Everyone loves a good story and in Throsby’s “Excursions in Leicestershire”, published in 1790, pages 476-7, he relates a tragic incident that took place in “Thornton Liberty” around the year 1707. The story goes that a Thornton man was suspected of having stolen some iron from the Bagworth blacksmith, Matthew Bott.
A sheriff’s posse was sent to search the man’s home, and they immediately discovered that a woman was living with the suspected thief, a man called Glass; she was in fact his sister.
In the house the search party found the bodies of 2 babies sewn up in a basket, at this point the sister thrust a knife into her throat and threw herself into a horse pit outside their home. The search party immediately attempted to pull her out and save her, but she was dead when she was pulled out of her watery grave. The search of the house continued: no stolen goods from the blacksmith’s were found but the hidden bodies of more babies were discovered.
The severity of the sister’s crimes, infanticide, concealment of bodies and then her own suicide, meant that not only was she denied a Christian burial, but she would become known as a “witch”. She was buried at Merry Lees crossroads, the intersection of two major roads in those days.
She would have had a stake driven through her body to “hold her in her grave”, the stake would have been visible above ground so that people knew that she was still there.
If you believe in revenge from beyond the grave, the fate of the 2 men who were part of this unhappy episode could easily give you something to think about. Matthew Bott, the blacksmith was alleged to have been hanged for forgery in Leicester a few years afterwards, and her brother was arrested for stealing in Northampton and sentenced to transportation.
In those days, this meant being sent to the West Indies to be sold as a slave to work on the sugar plantations. If he survived the sea voyage then he would almost certainly have ended his days dying from one of the many tropical diseases, malnutrition or from exhaustion under the lash of an overseer’s whip.
The fate of her brother was not as unusual as many people would think. Britain had possession of a number of islands in the West Indies at this time including Jamaica, which had been captured from the Spanish in 1655. These were important prizes for the Government of Oliver Cromwell but there was a problem: a lack of workers for the plantations and a high death rate. Some could be moved from one island to another but there were still not enough. I should point out that when I say ‘workers’ I do actually mean slaves, at this time predominantly white slaves.
One method used to get more workers was the Enactment of 1652 in the British Isles, this ordained that:
“it may be lawful for two or more justices of the peace within any county, citty or towne, corporate belonging to the Commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the Port of London, or unto any other port from where such person or persons may be shipped into a forraign collonie or plantation.”
Oliver Cromwell was a resourceful businessman, so labourers were procured from another source as well – from his wars in Ireland and the attempted uprisings against him in the rest of the country until 1659, meant that almost 50,000 people were shipped to the West Indies and Virginia as (white) slaves. These slaves included Scottish Presbyterians (who had fought for Charles II in 1651), Irish Catholics and English ‘rebels’ of all religions. Many descendants of these white slaves are still in Barbados and are referred to as ‘Redlegs’.
The next major source of British white slave labour came as a result of the Monmouth rebellion in 1685 in the reign of the Catholic James II, when many thousands of Protestants (mostly from the South West of England), were shipped to the West Indies as slaves, never to return.
To give you an idea of how large scale the transportation of criminals and others was, in Barbados in 1701, out of a slave population of about 25,000, the vast majority 21,700 were white (The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series of 1701).
Researched and written by Peter Leadbetter
Thornton 