Stuart Marriot (Oct 2009)
Husthwaite penny loaves and the Coxwold school clock: George Potts and his charities
Early directories for the North Riding and for York diocese tell us that the poor people of Husthwaite once had the benefit of a bequest left by a certain George Potts. This amounted to an annuity of fifty-two shillings, from which loaves were provided week by week for villagers who were (so to speak) on the breadline. It turns out that there was a little more to Potts’s charitable activities, but who was he?
Whellan’s directory of 1859 totally confuses the topic by suggesting that he was a wool-merchant and built Woolpotts about 1840. As I have commented elsewhere, if the strange name of that farmhouse can be attributed to anyone it is to Thomas Potts, and he lived two hundreds years before that. And as it happens he was George Potts’s father.
Thomas Potts came from St Crux parish in the city of York and in 1616 married Mary Ross, a daughter of George Ross the lord of Husthwaite manor. The two of them settled in the village. In the manorial records Thomas appears as a ‘resient’, that is a recognised householder but without land of his own. Yet he was much more than a simple cottager, and was able to mix on equal terms with the men who presided over local society. In 1622 he was one of a party that hunted in Husthwaite Wood and illegally killed deer belonging to the king’s forest of Galtres. The list of his fellow offenders was a roll-call of local big-wigs, with no fewer than five lords of manors among them. Potts died at Husthwaite and was buried there in September 1651.
His son George, born at Husthwaite in the spring of 1621, was educated at the Coxwold grammar school. He was for a time owner of what is now Black Bull Cottage in Husthwaite; it was given to him by his grandmother Ann Ross, and he eventually surrendered it to his cousin William Ross. Young Potts had one brush with the authorities that found its way onto the record. In 1639 when he was about eighteen he was accused before the Husthwaite manor court of making an affray on Widow Atkinson. Since she was also reported for the like offence on him the score was even; no formal punishments were recorded, and it seems that the two were simply warned to behave themselves. Perhaps George should have known better: by this time he was marked out to be a lawyer and was about to go to York to train for the profession.
George Potts practised as a common-law attorney in London, and later again in York. He made a very expansive, somewhat autobiographical, will when he was in his mid-forties. The course of his career is hinted at in the bequests listed there. He mentioned lawyers of the Temple and Barnard’s Inn in London. He left money for a mourning ring to Robert Benson, clerk of the York assize court and almost certainly clerk to the special court that had tried George Denham of Baxby for treason just three years earlier. To Richard Potts, formerly his ‘servant’ (pupil or apprentice), went a number of personal items and the ‘president books’, which must have been collections of legal precedents.
Potts owned houses and land in the city of London, and at Easingwold, Bainton, and Escrick, all of which, he declared in his will, had been bought to provide security for his heirs. At the time the will was made he was unmarried and so without direct heir, and he gave instructions for the properties to be dispersed among members of the family. There were a number of smaller bequests. George Potts was a devout Anglican and left a generous sum of money to a friend’s house-servant in recognition of her refusal to be ‘drawn to the Romish Church though much wrought upon by her sister for that purpose’.
Another bequest was made in gratitude for his early education. He gave ‘to the Free Schoole of Coxwold where I was a scholler’ £10 for the purchase of a clock, on the understanding that it should ‘come not to private hands and not to public use’. A second limitation suggests that the gift was really intended as a small endowment, to extend the school’s charitable provision in favour of Husthwaite boys. The money was to be paid on condition that ‘all such poore people as goe from Husthwaite and were borne there, to the sayd Free Schoole, whose parents are not able to pay the M[aste]r or Usher for teaching shall goe free and pay nothing’.
George Potts also gave in perpetuity ‘to the poore of the parish of Husthwaite where I was borne’ fifty-two shillings a year. Weekly on Sundays each pauper in Husthwaite village was to have ‘a penny in money or one penny wheaten loafe’. Potts also thought of the situation in which the money might not all be spent: ‘if there be not soe many indigent people as I feare there are’, he added, ‘the people of Carleton which are poore may have a proportion thereof’. There is no evidence that anything was ever left over for distribution at Carlton Husthwaite.
This charity was supplied by an annual rent-charge on land called Nun Pallions at Escrick, near York. After Potts’s death the land passed to a cousin and then to a wealthy York merchant family called Thompson. In 1820, in the course of a complicated descent, a certain Lawley inherited the Escrick properties and became responsible for seeing that the rent-charge was paid. The land became his on condition that he changed his name to Thompson; then in 1839 he was made Baron Wenlock. Some confusion seems to have entered at this period. Lawton’s collection of ecclesiastical information for the diocese of York, first published in 1840, failed to note that Mr Thompson had become Lord Wenlock. White’s county directory published in the same year had all the details correct and also stated that the poor’s money continued to be paid by Lord Wenlock. And yet in 1897 the Charity Commissioners, delivering their report on the amalgamation of the Husthwaite parochial bequests, could write that the annuity had ceased to be paid by 1820. Whatever the truth of the matter, the amalgamation report ended the separate existence of George Potts’s charity. I do not suppose anyone knows what happened to the Coxwold school clock.
Notes
The Potts–Ross marriage is listed in Paver’s Marriage Licences, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 1909–12. The deer-hunting episode is referred to in G C Cowling, History of Easingwold and the Forest of Galtres, Huddersfield: Advertiser Press, [1968]. Entries on the Husthwaite court roll state that George Potts was a minor at Easter 1642, and imply that he had come of age by the following month. His will was written in February 1667; all quotations here are taken from a certified copy in the Wenlock papers, which is in handwriting of the later seventeenth century (Hull University Archives: DDFA/5/21). The Potts charity is listed in George Lawton, Collectio rerum ecclesiasticarum diocesi Eboracensi, London: Rivingtons, 1840; and White’s History, Gazetteer, and Directory, of the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire, Sheffield: William White, 1840. The Charities Commission amalgamation report of 1897 is cited in Victoria County History, North Riding Vol 2.