"To his Excellency the Lord Generall Cromwell,
The humble peticion of Jeremiah Maye.
Sheweth, that aboute 7 yeeres since your peticioner with one John Wyeburne Sir Timothy Middletons mans did take a Cavelleere with his horse & armes at Stamford Mount Fitchett, and hee offered them his horse & 401i in money to lett him escape, But they refused the same, Not longe after your peticioner was imprest at Ashdon in the County of Essex for the Parliament service & served under the command of Captain John Smith in the Regiment of Sir William Waller at Basing howse where hee receaved divers hurts & wounds in his Body, As by certificate will appeare, The which hath altogether made him unfit for future service & noe waies able to mainteyne himselfe & languishinge family beinge nowe in a most sadd & deplorable condicion.
Humnbly beseechinge your Excellency to take the premisses into your wise consideracion and to bee pleased to grant your Excellencies Warrant directed to the honorable Bench assembled in Essex to afford your peticionner a pencion or some other Releife what they in their Wisedomes shall thnke Fitt.
And hee shall ever pray for your Excellency
(Endorsed on the back in Cromwell's own hand)
Whereas the Bearer hereof Jeremiah May the peticioner was wounded in the service of the Parliament & thereby unable to follow his calling as appeares by the annexed Certificate. These are therefore to require you to permits & suffer him quietly to passe to Ashden in Essex his former aboad without molestacion. And I desire the Justices of peace for the said County to allow unto the said Jeremiah May a competent weekly pencion for his releife & maintenance according to the late Act. Given under my hand & scale the 10th of January 1651.
To all officers & souldiers under my Command & others whome it may concerne.
O. Cromwell
The original Petition
The original petition of Jeremiah May still exists in the collection of
Essex Quarter Sessions'rolls preserved at the Essex Record Office (1). As Paul Leask has demonstrated by his
research into similar petitions contained in the Wiltshire Quarter Sessions
(2), the information given by such
humble petitioners allows us a rare insight into the lives of ordinary
people in an era dominated by the archives of the gentry.
However, these documents can often yield far more than a simple
tale of lower class hardship: not only can such a document pick out
individual faces from the anonymous masses of the rank and file, it can
also go a great way towards explaining the complex machninations of the
legal, social and military apparatus by revealing the system at work on
the case of a common soldier.
Jeremiah May of Ashdon, Essex
Despite extensive searches through the parish registers of the villages Ashdon and Stansted Mount Fitchett (3) no other record of Jeremiah May, his
family or his companion, John Wyeburne, has yet come to light to complement the petition. With the net now being cast more widely into the records of adjacent parishes it is hoped that more information will emerge to tell us about this trooper.
Thus, at the moment, it is impossible to glean any more clues of
.Jeremiah May's "calling" save for the fact that he worked for Sir
Timothy Middleton and, presumably, could ride a horse before his service
with Captain John Smith's troop, There is, however, more information
on his master, Sir Timothy Middleton.
Sir Timothy Middleton
From the very outset of the English Civil War in 1642, Sir
Timothy Middleton was an active and committed supporter of the
Parliament cause. He sat on virtually every Parliamentary committee
in Essex, and thereby was instrumental in the sequestration of
delinquents' estates and the punishment of scandalous and dissaffected
clergy as well as the raising and levying of taxes for the
Parliamentarian war effort.
Some five years after Jeremiah May was impressed into the
Army of Parliament, the war was destined to visit Sir Timothy himself
with a vengeance: On the 4th June, 1648, he and eight other members of
the Essex Committee met at Chelmsford to discuss the growing
pro-Royalist disorders engendered by the uprisings in Kent. They
were suddenly interrupted in their deliberations by Henry Farre, Colonel
of the Essex Trained Bands. To their horror, Farre declared
himself a Royalist and arrested them. Opinion had so completely turned
in the county that the Committee were in some danger of being
lynched, "had not other gentlemen &c. rescued them, pacified the heat
of others, and afterwards placed a guard over them" (4).
