The Plague Arrives in Peterborough

This is the longer ramble of a shorter post on the Peterborough Women’s History Group blog here, which focussed on women during the plague. This post is where I delve into more of the wider context of the plague in Peterborough and consider where the pesthouse once was. Huge thanks must go to Gail Richardson (no relation) at Peterborough Archives who first pointed out the fascinating church accounts detailing every victim of the deadly virus and suggested I should investigate it.

The plague arrived in Peterborough in September 1665. The bringer of the great pestilence was a woman. She was a stranger who had travelled up from London and died in September 1665. It seems very likely that the woman who cared for this sick stranger in her final hours was Katherine Hambleton, for she was the first victim in Peterborough. All we know about her was that she was the wife of Cornelius Hambleton and that after her death a small cross was marked against her name in St John’s church register, a cross that would be scratched hundreds of times over the next couple of years.

OS Map of Newark, Near Peterborough, 1889

Interestingly, the plague didn’t first appear in the centre of town, where you might expect a weary traveller to arrive at an inn, but just north of the town. Although no location was given to the burial location of the unnamed woman, or indeed Mistress Hambleton, the disease spread to the woadgrounds and then on to Newark (the name is preserved in Newark Hill School). The woadgrounds was an area where people were growing woad plants to extract the vivid blue dye from them. (For more information see my earlier post 'Woad You Believe It'). It was smelly, dirty, backbreaking work and it’s possible that the woman had arrived to offer much needed support at harvest or processing time and was a temporary part of their small community. Alternatively, she was taken in by the transient community who were likely ostracised from the town due to the processing of woad, but who were happy to help a woman in need.

It should be no surprise that it was mainly women and children who died first. The key to these deaths, and to so many more, is that women provided (and still provide) the lion’s share of all caring work, be it tending to the sick, the elderly, or indeed their own children. The proximity of care and physical touch was what led to a higher rate of women dying than men: 58% or 266 of the recorded burials were women.

The Dance of Death

Another interesting factor, and part of the wider context of this outbreak of the plague, is that many people had died during the Civil Wars and in considerable numbers after them. We naturally think of the soldiers who were killed in combat, but war is more than the battles won and lost; the whole country was weakened by the events of war. Families found themselves in poverty, former soldiers were traumatised or injured: this was a particularly bad time for the plague to arrive.

There aren’t any specific figures for the number of Peterborough men who died in warfare during that period, but it is likely that a diminished male population contributed to the gender differences in the reported deaths with only 42% or 194 of the plague burials of males in the city. These figures are not large – Peterborough was a small market town in the 17^th century – but when we consider that the total population of the city was roughly 2,000 people then the female deaths alone represented around 13% of the population. Combined with the males, this gives a figure of 23% which is similar to the death rate elsewhere in the country.[1]

In addition to this, those with money, other properties, or family were able to move out of the city to nearby villages, country manors and safer towns. Peterborough Feoffees’ account books, which ran through the 17^th century, were notably blank during the plague. The feoffees were the cream of society, the men trusted to make important decisions on welfare and town improvements, but they did not remain in the city. None of them were on the list of the dead. None of their families were on the list of the dead.

However, the Feoffees had made an important decision in 1642 by agreeing to create a pesthouse in the city. Deadly infectious diseases were common until vaccinations were created, so a pesthouse – a building where those with infectious diseases could be isolated and cared for – was always going to be a sensible addition to any town or city. There are clues in the Feoffees’ accounts that tell us where it might have been. In 1646 a reference to the pesthouse was recorded when Widdow Tinkerson rented ‘two closes neare the Pesthouse in Westgate and a cottage’ and later to a ‘Pesthouse close’ situated at ‘Peterborough Westfield’ in 1683, approximately 13 years after it had been dismantled.[2] This doesn’t give us an exact location for the house, but a quick view of John Speed’s 1610 map of Peterborough does show us that Westgate finished roughly where Lincoln Road starts now, with fields and only a couple of cottages further west. 

