Attorneys - Louth Lincs 1838

This page deals with Louth attorneys active in the period approximately 1820-51. The attorneys referred to are listed in the schedule. Press reports provide much of the information about them. Additional information has been drawn from Goulding’s Some Old Boys of Louth Grammar School (“OB”) and General Loft’s Lincolnshire Notes. For references to the old corporation and the borough council see Corporations.

Background – the Profession

The terms “attorney” (or “attorney at law”) and “solicitor” were technically different in that attorneys were licensed by the common law courts and solicitors by the court of chancery. However, by the nineteenth century it was normal for the same individual to be both an attorney and a solicitor. In the first half of the nineteenth century practitioners tended to call themselves solicitors but other people usually called them attorneys. A change in the law in 1873 made the name “attorney” redundant.

Attorneys qualified by a form of apprenticeship; this involved service with an attorney as an “articled clerk”, normally for a period of five years. Examinations were introduced in 1836. Qualification was not intellectually difficult to achieve, but it was often expensive: typically the parents of articled clerks had to pay the master attorney a premium to obtain the articles and there was a special tax on articles, sometimes over £100. Details of the articles are available online from family history websites. Once qualified, an attorney could set up work on his own, but might find it difficult to support himself until his business had become established. Alternatively he might work as a salaried assistant or (if he had the money) buy a partnership with another attorney.

The Work

Contemporary literature placed most emphasis on the involvement of attorneys in litigation. It was often suggested that they fomented disputes in order to enrich themselves. There was scope for a great deal of civil litigation, because a high percentage of transactions were for credit rather than cash. No doubt the Louth attorneys sent plenty of threatening letters to defaulters. The problem was that, until county courts with professional judges and monthly sessions were introduced in 1847, there was no satisfactory local venue for civil litigation. Before then, Louth had a “court of requests”, staffed by amateur judges, but it was ineffective and held in low esteem; legal representation at its hearings was not permitted. Serious litigation was largely dealt with in London through agent attorneys, though some cases were heard by judges at the assizes held in Lincoln, usually twice yearly. These court hearings were conducted by barristers with attorneys being confined to preparatory work.

Debts provided another, but generally not very lucrative, source of income for attorneys: the organisation of assignments for the benefit of creditors. Under the assignment the debtor transferred all of his property to trustees who eventually paid proportionate dividends to the creditors. This type of work would today be done mainly by accountants, but that profession emerged only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Formal bankruptcy, which could involve the imprisonment of the debtor in Lincoln Castle, was less common.

In some towns attorneys ran small banks. The only Louth example failed at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Louth attorneys were still involved in arranging loans; advertisements offering loans to be secured by mortgages were fairly common and there must have been many unadvertised transactions. The attorney would receive a fee for arranging the loan and another for investigating the borrower’s title and drawing up the mortgage. This sort of work could also be linked to land sales; sale advertisements often offered prospective purchasers mortgages to cover part of the purchase price.

Another important area of work was drawing up wills and administering the estates of deceased persons. Wills were sometimes associated with elaborate family settlements regulating the transfer of property.

An easy first opportunity for any attorney setting up business was to be an insurance agent. In the first half of the nineteenth century there were numerous insurance companies eager to appoint local agents working on commission.

Criminal litigation did not constitute a large part of the work of Louth attorneys, since the prosecutors were mostly private individuals, and the vast majority of the defendants had no legal representation.

Land law was more complicated then than it is now, and conveyancing could be lucrative. The number of freehold transactions was much lower than today, mainly because the percentage of owner-occupied houses was much smaller (and declining, as mentioned on another page ). In the absence of trading accounts the scale of an attorney’s conveyancing practice has to be deduced from the frequency and importance of advertised land sales, which usually named the seller’s attorney. There were not a great many such: see appendix 1 below. A comparison of the landowners identified in the three rating lists show that there must have been many unadvertised private sales, but these cannot be quantified.

In some of the villages around Louth the manorial system survived: much land lay in open fields and the effective owners were not freeholders but tenants (“copyholders”) paying small fixed rents to the lord of the manor. The formalities associated with this system increased the expense of selling land and provided work for attorneys acting as stewards of the manors. A potentially significant, but intermittent, area of work arose from the enclosure of land authorised by private acts of Parliament: see appendix 1. Louth’s open fields were enclosed at the beginning of the nineteenth century and most of the Lincolnshire enclosures were completed before 1820, but some remained.

The articled clerks generally worked unpaid, although in one Louth case, Lysimachus Parker, there is a record of a salary of £40 pa, which probably represented the salary earned before articles. A good deal of the attorney’s routine office work was done by poorly paid clerks. Few of these secured qualification as an attorney. Some rose to be “managing clerks”, who saw clients and dealt with legal work largely unsupervised. That degree of success was exceptional, but for an intelligent boy in his mid-teens with good handwriting, employment by an attorney offered experience in business practice and general office work that could open other doors. For example, Charles Norton, who in the 1851 Louth census identified himself as an “attorney’s general clerk” had ten years later become a Great Northern Railway stationmaster.