Middleton and the other Committee members eventually
found themselves held as hostages inside the beleaguered town of
Colchester during the three months of Lord Fairfax' siege. They were
only made safe by the Royalist surrender on 28th August. For ever after,
the nine former prisoners gathered together on the aniversary of the
surrender to give thanks to God for their deliverance. Middleton died
shortly before the commemoration of the date in 1655 (5).
Capturing Caveleeres
Back in 1643, in contrast, the prevailing sympathies of Essex and the
neighbouring East Anglian counties were overwhelmingly in favour of
Parliament. The Parliamentary authorities were well aware, however,
that there were significant pockets of Royalist support in the region.
Many Royalist gentry had already departed, having ridden to
join King Charles almost as soon as he took his leave of London in
January 1642. Others remained in the area; constrained by domestic
obligations or by hopes of a last minute settlement and cowed by the
surprisingly efficient surveillance system of the local Roundhead
authorities.
The public paranoia that hosts of armed Cavaliers were hiding in
local houses, awaiting the signal to rise and slaughter the godly, was
largely to blame for the Stour Valley Riots which swept north Essex and
its borders in August 1642 (6).
The spark was the attempt of Sir John Lucas to leave his
Colchester home with a supply of arms and I horses for the King. His arrest
and transport to London for trial made huge publicity, both in Essex and
the capital itself (7). Less auspicious
Cavaliers were apprehended with less fuss, one being the diarist Richard
Symonds, imprisoned as a delinquent on March 25th, 1643(8), although
he soon escaped to join the Royalist forces.
For a number of reasons, the "Cavaleere" taken by Jeremiah May and John Wyeburne would appear to be a Royalist sympathiser stopped on his way to join the King rather than a soldier taken in the middle of a campaign: "Aboute 7 yeeres since (1650/51)" would be just at the time
(i.e., 1642-43) that gentlemen such as Richard Symonds were making their
way to Oxford and York.
Furthermore, it is clear from the petition that the incident occurred before May became a soldier.
The bribe of £ 40 was a considerable one for the time,
which tends to suggest that the Cavalier in question was fairly well-to-do
to have that much ready cash about him, as well as testifying to the
loyalty and commitment of May and Wyeburne in refusing it.
It is not beyond imagination, however, that the sum might
have been exagerrated seven years later to show the petitioner in a
better light.
The location of the Cavalier's capture, spelt "Stamford Mount
Fitchett" in the petition, was in fact Stansted Mountfitchet, a
sizeable village lying on the Essex side of the Hertfordshire
border, on the road between Saffron Walden and Bishop's Stortford (9. It was in addition the seat of the
Middleton family, who had been lords of the manor tor some
generations.
Whilst evidence is far from conclusive, it is just possible
that the captured Cavalier may have been Richard Symonds
himself not only does his date of arrest tally well with the
information in the petition, but the most obvious westbound
route from his home at Black Notley leads straight past Stansted
Mountfitchet (10).
From the very outset of the war, the authorities in Essex received
numerous warrants to raise men, horses and weapons for the
Parliamentarian cause. Caution, however, should be exercised in using
these warrants as proof that the numbers recorded were actually raised:
one such missiv to the town of Colchester for 2,000 horse was followed
by two more letters demanding to know why none had been sent.
Most of the surviving warrants for recruitment or impressment
of troops in the north Essex area are consistent in that the recipient
commanders are almost invariably the Earls of Essex and Manchester.
With the more immediate requirements of these powerful local magnates
continually on their desks, the distant campaigns of Sir William Waller
must inevitably have been of less concern to the burghers of north Essex,
the majority of Waller's officers appear to have come from the the
western and southern counties, whilst the bulk his men hailed from
London and the western counties (11).
