Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

In Victorian times perukemakers and barber-surgeons were no more, being
replaced in Bidford by a couple of hairdressers. 194
Women in service industries are still
under-recorded in the 1841 census, when only a couple of laundresses are mentioned. 195
Professionals, gentry, domestic servants and others
Throughout the two centuries each parish had its Church of England rector or
vicar, some of whom held many parishes, leaving the cure of souls in the hands of a
succession of (sometimes short-lived) curates. The small parish of Weston was served by
successive clergymen, who also served as masters at Stratford grammar school. The
location of schools and their masters in the early period was dependent on their charitable
foundations rather than any other reason. 196
In 1730 Richard Rawlins bequeathed funds
for a school (presumably in his parish of Welford). Whether he was funding a new school
or boosting the finances of an existing school, his will stipulates that eight poor boys
should be educated in the catechism and taught to be ‘ready accountants’. 197
Rawlins, as
a successful and literate mercer, knew the value of education. These small village
schools with a handful of pupils in attendance for a mere half-dozen years may not seem
important, but in a twenty-year period Rawlins’s charity would have improved the
chances of some thirty local lads. In conjunction with the growing number of such
schools throughout the land, Rawlins’s charity school thus played its humble part in
contributing towards the commercial success of England as a whole. In addition to
194 WaRO, Bidford baptisms 1842 and Bidford 1851 census.
195 The 1851 census records laundresses and washerwomen more faithfully.
196 Fendley, ‘Notes on the Diocese of Gloucester by Chancellor Richard Parsons, c.1700’, p. 28. Parsons
notes that Mr John Cooper gave £300 for a free school in Long Marston to teach 22 poor children. J. A.
Thomson, Salford Priors, the Tower in the Vineyard, (Salford Priors, Thomson, 1976), p. 50, states that
William Perkins, (d. 1656), London, merchant tailor, set up the school in Salford Priors. See Appendix 19.
197 GlosRO, probate of Richard Rawlins, Welford, mercer, 1730.
181