The Louth Connection

The business of the Louth attorneys related mainly to the town and nearby villages. To a prospective attorney a Louth connection was clearly advantageous; and most of the men listed in the schedule were born in or near Louth. It may be assumed that close blood relationships helped business. However, I have not explored in detail the numerous marital connections amongst the attorneys and other prominent residents of Louth. For example, F F Goe and Henry Falkner were W G Allison’s brothers-in-law, but there is no information on whether this helped their respective practices as attorneys. (After the death of his first wife in 1846, Allison married her younger sister, thus doubling his relationship with Falkner; presumably the marriage took place abroad, because it would have been unlawful in England.)¹

Success in Business

For this period there is little information about the professional earnings of country attorneys generally and virtually none about those in Louth. Peter Criddle’s study of Alford attorneys ² quoted annual profits of about £550 split between two partners in the years 1855-7, and this is consistent with an 1837 suggestion that in England as a whole half of the attorneys did not earn as much as £300 pa. ³ It is evident that some Louth attorneys accumulated significant wealth, but much of this is likely to have been derived from personal property transactions. In commercial terms one of the strong points of attorneys was the lack of any need for risky capital investments. Many nineteenth century businessmen became insolvent by over-investing in premises and equipment; but attorneys could operate from small offices and often worked from home.

Office Holders

There were many local positions that gave attorneys a degree of public notice, which was a discreet form of advertisement. The office of town clerk, which meant clerk to the old corporation up to 1835 and clerk to the borough council thereafter, was the most important, because these bodies had a good deal of land and other property. When Frederick Lucas, clerk to the old corporation, was displaced on political grounds in 1835, he claimed large compensation; a back-dated annuity of £86 was eventually agreed.⁴ In 1862, when the then town clerk, Christopher Ingoldby, was gravely ill, it was reported that in anticipation of his death four different attorneys were lobbying members of the borough council for the appointment.⁵ After Ingoldby’s death his successor was approved unanimously.

Social Considerations

In the nineteenth century there was great concern with the concept of gentility. The standard articles for an articled clerk always referred to the attorney as a “gentleman”. The usual implication was that the gentleman came from a family of gentlemen. But the schedule shows that this was not the case for at least four of the Louth attorneys: we have the sons of a labourer, a baker (who, according to Loft “kept a gingerbread stall in the market”), the tenant of a small pub and a chair maker. For them Louth was plainly a place where merit could be rewarded. A former town clerk, Thomas Phillips (1750-1809), seems to have been willing to take boys on the basis of ability. Loft stated that Christopher Ingoldby was employed by William Wilson initially as a “boy writer”; he was past 30 before he was given the articles that enabled him to qualify as an attorney.

It may be significant that all four qualified before 1820. As time went on, candidates from less affluent backgrounds seem to have been squeezed out. Nationally it was feared that there might be too many attorneys: “The Law Society, first legally constituted as the Law Institution in 1825, accepted the high rates of stamp duty on articles after 1870 as one way of limiting entrance to a profession regarded by many as overcrowded.” ⁶ Upward social mobility was achievable in a rapidly growing economy, as was Louth’s in the early nineteenth century; but later in the century Louth’s growth stalled.

For some attorneys the pursuit of gentility led to personal extravagance, which in turn risked leading to crime. The cases of Thomas Bentley Phillips and Henry Pye are dealt with in appendix 2 below.

Politics and Religion

For voting generally see the voting page.

The personal politics of the attorneys may be of some interest but need to be distinguished from their business work. The most extreme example of the former may be the activities of the Pitt Club. This was one of many that flourished in towns in the period 1815-25; their main function was to hold dinners at which numerous toasts were proposed to the memory of William Pitt the Younger and the supporters of his views. T B Phillips was the secretary of the Louth Pitt Club and its membership included Bellwood, Lucas and possibly other Louth attorneys. In 1820 the club considered the “Peterloo massacre” in which certain Manchester magistrates had ordered the Manchester Yeomanry (cavalry) to make arrests amongst a crowd of demonstrators; hundreds of people were injured and an uncertain number killed. The Louth Pitt Club expressed their approval by toasting both the Manchester magistrates and the Manchester Yeomanry.⁷

R J Olney’s study Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885 showed that some Lincolnshire attorneys made a good deal of money out of organising election events, which in some cases amounted to bribery of the voters. However it is unlikely that Louth attorneys did very well out of this, because Louth was not a parliamentary borough or the effective HQ of any of the candidates.

