St Matthew's Guild

History of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne

Folsom fair is set in the town of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne; at away fairs, we represent a trade delegation from Newcastle. Situated on the water and near the Scottish border, Newcastle provides us with a perfect excuse for the mixture of nationalities portrayed by the various guilds that attend Folsom. Although our Newcastle is more fictional than realistic (Queen Elizabeth never visited Newcastle, for example) it’s useful to know a little bit about our “home.” The following (edited) excerpt about Newcastle’s history is from Newcastle Upon Tyne, published by the Northern Heritage Society.

Index

1. The Dissolution
   
2. The Plague
   
3. The End of the Wars
   
4. Coal
   
5. The Hostmen's Plot
   
6. The Expanding Town
   
7. Trinity House
   
8. The Guildhall
   
9. Drinkers & Players
   
10. Fairs
    
11. Justice
    

The Dissolution

Henry VIII’s severance of English life from the Church in Rome transformed Newcastle. The first religious houses in England began to be closed in 1536. To begin with only the smaller houses closed, but it would be only four years before all the town’s imposing friaries had gone, stripped of their wealth and turned over to the crown.

Many saw this as an opportunity to make their fortunes, although the king was the chief beneficiary of the extensive land holdings and treasures that the Church had built up over the centuries. The vast wealth of eight thousand religious houses in England and Wales was to provide him with a secure financial base for years to come. He leased much of the land to the lesser gentry, using his rights of patronage to secure their support against any insurrection which might unfold from these unpopular measures. Great swathes of land became available and many of the town’s merchants were able to become landed and moved away.

The five Newcastle friaries were dissolved during 1539 and the nunnery a year later. Between them they had less than sixty brethren at the time of their closure, the Trinitarian House being home to a solitary member. The monks and nuns were pensioned off, whilst the friars received gratuities to enable them to find new professions. Many were to turn to the priesthood.

The years that followed saw the greatest social and physical upheaval since the Norman conquest. The social fabric was torn up and rewoven in only a few years when such change had previously taken centuries. The friaries, which had been responsible for education, health and religious well being and which had taken up vast amounts of land in the town, were gone within the space of a year. There are no modern comparisons. What followed was indeed a reformation.

The removal of the religious houses opened up a massive block to new building in the town. Given this, much of the land within the walls remained untouched greenbelt until the seventeenth century. There was now too much land available, and in the wrong place. The Quayside was rapidly becoming the center of activity whilst the land vacated by the friaries was higher up in the top of the town.

It would also be some time before the wealth from the dissolved friaries would trickle down from the merchants into new building projects. When regeneration finally got underway in the seventeenth century, it was rudely and violently cut short by plague in 1636 and then by civil war.

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The Plague

The town’s growth was hampered from time to time by visitations of the plague. It came in 1589, taking over seventeen hundred souls, then returned in 1636 for its most brutal visit. It entered North Shields in 1635, reaching Newcastle the following year. When plagues approached anybody who could would leave the town for the relative safety of rural areas. All that was left behind was a skeleton population of poor and artisan classes, servants and labourers.

The plague stayed for thirty-six grisly weeks. Death came suddenly, often in only a few hours. Symptoms began with sweating, a “grete stynking”, followed, hardly surprisingly, by a sense of deep foreboding, high fever, a violent headache, dizziness, abdominal pains, and black spots. Fumigations of pitch, resin and frankincense appear to have been used on this melancholy occasion, and to cleanse the apartments of those who had died of it, to prevent the spreading of the infection.

Colonel John Fenwick recorded that Newcastle was in a state of near collapse, “almost desolate, thy streets growne green with grasse, thy treasurie wasted, thy trading departed, as thou never yet recovered it.” Over five thousand died. This must have been an alarming blow for a town whose population ranged from only ten to eighteen thousand between 1500 and 1700.

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The End of the Wars

Newcastle was beginning to lose its military importance as a bulwark against the Scots. Although the town was used in 1547 by the Duke of Somerset during the Pinkie, campaign the border was slowly becoming more settled. Even the walls began to be neglected. The end to centuries of border conflict was in sight.

