Recorded Illegitimacy in Lowestoft (1561-1730)

The one thing missing from F.A. Crisp’s printed versions of the Lowestoft Parish Registers (1902) is any reference to the baptisms or burials of any infants born out of wedlock. Yet, such entries are there from the very first year of the first surviving register book: 1561. The best guess as to why this is so is probably to be found in attitudes of the time regarding illegitimacy being widely seen as a social disgrace, together with the more practical matter of who was to be responsible for the raising of the child – if it survived. The latter consideration was probably even more of an issue during the Early Modern period, particularly after the Poor Law Act of 1601 had laid down the foundations of how those in need were to be looked after and how it was to be financed from local resources raised by taxation on those able to pay.

The table below presents the information which is there to be found in the parish registers, with the word bastard used as the standard term of the time – either in full form or in abbreviated versions. Various theories have been put forward as to the origins of the word, but there is no general agreement as to which is the correct one. And that’s about as much as can be said in the matter. The expression base born is also encountered, sounding perhaps not as blunt and direct as bastard and being also easier to arrive at an explanation of origins. With “base” having the meaning of the bottom of an object or structure, it becomes easy to apply the description in social terms to any child born outside the institution of marriage. Particularly in the lower echelons of society where money was usually in short supply and hard to come by. This, by contrast with the wealthier levels, where access to cash could be used to make some kind of financial reparation for indulging in the sins of the flesh. And the word base would also have applied in a moral sense to the contributive acts of fornication or adultery which had led to the birth of an infant.

Also to be found in the Remarks column is use of the abbreviations “B” and “BB”, which can probably be safely interpreted as standing for “Bastard” and “Base Born”. It was mainly a matter of which method of recording illegitimacy was adopted by the various parish clerks who fulfilled this particular role, over the years. But recorded it was. And not only for logging acts of immorality (as they would have been seen at the time), but also for trying to monitor behaviour which would incur a financial cost of some kind for the people who had produced an illegitimate child. A consideration which (as referred to in the first paragraph) became a matter of social and legal concern after the passing of the 1601 Poor Law Act.

The layout of the table which follows should be more or less self-explanatory. It was created during the mid-1980s, at a time when this writer was transcribing the early St. Margaret’s Church parish registers and carrying out full family reconstitution of them for the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. The use of s. and d. in the third column represents abbreviation of “son”and “daughter”, to establish the gender of each child and also give a sense of the relationship between mother and offspring. A decision was made, at the time, to put the register entries into alphabetical order of surname (rather than leave them in the original date-sequence) for easier identification of the women whose children were recorded. And a further choice was made in preparing this article for the LO&N History pages – which was to use a word-processed single table of the parish register references to illegitimacy, rather than the  individual scans of four transcribed handwritten pages that formed the original method of recording the information.

List of Illegitimate & Possibly Illegitimate Children (1561-1730)