A map of Peterborough is at the bottom right of John Speed's larger map - zoom in if you can

This is interestingly in the vicinity of medieval St Leonard’s Leper Hospital, which was located close to the eastern side of what is now Midland Road. Westgate used to continue west (hence its name) from the city, and is likely to have passed through what is now Rathbone Crescent and/or Granary Close, to the east of Midland Road, which is where an archaeological dig was carried out in advance of the house build in 2014.[3] The dig did not reveal St Leonard’s Hospital but it did reveal a mass grave with skeletons from several time periods, sadly none from the 17^th century. It’s believed that St Leonard’s was no longer used after the dissolution, but there were other suggestions that the site – or a nearby site – became used as a pesthouse. This means the gravesite of the plague victims is likely to be close to the location of the leprosy victims and could potentially be sitting under houses, industrial buildings, or even the East Coast Mainline…

Westgate travels from right on left on the picture and would have crossed Midland Road on the left of the picture

The last woman to die from the plague in Peterborough was Alice Hall, who was buried on 28^th April 1667. Unusually, nothing much is known about her either – the fatigue of the pandemic had no doubt taken its toll. Most women were described by the man they were related to – daughter of, wife of, widow of – but Alice had no such attribution. Following the wars there was a rise in the number of independent women, for there was never going to be enough men to make wives of them all. And of the single men who had returned from war, a widow, perhaps with wealth inherited from her husband and a proven record of child rearing was a better prospect. So there were more single women, too old to still belong to their fathers, but never married.

Sadly, it was not declared where Alice had been buried either. The grounds of the pesthouse, where hundreds of the deceased had been buried, was undoubtedly full, but without the detail of a burial in her own grounds, it is likely that the pest house was her resting place. As an unattributed woman she is less likely to have been buried by family, and even less likely to have been buried on family land, particularly because there are no other Halls in the records.

The last person to die from the plague in Peterborough was a child, a little boy named Roger Whittington. He was the son of Roger Whittington and was buried in an undisclosed location on 9 May 1667.

In a final note, it is worth adding that there was a surge of weddings and baptisms once the plague appeared to be over. After years of fear, the people of Peterborough wanted to celebrate their unions and new arrivals in the sight of God and what remained of their congregation. The human desire to enjoy the good and find hope descends through all generations.

If you want to look at the St John’s church records, then Ancestry.co.uk is the best place to look. You can do so for free on a computer in Peterborough Archives, where you will find the Feoffees Accounts, old maps, and microfilm of church records. If you’re looking for more local church registers with evidence of the plague, good places to explore are Oundle and St Martin’s, Stamford Baron. 

Images:

OS Map of Newark printed in 1889 from maps.nls.uk

Dance of Death by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

John Speed’s Map from Wiki Commons

OS Map of Westgate, Peterborough from maps.nls.uk

[1] The vast majority of statistical data from the time period is based on estimates and extrapolations. London statistics are the most frequently shared, but even they are open to interpretation. A population loss of 23% is certainly at the higher end of supposed population loss and could suggest that the population of Peterborough was in fact higher than 2,000, but it could mean that the city was hit hard and in a particularly weakened state. There is a good chance that the recorded number of people who died in Peterborough from the plague was incorrect, as people buried their family privately or they were missed from the records in times of overwhelming stress. We should also consider that there are no deaths of infants or the elderly that we would expect to see in the records, so there will have been other deaths/burials unrecorded, in addition to the plague deaths.

[2] As an aside, the wood from the pesthouse was kept for some time in the belfry of St John’s after the building had been dismantled, presumably to be used again elsewhere. This, and other facts, are from the Feoffees Accounts.

[3] https://peterborougharchaeology.org/st-leonards-leper-hospital/

Miss Pears’ Almshouses: A Truth Hidden in Plain Sight

If you live or were born in Peterborough you’ve probably heard of Miss Pears’ Almshouses and you’ve almost certainly walked past them. Situated in a prime location on the corner of Exchange Street and Cumbergate (and right next to McDonald’s), the buildings overlook St John’s Church and Exchange Street at the front and a row of listed buildings on Cumbergate to the side. If you’ve visited the site, it was almost certainly to eat in one of the many restaurants that have made the building their home over the last few decades.

Sitting on the side of the building is a large plaque with the date of A.D. 1903. It reads:

 

Erected by the Feoffees

Out of the fund bequeathed by

MISS FRANCES PEARS

Of this city, for the use of the

Aged and infirm of the parish of

PETERBOROUGH

 

Miss Pears had died on 1^st December 1901 aged 60 and left a bequest of £5,000 to rebuild, repair or extend the Cumbergate almshouses. She was following in the path of her father who upon his death in 1886, had also bequeathed money to the almshouses to provide each of the inmates with ‘half a ton of coal annually’[1]. Her father had lived in The Crescent (a very smart semicircle of houses on Thorpe Road situated close to the railway crossing) and she lived in Bennithorpe, also on Thorpe Road. They were rather wealthy, with Frances’ estate worth over £28,000 when she died. 

