Stuart A. Raymond - Tracing Your Ancestors in County Records: A Guide for Family & Local Historians

FAMILY HISTORY FROM PEN & SWORD

Tracing Secret Service Ancestors

Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors from 1066 to 1837

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Death Records

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Family Photographs

Tracing Your Ancestors Using the Census

Tracing Your Ancestors Childhood

Tracing Your Ancestors Parish Records

Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors

Tracing Your Army Ancestors 2nd Edition

Tracing Your Birmingham Ancestors

Tracing Your Black Country Ancestors

Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors

Tracing Your Canal Ancestors

Tracing Your Channel Islands Ancestors

Tracing Your Coalmining Ancestors

Tracing Your Criminal Ancestors

Tracing Your East Anglian Ancestors

Tracing Your East End Ancestors

Tracing Your Edinburgh Ancestors

Tracing Your First World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Gallipoli Campaign

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Somme

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: Ypres

Tracing Your Huguenot Ancestors

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors

Tracing Your Labour Movement Ancestors

Tracing Your Lancashire Ancestors

Tracing Your Leeds Ancestors

Tracing Your Legal Ancestors

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors

Tracing Your London Ancestors

Tracing Your Medical Ancestors

Tracing Your Merchant Navy Ancestors

Tracing Your Naval Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Ancestors

Tracing Your Pauper Ancestors

Tracing Your Police Ancestors

Tracing Your Prisoner of War Ancestors: The First World War

Tracing Your Railway Ancestors

Tracing Your Royal Marine Ancestors

Tracing Your Rural Ancestors

Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors

Tracing Your Second World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Servant Ancestors

Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors

Tracing Your Shipbuilding Ancestors

Tracing Your Tank Ancestors

Tracing Your Textile Ancestors

Tracing Your Trade and Craftsmen Ancestors

Tracing Your Welsh Ancestors

Tracing Your West Country Ancestors

Tracing Your Yorkshire Ancestors

First published in Great Britain in 2016
PEN & SWORD FAMILY HISTORY
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street,
Barnsley
South Yorkshire,
S70 2AS

Copyright Stuart Raymond, 2016

ISBN: 978 1 47383 363 0
PDF ISBN: 978 1 47387 910 2
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47387 909 6
PRC ISBN: 978 1 47387 908 9

The right of Stuart Raymond to be identified as Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.

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CONTENTS

A box of Quarter Sessions documents. What might they tell you? (Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre)

INTRODUCTION

The lives of the plain English folk depicted in the records of Quarter Sessions and Assizes, are the fountain from which the crowd of Shakespeares characters is derived. Every one of his squires, constables, serving men, labourers, clowns, drunkards, and other picturesque villains have their real prototypes in the pages of these records. If history is about people, then anyone aspiring to study the history of ordinary English people needs to consult the Quarter Sessions order books, sessions rolls and other archives preserved in county record offices.

Many people who use these offices do not realise that their original purpose was to preserve the records of Quarter Sessions. Nor do they appreciate the extent of those records, the diverse information that can be found in them and the possibilities for research that they present. The aim of this book is primarily to provide a detailed handbook to English and Welsh Quarter Sessions records, to describe the background to the various different record series and to suggest how they might be used. The duties of Lord Lieutenants, Sheriffs, Assize judges and other county officers were intimately linked with Quarter Sessions, and their records will also be discussed (see ).

England was divided into shires, as the Anglo-Saxons called them, at an early date. The Normans called them counties. For administrative purposes, they were divided up into Hundreds (Wapentakes in the North, Rapes in Sussex, Lathes in Kent), which had their own officers. Hundreds consisted of a number of parishes, which also had their own officers. These were the areas over which Quarter Sessions and related authorities exercised their jurisdictions. In Wales, the shires were not created until 1536.

English Quarter Sessions began in the fourteenth century. Their archives do not generally survive before the sixteenth century, although some fourteenth-century records are in The National Archives. Most of the information in this book relates to the period between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The administrative functions of Quarter Sessions ended in 1888, when County Councils were created. The records of County Councils and other post-1888 local government institutions will not be dealt with here. Nor will the post-1888 judicial functions of Quarter Sessions, which continued to be exercised for almost another century. The Justice of the Peace, of course, continues to adjudicate today.

Justices of the Peace were also intimately linked with parish officers. The records of parish government have already been described in my Tracing Your Ancestors Parish Records: A Guide for Family and Local Historians (Pen & Sword, 2015), which should be read alongside the present volume.

This book also deals with the records of some other pre-1888 institutions of local government, such as turnpike trusts and commissioners for sewers. However, separate books would be needed to review the records of boroughs, and of Poor Law Unions. Many boroughs had their own Quarter Sessions and Justices of the Peace. Their activities were partially governed by borough charters, and will not be dealt with here. Nor will the various liberties such as Havering at Bower (Essex), the Isle of Ely (Cambridgeshire) and the Hundred of Launditch (Norfolk) which were exempt from the jurisdiction of county Quarter Sessions. The activities of Justices and other county officers in collecting national taxation will not be discussed in detail.