Explanatory notes

• Right into the 20th century, the burial of miscarried babies and stillborns in consecrated ground was not allowed under Church of England rules – though many liberally-minded clergy did not adhere to the “old ways”. 
• The same often applied to infants who died after being born and before their baptisms had taken place. One of the most evocative descriptions of this in English Literature occurs in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the Durbervilles (1891), Ch. 14, when her father refuses to send for the parish priest so that his daughter’s sick, illegitimate, baby son may be baptised. Tess then baptises the boy herself just after 1 a.m., with her younger siblings in attendance, and names him Sorrow. He dies just after dawn and Tess, later that day after dusk, goes to see the relatively new Vicar and asks him if her baptismal rite was as valid as one carried out by him. He is so impressed by her bearing that he replies in the affirmative – which then leads her to ask if the child can have a Christian burial in the churchyard, conducted by him? To which, the answer is no, as the rules didn’t allow it. She then asks the clergyman if a burial carried out by her would be the same as an official one, and is again told that it would. And so, the Sexton was bribed with payment of a shilling and a pint of beer to dig a grave in a neglected corner of the churchyard (to the north-east or north-west, most likely), where the remains of suicides and other unbaptised infants were placed – the ground to the south, east and west being the preferred parts of “God’s acre”.
• The last resting place of illegitimate children who had been properly baptised is far less easy to establish, as little or no specific information relating to it seems to be available. It is likely that part of a churchyard (that of St. Margaret’s being the case here) on the north side of the building was reserved for such burials.  
• Early baptism of infants, following birth, was usually practised, with the first or second Sundays being the favoured ones for the rite to be carried out. The risk of death following soon after death was relatively high in the Early Modern period and it was thought important to prevent a baby’s soul from going to Limbo and to save it for Heaven. But, it is no part of this article to discuss beliefs regarding the After-life, which were held in days gone by.
•  All register dates from 1 January to 24 March have had the year changed from Julian calendar format to its Gregorian replacement. The first example encountered is No. 8, with Edward Bently’s baptism date given as 17 January 1630, not 1629. Until reform of the calendar in England, on 14 September 1752, New Year’s Day had been 25 March – Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 
• The alphabetical order of surname in the table has one departure from this method of presentation (Nos. 125-8) where two variants of “Smith” (Smyth and Smeth) accompany two of the usual spellings – with all four of them following register date order.
• It will be noticed by readers by that only eight of the 149 children recorded have the names of the fathers referred to – with one of them (Samuel Barrett, brick-maker) identified as the parent of three of them by the same woman (Mary Kemp). Barrett was excommunicated from the Church for his misdemeanours, but must have made kind of atonement for his moral lapses because he was buried with all due ceremony (aged seventy) on 12 April 1721. At the time, people still under an order of excommunication were buried without any kind of service being held.
• The question of why so few of the fathers (six, in all) are named can not really be answered with any degree of accuracy. There may well have been an unwillingness (for various reasons) on the part of many of the women to reveal the identity of the men responsible for their pregnancies and it would not have been required to name them for the purposes of parish registration outside of legal marriage.
• The thirty-one register transactions indicated by asterisks as having no specific reference to illegitimacy (twenty-two burials, eight baptisms and one of both processes) were worked out from the exercise of full family reconstitution of the documentation as being those relating to children born out of wedlock.
• It is possible that at least some of the children who feature in burial entries only may have been born out of parish.
• There are nine cases of the mother not being named, but no specific reason can be given for this.
• Then there are the infants whose identity is not made known, either in part or in whole. There are eight cases, altogether: four with no forename and gender given, one with no forename for child or mother, one with no surname or mother’s forename, one with no surname, and one with no details at all concerning child or mother. Again, no reason can be given for these administrative lapses. In overall terms, the Lowestoft parish registers were extremely well organised and well kept. 

• 1561-1600 – 1909 baptisms: 37 bastards = 1.94%. 

                           17 other bastards recorded in burial entries only = 2.8% from 1926 births. 

• 1601-1700 – 4253 baptisms: 32 bastards = 0.75%.

                          14 other bastards recorded in burial entries only = 1.08% from 4267 births.

• (1601-50) – 2035 baptisms: 26 bastards = 1.28%.

                        7 other bastards recorded in burial entries only = 1.62% of 2042 births.

• (1651-1700) – 2218 baptisms: 7 bastards = 0.32%.

                            6 other bastards recorded in burial entries only = 0.58% of 2224 births.

• 1701-1730 – 1641 baptisms: 43 bastards = 2.62%.

                           6 other bastards recorded in burial entries only = 2.98% of 1647 births.

