Learning from the census

 Having done my ten-yearly duty in filling in the census form (online) I'm reminded of how important previous censuses are to any historian of the 19th century, and how important they are to our knowledge of the Charterhouse.

The first census of England and Wales was in 1801; but it had very limited information.  It was counting heads, not naming them.  The next three censuses were in the same format.  It was not until 1841 that the names of the inhabitants were listed.  So we know where people lived and what their names were; we know their ages (rounded up or down to the nearest 5 years) and whether they born in the county.  We don't know the relationships between what appears to be a family group or who was married, who single; their actual places of birth; or their occupations.  Those drawbacks matter little, of course, in compiling a list of Charterhouse residents,

The 1851 census was an improvement.  This is a page of the Charterhouse return for that year.

The deficiencies have all been remedied.  We have "condition" i.e. relation to head of household; actual age; occupation; and actual place of birth.  There is also a final column to record whether the person is "blind or deaf-and-dumb".  (This very rarely has anything in it.)  The enumerator, who compiled the list, helpfully recorded the residents' former occupations.  

Suddenly we have residents we knew nothing about because they are not recorded in the register.  As I have noted before, when a married man was awarded a room his wife could enter with him but had no entitlement to the room when he died.  It was his room, and so the wife often did not warrant an entry in the register.  With the census we can see that there were many more women living in the Charterhouse than we previously knew about.

The 1861 census follows the same format.  Under "occupation" the enumerator has described them all as "almsman" or "almswoman" and added a former occupation if relevant.  Again, we can add previously unknown wives to the list of residents.

In 1871 the only change is to the heading of the last column.  Only one of those categories is one we might use today, and "blind" is, in fact, the only category which is used in the Charterhouse census returns.

In 1881 the enumerator doesn't bother with former occupations.  The first resident on the list is described as a "pensioner" and the rest are ditto.  It is an odd description; there were no old age pensions then; only former members of the armed forces received pensions, and retired people who had regular income from savings were usually described as annuitants.  

By this stage the column headings give us a clear picture of the "condition" of the residents, particularly of the lone women; if they are unmarried we have a good chance of tracing them back in the censuses.

The 1881 census, like its predecessors, was compiled by an army of enumerators going door to door.  But when it came to institutions like almshouses, along with prisons, boarding schools, prisons,  ships' crews etc, they probably just asked for a list from whoever was in charge.  This means we have to be careful about trusting the entries.  Many of us doing family history have found ancestors who lied about their age or even their marital status, and spelling can be wildly inaccurate when the it was left to the enumerator to make a stab at it.  The Charterhouse records appear to be largely accurate.  But the one person who appears on 5 successive censuses, Matron Jane Burn, was apparently reluctant to tell the Master her true age - or he was reluctant to ask her.  It was inaccurate every time.  Jane died in 1884 aged 93. 

The 1891 census follows the same pattern, the only change being that the instructions at the head of each column are more detailed.  The same is true in 1901.  

The 1901 enumerator has a novel way of recording the "relation to head of family or position in the institution".  All the residents are "inmate-Brother" or "inmate-Sister".  This must have been the description supplied by the Master, W H Fea; and he was correct.  We are all "brethren and sisters of the Charterhouse".

The 1911 census switched from street-based lists compiled by enumerators to individual household forms, but this made little difference to institutions like the Charterhouse, where everyone was listed as part of the same household.  The 1911 is the last census to which we have access; we have to wait until January next year to get at the 1921.  We await it with interest; what will it be able to tell us about the Charterhouse.

Food and cooking

There were some almshouses which provided meals for their inmates, and some, like the London Charterhouse, still do.  But our Charterhouse never did.  Food had to be bought out of the weekly allowance or produced on site.  So what did the early residents eat, and how did they cook it?

The earliest evidence we have comes from information in the accounts in 1584 and subsequent years.  The inmates' accommodation, we learn, included brick-paved kitchens in the wings, a chicken house, a well, a dovecote and a buttery.  (We can't be sure that these facilities existed from the outset, two centuries earlier, but the buildings were the originals.)  Each of the two wings, for men and women, had a communal kitchen with brick flooring.  These would surely have included bread ovens and probably brewing facilities.  It suggests that inmates did not have fires in their individual rooms.  There was a chicken house, which would only have provided eggs for part of the year; hens did not lay all the year round as they are now bred to do.  The dovecote is unusual.  These had to be licensed and on manorial land.  It came as a surprise to learn that the purpose of dovecotes was not to provide pigeons for food.  People only ate the squabs, or young pigeons.  However, the feathers were valuable, and the guano on the floor of the dovecote was used as fertiliser.  The buttery in the list seems to be a hang-over from monastic terminology.  It would have been a store-room for supplies.