Politics and religion were often closely related: see the note on voting in appendix 1 below. Personal ambition might trump political considerations. In the early years of the new borough council the Liberals were triumphant; and the local Tories established a “Borough Guardian Society” to oppose them without approaching national politics too closely. Christopher Ingoldby junior was an active member of the society; but later resigned and expressed hostility to it. In an acrimonious debate in 1844 Henry Orme suggested that Ingoldby had been motivated by a promise that, if the society’s candidates took control of the council (which they did in 1843), the town clerk, John Gray, would be sacked and Ingoldby would replace him; but the promise was not kept. James Wilson denied that any such promise had been made; but a prominent member of the council, Samuel Trought, said that it had.⁸ Curiously, when Gray unexpectedly died three years later, it was Trought that delivered a eulogy (“he died lamented as he lived respected”) and moved that Ingoldby should replace him, an appointment approved by the council without debate.⁹

Leaving the Law

Not all articled clerks became attorneys. For example, Field Flowers Goe took his son (of the same odd name) as an articled clerk, but Goe junior, described by Goulding as “a man of extremely gentle and sympathetic disposition” (obviously unsuited to the law!) went into the church and eventually became Bishop of Melbourne. Similarly Goulding referred to Raymond Daniell (1818-94) only as a clergyman, but he had been articled at the age of 14 to W G Allison; presumably he found the law uncongenial.¹⁰

As shown in the schedule there were also cases of qualified attorneys that abandoned the law for other activities: Hildebrand Alington and Christopher Byron both became farmers and Henry Hynman Allenby, with family money behind him probably considered it unnecessary to work for a living.

Schedule: The Attorneys

The Louth attorneys known to be active in the period 1820-51 are listed below in the order of the dates of their registered articles; they usually qualified five years later. Dates of birth are usually those of baptism. “LGS” means that they were recorded by Goulding as attending Louth Grammar School, though sometimes only briefly. The schedule is probably incomplete, since attorneys working as employees rather than in business on their own account are hard to trace. Also, some attorneys based in other towns occasionally had temporary offices in Louth. Where applicable, the values of the premises that the attorneys occupied in the rating lists are shown. As is explained elsewhere in this website, the R1823 values were typically about half the R1838 values but the R1851 values were lower than R1838 values. It may be seen that many of the attorneys occupied open land; this must have been primarily used to provide grazing and hay for their horses.

William Wilson (1765-1831)
Born in Poulton, Lancashire, the son of an attorney. Articled in 1782 in Poulton to his elder brother. Goulding said that he moved to Louth on the encouragement of another brother, an attorney in Alford.¹¹ In Louth with his own practice by 1793, when he was secretary to Louth Association for Prosecuting Felons. He was a member of the old corporation from 1803 and six times warden. In partnership with F F Goe from early 1829.
R1823: £28 (house and office) + £6.5 paddock.

Robert Paddison (1765-1822)
Born in South Cockerington (4 miles from Louth). His father was described as a “labourer”, later a “farmer”. Articled 1784 (just before the tax on articles was introduced) to Thomas Phillips, who was town clerk and appears to have been the town’s leading attorney then. Own practice by 1794. In partnership briefly with Charles Wigelsworth 1818-9. Loft described him as a very clever man, but “his partiality of spouting on democratic principles lost his business.” He owned various properties, but they were probably heavily mortgaged, as he appears to have been almost insolvent at the time of his death.
R1823: £35 (house and offices).

Richard Bellwood (1774-1824)
Born in Gainsborough (37 miles from Louth), the son of a shopkeeper. His father was later a publican and eventually a baker in Louth. [Richard’s brother, Charles (1777-1855) continued and expanded the bakery business.] Articled in 1790 to Thomas Phillips. Own practice by 1801. He was appointed town clerk when Phillips resigned in 1804. In partnership with Frederick Lucas from 1812.
R1823: £31 (house) + £5 (office) + £10.5 (land).

Thomas Bentley Phillips (1782-1828)
Born in Louth, the son of Thomas Phillips (a former town clerk mentioned above). LGS. Articled to his father in 1799. He presumably worked for his father when he qualified but the latter seems to have retired by 1809 and died in 1810. He was elected to the old corporation in 1811 and was warden three times. He became heavily indebted and committed suicide in 1828: see appendix 2.
R1823: £53 (house and offices, later called The Limes) + £33.75 (land). Also a new house, apparently built as a speculation but in 1823 not yet sold and valued at £40.

Frederick Lucas (1788-1842)
Born in Alford (10 miles from Louth), the son of Richard Lucas (1753-1806), a woollen manufacturer and draper, who was bankrupt in 1794 but later became a wine merchant in Louth. [Frederick’s brother, Henry (1787-1844) continued the wine business.] Articled in 1805 to Richard Bellwood. In partnership with him by 1812. Lucas was appointed town clerk and clerk to the magistrates when Bellwood died in 1824 and was first clerk to the improvement commissioners in 1825.
R1823: £25 (house) + £5.25 (land). R1838: £45 (house) + £8 (office) + £42 (land).