• The statistics above show that illegitimate births, as a percentage of live births as a whole, were much the same for the last four decades of the 16th century as for the first three decades of the 18th. The 17th century had a noticeably lower overall proportion, with its second half being very much lower than the first.
• No definitive reason can be given for this overall difference, but the economic, social and demographic decline that Lowestoft underwent during the first half of the century would have been a factor – particularly bearing in mind the two serious plague outbreaks of 1603 (310 fatalities) and 1635 (154 fatalities).
• The noticeable difference in the percentages for the first and second halves of the 17th century, with the latter being lower cannot be fully explained. But a certain degree of defective registration between 1640 and 1663, which was caused mainly by parochial upheavals resulting from the English Civil Wars, the Protectorate and Restoration of the Monarchy, may well have been a factor. 
• The percentage of illegitimate births in Lowestoft was a little lower than that identified in other parts of England during the later 16th century and for the whole of the 17th, but was much the same during the earlier decades of the 18th. It is difficult to say exactly why this was the case – but it has been suggested by some commentators (relating to England as as whole) that, as Poor Relief contributions increased in value, this may have relaxed some people’s attitude as to how illegitimate children were to be supported.
• There are forty cases, overall, where both baptism and burial are recorded: eleven for 1561-1600, thirteen for 1601-1700 and sixteen for 1701-1730. The variation in the length of life is considerable, from two days (Benjamin Middleton) to full adulthood of thirty-six years (Honor Poolye – an unmarried woman ). 
• The overall pattern for 1561-1600 is 5 days (boy), 7 days (girl), 9 days (girl), 18 days (boy), 25 days (boy), 33 days (girl), 7 months (girl), 11 months (boy), 11 months (girl), 9 years (girl) and 14 years (girl). The last two children died during the plague outbreak of 1603.
• The overall pattern for 1601-1700 is 3 days (girl), 4 days (boy), 5 days (girl), 6 days (girl), 2 months (boy), 3 months (girl), 3 months (boy), 3 months & 3 weeks (girl), 4 months (boy), 12 months (boy), 13 months (boy), 3 years (girl) and 36 years (girl). The twelve-month old boy died during the plague outbreak of 1635.
• The overall pattern for 1701-1730 is 2 days (boy), 4 days (girl), 5 days (boy), 8 days (girl), 15 days (boy), 17 days (boy), 2 months (boy), 2 months (girl), 2 months (boy), 3 months (boy), 6 months (girl), 17 months (girl), 21 months (girl), 5 years & 10 months (girl), 7 years (boy) and 10 years (boy).
• Twenty-five widows are recorded in the register transactions (16.8% of the total number of 149), but only three single women named as such (2%). There must have been many more who went unrecorded.
• One of the most interesting individual register entries is that of 2 August 1562 for the burial of John, son of Ellen Smith, which records that he had been baptised at home. There is no record of this, which means that it had either gone unrecorded  or perhaps that he had been born before the starting-date of the first surviving register book: 25 March 1561. The child was obviously in a very fragile state of health to be given home baptism, and so it is just possible that he was baptised and buried on the same day. 
• Each and every one of the register entries here has its own compelling story to tell, behind and beyond the mere statement of illegitimacy. But, occasionally, a good deal more background information is given. Another example is that of the nameless unbaptised child of Elizabeth Shepparde, whose gender is not stated and who was laid to rest on 21 September 1590. The mother had married John Boulton at some point after the birth, so perhaps he was the father.
• Then there is the case of Roose [Rose] Whitlofe’s twins, John and Margery, born outside of marriage to her husband Thomas – the baby boy being buried on 3 February 1570 and his sister baptised on the same day.
• Another case of a child being fathered by a man other than the wife’s husband is to be found on 13 February 1562, when the wife of John Hall had her illegitimate son John baptised with the same name as her husband. Exactly what lay behind that particular little family drama can only be guessed at.
• A further set of twins are detectable in the baptisms of Grace and Sara Neale on 18 June 1639 - the former of whom was buried over three years later on 17 August 1642.
• The baptism of Edward Sallers [Sallows] on 25.10.1698 records that his mother was named Mary Martin – the infant’s surname almost certainly being that of the father, with the mother probably giving that information.