After notable successes which brought Sir William the epithet of
"William the Conqueror", his army met with disaster at Roundway Down
on 13th Julv, 1643. Although one of his officers, Edward Harley,
opinioned that they had not lost many men, "considering what a
miserable rout we were in" (12),
there seems little doubt that the army had been seriously damaged.
Waller returned to l.ondon expecting recriminations, but, to his
surprise, instead was given comand of a new army in the making. Recruitment however,
proved difficult, as many of his West Country officers reported that they
could not attract many, London recruits(13).
As the authorities realized more clearly than their populace the
urgency of the situation (to say nothing of the threat to London) they
acted swiftly to widen the cathchment area and beefed up recruitment by
resorting to impressment. This combination of circumstances rested in
the rare, perhaps unique, spectacle of Sir William Waller recruiting in
north Essex by the end of July 1643:
"At the [order] of the l.ords and Committee For ye safety of the
Kingdome.
Whereas it appeares unto us that there is a present [necessitie] of
raisinge a considerable Force of horseand foote under the command of Sir
William Waller for the showing of force [to assist?] of this kingdom
there are in distress and for the suppressing of those forces raised by the
kinge without consent of the houses of Parliament which doth plunder
and spoil the well affected of btoh houses of Parliament's party in all
places where they have power. Thes [is] therefore to desire and require
you worth with in the name of the Earl of Oxford to rayse and send 4
Troopes of horse (of which Capt Riches troop to oe one) well furnished
with [ ] pistolls and sufficient Riders and 1000 Musketteires on horses
unto Romford on Tuesday next, the place appointed for theire
Rondevous, to be Joyned with those of the City of London [ ][ ][ ], to
goe forth uppon such duty its conduct to the Citty of London and other
parts ofthe Kingdom [ ] this service is of greate [concernment?] and
requires all possible expedition you are desired to hav e upp the number of
those Troops out of the light horse of the County which shall be attached
both for when this service is [enacted?] in the [ ][ ] this Committee will
[toil?] hard, that the safety of the County be [preserved] in the absence
of these horses by other strength and it is furthermore ordered that you
send 6 weeks pay both for 4 Troops of horse and the 1000 dragoones of
those moneys you have received in [the] county by virtue of the
Ordinance of both houses of Parliament For [ ] the 20th [ ].
It is further ordered that all well affected men within the county
shall be assistant to the sd Deputy lieutenant in the sd service which shall
be taken for an acceptable service to the Commonwealth &d for this
shall be your warrant.
Dated this 28th of July 1643
To Sir Thomas Barrington and the Barrons and the rest of the
Deputy Lieuts of the County of Essex
Northumberland
Impressment Document?
This is almost certainly the document which impressed Jeremiah
May and in the event almost became his death warrant. It is not clear
whether May was impressed into Waller's Horse from the outset, or
transferred, or indeed was already a militia trooper with one of the troops
of horse in the Essex Trained Bands.
Alan Turton has written in correspondence that he has not
previously come across evidence of impressment into the cavalry, for
the very good reason that an unwilling conscript with a horse would be
more likely to use it to escape than ride into battle. The problems of
desertion amongst pressed men are illustrated in a letter sent to Sir
Thomas Barrington, MP for Colchester, a few weeks after the warrant of
28th July 1643.
This letter orders a "search to be made in all parishes for those
formerly impressed as soldiers who have returned to their homes" (15). May, whose commitment to the
Parliamentarian cause we have already observed, did not desert and joined
the troop of Captain John Smith.
Sir William Waller's regiment appear to have been involved in action
at Basing House on at least two occasions, namely in November 1643
and on September 4th 1644. On the latter date, the Marquis of
Winchester recorded,
"Sir William Waller with two Troupes of Horse, two houres
bef'ore arrived at Basingstoke, came forth to see the sport, and with his
horse facing the House too near on Cowdreys Downe, they had their
Captaine killed with round shot from our workes." (16)
The gap of seven years between Jeremiah May's wound in 1643/4
and his petition to Cromwell in 1651 begs the question as to how and
where the maimed trooper had maintained himself and his family in the
meantime. The petition makes it clear that he was not then resident at
his home in Ashdon.