Frances and her father had seen the poor condition of the old almshouses and being wealthy but with no heirs, had left their money to comfort the elderly poor of the city. Her father’s contribution was significant because there were lots of people living in the almshouses. In 1896 there were 44 people living in the Cumbergate almshouses alone. We know this thanks to the report of a Christmas gift of ‘tea, sugar, and a plum cake’[2] to each person who lived there. She also left £1,000 to Peterborough Infirmary, which may have contributed to one of the extensions there.

 

The Feoffees were a centuries old group of trustees who organised the city's charity needs. They had been created in 1572 and consisted of 14 men 'chosen from the most "honest, substantial and discreet" citizens, to administer lands and property in common ownership.'[i]  It was a great privilege to be one of the Feoffees, which is why so many of the most influential men in Peterborough's past became one. By the Victorian era they owned and managed a sizable portfolio of properties, including The Bull and Dolphin.

Looking at the front of the building from Exchange Street it is easy to see that the almshouses were actually two separate buildings. However, the prominence of the plaque high on the western side of the building could easily fool a casual bystander to believe that the entire L-shaped complex was built in 1903. What they would have missed is the date over the main entrance door of the western building of 1835 and a large (but now embarrassingly degraded) plaque at the rear of the building.

                                          

The building on Exchange Street to the east and stretching north (abutting McDonald’s) were built first in 1835 by the town Feoffees. The western building (with some matching architectural features but clearly a different building and on a different alignment) was finished in 1903 thanks to money left by Miss Pears but also built by the Feoffees.

Early pictures and maps of the site reveal that there were more buildings on the wedge-shaped site that have been removed. There was an earlier row of squat little almshouses along Cumbergate that had lath and plaster walls, lead-lined windows, and tall chimneys (to take them up to the same height as the chimneys of neighbouring buildings). These predated the 1835 row and ran almost parallel to them, which left a little courtyard in the middle (and to the west) for washing and other outdoor chores. But these were in increasingly poor condition, and by 1873 Walter Skirrow recommended that no new inmates should be placed in the older almshouses. Once the last inhabitant had died, he said, they should be pulled down to improve the situation for the eastern (1835) row. There is a wonderfully evocative painting of the almshouse courtyard by Wilfrid Wood here that shows the two contrasting rows, but it’s worth noting that it was painted in 1944, supposedly over 40 years after the western row was demolished. 

On the corner where Miss Pears’ extension was built there had been a variety of buildings over time including (potentially) the Moot Hall and a fire station, and there were also some lavatories (just what you want next to almshouses!) In fact, the extension was built on a building that was previously a mortuary (a mortuary sited next to almshouses for the elderly seems a little cruel).

When the Feoffees received the money from Miss Pears’ will there was a lot of discussion about what to do with it and it quickly became a politically weighted issue. Some suggested repairing the existing almshouses in Cumbergate and Westgate, others suggested building new ones on Bishop’s Road to remove the ugly face of charity from a prime location in the city. Even once they had agreed to leave the almshouses in Cumbergate and build more, there were further issues. The corner of Cumbergate and Exchange Street was a high traffic route and at an acute angle, so it was vital that any new buildings were set at a bit of an angle to allow good visibility round the corner to ease possible congestion and to attempt to widen Exchange Street. However, Mr Clarabut (one of the executors of Miss Pears’ will) and the Feoffees were quite keen to make the new building square, so a small dispute grew. It was this argument that led to the new building sitting at a strange angle to all of the other building along Exchange Street and the north side of Cathedral Square and looking like an awkward relative of the 1835 building.

Plans for the four additional almshouses were taken to the Town Council at the end of September 1902 along with plans to ‘re-build the Cumbergate almshouses’.[3] What it doesn’t make clear is which almshouses they plan to rebuild. There was excitement about the building of the new almshouses along with a large extension of the Post Office further round the street, with the Peterborough Advertiser claiming ‘the pretty little almshouses will make Cumbergate a decidedly important thoroughfare.’[4]

Thankfully, an article in 1903 explained exactly how Miss Pears’ money had been used, and an artist’s impression showed just how pretty the new almshouses were intended to be.

In November 1903 the Peterborough Standard revealed the full details of the new almshouses.[5] They explained that Miss Pears’ money was being used to build THREE almshouses; one was an extension of Wortley’s almshouses in Westgate (at the back of the site so not visible to the public), the building on the corner of Cumbergate and Exchange Street; and a similar structure at the opposite end of the 1835 almshouses to create three sides to a courtyard. At the time of the article the Westgate almshouses (ten single room dwellings) were almost complete and the Exchange Street building was under construction. The other building had not been started because the old row of almshouses were still standing despite being ‘exceedingly impractical’ and ‘in no little danger of one day falling down on the heads of the occupants.’  This is an image of the old almshouses as the south extension was being built. 

