In 1842 a London compiler signing himself “Henry Edwards of Hoxton” published A Collection of Old English Customs, and Curious Bequests and Charities — a digest of excerpts from the reports of the Commissioners for Enquiring into Charities in England and Wales. That body was set up in 1818 to inspect trusts for educating the poor, soon widened its remit to all charitable trusts, and conducted the first parliamentary survey of English charity. Its institutional descendant, the Charity Commission, still does much the same job.

Edwards organized the material by type of charitable act rather than by parish. Out of that ordering comes the strangeness:

  • Money for the yearly washing of the tomb of one Molly Grime, in Glentham, Lincolnshire
  • £21 a year at Newmarket from 1801 to encourage local couples to marry — and if nobody claimed it, the money went to the fund for the encouragement of horse racing
  • Bequests for “maimed and old soldiers,” and for “redeeming Christian Slaves from African Captivity”
  • Funds to reward decorum: “for upholding loyalty and patriotism,” “for the encouragement of Servants and Apprentices”
  • Sermons of thankfulness in times of national emergency, the Great Fire of London and Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar among them
  • Small sums “to keep church and churchyard clean” and, more hopefully, for “keeping boys quiet in church”

The wills carry their own small plots. John Nicholson, a London stationer, left money in 1717 to any poor person in England named Nicholson so they could advance themselves. Sir Robert Cocks left money to the poor of New Woodstock shortly after buying a winning lottery ticket in 1719. In Upper Holker, Lancashire, five acres were bought with 185½ guineas found in the pocket of a travelling beggar who died in the village lodging house in 1799.

What makes the collection worth reading is what it documents unintentionally. Edwards states his aim as combining “instruction with amusement,” and the book does read as a celebration of the well-to-do’s beneficence toward the “deserving poor” — a category that had to be continuously performed by its recipients. The clearest crack in that framing is the death of “Stephening” at Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire, where the whole parish used to turn up at the Rectory on St. Stephen’s Day and eat as much bread and cheese and drink as much ale as they liked at the Rector’s expense. It was discontinued because it “gave rise to so much rioting.” Custom did not decay here; the funding was withdrawn.

Against the persistent myth of the unchanging English countryside, the book shows how mutable these practices were, shaped by money and social expectation rather than antiquity. It also sits four years before William Thoms coined “Folk-lore” in The Athenaeum in 1846 to replace “popular antiquities” — and Thoms appears never to have noticed Edwards at all, which may be no accident. Thoms wanted tradition arising from the folk, not from the whims of donors deciding which poor were deserving.