Lysimachus or Lys Parker (1786-1860)
Born in North Ormsby (6 miles from Louth); the then occupation of his father, Lysimachus senior, is not known but by 1799 he was tenant of the Black Bull in Louth. LGS. Articled 1806 to Robert Paddison. Own practice by 1811. In partnership with his brother Cornelius by 1824. He appears to have had a very successful practice: in 1825 he was steward of the (small) manor of Little Cawthorpe but by 1842 he had become lord of the manor himself and owned land there. The firm was still listed in White’s 1842 directory but declining advertisements indicate that by then the practice was being wound down. Lys appears to have left Louth in 1848 and for some years occupied a large house in Buckinghamshire.
R1823: £15; but he later bought Phillips’ house. R1838: £94 (house/office) + £12.25 (land). R1851: nil – had left Louth.

Charles Wigelsworth (1794-1850)
Born in Louth, the son of Charles senior (d 1799), an attorney, paper manufacturer and failed banker. LGS. Articled in 1810 to a Market Rasen attorney. In partnership with Robert Paddison 1818-9. He then practised alone until about 1825 but with little business. His subsequent activities are unclear; he probably soon left Louth.
R1823: £10 (house and office).

Christopher Ingoldby (1777-1860)
Born in Louth, the son of a chair maker. Articled in 1811 to William Wilson. Loft’s comment: “a very respectable, steady man accumulating a considerable property”. The amount of land that he occupied in 1838 is puzzling: more than could have been needed for carriage horses or other domestic purposes, but not enough for farming. He seems to have owned land mainly as investments. The value of his holdings approximately doubled between 1823 and 1838, largely as a result of new purchases; for example between those dates he bought a block of eight small houses in Gospelgate. He also built some new houses, not of high value. By 1838 the annual rental from his tenanted houses and land must have been close to £300. His holdings in 1851 were similar. After 1851 the business seems to have been largely in the hands of his son (see below). White’s 1856 directory shows him still resident in Louth, but he seems to have left soon afterwards. His wife died in Lincoln in 1857, apparently whilst in the household of his son-in-law, Pearson Bellamy (the architect of Louth Town Hall) and he died in London.
R1823: £14 (house) + £13 (land, over 10 acres). R1838: £21 (house/office, probably the same as 1823) + £71.25 (land). R1851: £15 (new house), £6 (office) + £40 (land).

Field Flowers Goe (1798-1865)
Born in Coningsby (22 miles from Louth). His father was a clergyman and vicar of Boston from 1817. His uncle, Samuel Goe (1765-1816), was a Louth surgeon, member of the corporation and warden in 1809. Articled in 1813 to William Wilson. Some advertisements suggest that he had his own practice by 1820; but R1823 did not list him as the occupier of an office. He probably worked for Wilson and was in partnership with him from 1829 and then with James Wilson (see below) from 1834. In 1827 he was elected coroner for the Louth area, which covered most of south Lindsey. (The election took place at Lincoln and was so disorderly that voting had to be adjourned. His opponent, a spirit merchant at Horncastle, hired gangs of supporters to shout “No Goe!”; but it was soon established that the demonstrators were mostly not freeholders and therefore not entitled to vote.)¹² He was a member of the old corporation from 1832 and of the borough council 1837-40, and later an alderman and mayor in 1849 and 1850.
R1823: absent. R1838: £43 (house; offices in house primarily occupied by Wilson’s widow). R1851 £32 (house) + £10 (stables); + £10 (offices).

William Grant Allison (1797-1865)
Born in Louth. His grandfather was a prosperous Louth grocer and later sub-distributor of stamps. His father, William Allison junior, was by 1800 a bank agent and later became a partner in the Boston bank of Claypon, Garfit and Claypon; “Banker Allison” was a member of the corporation from 1819 and was warden in 1823. LGS. Articled to Richard Bellwood in 1813. Own practice by 1821. In, or soon after, 1826 he bought what may have been then the largest house in town (The Mansion). This purchase must have been made with family money. He had a sideline as a seed merchant and also at least a financial interest in selling wine and spirits. He took his two sons (see below) into partnership about 1851.
R1823: £5 (office: he presumably lived with his father). R1838: £105 (house) + £6.5 (office) + £3 (land). R1851: £83 (house) + £2.5 (land).

Henry Alington (later Pye) (1799-1883)
Born in Swinhope (9 miles from Louth), the son of a clergyman and landowner from a long-established landowning family; his mother was the daughter of John Emeris, a wealthy clergyman and headmaster of Louth Grammar School. LGS. Articled in London 1815. Own practice in Louth by 1821. He changed his name to Pye in 1828 on inheriting property. In partnership with Thomas Phillips Waite 1831-63. Their firm dealt with many land sales in the Marsh parishes, including some near Boston and in a major sale of properties in Grimsby market place in 1858; but appendix 1 shows that the scale of their business was unremarkable. They also were clerks to turnpike trustees, stewards of various manors and acted for enclosure commissioners. Pye was elected to the old corporation in 1829 and was warden in 1832. He was appointed county treasurer for Lindsey in 1829. This post only carried a small annual salary, probably £50, but the salary increased to £105 in 1857, when he was handling receipts of £20,000 pa.¹³

Pye was an enthusiastic Tory. He was a member of a committee formed in 1832 to establish a new county newspaper (which became the Chronicle) to oppose Mercury, which was considered too radical.¹⁴

