Thrale history

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1604. Found in the Church box the 17th of June xxvys vid whereof gyven to Catlines wif for searching of Lambard suspected of the plague vs.

1612. Our church chest was hand robbed and thereout taken xxxvjis.

The burial register shows the same state of affairs.

1623. George Monden, a poor wandering boy.

1624. Thomas Holydale, a poor wandering fellow.

1624. John Dixon, a poor old lame man.

1624. Richard Holt, an old poor man kept of the parish.

1625. Thomas Crawley, a wandering distracted fellow born about Luton.

1627. A dumb woman died at Fairfolds whose name we could not learn.

In 1631 a poor beggar whom no one could identify was found in the road near Nomansland and was buried at Sandridge.

For eleven years, 1628 to 1639, Parliament did not meet, and King Charles I raised money for war and defence by forced loans. Accordingly we find that twelve of the local gentry were summoned to attend at Sandridge for this purpose. They came from North Mymms, Shephall and Redbourn in Herts., and from Studham in Bedfordshire, and between them they had to pay £170. Three of them were Sandridge men, who were charged £10 each; they were Hugh Smith, a bachelor who had a special seat in church near the pulpit,⁶ Thomas Adams and Willlam Thrale. These three men were buried in Sandridge in the years 1642, 1644 and 1646 respectively.

At this period some Christians in north-west Italy were suffering persecution at the hands of the Roman Church, and during 1655 a collection was made for their relief towards which Sandridge contributed £1.13.7, the total from Hertfordshire being £754. Meantime the village folk carried on tilling the soil, marrying, bearing children and dying. Only on rare occasions did anyone get into trouble. In 1662 John Jakes, husbandman, was summoned for keeping an unlicensed ale-house.⁷ Then Bill Weathered, a yeoman and sometime churchwarden, was indicted in 1663 for not purging a ditch along Sandpitt Lane, which was then the parish boundary.⁸ Just as Hertfordshire people witnessed the night bombing of the London area from a safe distance, so in 1666 Sandridge people would see the glow in the southern sky at night caused by the Great Fire of London, which raged for five days, destroyed over 18,000 houses and at the same lime helped to cleanse the city from the effects of the plague of the previous year. The plague of 1665 was the last of the terrible outbreaks which had been harassing Europe for 300 years. This was due in great part to the fact that the black, or house, rat was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries displaced by the brown rat, which does not breed indoors.⁹

From 1687 onwards light is thrown on village life by the parish accounts, which have been carefully preserved. That year the whole parish was assessed at £1,643, so that the rate of 9d. in the pound raised £61.12.3. from forty-eight ratepayers. The biggest ratepayer was Richard Sibley whose farm at Waterend was assessed at £125. Roger Ballard at Hill End and Roger Ballard the younger at Bridehall also had large assessments, but the Sandridge windmill was assessed at only £12, and the payment of rates was shared equally by the three millers, William Frankling, Thomas George and Michael Sanders: (The windmill which was on Woodcock Hill is first mentioned in 1628, when Mary White was killed by the sails.) The money was mainly used for the relief of poverty "as well for the lame and impotent as to set ye poore on worke". Relief in cash varied from two shillings to twelve shillings a month, and the following items provided in kind give an impression of prevailing prices.

Footnotes

6. Edward Steele who visited Sandridge in 1715. His notes about the Church are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, (Gough Herts MSS4).↩︎
7. Record Of The Hertford County Sessions. Nine volumes edited by W. J. Hardy, F.S.A, and Colonel William Le Hardy, M.C., F.S.A. Vol.6, p.65.↩︎
8. Record Of The Hertford County Sessions. Nine volumes edited by W. J. Hardy, F.S.A, and Colonel William Le Hardy, M.C., F.S.A. Vol.6, p.104.↩︎
9. H.H.Scott, History of Tropical Medicine, Vol.2, p.735.↩︎