Newcastle’s existence until then had owed much to its military role. This was where the English army would muster before a campaign. The regular visit of the mighty English army of many thousands, to a town whose population had hovered around five thousand for most of the wars, had provided a steady stimulus to growth over the preceding centuries. The king and his court, together with the cream of English nobility and their hangers on, would provide the town’s merchants with a generous market: all needed housing, feeding and provisions for a campaign. Even in peace time there would have been continual maintenance of the town’s defenses, which no doubt provided steady work for craftsmen and labourers. This was a worrying time for Newcastle as the town moved into a recession. A new role had to be found.

The merchants moved into an industry which had previously been the domain of the Church, coal. Many of the mining areas were owned by the Church, who had never allowed the industry to develop to its full potential. This is where the importance of the Dissolution lay for Newcastle. It brought a massive stimulus to the coal industry, taking it out of the hands of the Church into the hands of the Merchant Adventurers—the new nobility.

This expansion in the coal industry provided the spark for the growth of other industries along the water-front. Many had been there for centuries, but they never had the conditions that now existed: access to abundant coal reserves for power, and an increasingly wealthy merchant class.

It is sometimes easy to forget that Newcastle was not only dominant in the coal industry, but that forty percent of the nation’s glass was produced around Tyneside. Other flourishing industries included the production of lime as fertilizer, the “great plenty of salmond”, iron smelting and various trades related to shipping. Gray, Newcastle’s first historian, tells us of salt pans in Country Durham, “which makes whits salt out of salt water, boyled with coale,” which was exported through Newcastle. Another on temporary, Sir William Brereton, records pans at Shields in 1635 “wherein is more salt works than in any part of England that I know.” The town was also renowned for the production of grindstones from the quarries at Kenton. A popular phrase of the time was “A Scot, a rat and a Newcastle grindstone, you may find the world over.”

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Coal

From Roman times coal has been a staple commodity of the North East people, providing employment and prosperity. Coal would have been used in the forts along the Wall. Horsley, the eighteenth century author of Britannia Romana, states “that there was a colliery not far from that place [Condercum, the Roman fort at Benwell] . . . . to have been wrought by the Romans.” Mining began to increase in importance under the Norman kings. By the fourteenth century coal was beginning to be sold outside the area, mainly to London.

The first area to be exploited was high above Newcastle along the Tyne Valley. By 1256 coal mining was so extensive in Tynedale that it was said to be dangerous to travel along the road from Newcastle to Corbridge at night, for fear of falling into one of the open pits. The earliest miners used the open cast system, simply digging large bell pits, extracting the coal and moving onto the next coal field. Moving east towards the coast, the coal seams are deeper and less accessible. As the early pits became depleted, the industry slowly drifted east towards the town. To make this possible, new techniques were pioneered to sink ever deeper pits. This made Newcastle not only the biggest producer of coal, but also a world technological leader.

Pits had to be close to the Tyne because of the high costs of land transport. On reaching the river the coal was transferred to small keel boats. At first these sailed down the river to Newcastle where the coal was transferred to collier boats. By the 1300’s these colliers had grown too large to navigate the river, so they docked at Shields.

The earliest written records on the coal industry come from the start of the fourteenth century and give a fascinating insight into the early coal trade. The oldest surviving document concerns a Thomas Migg, who shipped a consignment of coal from Newcastle to London on board the Welfare in 1305.

A year later, a royal proclamation forbade the burning of Newcastle coal in London because of the stench. This was largely ignored by the poor, who could not afford the more expensive and cleaner charcoal. A second, and more forceful, proclamation was made. It cannot have lasted long since shortly after there are records of coal being used in royal palaces. Charcoal had become increasingly scarce as the demand for wood for shipping took precedence, and even the wealthy had to turn to coal. It would be another six hundred and fifty years before new laws were brought in to combat smog both in the capital and elsewhere.

By the second half of the fourteenth century, larger amounts of coal were being exported. Fifteen thousand tons every year were leaving on boats bound for ports in England and the Continent. Nevertheless, the industry expanded slowly. The church exerted a strong grip over the quantities of coal allowed to be mined under expensive and short term leases. There was phenomenal growth in the industry. Gray wrote only a few years after the Dissolution that “Many thousand people are imployed in this trade of coales; many live by working of them in the pits; many by conveying the coales in keels from stathes aboard the ships: One coal merchant imployeth five hundred in his works of coal.”