Pye presented himself as (and probably was for a time) a rich man, a supporter of local charities, particularly those associated with the church. In 1823 he occupied a relatively modest house/office on the north side of Westgate. Later, probably about 1830, he built what he doubtless intended to be the finest private house in Louth, The Cedars, described in R1838 and R1851 as being in Westgate, but actually in what is now called St Mary’s Lane. (It sold for £3,700 in 1868.)¹⁵ At some date between 1842 and 1848 he built in Westgate another large house, later called The Firs for his mother. In the early 1850s he built for himself “a handsome marine residence” at North Somercotes. His marriage in 1854 to his second wife, the daughter of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, was unlikely to have reduced his expenses. He absconded in 1868 and kept out of England for the rest of his life.

Pye seems to have farmed some of his Louth land himself. He was a landowner in the North Somercotes area and carried out a major reclamation scheme under which nearly 400 acres of saltmarsh were converted to agricultural use. A press report suggested that he was carrying out the scheme in partnership with Waite.¹⁶ In 1869 his estate there, “482 acres of arable and meadow land, together with 41 acres of out-marsh” was auctioned with a reserve of £29,000 but £27,000 was the best bid.¹⁷
R1823: £18 (house/office) + £15 (land & stables). R1838: £115 (house, some land) + £74 (other land) + £9 (office). R1851: £86 (house, some land) + £62.75 (other land) + £10.5 (office).

Hildebrand William Alington (1803-1866)
Born in Swinhope, the brother of Henry Alington/Pye. LGS. Articled to Henry 1821 and in partnership with him from 1826 but appears to have given up the law by 1829 and became a farmer at Welton le Wold.
[Not in the rating lists.]

Cornelius Parker (1794-1879)
Born in Louth, the brother of Lys (see above). LGS. Articled to Lys in 1818 and in partnership with him on qualification. For his professional career see Lys. He was elected to the borough council in 1845 (a radical according to Chronicle) and was immediately made mayor and re-elected mayor 1846 and 1847; he then retired from the council. He was elected a poor law guardian in 1853 and was appointed as a JP for Louth in 1845, and for Lindsey in 1857. A generous benefactor of local charities.
R1823: nil; he presumably lived with his brother or his father (who had retired from the Black Bull). R1838: £52. R1851: £37 (same house).

Richard Paddison (1801-74)
Born in Louth, the son of Robert Paddison (see above). Articled in 1820 in Hull. He was active in Louth from 1823 in the administration of his father’s estate and other matters. Own practice by 1828. He was much involved in politics as a radical and led the opposition to the church rate in 1834. He was a candidate for the new borough council in 1835 but withdrew at the last minute to claim the town clerkship. He seems to have had only a small general practice. Paddison resigned and left Louth in 1842, but continued to act for the borough council in protracted litigation (“the toll case”) with the governors of the grammar school. For this he eventually presented a bill for £1,213, though this included counsels’ fees (sums paid out to barristers).¹⁸
R1823: nil. R1838: £29.

John Gray (1804-47)
Born in Louth, the son of a shoemaker. LGS. Articled in 1823 to his uncle, a Market Rasen attorney, Thomas Rhodes, who had served articles in Louth. After qualifying he seems to have worked partly for Rhodes but was resident in Louth from 1828 ¹⁹ and had his own office in Louth by 1834. By 1841 he was living with his sister, who ran a school for girls in Walkergate. His practice seems always to have been small, but he was appointed town clerk when Paddison resigned in 1842. This appointment was probably a political one: he was elected to the borough council in 1839 and, as “a principal supporter of the Louth Independent Chapel”, he was naturally a Liberal; he resigned from the council on his appointment as town clerk. His death, like that of Henry Frederick Lucas earlier in 1847, was said to be attributable to typhus, a disease spread by lice; but the state of medicine at the time was such that the diagnosis may have been unreliable.
R1823: nil. R1838: £18.5

Thomas Phillips Waite (1809-91)
Born in Louth, the son of the headmaster of the grammar school. LGS. Articled in 1826 to Thomas Bentley Phillips; then after the suicide of Phillips to Henry Pye. In partnership with Pye from 1831 to early 1863. He was appointed the first registrar of Louth County Court in 1847. He was a member of the borough council 1843-6 and from 1855 onwards, being elected mayor in 1844, 1856, 1857 and 1858 and an alderman in 1867. In partnership with his son Charles 1867-8 but he made an assignment for the benefit of creditors in January 1868. R1851 suggests that he then owned considerable property in Louth but sales on behalf of creditors in 1868 show that most of this had been sold previously. His insolvency was probably simply due to living beyond his means. In a very brief entry Goulding stated that “misfortune overtook him by reason of his partnership with Henry Pye”. ²⁰ This seems doubtful in view of the gap of four years between the termination of the partnership and Waite’s insolvency. His life-style did not approach Pye’s lavish spending, and there seems to have been no suggestion that he was involved in Pye’s misappropriation of trust funds. (However, it is possible that Goulding, who rarely cited his sources, had additional information.)
R1838: £63 (house – for his office see Pye). R1851: £55 (house) + £1.5 (garden).

