The Rival Family

Owing to a gap between the end of the seventeenth century assize documents and the beginning of the eighteenth century quarter sessions records, the names of the jailers are not mentioned in county records from the time Richard Freebome held office in 1684 until 1711. In that year John Richardson the Elder was jailer, and he appears not to have held the post thereafter, but he may well have filled it earlier—possibly even in the seventeenth century. In 1687 he had married Dinah Wiffin, and they had a number of children, among them John born in 1690, Thomas born in 1692, and Mary born in 1695. John and Thomas were to be jailers in due course and so were one of Mary’s sons and two of her grandsons. In the period of just over a century from 1711 to 1814 John Richardson’s family was to fill the post of jailer for some seventy years, the last fifty of them without a break. Each one of the family who was a jailer was simultaneously the innkeeper of the Chequers next door to the jail (or possibly of another nearby establishment), and so inevitably the two businesses were run as one by the jailer and his wife.

John Richardson the Elder probably acquired the Chequers towards the end of the seventeenth century, for very early in the eighteenth he was there, quarrelling with his neighbour, John Bamford. Bamford was also an innkeeper and was to succeed Richardson as jailer in 1712: it may well be that Richardson and he had been rivals for several years earlier. A letter in the Public Record Office shows that Bamford had been jailer in 1710. On 25 November 1710 Francis Brace, who a few days earlier had offered to act as Under-Sheriff, wrote to Ralph Bromsall: ‘You were last night appointed High Sheriff. If you have not promised the jail, Mr. Bamford the present jailer is a good man, and a friend of mine, whom I hope you will keep in’. Bromsall rejected the advice and appointed John Richardson instead.