Petitions to the Westminster Quarter Sessions, 1620-1799.
This free content was born digital and sponsored by the Economic History Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the cost of transcribing eighteenth-century items was funded by a later Economic History Society Carnevali Small Research Grant: ‘Poverty, Taxation and Regulation: Petitions to Local magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England’ and the other costs, including photography and transcription of seventeenth-century items and editorial work, were funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant: ‘The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England’ (AH/S001654/1). CC-NC-BY.
Mary Brown. WJ/SP/1762/07 (1762). LondonLives reference: LMWJPS654710003
To the worshipful the chairman and the rest
of his majesty's justices of the peace now in
their quarter sessions assembled
The humble petition of Mary Brown
Sheweth
that your poor petitioner hath a poor blind
husband to maintain by her industry
that she hath no means of obtaining an
honest livelyhood for herself and her said
husband but by dealing in old cloaths, that your
petitioner hath already suffered imprison
-ment in the Gatehouse on account of the
assault of which she is convicted which had
like to have cost her, her life, being imprisoned
at the time she was ill of a violent fever
that your petitioner has witnesses to prove that
she was cruelly beat and bruised by the
prosecutrix Mistress Lock at the time she is
charged with having assaulted the said Mistress
Lock, but being utterly unable to fee
any councell etc to defend her prosecution
was advised by her friends to plead guilty
to the indictment.
Therefore your petitioner hopes that your worships
will take her distressed situation as well as her poor
blind husbands into your kind consideration and
shew her all the lenity in your powers
- Mary Brown
And your poor petitioner as in duty bound will
ever pray etc
We whose names are hereunto subscribed being inhabitants
and housholders in the parish of Saint James's Westminster do
hereby certifie that we know personally the petitioner Mary
Brown, and verily believe every fact setforth in her petition
to be strictly true
We therefore humbly reccomend her as an object worthy
of any lenity which your worship's are pleased to shew her
- Bolard Newson Jeremiah Wordley
- Joseph Hobard
- George Jones
- William Sadler
- Mary Boltton
- John Redshaw
- Joseph Boswell
- Margret [Bans?]
- [Easter?] Haw
- Margaret Starck
- John Patinson
- John Lidel
- John Batt