James William Wilson (1811-1894)
Born in Louth, the son of William Wilson (see above). LGS. Articled to his father in 1828 and, when his father died, to Goe. In partnership with Goe from 1834. He was appointed as the first clerk to Louth Union poor law guardians in 1836 (salary £100 pa), the first superintendent registrar of births, marriages and deaths in 1837 and clerk to the Lindsey magistrates by 1848. From 1841 he was a member of the borough council.
R1838: £13 (field only, he lived with his widowed mother). R1851: £48 (house); £17.75 (fields); £10 (firm’s office).

Thomas Grant junior (1814-61)
Born in Withcall (2 miles from Louth), the son of a farmer, Thomas senior, who retired at an early age and moved to Louth. LGS. Articled in 1831 to William Grant Allison. Own practice by 1839 but advertisements indicate that it was small scale. He apparently gave up his practice about 1857. He became mentally ill and committed suicide in 1861. He was briefly a member of the borough council in 1851. Goulding stated ²¹ that he continued the practice of L & C Parker; this was incorrect; but he did rent some of the office space previously used by them.
R1838: £8. R1851: £20 (house) + £7.5 (office).

Henry Falkner (1815-69)
Born in Southwell (Notts). Articled in 1831 in Newark. In practice as an attorney in Southwell by 1838 but his partnership there was dissolved in 1844. In Louth by 1846, ²² He took over the Lucas practice following the death of Henry F Lucas in 1847. He succeeded Ingoldby as clerk to the magistrates in 1862. (His move to Louth may have been connected to the fact that his sister was married to W G Allison.)
R1851: £37 (house) + £13 (office) + £4.5 (land).

Henry Newbald (1814-88)
Born in Hull, the son of a merchant. Articled in 1831 in Hull to Charles Phillips (a son of Thomas Bentley Phillips). He was in Louth as an attorney’s clerk in 1841, probably employed by Pye & Waite. In partnership with them by 1848 but he left in 1854 and moved to Newark, where he was mayor in 1871 and continued in practice almost until his death.
[Not in the rating lists – he lived in Louth as a lodger.]

Frederick Richard Lucas (1818-64)
Born in Louth, the son of Frederick Lucas (see above). Articled in 1836 to his father and briefly in partnership with him, then with his cousin Henry (see below) until about the end of 1843. He appears then to have left Louth (and deserted his wife, Lucy, who stayed in the town for the rest of her life, living with her mother-in-law.) He died in Canada. ²³
[Not in the rating lists.]

Henry Frederick Lucas (1818-47)
Born in Louth, the son of a wine merchant and nephew of Frederick (see above). Articled in 1837 to his uncle. After his uncle died at the end of 1842 he succeeded to the post of clerk to the magistrates, in spite of his youth. The number of property advertisements in his name indicate a thriving practice, terminated only by his death at the age of 29.
[Not in the rating lists.]

Henry Cave Orme (1810-51)
Born in Louth, the son of a wealthy clergyman; his paternal grandfather was headmaster of the grammar school; his maternal grandfather was a member of the corporation and warden six times. LGS. His articles have not been identified. Own practice by 1838. His appearances in property advertisements indicated that he soon established a good practice. He was appointed clerk to the improvement commissioners in 1847. His death was sudden and took place in the family house where his father had died.
R1838: £5 (office only). R1851: £42 (house); £4.5 (office).

Henry Cox Goy (1816-1900)
Born in London, the son of an attorney, who moved to Barton upon Humber. Articled in 1833 to his father, who died; the articles were transferred to his brother William. He probably worked for William after qualifying. He appears to have bought the practice of John Gray, which was advertised for sale when the latter died in late 1847. He was listed in the 1849 directories and subsequently but seems to have had a very small practice.
R1851: £4 (office only – he lived as a lodger).

Christopher Ingoldby junior (1818-62)
Born in Louth, the son of Christopher senior (see above). Articled in 1836 to his father, who took him into partnership when he qualified. During his articles he dabbled in Tory journalism: “A youth called Christopher Ingoldby, a correspondent for an obscure newspaper …” ²⁴. He was appointed as town clerk in 1847 (see above). Earlier in that year Louth County Court had its first monthly meeting and Ingoldby soon emerged as the leading advocate before it. He also represented some defendants in criminal cases before the magistrates in Louth and some nearby towns.
R1851: £24 (house and premises); £6 (land); £6 (law offices occupied with his father).

Henry Hynman Allenby (1828-69)
Born in Legbourne (in Kenwick House, almost on the Louth parish boundary), the son of a landowner. Articled in 1836 in Lincoln. He had given up the law by 1855, though his father was still alive. There is no evidence that he ever had a significant practice, though the directories for 1849 listed him in partnership with Septimus Bourne with an office in Mercer Row. (He had married Bourne’s sister in 1849.) The partnership was dissolved in 1852. He identified himself as a “landed proprietor” in the 1861 census.
R1851: £25 (house; no separate office).

