Clerk to Haworth Currer of Kildwick Hall: The Career of Henry Newby (1699/1700-1769)

Abstract

Henry Newby was ‘clerk’ (to use his own term), or steward, to Haworth Currer Esq. of Kildwick Hall, near Keighley in West Yorkshire. He assisted his master in the management of the family estate, and continued to manage this property largely single-handedly after the death in 1744 at a comparatively young age of Currer, whose heir was a minor and whose widow was living away from Kildwick in the family’s town house at York. Newby’s accounts survive in the Bradfer-Lawrence collection of the Yorkshire Archaeological & Historical Society and they, with material in two other archives, provide evidence for the painstaking work he performed in the service of the Currers, who were affected by further premature deaths, leading eventually to the extinction in the direct line of the family. The career of Newby illustrates the importance of the steward in the rural economy of eighteenth-century Yorkshire and in the lives of its landed-gentry families.