What other means of self-sufficiency might there have been?  Bee hives are highly likely.  It's quite possible that goats were kept for milk, and even a pig or two.  There was land available for growing fruit and vegetables, although not all the inmates would have been physically able to get involved in their cultivation.  There is a persistent idea that the medieval peasant diet was drearily monotonous, confined to cabbages, beans and onions with bread; but this is a mistake.  Fruits cultivated included apples, pears, plums, strawberries, elderberries and rhubarb.  A wide range of vegetables were grown, some of which have now fallen out of favour such as orach and skirret; greens of various species were grown or foraged.  It was a largely plant-based diet but it was not necessarily boring.  In addition to what was grown or produced on the site, the residents were within easy reach of the markets of Hull, and traders may well have brought their wares to the almshouse.  We would expect fish to be an important part of the diet too.

A question arises.  If some of the food was produced communally, how was it shared out?  That is something we can only speculate about.

We turn to cooking.  Ovens were used mostly for bread.  Other foodstuffs were cooked in a pot or on a griddle over a fire.  We all have an image of a cauldron and indeed the most common meal of the time was pottage, a kind of stew cooked in the cauldron.  It was a kind of "chuck it all in" stew made mostly of vegetables with grains for thickening.  But the cauldron could also be used in a more sophisticated way.  

This is from Dorothy Hartley's Food in England and shows how one-pot cooking could be an art.

The original almshouse buildings were demolished in 1642, and the Charterhouse hospital buildings which replaced them in the second half of the century are almost a total mystery to us.  We don't know whether there were communal kitchens or fire-places in individual rooms.  The rough sketches of the exterior which exist show no chimneys.  Did the well survive?  In the following century inmates were probably more dependent on the town's cookshops and markets for their food, with a wider range of foodstuffs becoming available.  But we must bear in mind that there were sporadic states of famine because of poor harvests.  Add to that the fact that inmates' allowances sometimes fell in value because of inflation and we have a picture of occasional hunger.

We have a lot more information about the new building of 1780.  Each inmate had their own bed-sit, with an open fireplace as the only cooking facility.  

This example is from the Geffrye Museum's reconstruction of their own almshouse rooms which are exactly contemporaneous with ours.  This one fits in a remarkable way the blocked-up and boarded fireplace I am looking at as I type.  We can see that it is more than a simple hearth; but there was no oven.  And there was no water supply in the rooms.  All water had to be fetched from the bathrooms or the laundry room.

We must assume that the residents had to buy all their food rather than having any produced on the site.  However, a snippet of news from 1884 reports the theft of a hen belonging to the Matron.  It is tempting to think that there was a chicken coop in the grounds, with the Matron of the time, Jane Burn, selling her surplus eggs.

When new "rooms" i.e. additional buildings were put up during the 19th century they followed the pattern of the existing buildings.  Nothing changed. 

Intriguingly, I found a single reference to "small ranges" being removed.  At some point at the end of the 19th century or the start of the 20th some or all of the fires were replaced with cooking ranges along the lines of the one pictured.  These would at least have provided an oven.  But for some reason they were not kept for long.  It was back to the old open fires.

Space for food storage was obviously limited, and it restricted what residents would have eaten and how they would have shopped.  Milk would not keep for long, bread would go stale quickly, and meat and fish (when they could afford it) would be bought within 24 hours of it being cooked.  In that respect the Charterhouse residents were in no worse position than the rest of population.  But the situation persisted here long after kitchen equipment had improved in the outside world.  It was not until 1960 that the trustees decided that improvements to the living conditions at the Charterhouse were urgently needed.  In a "modernisation" which effectively halved the number of people who could be accommodated, the single rooms were converted into two-room flatlets, a bedroom and a living-room.  Crucially, the living-room now had a sink and tap, and an electric socket.  Many of the residents used the alcove next to the fireplace as a mini-kitchen, buying a famous cooker of the day, a Baby Belling.

Equipped with these little cookers, a growing number of residents sought permission to have the fireplaces removed and replaced, at their own expense, with electric fires.  I have met people who, as children, visited their grandparents here and tell of the cosiness of the flats and the satisfaction of the residents.

But it wasn't enough.  There was a much more ambitious regeneration project in 1978; the Victorian buildings were demolished and replaced with flats with all mod cons, including kitchens which residents could fill with modern cookers, fridge freezers etc.  (But not washing machines; although at least there were now washing machines in the laundry room.)  The rooms in the remaining old buildings were remodelled to make one and two bedroom flats, with kitchen and bathroom.