L s. d.
Gave James D---- for an Ass . . . . . . . . 0 8 0
to which is added that the Overseer paid to Mr. Beldam this J. D.'s rent.
A system which afforded a man a house rent free and provided him with a donkey for his business was, to say the least, rather different from Guardians in the leading-strings of the Local Government Board!
Nick names in the old parish accounts are abundant and also many Christian names not often used now. Thus:—Peg Woods, Nel J——, Old Nib, Royston Molley, Old Grig, and Hercules Powell. The last named was the Parish Constable in 1780, and he had a name at least calculated to warn off offenders!
One common characteristic of these entries of the Overseers, but more especially in the Parish Constable's accounts, was the extraordinary liberty taken in the spelling of words! In a general way Dogberry, especially, was a spelling reformer, in so far as he went in for a phonetic spelling, but many entries occur in old constable's accounts which are governed by no principle ever yet laid down by scholars, with the result very often that it would be impossible to settle what the word intended could be but for the comparative study of it, as it turns up in a variety of literary dress in different documents always with the same context. Here is the result of a little investigation into the handling of one of the commonest of the long words which found their way into the old Parish Constable's bills:—Diblegrates, dibcatkets, dibelgrates, dibhegrats, dipplatakets, dibicits, diblicits, dibblegats, dublicits, duplicates.
It took the Parish Constables of Therfield 37 years to solve the problem of spelling that word of three syllables! and the honour of spelling "duplicates" correctly belongs to one, John Groom, who was Parish Constable for Therfield in 1801.
One of the most frequent items in the Churchwardens' accounts for parishes in this district, during the last half of the eighteenth century, was that of vermin killing, and entries for polecats and hedge-hogs were jumbled up with items for bread and wine for the communion, &c.! Why the farmers should have had such an antipathy to hedge-hogs I am not aware, considering the amount of good the modern naturalist finds them doing. About the middle of the last century any person killing a hedge-hog in Therfield and taking it to the Churchwarden received 4d. for his trouble, and 21 hedge-hogs were paid for in 1788. The price after this went down to 2d. for a hedge-hog and 4d. for a polecat, but at Barkway the price of a hedge-hog was still 4d., while at Nuthampstead the price for sparrows, as appears by "the sparrow bill," was 3d. a dozen.