In this anniversary year, spare a thought for Jane Austen’s elder brother George. The historical record says something about his life. We know that he had severely impaired cognitive and linguistic capacities, and suffered from fits. His father is reported to have said, ‘We have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or wicked child.’[1] At the age of six, it seems, George was sent to be cared for by the Cullum family of Monk Sherborne, a few miles from the Austen home in Steventon. The Cullums also cared for George’s similarly afflicted uncle Thomas. Their home, Beame End Cottage, was not a dedicated private asylum. Rather, the Cullums augmented the household income by providing care to infants and the so-called ‘feeble minded’. Mrs Elizabeth Cullum nursed Mrs Austen’s children in their infancy. The males of the Cullum family were primarily agricultural labourers.
A picture of the people amongst whom George Austen lived would help us see him better and contribute to a more informed understanding of the relationship between George and the rest of the Austen family. The sources on which the generally accepted picture is based have been underused.
In the Hampshire Record Office is the Manor Court Book, Monk Sherborne, 1769-1830. Also helpful is the Hampshire County Council publication A Guide to Enclosure in Hampshire 1700-1900by John Chapman and Sylvia Seeliger.
To begin. What was it about the Cullums that caused the Leighs and the Austens to entrust their children to them?
The head of the household, Francis Cullum, was a literate agricultural labourer. He fulfilled the role of parish clerk at Monk Sherborne. Later, one of his sons took on that role. The Cullums, then, were ‘respectable’ members of the so-called ‘lower orders’, and perhaps more enterprising than most of their peers.
For all that respectabilitythough, Francis fell foul of the Manor Court more than once. Here I should point out that the relevant Manor Court Book is incomplete. There is no record of the court’s activities after 1791, until 1804, when the entries resume. From that date, there are many entries concerning infractions relating to common and waste land. The records suggest that this unlawful activity was at its most intense between 1804 and 1819.
In 1807, Francis Cullum enclosed a small part of the common land in front of Beame End Cottage for his own use, an action which was unlawful. He was forced to throw the land open again promptly or pay a hefty fine. He was just one of several men who enclosed patches of common land adjoining their gardens. As well as this, in 1810, with several other Monk Sherborne men, Francis was fined for taking dung and manure from common land.
Mould, gravel and sand were often extracted from waste or common ground as well. Several men were also fined for putting geese and sheep out to graze on the village green. From time to time, ‘cask houses’ (presumably places for the sale and consumption of locally brewed ale) and pig styes were erected on common land and then ordered to be dismantled.
A fair amount of the unlawful enclosures and extractions of material occurred at West Heath. The history of the official enclosure of one part of this corner of Monk Sherborne provides food for thought.
The 1792 Act allowed about 700 acres in Monk Sherborne to be enclosed. Most of it went to the Deane family: to Harriet Deane as lessee of Queen’s College Oxford, to the Trustees of Harriet Deane, and to William Deane. More land would be enclosed following an act of parliament in 1829. In 1832 the largest part of over 200 acres was awarded to Queen’s College, and to the Trustees of Lambert Fowler and the late Revd. L. G. Halton.
As well as enclosure by act of parliament, there were across England enclosures achieved by local agreements among certain select stakeholders. The Manor Court Book for Monk Sherborne provides a glimpse of this phenomenon. The volume includes lists of freehold tenants and customary tenants. There is little change in the persons and families identified in this way from one year to the next. Occasionally, though, a new name appears.
In 1774 John Copperthwaite is listed with the freehold tenants. The handwriting is hard to decipher, but he is mentioned because he has ‘a lease’ on a part of West Heath which he made ‘a close on’. This, I infer, was done by local agreement rather than by an act of parliament.
My hunch is that Francis Cullum, like his predecessors and his contemporaries and peers, was not content to see so much land taken from common access and use, whether by local agreement or by act of parliament. During this period of increasing enclosure, the Cullum family had grown to include eight children. It is probable that the Cullums, and other families like them, needed to supplement their income and the produce of their bits of garden simply to feed their growing families. Relatively minor encroachment on the remaining common or waste land seems understandable.
It should not be forgotten that 1830, in between the passing of the act of enclosure in 1829 and its award in 1832, was the year of the so-called ‘Swing riots’. Across the south of England, poverty among the rural labouring classes was acute. In the 1820s the people of the so-called ‘lower orders’ themselves called for higher wages and for parliamentary reform, so that their interests were properly represented.
When peaceful petitioning failed, the Captain Swing movement took a different approach. Tactics included breaking agricultural machinery. Threshing machines were blamed for causing unemployment. There were also cases of burning down hay ricks and other property. In November 1830 Monk Sherborne was visited by protestors or rioters. They extracted money from one farmer and made sure that another’s threshing machine was withdrawn from use. These were hard and sometimes violent times.
What about George and the Austen family? As noted before, George Austen, like his uncle Thomas, brought a little money into the Cullum household. It seems probable that George’s fees were administered by his brother James, who was the vicar of a neighbouring parish. The death of George’s mother in 1827 did not immediately bring anything extra in the way of money. George was not even mentioned in Mrs Austen’s will. However, George’s brother Edward (Knight) made sure that his own inheritance went to George. It amounted to ‘his full share of the £3,350 Old South Sea Annuities’ [2]. It would have been very welcome to the Cullums if some part of that came to them for caring for George. There could be evidence on the use of this wealth buried away in the Austen Papers, 1704-1856 edited by R. A. Austen Leigh.
No one from the Austen family attended George’s funeral in 1838. It was one of the Cullum sons, another George, who witnessed his death, and wrote in the records that the deceased was a ‘gentleman’. George Austen is buried without a gravestone in Monk Sherborne parish churchyard.
Observations made in this piece rely on 3 secondary sources:
- G. Holbert Tucker, A Goodly Heritage: History of Jane Austen’s Family (1983)
- Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen (1997)
- David Nokes, Jane Austen (1997)
Another excellent source is Hampshire Machine Breakers: The story of the 1830 riots by Jill Chambers, 1990, 1996. This compiles transcriptions of and some reproductions of primary sources, some of which are relevant to the story of the poor of Monk Sherborne and its surrounding area.
[1] Hampshire Record Office, 23M93/M1, quoted by Claire Tomalin in her 1997 biography of Jane Austen
[2] G. Holbert Tucker, A Goodly Heritage: History of Jane Austen’s Family (1983), pp. 116-117
Author: Peter Marshall
Bio: Peter is an ex-teacher with time to do local history research. Since moving to Basingstoke, he has pursued interests in the Hampshire connections of the following: the Austen family, the Baring banking family and William Cobbett. Way back in the late 1970s, he did an MA in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought and Literature.