Flow
There was a great energy today as we worked at NRO. It feels like we are making real progress and connections.
Last week I spotted a Land Tax reference in the Coleman Collections directory so I requested it ready for today with no idea if it would be useful or not. It’s an early reference, but last week we had spoken about how we hadn’t seen any records of how the tax collecting was recorded. This book gave us a starting point, hand written with amounts for property and amounts for stocks. Wendy mentioned a reference she had written down from the on-line catalogue. When Susan joined us we discussed this early document and Wendy’s note and off she went and came back with two bundles of documents, Land Tax records for the parishes of St Andrews and St Peter Mancroft. Looking at 1821 records, the information is now entered into specially printed forms. There is, after trying to decipher difficult handwriting, a real joy in a form filled in with readable or mostly readable information we can make sense of. The number of entries is much larger which logically follows the rise in population in Norwich over the 100 or so years between the two sets of information. One of our characters Yallop, a commissioner is mentioned as paying some 50 pounds in the St Peter Mancroft Parish (the church opposite the forum in Norwich), not an insignificant amount of money at the time. So being a commissioner in no way was an exemption of the tax. It also didn’t mean that he personally went around collecting money, rather he appointed staff to be both assessors and collectors.
The other two detectives spent time looking at the United Friars materials. A history of the group was written by M Knights when the documents where held in the Coleman collection. On reading the account one of the History Detectives Elaine was questioning Knight’s interpretation, do we trust his referencing or paraphrasing, does he stray into embellishing? Something we might call in the trade artistic license perhaps.
In the afternoon I asked each member of the group to talk about a document of their choice. This audio recording trial run was really useful and gave me some material to work with over the next week.