With the keel boats passing through Newcastle, the town’s merchants were able to exert an increasingly powerful control over the industry. The expansion of the Quayside area as the new commercial core ties in with the rapid increase in the importance of coal. All the administration and dealing was carried out in this area. By the sixteenth century the merchants formed a total monopoly, both on production and export. They often acted as middlemen between foreign merchants buying the coal and the Town Council, who charged levies on every chaldron exported (an old coal measure equivalent to 25.5 cwt).

The merchants were expected to entertain their counterparts on arrival in Newcastle. This hospitality, or “hosting,” gave rise to their guild name of the Company of Hostmen. The hostmen usually specialized on either the continental or domestic side of the coal trade. Examples of this are shown in surviving records. An Edward Baxter usually hosted French ships, whilst George Bird dealt exclusively with East Anglian boats.

During Elizabeth’s reign, the merchants became even more powerful. In 1600 she granted a new charter to the hostmen, formally incorporating them into “The Fraternity of Hostmen of Newcastle.” In this new charter they were charged with a shilling for every chaldron of coal exported. In return their rigid monopoly over the whole industry was reinforced. They were made responsible for “the loading and better disposing of sea coals and pit coals in and upon the river and port of Tyne.” Up until the Civil War the coal trade boomed, with over three hundred ships involved in the coastal trade and many foreign ships docking in Newcastle or Shields.

The Civil War brought this lucrative period of expansion to a halt. Parliament embargoed Newcastle’s coal, and by the end of the war the industry had settled into a period of stagnation. With this uncertainty the hostmen began losing their grip on the industry. New entreprenuers, such as powerful local landowners, acquired coal interests. The hostmen were increasingly involved with the keel traffic and the marketing side of the industry, becoming known as “fitters.”

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The Hostsmen’s Plot

Newcastle’s freemen directly elected the town’s Members of Parliament. A man became “free” once he was admitted to his trade after serving his apprenticeship. These made up about one third of all the men in town, an unusually high electorate.

Despite this fairly democratic facade, it is clear that the town was tightly controlled by a body of wealthy coal merchants, numbering perhaps only twenty. Problems arose because the freemen did not directly elect the town’s governors. The same names constantly appear as mayors and councillors or as signatories to important documents. At a time when more power rested locally these individuals, comprising a select group of hostman known as the “inner circle,” virtually monopolised the town’s government. Whilst in theory any freeman could become a hostman, in practice admission was strictly limited. It was those hostmen who were also members of the Merchant Adventurers who formed the inner circle. Though many of these men no longer resided in the town, it was still the source of their wealth and political influence.

Attempts to broaden the town’s government in 1516 failed, though it took the King’s Council, the Star Chamber, to come to a final decision. A further attempt in 1595 was mediated by the Privy Council.

The events that surround this affair are complex and inevitably revolve around the coal industry. The mines at Whickham and Gateshead, the wealthiest in Britain, had been assigned, in 1582, in what was known as the Grand Lease. Elizabeth I, who owned the mines, leased them for ninety-nine years to Thomas Sutton. He was not from Newcastle but was one of the Queen’s favourites —reputedly the wealthiest commoner in England. He worked the mines for six years.

The town’s merchants were envious of his position, his wealth and his royal patron. They wanted both to protect their cartel and gain control of his profitable mines. They excluded him from the Newcastle coal market by preventing him from becoming a freeman, even though many of the leading merchants were outsiders themselves.

Sutton’s exclusion from this busy market place meant he was forced to sell the lease. Henry Anderson and William Selby bought it on the pretext of giving it to the town, but in reality they shared it out amongst the leading merchants. The lease had been secured with town funds, at a cost of around £5,000. Though purchased through the civic treasury the lesser guilds received nothing. This gave them the opportunity to try and secure a new charter and widen the political base. The cause was taken up elsewhere. London’s coal merchants were stirring for a change in Newcastle’s charter because of the unfavourable cartel. As early as 1590 the Mayor of London complained to Burleigh, Elizabeth’s Chief (and most trusted) Minister, about the price of coal, which had risen from six to nine shillings during the 1580’s.

An attempt to form an alliance between the London Merchants and the lesser guilds was doomed to failure since the two groups had different ends. Unlike the London Merchants, the lesser guilds did not want to see an end to the prosperous cartel; they merely wanted the inner circle to be expanded to include themselves, the so-called outer circle.