• The baptism of John Sowell (20 May 1718) reveals that his mother, Alice, was deceased (probably during, or very shortly after, childbirth). He was buried on 6 June, with his age stated in the register as being three weeks. If this was accurate down to the day, it means that he had been born on 17 May.
• The case of Mary Wells (baptised on 21 May 1722) is not without interest, with her burial record of 9 February 1724 stating that her mother (also Mary) was now named Morgan. The latter’s marriage to Edward Morgan (innkeeper) had taken place on 22 October 1722, he being a widower and she a single woman. His wife had died during January 1719, her burial recorded on the 19th and her age given as fifty-three years. This means that Morgan himself was probably a lot older than his second wife and that he might well have been the father of the child.
• A particularly interesting pair of double entries relate to a woman named Elizabeth Helcoat, who had an illegitimate daughter baptised on 23 July 1722 and whose burial was recorded on 14 March 1724. The child bore the Hebrew name of Jerusha, mother of Zadok, High Priest of the Israelites (2 Kings, 15. 33.) and celebrated in Handel’s Coronation Anthem for George II. At some point, before her first child had died, she fell pregnant again with another girl – baptised on 28 July 1724 and also named Jerusha. The child lived longer than her predecessor, being buried on 21 May 1730 about two months short of her sixth birthday. If the second Jerusha’s birth was full term, she would have been conceived some time during November 1723 when the first one was about  twenty months old. How and why Elizabeth Helcoat should have chosen the name of Jerusha for her two daughters cannot begin to be understood.
• It will probably also be noted by readers that this woman went on to have have another illegitimate child, named John, who was baptised on 14 April 1727. Whether or not the same man was the father in all three cases can only be speculated upon, as the registers give no indication. 
• Most interesting of all the stories able to be created from the parish register entries is that deriving from the baptism of William Morris (2 December 1715). He was the child of Mary Morris, fathered outside her marriage to Samuel Morris, who was obviously in the Royal Navy and absent from home. An entry in the register says this: “Memdum [Memorandum] that Saml. Morris had been absent from Lowestoft two or three years or more, but having been wthin [sic] ye four Seas all ye Time, ye Justices of Peace said, That he must father ye child: Tho[ugh] in all likelihood It was a bastard.” The four seas referred to world have been the Atlantic Ocean, Irish Sea, English Channel and North Sea – probably indicating that Samuel Morris was on home duties of some kind rather than those in waters further removed. And this seems to have been the reason that local Justices of the Peace had placed the responsibility on him for bringing up a child that wasn’t his. A strange kind of reward, it would seem, for being in His Majesty’s Service in defence of the realm!
• That’s not the end of the story, either. Mary Morris had three further illegitimate children: Robert (baptised 28 March 1718 and buried 22 July 1725), Mary (no baptism date and buried 5 October 1719) and Henry (baptised 24 July 1724). This may have been during her husband’s continuing Naval service or it may have been the case that he had died while so engaged. There is no information, either way. Nor are there any details as to who fathered the children. 
• Other women who gave birth to more than one child out of wedlock were Elizabeth Carver (21 & 23), Elizabeth Cooke (28, 29 & 30, with lengthy intervals between – same woman, or not?), Elizabeth French (45 & 46), Margery Graye (51 & 52), Martha Jesup/Jyzep (66 & 67), Elizabeth Mayes (85 & 86 – lengthy interval between), Elizabeth Moore (91 & 92), Mary Newworke (99 & 100) and Jone Reed (113 & 114). 
• As a final comment, the compilation of the Lowestoft registers and the amount of detail given in the various entries was very much the result of how much information the individual vicars and their various parish clerks saw fit to give. There is a very good level of family relationship present throughout the whole period covered in this article (and in the three decades following), which was perhaps the thing most needed to be able to carry out a full family reconstitution of the records. And then, on top of this, there is also quite a high degree of occupational information attached to adult males (particularly in the burial entries) which enables greater understanding of the socio-economic structure of Lowestoft itself to be achieved. And finally, of course, there is the demographic content of the records which, when added to the other two elements, allows for detailed reconstruction of the community to be undertaken.

CREDIT: David Butcher