¹ Hoppit, J., ‘The use and abuse of credit in eighteenth-century England’, in McKendrick, N. and Outhwaite, R.B. (eds), Business Life and Public Policy: Essays in Honour of D.C. Coleman (Cambridge, 1986), 66.Google Scholar See also idem, ‘Attitudes to credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 305–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁷ For the borough courts, see Muldrew, C., ‘Credit and the courts: debt litigation in a seventeenth-century urban community’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 46 (1993), 23–38;CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the county courts, see Johnson, P., ‘Small debts and economic distress in England and Wales, 1857–1913’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 46 (1993), 65–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹³ Winder, , ‘Courts of requests’, 380.Google Scholar The legislation was 45 Geo. III c. 67.

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¹⁵ The court of record, although empowered to hear debt cases of any amount, issued only forty-five writs in 1823, and only seventeen in 1827. A Return of All Places in England and Wales Claiming Power of Issuing Processes to Hold Bail in Actions for Debt, Parliamentary Papers, 20 (1828), 82.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ The court record books for 1785–88,1829–31 and 1837–40 are located in the City of Bath Record Office, Bath Guildhall. As the eighteenth-century records are substantially less complete than the nineteenth-century court books, they are not included in the following discussion.

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²³ Only the three statuses of gentleman, spinster and widow appear for defendants. Occupations or statuses are recorded for 91.3 per cent of plaintiffs and 82.0 per cent of defendants in 1829, and 100 per cent of plaintiffs and 99.6 per cent of defendants in 1839. The omission of occupation or status information appears to be fairly random across groups. Thus when checked against the entries in Keene's Bath Directory for 1829, the unidentified litigants in the sample appear in trades as diverse as grocers, farriers, carpenters, tailors, plumbers, drawing and painting masters, and surgeons. As not all litigants can be identified in this manner, and as labourers are not listed in the directory, all calculations of the proportion of litigants belonging to a given occupational group are calculated in this paper as a percentage of the plaintiffs or defendants for whom an occupation or status is given in the court register.

²⁴ A total of 51.7 per cent of the 1829 causes and 45.2 per cent of the 1839 causes were described as concerning either goods sold and delivered or the balance of an unspecified account.

²⁵ In 1831, the weekly charge for keeping a labourer, his wife and two children at subsistence levels was estimated at 12s, of which 1s 6d (12.5 per cent) represented rent. Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 282.Google Scholar

²⁶ The range of causes entered per session was 71 to 90 in 1829, and 88 to 143 in 1839.

²⁷ Of the judgements rendered for 1829,44.9 per cent were denoted ‘settled’, ‘neither appeared’, ‘nonserve’, or ‘plaintiff did not appear’; the corresponding figure for 1839 was 54.1 per cent. A similar, but far more pronounced, tendency in early modern civil litigation is discussed in Muldrew, ‘Credit and the courts’, 27, who notes that in the borough court of seventeenth-century King's Lynn only 4 per cent of cases continued to judgement. See also Sharpe, J.A., ‘“Such disagreement betwyxt neighbours”: litigation and human relationships in early modern England’, in Bossy, J. (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 1983), 167–88.Google Scholar

²⁸ Bath Guardian, 22 03 1839.Google Scholar For legal opinions on the purchase of necessities and luxuries, see Donnison Roper, R.S., A Treatise of the Law of Property Arising from the Relation between Husband and Wife, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London, 1826), vol. 2, 110–11.Google Scholar

²⁹ These figures clearly underestimate the proportion of suits brought for food and drink provision, as suits brought by yeomen, spinsters, and widows — excluded here from the calculations — were often for beer, bread and meat. Trades included in the calculation are: bacon-factor, baker, beer-seller, brewer, butcher, buttery jobber, cheesemonger, confectioner, cook, dairyman, fisherman, fishmonger, fruitier, ginger-beer maker, greengrocer, grocer, innkeeper, maltster, milkman, miller, poulterer, shopkeeper, tea-dealer, tripeseller, victualler and wine merchant.

