LiveTheirStory

Clarissa’s story had more surprises for me as I continued to trace her in the workhouse and registry records. Still living in the locality, in 1853 she married John Drake, whom I suspect is a distant relative of mine. The Drake family was a large one, and John was from the parish of Hingham, just west of Wicklewood but still within the Forehoe Union area. In their marriage certificate we finally learn that Clarissa’s father was a John Burton, but having both her parents’ names has still not helped to identify her securely.

James died in 1855, leaving Clarissa to enter Heckingham workhouse again in January of the same year (the chronology is fuzzy here – his death was in the same quarter). In February 1855 Clarissa, aged 36, using the name Burton and presenting herself as a spinster, married 61-year-old George Rudledge, a widowed wheelwright who had been an inmate of the Wicklewood workhouse in 1851.

At this point I wondered whether this was an attempt by the Forehoe Guardians to solve two problems in one: did they offer Clarissa and George a financial incentive to settle down together in the hope that they might manage without further Union support? Was it an offer they could not refuse? And were the Guardians complicit in enabling her to give an inaccurate name? (There was no explicit prohibition against a widow remarrying, but the haste might have caused some comments.) If so, it soon backfired: George was dead within the year and is buried in Wicklewood churchyard.

Undeterred or perhaps by this time desperate, Clarissa (or the Guardians) had one more try at finding her a husband. In August 1857 Clara [sic] Rudledge, ‘widow of full age’, daughter of John Burton, married John Bartram, possibly five years her senior, a widowed weaver from Damgate, Wymondham. Misfortune struck again however: he died in 1860, and she returned to Heckingham workhouse for 6 months until February 1861.

This is where the trail goes cold. I searched for recorded deaths of a Clarissa or Clara Bartram and found just two: in London in 1863 or Liverpool in 1880.

Had she moved on? At the age of 42 Clarissa was thrice-widowed (or twice if the Drake marriage is not hers), had had at least one child outside marriage (whose fate is unknown), and may finally have run out of options in the Forehoe locality, where by now she surely had a reputation and may even have been suspected of having a hand in her husbands’ deaths. Whilst the Guardians had a legal duty to help the destitute, we have already seen that they were less than sympathetic to ‘bad characters’. Through writing this post I have wondered how much agency she really had as she went from one marriage to the next.

Clarissa is an unusually well-documented woman, but for all the wrong reasons, and I cannot help thinking how her early experiences in the workhouse shaped the rest of her life. Was she the ‘bad character’ she is written up as? Or was she just one of the mass of young, poor women caught up in the economic uncertainties of rural life in the early 19th-century, and forced to find any means to make a living? Their stories litter the record books (and, I find, this blog!) and deserve to be investigated beyond the bald statements on the archival pages.