Christopher Byron (1821-66)
Born in Tathwell (3 miles from Louth), the son of a farmer. (His grandfather, a retired farmer, lived in Louth.) Articled in 1838 to a Doncaster attorney. Own practice in Louth by 1847 but advertisements show little evidence of work. He was listed in the 1849 directories but not later. He is not identifiable in the 1851 census but was farming with his father in 1861.
R1851: £8.5 (house).

Septimus Bourne (1824-1888)
Born in Alford (10 miles from Louth), the son of a prominent Alford attorney. Articled in 1841 to his father. Briefly in Louth as a partner of Allenby but he was “an invalid, not really able to hold down a job.”²⁵ He died in an asylum at Lincoln.
R1851: nil; lived in Louth as a lodger.

William Allison (1828-1906) and Thomas Falkner Allison (1829-1915)
Born in Louth, the sons of W G Allison. Details of their articles are unknown, but both were qualified by 1851 and in partnership with their father. After their father’s death in 1865 they practised in partnership and also continued the seed and wine businesses. In the parliamentary return of owners of land 1873 the brothers were shown as joint owners of 715 acres yielding an estimated annual rent of £1,346; but this is likely to have represented inherited assets rather than profits from attorneys’ work.
[Not in the rating lists.]

Frederick Sharpley (1829-1903)
Born in Louth, the son of John Booth Sharpley, merchant, Methodist (he led the local “Free” Methodists in splitting from the Wesleyans) and prominent local politician. Details of his articles are unknown, but according to Goulding ²⁶ he qualified in 1850. There seems to be no evidence of his practice in Louth earlier than 1852.
[Not in the rating lists.]

APPENDIX 1 – FURTHER INFORMATION

Conveyancing Work

Advertisements for 1838 and the three previous years have been examined in order to make some estimate of the volume and distribution of conveyancing work done by Louth attorneys at that time. These years have the advantage of stability in that none of the leading attorneys died or otherwise ceased to work. The advertisements show that the four leading practices were those of L & C Parker, W G Allison, F F Goe & J W Wilson and F Lucas. Their volume of work seems to have been roughly equal with the Parker brothers perhaps marginally in the lead. The advertisements reflecting that firm’s work are listed below. By modern standards the amount of work was low, averaging well under one freehold transaction a month.

Behind these four practices were two others: H Pye & T P Waite and C Ingoldby; they were concerned with noticeably fewer transactions. The other attorneys active throughout this period, R Paddison and J Gray seem not to have been significantly involved. (Thomas Grant jnr and Henry Orme have been disregarded, as they appeared only in 1838 and did little business then.)

A Note on Voting

Of the eleven attorneys listed above eight were freeholders and so were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. All eight voted for Tory candidates in the general elections of 1832 and 1835 and six of the eight voted for the church rate in the vestry poll of 1834. (Allison and Goe did not vote in 1834.) Paddison and Gray were not parliamentary electors because they were not freeholders and their leased premises had annual values below £50. As ratepayers they both voted against the church rate in 1834. Wilson was probably not a ratepayer in 1834; the ratepayer for the house in which he lived was his widowed mother; she voted for the church rate.

Advertised Transactions involving Lys and Cornelius Parker

Some of the following sales seem relatively distant from Louth. The explanation appears to be that the Parker brothers had working relationships with land agents, particularly William Bartholomew, a farmer and land agent based at Goltho, near Wragby.

1835
1. Sale of tannery, house and buildings at Waltham. (Sale failed: see 8.)
2. Lease of watermill at Alvingham.
3. Sale of cottages and blacksmith’s shop at Horsington.
4. Sale of house & brewery in Louth.
5. Administrators’ notice re Thomas Bogg deceased.
6. Sale of six houses, a beerhouse, a public house and five building plots in Louth and a public house & blacksmith’s shop in Somercotes. (Some overlap with 4.)
7. Sale of eight building plots in Louth.
8. Lease of tannery etc at Waltham.
9. Lease of farm at Saltfleetby.
10. Sale of freehold & copyhold land at North Cotes.
1836
11. Sale of mortgage of turnpike tolls.
12. Offer of money to lend.
13. Sale of windmill & bakery in Louth.
14. Warning notice to trespassers in pursuit of game in several estates.
15. Notice for meeting of creditors of Louth merchant. (This was part of the protracted bankruptcy of William Dunn.)
16. Sale of farm at Goulceby.
17. Sale of houses and agricultural land on Lincolnshire/Nottinghamshire border.
18. Sale of house and two cottages in Besthorpe, Nottinghamshire.
1837
19. Sale on a long lease of Legbourne Abbey estate.
20. Offer of money to lend – up to £10,000 (advertised in a London paper).
21. Lease of grazing land at Bardney.
22. Sale of large house in Louth and commercial properties near Louth canal.
23. Sale of five acre field at Theddlethorpe.
24. Sale of 1300 acre estate in several Marsh parishes.
25. Sale of 700 acre leasehold estate at North Cockerington
1838
26. Sale of copyhold land at Reepham near Lincoln.
27. Sale of the advowson (ie the right to appoint future rectors) of an unnamed parish near Horncastle; the living was worth about £373 pa; the present rector was aged 68. (This was advertised in several papers.)
28. Lease of grazing land at Bardney (same land as 21).
29. Lease of tithes of North and South Cockerington.
30. Sale of 336 acre farm near Mablethorpe.
31. Notice of meeting to discuss the commutation of tithes of North Cockerington.
32. Sale of farms totalling over 900 acres, part freehold & part on long leases in Fotherby & nearby parishes.
33. Notice of meeting to discuss commutation of tithes of Wyham and Cadeby.

