The manuscript

In his biography of Samuel Whitbread, 1764-1815, Roger Fulford briefly mentions the notebooks kept by him as a magistrate. These two books give a short account of each case which came before him when he was in residence at Southill from December 1810 to December 1811 and from September 1813 to December 1814. Each small quarto volume has its own index and both are bound in calf, one still retaining its brass closing-clips. They appear to be the only survivals of a series kept by the methodical writer. They were offered for sale by a London bookseller in February 1936 as “apparently being minute books of a Clerk to the Justices of the Peace” for Bedfordshire, “unique, 30s the two”. Fortunately they were purchased for the County Record Office collection at Bedford. They are the subject of this volume.

Approximately 80 per cent of the earlier volume is in Whitbread’s own writing, the other 20 per cent by a young or less literate person. The second volume, with the exception of the index, appears to be entirely written by him. As he was merely making notes for his own purposes, the writing is scribbled and extremely difficult to decipher; most 16th and 17th century hands are far easier to read. At the end of the first volume is a list of the parishes and hamlets in the hundreds of Biggleswade, Clifton and Wixamtree, which in 1830 became the Biggleswade Petty Sessional Division, and for which Whitbread had prior responsibility. Such was his reputation however among the people of Bedfordshire for justice tempered with honesty and kindness that many from beyond these arbitrary boundaries turned to him, with what perhaps other justices would have thought trivial matters. As Fulford put it (p.218) “power was accompanied in Whitbread’s case by a personal knowledge of people and events in his neighbourhood, so that in return Bedfordshire people grew to believe that his clear mind would dispel the smallest personal difficulty, and that nothing was too much trouble for his personal surveillance”.

Whitbread went carefully into each case, making his notes; usually, where it was required, he issued a summons for the other party in the case to appear before him, sometimes the same day (152), but often the following morning at 8 o’clock (189).