The almshouses built in 1835 were deemed to be ‘in a satisfactory condition’ and would therefore be part of the new ‘quadrangle’ that would sit around a garden and behind a short wall and iron palisades. The article goes on to describe the content and dimensions of each of the little almsrooms and how very comfortable and practical they would be. The stones used for the front of the extension was from Ketton and the slate from Bangor. It also stated that the northern almshouse extension on Cumbergate was to look the same as the Exchange Street building but contain ten rooms.

The third and final building was begun in 1904 after the old almshouses had been removed. Mr Clarabut, one of the executors of Miss Pears’ will and a stalwart supporter of the almshouses was asked to lay the memorial stone in a ceremony in April when the building was half complete.[6] That memorial stone read:

This stone was laid April 18 1904

By Mr W. Clarabut

One of the Executors of the late

Miss Frances Pears

Feoffees:

H Little, J.h. Beeby

L.T. Jones, G Wyman

J.W. Buckle, T.J. Walker

(The layout is not true to the plaque, but a possible option) 

I’ll be honest here. I’d presumed the northern extension had never been built. I’d never heard of it. I’d never seen it in any of the old pictures of Cumbergate and I’m not old enough to have known the city before Queensgate was built. But there are some obscure pictures of the building. In this photograph on the Peterborough Images site you can see the two extensions, the little wall and trees in the garden. Sadly, the northern extension was gobbled up by Queensgate, but we can be grateful that the 1835 and 1903 buildings remain.

To recap, Miss Pears left money in her will to the Feoffees for the improvement of the city’s almshouses, be that rebuilding, extending or improving. Her £5,000 bequest was used to build ten additional rooms at the Westgate Almshouse (lost to Queensgate) and a total of 14 rooms at the Cumbergate almshouses.

The Cumbergate Almshouses were built in three phases in 1835, 1903, and 1904. The latest extension was demolished with the building of Queensgate, but the earlier two phases are still standing. The extension was built on the site of a former mortuary and lavatories and was set back to widen Exchange Street and make the junction safer.

 

One question I’ve thought about is whether we should even call the almshouses ‘Miss Pears’ Almshouses’. My answer to that has always been no. The present buildings were built and managed by the Feoffees – the four room extension abuts and detracts from the earlier 1835 build by them. However, since learning that there was another extension and Miss Pears’ bequest provided a total of 24 almsrooms in the city, it seems entirely appropriate that her name is associated with the buildings. 

The only issue now is that the listing for the site is completely wrong and could have allowed for the damage or destruction of features that should have been preserved. 

The listing dates from 1973 and appears to have been written because somebody read the plaque on Cumbergate and walked on to the next building (I said it was a problem). Annoyingly the address isn't even correct - it says Cowgate in the details! It also states there are 'matching end blocks' despite the northern block being destroyed over 40 years ago. What is also quite infuriating is that there is a grade II listing for the little wall that bordered the garden, on the British Listed Buildings website, but the wall has since been destroyed! (It's no longer on the official listing website)

Thankfully, the Civic Society information on the buildings in Cumbergate here, written by Richard Hillier, is spot on. But why should the truth about the almshouses be sitting in information about blue plaques and not on the official listing?

It seems imperative that the correct date and information is provided and the buildings are given the respect they need. After all, the original almshouses on the site are almost 190 years old, which make them (sadly) some of the oldest buildings left in the city.

What this also reminds us is that datestones can be very misleading in the context of a building, which is something I’ll be building on in my next blogpost...

p.s. Apologies for the dodgy footnote. (Who knew it would be so difficult to retrofit a footnote?!)

Addendum: since writing this blogpost I applied to have the listing of Miss Pear's Almshouses changed and was successful! It's amazing what one person can do when you put your mind to it!

All images belong to the author. 

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[1] Stamford Mercury, 3 December 1886, p.4.

[2] Stamford Mercury, 25 December 1896, p.4.

[i] https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/constituencies/peterborough

[3] Peterborough Advertiser, 1 October 1902, p.6.

[4] Along with the new Post Office and Peterborough Advertiser building! Peterborough Advertiser, 26 November 1902, p.5.

[5] Peterborough Standard, 21 November 1903, p.6.

[6] Peterborough Express, 20 April 1904, p.3.