Enclosure Acts

There is little information about the earnings of attorneys from the enclosure of common fields, but evidence taken by a parliamentary committee in 1844 included a detailed bill for attorneys’ work on obtaining a private act for the enclosure of Clee Parish.²⁷ Three firms, including Pye & Waite, were involved in what seems to have been a very tedious procedure in 1841-2. The charges totalled £596, of which Pye & Waite’s share appears to have been less than one third. Their largest item was for Pye’s journey to London. He was accompanied by a clerk, who had posted notices of the proposed enclosure and had to prove that the parliamentary standing orders had been complied with. The trip took six days and a charge of £31 10s was made plus £20 12s for travel and accommodation. Pye made various visits to Grimsby (£2 2s plus expenses each) and there were many five shilling letters. Pye seems to have achieved one economy in securing the appointment of a single enclosure commissioner, when two had been suggested.

Eventually the enclosure act was passed, and the commissioner advertised the first meeting of persons interested; Pye & Waite were joint clerks with a Grimsby attorney and must have received small additional fees for attending meetings.²⁸

APPENDIX 2 – CRIMINALITY

Attorneys were particularly tempted to one type of crime: forgery of legal documents. A forged banknote was liable to repeated scrutiny as it passed from hand to hand; but a forged deed or stamp might stay unexamined in a deed box for many years. An example was the case of Joseph Blackburn, a Leeds attorney, who prepared a mortgage on behalf of a client; the mortgage was subject to stamp duty of £2, but Blackburn forged the stamp and kept the £2 for himself. He was hanged at York in 1815.

Thomas Bentley Phillips
The details of Phillips’ crimes were largely suppressed. Loft merely stated that he “from some cause at present unexplained went to Hull & cut his throat with a Razor.” The only real information came from a letter from an unnamed Louth resident to a London newspaper, reprinted in Mercury 28.3.1828, which suggested that Phillips had left his family and many others “reduced to utter destitution” and had been involved in “transactions partaking in extent and criminality those for which the London banker, Fauntleroy, was executed.” (Fauntleroy had been entrusted to hold Bank of England securities and pay over the dividends to the beneficiaries. He forged powers of attorney and sold the securities but for years covered up the crime by purporting to pay the dividends. In 1824 an enormous crowd had gathered at Newgate to see him hanged.) Presumably the downfall of Phillips was attributable to personal extravagance. There appear to have been no local economic problems that could have been responsible and the effects of the banking crisis of 1825/6, which involved many country banks had subsided. Forty years later it was stated that “the name of that arch-rogue Tom Phillips is still remembered and detested.” ²⁹

A non-criminal example of the conduct of Lucas emerged in litigation in 1843. Most of the property of a man who died in 1826 had been in the hands of Phillips to be invested in a mortgage. Instead of investing it Phillips gave a promissory note, paying interest but without security. A beneficiary under the will of the deceased asked the executor of the will to recover the money, but the executor refused on the ground that the money was safe because Phillips “kept his carriage and lived in great style in one of the best houses”. On the insolvency of Phillips about 80% of the money was lost. The court held that the executor’s neglect of duty made him liable for the deficiency. ³⁰

Henry Pye
Pye’s inherited property and sound legal practice should have enabled him to live safely as a wealthy man, but he seems to have indulged in gross extravagance. For example, less than a year before he declared insolvency he pledged a contribution of £200 for church repairs ³¹ When Pye absconded in 1868, some exaggerated estimates were made of his debts. After his death, in the final settlement of his affairs, his liabilities were stated to be £73,565 and the total dividends paid to creditors amounted to 1s 3¾d in the £ (ie 6.6%).³² The losses were widely distributed: much of his land was mortgaged; as county treasurer he owed about £9,500 when he fled to Belgium (where he remained), but that loss eventually fell on friends that had stood surety for him. His local, unsecured creditors (said to include some of his servants) probably received almost nothing. The biggest single loser may have been his daughter, Charlotte (1830-69, who under the pseudonym “Claribel” was the author of numerous sentimental songs). Under the will of a relative she had a trust fund and the immediately precipitating cause of Pye’s declaration of insolvency may have been the discovery by his co-trustee that he could not account for the trust money.³³