³⁰ Yeomen were more likely than drapers to settle out of court in both years. Of all suits initiated in the sample for 1829,44.9 per cent were settled out of court; 51.7 per cent of yeomen's suits but only 32.1 per cent of drapers' suits were settled in this manner. In the 1839 sample, 54.1 per cent of all suits, 56.3 per cent of yeomen's suits and 39.6 per cent of drapers' suits were settled out of court.

³¹ The census figures for this period are not wholly reliable, but they indicate, if anything, a decrease in unskilled male labour in Bath over time. The census of 1831 categorized just over 20 per cent of all adult males in the city as labourers; in 1851, one-sixth or just under 17 per cent were so designated. Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 268Google Scholar, and idem, ‘The industries of the city of Bath in the first half of the nineteenth century’, Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archæological and Natural History Society, 108 (1963–1964), 133.Google Scholar

³² Brougham, Henry, speaking in the House of Commons in 1828, noted that it was usual for a gentlemanly debtor in need of credit to ‘send for his butcher and his baker, and get bailed’, although such ‘a gentleman could not, after that, complain so well of the meat, or the bread, or the bills during the next half year.’ Speeches of Henry Lord Brougham, upon Questions Relating to Public Rights, Duties and Interests, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1838), vol. 2, 410.Google Scholar Similar relations obtained at the lower end of the credit spectrum as well, where shopkeepers ensured the continued custom of workers both by an extensive trade credit and through their role as substantial landlords. See Crossick, G., ‘The petite bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Britain: the urban and liberal case’, in Crossick, G. and Haupt, H.G. (eds), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1984), 82–4.Google Scholar

³³ All tables profiling the suits of the six selected groups exclude suits brought by gentlemen, spinsters and widows, as these status groups represent a multiplicity of occupations (or the lack thereof) and cannot be ascribed with any consistency to a particular type of purchase.

³⁴ In nineteenth-century usage, the term ‘shopkeeper’ denoted ‘small, non-specialized retailers who lacked capital or social standing’, while ‘grocer’ referred to a provisioner of higher status and wealth. Phillips, M., ‘The evolution of markets and shops in Britain’, in Benson, J. and Shaw, G. (eds), The Evolution of Retail Systems, c. 1800–1914 (Leicester, 1992), 63.Google Scholar For the grocer as a ‘purveyor of luxuries to the rich’, see Winstanley, M.J., The Shopkeeper's World: 1830–1914 (Manchester, 1982), 8–9.Google Scholar

³⁵ The court clerk's annotations for gentlemen's suits detail several instances of horse and gig hire as well as one suit to recover the cost of coach hire from Bath to London.

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³⁷ Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 275–81Google Scholar, notes the range of women's experiences as widows and spinsters in Bath. In the sample months of August-September 1829 and 1839, widows and spinsters together constituted 8.8 per cent and 6.5 per cent of all defendants. None of these women were designated by trade, but the wider samples for 1829–30 and 1839–40 denote some women as laundresses, butchers, servants, dressmakers, pastry-cooks and shopkeepers.

³⁸ The building trades occupied 14.5 per cent of Bath's adult male population in 1831; one in eight of Somerset county's masons lived in the city. Neale, , Bath 1680–1850, 268.Google Scholar

³⁹ Over half of the deaths associated with the epidemic of 1831 occurred in the Avon Street district, an area with especially low rentals. Mortality in most of the city's working-class districts in the 1848–49 epidemic was four to fives times higher than that in the affluent Bathwick region. Ibid., 289–91.

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⁴⁵ The so-called ‘Tippling Act’ of 1750, 24 Geo. II c. 40, protected debtors from most publicans' claims in the small debt courts.

⁴⁶ Winstanley, , Shopkeeper's World, 12Google Scholar, notes the diversity of some shopkeepers' goods. The only goods regularly itemized beside entries on suits by Bath's shopkeepers are, however, bread and meat.

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⁵⁰ Lemire, , Fashion's Favourite, 96Google Scholar, notes that domestic servants, with close proximity to more affluent consumers, were the most fashion-conscious of all wage-earners; McKendrick, ‘Home demand and economic growth’, underscores the impact of women's wages and employment on consumption; Campbell, C., The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987), underlines the role of romanticism.Google Scholar

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