The position of parish constable was probably introduced by the Manorial Court system late in the 16th century when he would have been appointed by the jury of the Court Leet. His duties would have included responsibility for the village stocks, pillory and lock-up, the apprehension of criminals and control of vagrants in addition to being an unpaid collector of county rates and for hearth, land and poll taxes. Constables were elected to serve for one year usually on a rotation basis from farm tenants and other better-off members of the community. The job was unpaid with no compensation for loss of earnings and it was Daniel Defoe who in his Parochial Tyranny written in 1714 wrote ‘the office of constable was one of insupportable hardship . . . It takes up so much of a man’s time that his own affairs are frequently neglected, too often to his ruin’. Nevertheless some regarded the position as an honour that increased their social standing in the community. Constables had to keep annual accounts and the extracts on the previous page cover the period 1838—63 and give an interesting insight to plight of the village poor in the middle of the 19th century.
The payment of the second instalment for the emigration of Martin Wilson was the result of a decision of the parish rate payers to rid themselves of a family who were a burden on the rates. Martin Wilson was one of nine children born to Jesse and Mary Wilson between 1818 and 1837 one of whom was the Jesse Wilson recorded in the 1851 census. In 1849 Martin and his wife and child were living with Jesse and his mother when they were paid poor relief of four shillings and in December 1850 a Vestry Meeting of the parish agreed to borrow £7 from Thomas Harrison to pay for the family’s passage to America, the sum to be repaid with interest in three annual instalments. As Martin was receiving poor relief at the age 26 it would seem that the rate payers saw him as a continuing burden on the parish making it a cheaper option to persuade him and his wife to emigrate to the ‘land of opportunities’.
Some of the people who were receiving help from the parish were not recorded as tenants and must have been sharing accommodation but Edward Wilson who featured regularly was an elderly pauper and George Lawson whose rent and wife’s funeral expenses were paid in 1843 would have been 39 at the time. Two of the saddest entries refer to the cost of taking two people to the Helmsley workhouse as Frederick Wilson was only 8 years old and Richard Wilson was his father but the story had a happier ending as Frederick was taken back to the village and the parish expended £11 7s 4d on his care between 1863 and 1866.
Other documents reveal that the poor of Old Byland seem to have faced particularly hard times in the middle of the 19th century as the combined cost of In Maintenance, Out Maintenance and Common Charges amounted to £51 in 1857 compared with £15 19s 6d for Rievaulx which had a larger population and £7 19s 7d for Scawton which was roughly the same size. The sum of £1 paid to Thomas Mason by agreement was half his annual salary of £2 for being the village schoolmaster. As 18 scholars were recorded in the 1851 census it was not a princely salary and compares with the £5 paid to Thomas Awmack in 1851 for catching moles.
It is interesting to note that the rateable value of the parish was £1,771 in 1851 compared with the £1,445 recorded in the National Valuation of 1909 and the reduction is thought to have been due to the very difficult times faced by farmers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries
