[135] The Rev. E. Bradley (Cuthbert Bede), who half a century ago was the incumbent of Denton, a village a little over a mile from Norman Cross, left the following note among the MSS. which were prepared for a history of Huntingdon, or, as he called it, Cromwell’s County, which was never completed:
“The French prisoners at the prison made beautiful straw plaits, which were purchased by people in Stilton and sold at a high rate. For a long time they were forbidden to sell these plaits, but they found means to do so through the soldiers. No doubt the soldiers made a great deal of money in this way, although the plaits were sold so cheaply that many people in Stilton made very respectable fortunes by their sale. The soldiers secretly brought the straw plaits to the houses, sometimes wrapped round their bodies under their clothes; in this case they would go upstairs and undress, and then come down with the straw plaits.
“I do not know how the prisoners got the straw, but as they could no more make straw plaits without straw than the Israelites could make bricks, I suppose the soldiers helped them to it. Much of the plait (which was more neatly made than the English manufacture) was made up and sold in Stilton. Other was hawked about round the district; also sent to wholesale houses in London or elsewhere. One vendor of the straw plaits cleared a thousand pounds in a few years.”
[136] Vol. 106.
[137] An old lady friend of mine, recently deceased, remembered in her childhood seeing the children following a woman in the streets of Peterborough, and singing, “Wind or storm, hail or snow, To the Barracks she will go,” a doggerel which had been fastened on to her when she carried over goods for sale at the market, and was supposed to smuggle in cut straw and to bring back concealed about her person straw plait, which she disposed of to the bonnet makers.—T. J. W.
[138] Chambers’ Journal, xxiii. 327. In the same journal (issue of September 1908) is an article by A. F. Morris upon straw marquetry, in which the introduction of that art into this country is ascribed to the French.
[144] Historical Sketch of the Old Depot, Perth, William Sievwright, 1894.
[146a] Vol. ix., chap. lxiv., par. 127.
[146b] This information Alison gave from his own personal recollection. I can confirm his account from what I have been told by my father, who in his sixteenth and seventeenth years was living in Perth, and was in the habit of going to the prison to take lessons in French and in fencing from one of the officers confined there.—T. J. W.
[147] Curiously this article does not appear in Poole’s original Index, but in the second supplement under “Banker’s Notes.”
[156] These were a part of the troops who in 1797 landed at Fishguard to invade England through Wales. This long-planned invasion ended in a fiasco.