"The late act" refered to in Cromwell's postscript was
undoubtably that passed in 1601, the 43rd year of the reign of Queen
Elizabeth (17). At the outset of war
Parliament had relied on private charity to care for maimed soldiers and
their families. Appeals read out in in London churches on fasting and
thanksgiving days bore a resemblance to the disaster appeals of today,
including as they did requests for the public to donate old clothes, linen
and woollen stuffs.
In October 1642, the Parliamentary authorities attempted to reassure prospective recruits by the vague declaration that the Lords and Commons would make provsion for their families. This seventeenth century "citizens' charter" predictably proved insufficient and soon "some more systematic method of raising money became necessary" (18). In March 1643, Parliament passed an ordinance requiring constables and churchwardens
to levy a rate for disabled soldiers from their parishes, and for the widows
and orpans of those who had been killed in action. It would have come as
no comfort to wounded troopers such as Jeremiah May to find that even
when endorsed by such commanders as Cromwell himself the response of
the local authorities was erratic and tardy.
(1)Essex Record Office, Chelmsford. ref
Q/SBa 2/78.
Many thanks to Essex Record Office for their permission to publish the transcript of the petition and to quote from the warrant to raise troops tor Sir William Wailer
Thanks are also due to the following individuals for their help in connection with this article:
John Appleby, FRHistS This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.Impressment
J.S.Howard
Jo. Pym
S.C. Lynne Sam. Vaxsell(14)
Waller''s Horse at Basing
House
A Pension for Jeremiah May
NOTES
(2) Paul LEASK, "Atter the
Battle", Intelligencer, Vol I No 3. Jacobus Press, 1994, ppl5-17.
(3) Essex parish records are
held on microfiche at the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford.
(4) Matthew CARTER. A
True Relation of that Honorable, though Unfortunate Expedition ot
Kent. Essex and Colchester.1648. 2nd ed. 1789, p. 100.
(5) Middleton's death was
recorded in Ralph Josselin's diary of 1655 (quoted in Essex Review, Vol
XXXIV, 1925, p.210.
(6) Ironically, these disorders
commenced on the very day that the Royal Standard was raised in naottingham,
although the rioters would have nothing of the vent.
(7) HMC 10th Report.
Braye.MSS, ppl4h-7: Commons Journals 1640-42. p732. 734. 736, 743.
(8) Richard SYMONDS, The
Complete Military Diary stuart Peachey (ed). Partizan Press, 1989, p3.
(9) I am grateful to Janet Smith and John Appleby who both independently suggested this location.
(10) This was an old Roman road, well used in the seventeenth century, nowadays better known as the A 120.
(11) S.J. OLIVER, Sir William
Waller's Horse". English Civil war Notes & Queries. Partizan Press, No 19.
pp 15-20.
(12) Edward Harley's letter
quoted in Oliver. ibid p5.
(13) Oliver ibid p5 Calendar of State
Papers venetian 1643-6 pl8
(14) The original warrant is to be tound in
the Morant Mss at the Colchester branch ut the Essex Record Office ret: D/Y 2/8 The reference to John de Vere Earl of Oxford is curious for all other evidence suggests that he was a Royalist
sympathiser. He became a member of the Sealed Knot in the 1650s and had his estate sequestrated. Sir Thomas Barrington MP was an energetic and active promoter of Parliament's interest in the Colchester area.
(15) Morant Mss
(16) Taken from A Description of the Siege of Basing Castle kept by the Marquis of Wichester I am grateful to Alan Turton for providing
the reference.
(17) C H FIRTH Cromwells Army Methuen University laperback ed 1967,p264-5
(18 ) Firth, p.264.
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
Paul Coverly, Essex Record Office,Colchester
Janet Smith Essex Record Office Chelmstord
Alan Turton Basing House
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