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Explanations

How the transcript is laid out

We have used the basic layout of the Poll Book, but with some changes. The columns and text in purple are interpolations, added to aid understanding and not included in the original document.

  • Trade column; for many of the entries, both printed and handwritten, the name in the trade column is shortened in one way or another, so we have expanded it where necessary.
  • Guild column gives the names of the guilds, or incorporated companies, to which each trade belongs. See below for the importance of these
  • County column; We have added this to allow researchers to analyse where voters were living. See below for principles adopted

Lines in italics are the handwritten additional entries, and lines or phrases with a purple F in front of them are on the facing page. This can be seen by clicking on Scan on the sidebar, and then on Notes.

Where the original text is an abbreviation, then if the word is underlined like this: abbr,  hovering your cursor over the word will show its expansion. In addition, where a place name is not spelt in the modern way, there is a dotted line below it and if you place your cursor on that, the modern version will float above it.

What do the different columns mean?

  • Mort, the heading for the first column on the left hand side means ‘dead’ – that is, the elector has died since the last election in 1780. The column is sometimes used for other notes as well, in particular
    • Customs House. This probably means the individual worked at the Customs House on the Quayside. The Parliament Act 1782 (22. Geo. III, c. 41), also known as Crewe’s Act, disqualified all officers of Customs and Excise and the Post Office from voting in parliamentary elections. The idea was to end the abuse by which government patronage was used to bribe the voters in rotten boroughs. Very few of these names have any marks in the right hand columns – they have presumably not been canvassed because it was not worth it. (1784 would have been the first election in which these people could not vote at all.)
    • Other remarks such as ‘Government’ – again, this means that they worked for the Government and would vote as required.
  • Freemen’s Names; Before the Great Reform Act of 1834, the qualification for voting varied between constituencies. Newcastle upon Tyne was a ‘freeman borough’ which meant that only those admitted as freemen by the Corporation could vote. Freemen had to be members of a trade guild (see next section), and to be male and over 21 The rules, however, were complex and some categories of guild members did not qualify for a vote. Follow this link for a lengthy explanation of the system written by local author Eneas Mackenzie in 1827. The returning officer and his clerks would have had a list of all the freemen in front of them, and would check each potential voter’s name against it.
    • Some names have the letters a.o. or b.o. beside them, and these letters are explained on the second page of the poll book.  B.o means ‘bribery oath’, in which the voter had to state that no money or reward has come the voter’s way, ‘a somewhat implausible assertion’ in eighteenth-century elections, according to expert Frank O’Gorman. A.o means either ‘allegiance oath’ or ‘abjuration oath’, while s.o. means ‘supremacy oath’; in all cases, one was swearing loyalty to the crown and the church. One voter, John Orrick, has  b.a.s.o. beside his name, presumably meaning he had to swear all three oaths.
  • Trades;  To become a freeman and hence to have a vote for your MP, you had to be a member of a guild – that is, to belong to one of certain incorporated companies, which according to Eneas Mackenzie in 1827, ‘still constitute the very ground-work of the other parts and offices of the corporation’. The most important were the Hostmen (spelt hoastmen in the Poll Book) who controlled the coal trade, and the Merchant Adventurers. Follow this link for a list of the guilds. They were divided into twelve ‘Mysteries’ or fifteen ‘bye-trades’, and belonging to one allowed you to become a freeman, but you might still be waiting for acceptance, so in some cases the Notes on the right hand side of the page say, ‘Not yet free’, or ‘wants his freedom’. Other notes say ‘guild stopt’ (stopped) – presumably because you had not paid your dues. Men became freemen by serving a (usually) seven year apprenticeship, by ‘gift’ (purchase was officially not allowed), by marriage or because their fathers were freemen.
  • Places of Abode. You did not need to practise the trade for which you were registered, nor to live in the town, and as you can see, voters lived all over the country. A little over a thousand of the 3,000 people listed are recorded as living in the borough as it was then, though many others live within modern Newcastle. As noted above, where a place name is not spelt in the modern way, there is a dotted line below it and if you place your cursor on that, the modern version will float above it.
  • County, So far as possible, we have assigned each Abode to a modern county. This has involved a certain amount of guesswork and some arbitrary decisions. The principles we have adopted are;
    • using modern postal counties, in particular Tyne and Wear, which no longer exists administratively, but constitutes the five districts of Newcastle upon Tyne, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead and Sunderland;
    • using ‘within modern Newcastle’ and ‘within modern London’ for places which in the eighteenth century would have been outside the boundaries of those towns, but are now within them, like Scotswood or Woolwich;
    • where there is more than one place with the same name, if one of them is in Northumberland we have assumed that place is meant. So for instance there is a Bradford in Northumberland as well as in Yorkshire, so we have assumed that.

We have made use of a number of documents and websites in our research. Perhaps the most useful was the Newcastle A-Z! This is because many now defunct hamlet or farm names live on in street names. For example, ‘Hotch Pudding’ on page 42 still exists as ‘Hotch Pudding Place’  in West Denton. We have also used Northumberland Archives’ index of farm names, the printed copy of the Northumberland 1780 Poll Book (also in Northumberland Archives), the Historical Gazetteer of England’s Place Names, the AA’s route planner, and internet searches more generally.

  • [in the printed columns] R, B, D. The initials stand for the three candidates in the 1780 election;
    • R is Sir Matthew White Ridley, one of the two sitting MPs;
    • B is Andrew Robinson Stoney Bowes, the other sitting MP, elected in a by-election in 1777. See below for more details about him;
    • D is Thomas Delaval, a member of the Seaton Delaval family.
  • [in the handwritten columns] B, R, Bg, Ab, Ag; B is Bowes, R is Ridley, Bg is Charles Brandling, one of the local worthies.  Ab may have been intended to register absent voters, and Ag against, but in practice these columns were not used systematically for recording information.
  • Notes. In this column on the transcription page, we have put the notes from the right-hand side of the book, plus those on the facing page (with an F] beside them. The handwriting is often difficult and where we have had to guess or it is unreadable, we have put the word in brackets { }, and with question marks. Help with deciphering words will be welcomed!
    • One of the most common notes is ‘not promised’ or an abbreviation of it. Unlike today, promises made to a canvasser were taken seriously – since it could be seen at the public ballot whether they were kept or not – and were listed carefully. Breaking a promise was seen as dishonourable, and voters who had not kept to their word could be identified from the poll book printed up later, and possibly harassed by, for example, withdrawal of patronage.

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