the university owing to his Arminianism, that is, his rejection of the mainstream Puritan and Calvinistic belief in predestination. The son shared his father’s views and, as Cotton himself later admitted, by the time of his own arrival in the town in 1612, Baron had established a considerable following in Boston. As well as his intellectual abilities and his skill as a doctor of medicine, Baron also had to recommend him the advantage of powerful support in the form of the town’s Recorder, Thomas Cecil, Earl of Exeter. His religious views, however, made him a controversial and divisive figure in Boston, with many enemies among the Puritans on both the Common Council and among the bench of aldermen. But his supporters in the town ensured that he was soon a member of the corporation, and with the Earl of Exeter’s support he was elected an alderman in 1609 (at the same meeting at which he became a common councillor) and mayor in 1610. One of his achievements as mayor, but one that proved very short-lived, was to persuade his fellow aldermen and councilmen to agree to convert the room over the south porch of the church into a library. His initiative, however, at first came to nothing. When Cotton arrived in the town two years later he quickly set out to reduce Baron’s influence in the town and consequently had no interest in promoting Baron’s library. He instead used the room as a petty school in which to prepare young children for the Grammar School, and no more would be heard of the library until after Cotton had left the town in 1633.⁴⁰

John Cotton’s first church in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1633.

Dr Baron remained a prominent and active figure on the corporation until his death in 1631, but his influence waned as Cotton’s star rose, and it is impossible to know how many shared his religious opinions at the time of his death. It is probably significant, however, that his family remained important figures in Boston society throughout the 1620s and 1630s. His elder son, Peter, became a magistrate but died in 1630, and his second son, Andrew, became the comptroller of customs at the port, a position in the gift of the Earl of Exeter. On his death it passed to Andrew’s son-in-law, George Slee, who retained his position as comptroller after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and may also have shared the family’s religious views.⁴¹

The porch of St Botolph’s church.

It is a myth – still commonly believed – that the Pilgrim Fathers, who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower in 1620, sailed from Boston, or included Boston men and women in their number. Their link with the town was simply that some of the Pilgrim Fathers, including two leading figures, William Brewster and William Bradford, were arrested in the port thirteen years earlier, while attempting to leave the country illegally to make a new life in the Netherlands. They were briefly imprisoned in the town, probably at first in the little cells in the basement of the Guildhall, while they waited to be dealt with by the magistrates, and then for a few months in the town gaol, which stood in the Market Place, close to the church.⁴²

The Grammar School

The growing Puritanism of the corporation during the latter half of the sixteenth century was entirely consistent with an increased concern in improving the educational facilities of the town. By the 1560s it was felt that the house in Wormgate, which was then being used as a school, was no longer adequate. The school had grown since its re-establishment under the grant of former guild properties by Queen Mary and it was decided in 1567 to erect a new schoolhouse, at a cost of £195 0s 11d, close to the site of the old manor house, in the Mart Yard. Part of the original building still stands today: a symmetrical small brick building, with a stone parapet and battlements, and its date stone of 1567.

It was also agreed that year that a second master, or usher, was now needed too, and the rentals of some of the corporation’s properties were set aside to pay his salary. Neither master nor usher were treated generously however; in the 1570s and 1580s it would seem that the mayor’s chaplain was expected to serve also as the usher without any extra fee, and in 1596 the usher, James Henry, was receiving only £3 a year as his salary, even though he was a Bachelor of Arts. The usher would normally teach the younger boys, and the master the older ones, and the latter were taught Greek as well as Latin. In 1601 the corporation bought both Greek and Latin dictionaries for the school.

The house in Wormgate which was being used as a Grammar School until 1567.

During Cotton’s incumbency he effectively gained control of appointments to the Grammar School and managed to ensure that the posts of both master and usher were filled by a succession of young Puritan graduates, keen to encourage Puritan ethics in the minds of their pupils. Most were graduates of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, whose master – John Preston – was a close friend of Cotton’s. Under Preston’s mastership, the college was described as ‘a nursery of Puritans’, and much the same could be said of Boston Grammar School. At least one of the schoolmasters in this period, Thomas James, was among one of the first groups of Boston Puritans to sail for New England, shortly before Cotton’s own departure.

The Grammar School, erected in 1567, as it appeared in 1850. It is still used by the school today.

The master may have at first continued to live at the house in Wormgate, but in 1628 he was reported to be renting a house next to the school ‘in the school yard’. Between 1613 and 1620 the school was served by a succession of five different masters. In spite of Cotton’s patronage and connections, it could prove difficult to find suitable candidates and, in 1631, two of the aldermen had to be sent to Lincoln and Cambridge in search of someone to fill the vacancy after the departure of Samuel Winter, Cotton’s latest protégé. It would seem that both masters and ushers were expected to augment their incomes with ‘perquisites’ and private tuition. In 1637, an additional £5 was paid to the master, George Atkinson, ‘on account of his perquisites having been diminished through the prevalence of the plague’. Atkinson would seem to have been a popular choice with the corporation, and may have been treated more generously than most of his predecessors. Twice in 1637 he was awarded an extra £5 because of the plague, and on his death, in 1639, his widow was granted £4, ‘in regard shee is now very poore and hath a great charge of children’. Three of Atkinson’s pupils were among the first to go up to Cambridge since the school had moved to its new site in 1567.⁴³