The Council of the North supported the lesser guilds, but the privy Council, short of money, invoked an old idea of charging a tax on coal exported from Newcastle. In return they allowed the hostmen to retain their lucrative cartel, confirmed in a charter of 1600. Only one mayor between this date and the Civil War was not a hostman, and every mayoral hostman was a Merchant Adventurer. The London merchants were appeased by a secret clause ensuring that the price of coal would not rise above ten shillings.

The tax raised amounted to £8,000 a year, a vast contribution to the government’s revenue. Henceforth the crown and inner circle’s interest became closely associated, an association which partly exploited Newcastle’s royalist stand in the Civil War.

The leading merchants had to act carefully: the town’s privileges had been wrought from the crown over many years and were guarded jealously. If they were seen to be too closely linked there would undoubtedly have been widespread disruption. There is considerable intrigue surrounding the affair and even now we cannot be sure that we have a complete picture of the episode. As it was, the tax on coal was not included in the charter incorporating the hostmen but in another charter dated the 8th April 1600, two weeks after the first. The “grant”of one shilling was made “in gratitude for their incorporation” rather than as a tax.

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The Expanding Town

The revenue generated by the coal trade and the spread of related industries helped Newcastle ride out the economic recession that was hampering growth in other parts of the country during this period. Sir William Brereton described Newcastle as “beyond all compare the fairest and the richest towne in England, inferior for wealth and building to noe cittie save London: and Bristow and whether itt may nott deserve to be accounted as wealthy as Bristow I make some doubt.” He also thought Newcastle had “the fairest key” and “the fairest built inne.”

Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign the threat of war with Scotland was steadily diminishing. Industrial expansion led to an increase in population which in turn put pressure on housing within the walls. Newcastle’s suburbs date from this time with steady building along the main routes into the town. Fine houses, with large gardens, were built along Northumberland Street and Westgate Road. The villages around Newcastle were also steadily growing, although it would be several centuries before they began to merge to form the city we know today.

Newcastle’s dominant features had changed little: the Castle, the walls and the churches, with new buildings being slotted into the old, haphazard, medieval street pattern. New building projects usually consisted of small scale clearances and the redevelopment of the vacant plots. The prime sites for new building were on the riverside, the heart of the commercial town. This was where nearly all the wealthy and merchant classes now lived: this was where they built their “lofty and commodious” houses.

The block of timber framed houses opposite the Guildhall, dating largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is probably the oldest group of buildings in Newcastle. They give an idea of the type of homes that stood along the Quayside during the time. The best known is Surtees House, made famous by the elopement of the young John Scott and Bessie Surtees. The window through which she climbed in the mists of the night was marked by a blue pane. The building has been restored and is now the regional headquarters of English Heritage, who have opened part of the house to the general public.

Other houses of the ear include the Cooperage and Red House. The Cooperage was, as the name suggests, a barrel making factory and was in use form 1730 to 1970. Its wooden beams are thought to come from a ship that sunk in the Tyne. Although it expanded since then, each story predating the one above by approximately one century.

The houses contain many fine rooms, with oak paneling, ribbed pillars and decorations of cherubs’ heads—typical of the 1600’s. The Red House pub still contains the original arched brick work of what was once the old cellar. The low beamed and oak-panelled rooms can still be seen inside the building.

A reflection of the wealth being generated at this time can be seen in the extensive refitting of the Merchant Adventurers’ banqueting hall, the Maison Dieu, in 1636, and improvements to the Trinity House. Many streets were paved for the first time, with the luxury of gutters, although a Norwich Lieutenant still “found the people and the streets much alike, neither sweet nor clean.”

Little of this money found its way to the poor. Beggars were still a common sight: Newcastle had twice as many licensed beggars as other towns. The poor lived in such streets as Low Friar and Gallowgate. There were also large numbers of artisan living in the south west corner of the town, around the Forth Banks and behind the Close, near to the new industrial sites.

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Trinity House

Trinity House was built for the Guild of Pilots and Mariners, originally known as the Guild and Fraternity of the Blessed Trinity, a religious group closely associated with All Saints. In 1492 Ralph Hebborn, a local merchant after whom Hebburn is named, donated part of his estate, Dalton Place in Broad Chare, as a meeting place or Trinity House. For this the guild were pledged to pay a red rose, if demanded, every summer.

In 1505 the building was remodelled to create a hall of assembly, a chapel, and an almshouse “for aged and infirm brethren.” In 1525 Ralph’s son, Robert, donated further land, this time on payment of a bottle of red wine “on the vigil of St. Peter and St. Paul.”

