Corporations

Louth’s Old Corporation

The origins of Louth’s original corporation have fully been dealt with in local histories.¹1.See especially Goulding 1891 pp 2 – 14 (translations of the charters), Gurnham 2007 pp 63 – 5, 79 – 80, 88. The following is only a brief summary. The original royal charter dated 1551 established a corporate body comprising the Warden and six assistants and vested considerable property in it, mainly for the maintenance of a grammar school. A further charter dated 1564 made the Corporation lord of the manor of Louth, which carried with it a variety of manorial and other rights. Further charters dated 1605 and 1608 gave the Corporation additional local government powers. These included a power to make byelaws and additional criminal jurisdiction: the Warden and one of the assistants were the town’s magistrates and held frequent court hearings including quarter sessions that dealt with the more serious cases. The number of assistants that could be magistrates was increased to three in 1830.²2. The increase was mainly because of a new statutory requirement for three magistrates to act on liquor licensing matters: Goulding 1891 p 13; Corporation minutes 15.5.1827).

Louth ceased to have its own quarter sessions in 1835, when consideration of the more serious offences passed to a division of Lindsey quarter sessions, the hearings of which alternated between Louth and Spilsby. The town justices continued to deal at petty sessions with lesser offences. Separate petty sessions were held in Louth by the Lindsey justices to deal with offences occurring outside the town’s boundary.

Though the Old Corporation had power to levy rates,³3. Goulding 1891 p 12. that power was not used in the nineteenth century, expenditure being met from rents and other income from property.

Like many charities then and now, the Corporation was a self-perpetuating body: members held office for life and vacancies were filled by election by the other members. The office of Warden was held for one year and was usually filled by rotation, so that an assistant might expect to become Warden at intervals of five to seven years.⁴4. For example Thomas Bentley Phillips became an assistant in 1811 and was Warden for the year 1815/16 and again in 1821/2 and 1827/8, when he died in office; the Warden’s annual term of office ran from Whit Sunday in each year. By the early nineteenth century the Corporation drew its membership mainly from doctors, lawyers and gentlemen of independent means, all Tories and supporters of the Church of England. A discussion of the composition of the Corporation is to be found in the Report of the Municipal Commissioners (1835 p 2,374):

Dissatisfaction was expressed by some inhabitants of the town respecting the exclusion of tradesmen from the corporation. It appeared that no tradesman had been elected for 27 or 28 years; and it seems probable that none had been a member during a much longer period.

When the Municipal Corporations Act took effect in September 1835 the composition of Louth Corporation was as follows.

Reform: the Borough Council

After the Reform Act 1832 had reformed the House of Commons, the Municipal Corporation Act 1835 was intended to reform local government. Louth was unusual in that the Old Corporation continued to exist, but only as the governing body of the grammar school. A new statutory body, the Borough Council, was established under a standard national pattern providing 18 elected councillors and six aldermen elected by the councillors; the new body was presided over by a mayor elected by the councillors and aldermen. A byproduct of the survival of the Old Corporation was a lengthy dispute about the extent of the property reserved for school purposes. This was eventually settled by a private act of Parliament, referred to here as the Compromise Act.

Under the 1835 Act councillors for a town were to be elected by the “burgesses”: those ratepayers of the town who (a) were male, (b) were householders resident in the town or within seven miles of it, (c) had occupied one or more buildings in the town for the whole of the year of registration and the previous two years, (d) had paid their poor rates, and (e) had not received poor relief. Qualification for election was narrower than qualification to vote: a councillor had to be rated upon property valued at not less than £15 or alternatively own property worth at least £500. Clergymen were barred from being councillors. (But Methodist lay preachers were not. Shortly after his first election as Mayor J B Sharpley caused eyebrows to be raised when he “delivered an excellent sermon in Louth Wesleyan chapel”.)⁵5. Mercury 6.12.1839, a news item picked up by about a dozen other newspapers).

In theory the burgesses could have numbered well over 1,000 but the actual number was smaller. According to Mercury 1.1.1836 there were only 609 burgesses listed on the “burgess roll” as being able to vote at the first election in December 1835. In many cases qualification was lost because of the receipt of poor relief, or failure to pay the rates.⁶6. The notes to R1838 give some information about four years in the 1830s, when the poor rates collected expressed as a percentage of the theoretical rate product ranged from 87.9% to 92.7%. Another cause is likely to have been many of the poorer inhabitants moved house frequently. Provided that the moves were within the parish boundary, this should not have affected their right to vote, but in practice may have caused their entitlement to be overlooked. In some cases occupiers may have lost their right to vote because the rates were paid by the owners of the properties; but there is no evidence that this happened on any significant scale before 1850. After the Small Tenements Rating Act 1850 the poor rates for most tenanted houses in Louth were paid by the owner, rather than the occupier, but the voting rights of the tenants were protected, provided that the owner did pay.⁷7. Section 7 of the act. Strangely, this protection did not apply to voting in the Vestry; Mercury 10.11.1854, 17.11.1854 reported a Vestry meeting involving a fiercely contested election for seats on the Burial Board (!) at which voting rights were disputed. The burgess roll for 1851 has not survived, but the roll for 1860 shows 1,116 burgesses. This number equated to roughly two thirds of the male householders. So a large minority of the male householders (and all of the female householders) could not vote.

The new local government bodies were intended to be financed by rates but in Louth there was some resistance to this, because a substantial income was derived from property inherited from the Old Corporation. The new Borough Council gave early consideration to redevelopment and new public buildings in the town centre (as described in Gurnham 2015 pp 6-7) but it was a very long time before these plans came to fruition. Local politics seem to have generated much local excitement; but the council did not provide many services or spend much money, though the mayor, as chief magistrate of the town, had an important role.

Initially the Borough Council’s main function was to establish a watch committee to create and supervise a police force. This was required by Municipal Corporations Act 1835 s 76; for the earlier position in Louth see Improvement Commissioners.