Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

learning accounts, a growing number of gentlemen’s and yeomen’s sons and daughters in
Georgian times were keen to learn the latest fashions in dance and the arts. 198
Valentine
Green, the son of the Salford Priors dancing master, gained a reputation as an artist at
home and abroad. 199
Although professionals were often a mobile class, at least one Salford Priors
schoolmaster, John White, was reasonably local. 200
Records of schoolmasters and
schools are not always easy to find, but by the nineteenth century several local parishes
were home to schoolmasters.
Dissenters, non-conformists and Roman Catholics were present in the Champion
Country, but references to their ministers are rare before 1790. 201
A Wesleyan preacher
appears in the 1790s, while in the nineteenth century Bidford was home to a Roman
Catholic priest. 202
Care of the sick was a hit and miss affair in the countryside before 1800. If you
were lucky, a surgeon or midwife may have lived in your proximity, although the
authorities licensed them according to their willingness to subscribe to the Church of
England’s thirty-nine articles rather than for any demonstration of skill. Although it
198 The dancing master, Mr Green, in Salford Priors, was probably also the schoolmaster there. J. A.
Thomson, Salford Priors – The Tower in the Vineyard, (Salford Priors, Thomson, 1976), p. 56, states that
Green specialised in figure dancing, morris and maypole dancing. (Thomson does not quote the primary
source.)
199 Thomson, Salford Priors – The Tower in the Vineyard, p. 56. Valentine Green had been apprenticed to
an attorney in Evesham, but travelled far and wide as an antiquary and historian.
200 WaRO, DR399/269/20, Salford Priors settlements, 1777, shows that he settled at Salford Priors from
Stock and Bradley.
201 J. Fendley, ‘Bishop Benson’s survey of the diocese of Gloucester 1735-1750’, Bristol and
Gloucestershire Arch. Soc., (2000), pp. 119, 120, 125, notes Presbyterian and Anabaptist dissenters and
records that a R. C. priest ‘comes to Mr Betham’s house [in Welford] to say mass’. Papists and nonconformists
are also recorded in various other diocesan surveys. GlosRO, D2502 also contains notes on
non-conformity in Pebworth including references to a quaker in the 1680s and an independent church and a
Baptist church c. 1720.
202 TNA, PCC probate of Henry Eden, Broad Marston , Pebworth, gentleman, 1792. Eden bequeathed £10
to Smith, a Wesleyan preacher. WaRO, Bidford 1831 census, lists a Roman Catholic priest.
182