The mock Tudor facade of 1841 hides the secluded court. The south side was built in 1721. Behind it is a smaller courtyard and the school, which still has a library of some three thousand books. In the main courtyard are the late eighteenth century almshouses and north range, together with the chapel of 1800. The chapel is still used by the brethren once a year. Those present received a half crown as a memento, though this has now been updated to five pence piece.

Over the years Trinity House gained more and more control over the river and its navigation, appointing pilots, training people at its own school and collecting various charges and duties. In 1791 they were excused from the obligation to bear arms or serve on juries which demonstrates the importance of their work.

Henry VIII granted a charter of incorporation in 1536. The new guild was allowed to erect two lighthouses at North Shields to be lit by candle and built with stones from the dissolved friaries. They charged foreign ships four pence and English ships two pence for entry into the port.

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The Guildhall

The original Town Hall, or Exchange, was built on the Sandhill early in the 1500’s. Bordering the Town Hall was the Town Court or Guildhall, appearing then almost as a lean-to. Indeed, in Elizabeth’s time it was known as the Pentice, or Penthouse, meaning a lean-to. This was also the public weigh-house. As such, it was probably supported by pillars and left open like a market.

Many of the town’s incorporated companies held their thrice-yearly guild meetings here. It was also the venue for the Mayor’s Court, Sheriff’s Court, the Quarter Sessions and Borough Courts, as well as other civic occasions.

The old Town Hall was demolished in 1655, probably as a direct result of the fire in 1639 which destroyed the Town Clerk’s office. The new Guildhall was built between 1655 and 1658 by Robert Trollope. It costs some £10,000, though the original quote was for only £2000. The ceiling was adorned with paintings, and the floor laid with chequered marble.

The Maison Dieu, literally “House of God,” was on the east side of the Town Chamber, above which was the “stately court of the Merchant Adventures” from 1480. It was founded as a hospital by Roger Thornton in 1412 for nine poor women who would pray for his soul. The hospital, hall and kitchens were later granted to the mayor and town for young couples to be married in.

In 1823, having survived years of town redevelopment, it was replaced by Dobson’s covered fish market. A new merchant’s court and offices for the town clerk, complete with fireproof records room and innovative double glazing, were also added. The new fish market enabled Sandhill to be cleared of fish stalls, and widened the entrance to the Quay. It was walled up in 1880 and turned into a newsroom.

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Drinkers and Players

After the Dissolution, life in the town lost many of its more colourful scenes, such as the Corpus Christi performances. In the sixteenth century secular plays had begun to take the place of the medieval mystery plays, which had been the “delight of the populace.” The Council’s records are scattered with payments to itinerant players, such as the twenty shillings for the Duchess of Suffolk’s players who performed before the mayor in 1561. Performers would tour the country, under the loose patronage of a gentleman, and often received such gratuities for performing before the corporation.

The Puritan Commonwealth saw all plays banned, although they continued illegally in the Sandgate area. Punishments for actors caught were severe: one record is of actors who were “all whipt in Newcastle for rogues and vagabonds.” In the post Restoration period performances were taken up with a new zeal. The Moot Hall became the main theatre with performances fitted in between the assizes.

In 1554 the Merchants banned their apprentices from listening to or playing music, “What use of gitterns by nyght” (a gittern was a kind of guitar). Elsewhere music was immensely popular. The carpenters’ guild spent three fines they had collected “in meten hous upon ij [the] mystreles, and in shorte cackes and aylle”. There were many companies, particularly of pipers, perhaps because the local watchmen would pipe the hour and so learnt how to play the instruments.

Lord Keeper Guildford’s visit to the town on the Northern Circuit during the assizes was recorded by one of his entourage: “The magistrates were solicitious to give him all the diversion they could, and one was going down to Tinmouth Castle in the town’s barge. The equipment of the vessel was very stately; for, a head there sat a four or five drone bagpipes, the north country organ and a trumpeter astern; and so we rowed merily along.”

The Forth was always the most popular site for recreation. In the time of Queen Elizabeth there are records of payments to the “tumbler that tumbled before Mr. Mairo and his brethren” and players were rewarded for “playing with a hobie horse in the Firthe before the Maiore.” It was also the site for archery and later a bowling green, which was overlooked by a tavern “whence the spectators, calmly smoking their pipes and enjoying their glasses, beheld the sportsmen below.”

