In 1913 the Rev. E.H. Bates Harbin, editor of a recently published volume of Somerset quarter sessions records covering the Commonwealth,1 received a letter from the Rev. William Hunt. Hunt had also edited material for the Somerset Record Society, was also a member of its council along side Harbin who was at this time the Hon. Secretary. Hunt contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, and had written histories of Bath and Wells, Norman Britain, as well as Italy and many other works. However Hunt’s letter reveals not only his enquiring and meticulous mind on antiquarian matters, but his attitude to the growing suffragette movement.
April 26. 1913
24 Phillimore Gardens.
Kensington, W.
My dear Harbin,
I congratulate you on the new vol. of our Record Society.
Your introduction is extremely interesting and I have spent some time in dipping into the text.
There are two points which I should like to mention. You notice the discontinuance of the barbarous practice of whipping women who had bastards. Was this due to any law, or was it simply that the justices did not care to order it? If it depended on them the practice might still have gone on in other counties.
And what was the ground on which the confession of ‘the present-state’ in justice was founded? Was there some ordinance on the matter. Was it to prevent ‘concealment of birth’. And what were the consequences of such confession? Did the woman escape punishment? You suggest that the discontinuance of the whipping of women was often, I think, ordered to be private – though I do not know whether in such cases. By the way this punishment, administered in private, and by wardens, would be a good thing now in the case of militant Suffragettes.
Hunt continues his letter with the legal position of marriages during the Commonwealth, querying Harbin’s interpretation and offering his own short account of the situation as existed mainly in the early 1650s. Whether or not Hunt’s attitude towards Suffragettes was shared by his fellow antiquarians and members of the Somerset Record Society is not recorded in the letter.2
1. E.H.B. Harbin, ed., Quarter Sessions records for the county of Somerset. col.III. Commonwealth 1646-1660 SRS 28 (1912).
2.Letter tipped into a SRS volume in the possession of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society.