It was here that many of the guilds held their meetings. The Fraternity of Smiths’ records show an order for thirty pence worth of “Beare of the Foorth.” The bowling green and tavern proved too strong a distraction for many of those present, not only were those who failed to attend fined but also “such as misbehaved themselves whilst there.”

An event in 1542 illustrates the importance of beer to the town. Orders had been issued to the gentlemen and sheriffs of the North of England to be at Newcastle with their tenants to march into Scotland on the 2nd October. The men of the North were ready to descend on the town, but the ships coming from London with beer had not arrived—the campaign had to be delayed twice, until the 7th and then the 11th. When it did arrive there was not as much as expected: the commander, the Duke of Norfolk, wrote to Henry VIII that he only had enough for a six-day campaign.

With the whole of the English army in the town he had no choice but to head north. He marched to Berwick and crossed the border on the 22nd. Either his quartermasters miscalculated or his soldiers drank more than their ration, but the beer ran out after only four days. Rather than face a mutiny, Norfolk retreated. The Scots misread this as a sigh of weakness and invaded unprepared. In the battle of Solway Moss they were decisively defeated.

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Fairs

There were three fairs, St. Luke’s, Lammas and Martinmas, held on the 29th March, the 12th August, and the 22nd November respectively. The first two lasted for a week, and horses would be herded into the town from all over the North to be traded at Cow Hills. The local merchants would also set up stalls for the influx of people. The Cordwainers noted in 1690 the “publick merkett for shooes att the two faires of Lamas and St. Luckmas, [where] no forraine shoe makers have any liberty to sell any shoes or other waires in any other liberty of the towne.”

The Cordwainers had earlier been the subject of a Papal Bull. In the fifteenth century an Act of Parliament had forbidden the wearing of pointed shoes, and the Pope scolded the Newcastle cordwainers for continuing to make them.

During the fairs an amnesty was given to the “King’s outlaw, or ane traitor or sic ane malefactor.” The great bell in St. Nicholas became known as the “theif and reever bell,” as it was used to pronounce the start of the fair and the entry of criminals into the town. During the fairs flags would be raised on the Castle, attracting people from far and wide. In 1590 John Hardcastle was employed in “penyting the banners which wer sett upp at the Newgate in the fair tyme.”

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Justice

Punishments were public and thousands would gather to witness executions or the humiliation of a person in the pillory.

The condemned were taken through Gallowgate to the gallows on the Town Moor, though sometimes executions would take place in the town itself. In 1577 “a newe paire of gallowes was set up in the market place, and a souldior hanged for quarellyng and fightyng.” The town’s executioner was kept busy by the steady flow of moss-troopers (reivers) found guilty of border raiding. Between four and six were hanged on each gallows, and as many as twenty-one were executed in a single session.

There are also records of religious dissenters executed in the town. The North long remained sympathetic to the Catholic cause with priests celebrating Mass Clandestinely. In 1592 James Watson was hunted from Newcastle with sleuth hounds but escaped, probably the same James Watson who was captured a year later and executed.

In 1593 there are records of an Edward Waterson being executed in Newcastle. He attempted to escape from the prison at Newgate by burning down his cell door. His arms were tied and he was taken by horsedrawn sled to the gallows where he was hanged by another prisoner. The aptly named William Server, a member of the B-Surgeons’ guild was employed to drag and quarter him. Waterson’s bowels were cut out, he was then decapitated and his body divided into three pieces. The head was placed on the magazine gate and other portions were placed around the town.

John Ingram was executed at Gatehead and his quartered body taken to Newcastle to be displayed. Ingram and been transferred to the Tower of London to be tortured in the hope he would reveal information on other Catholics. He gave nothing away and was executed for his pains. Following Catholic executions the gallows were burnt so that pieces could not be cut off and used as holy relics of martyrs.

There are records of the “ducker in the water” receiving regular payment. Quite often, women were drowned during a ducking. The Branks, an “iron engine,” was kept and regularly used for gossips. It consisted of a crown which fitted over the head leaving the face clear. An iron tongue then fitted into the mouth which prevented the culprit from speaking. The “Newcastle coat” was kept for drunks. This was a hollow barrel which rested on the felon’s shoulders. Once these instruments were in place the victims were paraded around the town to be humiliated before the public.

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