Sequestration Committee Receipts: Wirral Hundred

Notebook containing:

• (folios 1-30v) notes, in several hands, of receipts by Richard Johnson, Thomas Crosse, Thomas Kirkes, James Croxton and others from Robert Harvie, Treasurer to the Committee of Sequestration in the Wirral hundred of Cheshire, for miscellaneous payments (December 1646-January 1648/49), including a number for church levies and repairs, sequestred rents, troopers' pay and the maintenance of soldiers in Chester garrison.
• Blank pages (folios 31-39, 63v-85v) were used in the following century, mainly the 1760s, for miscellaneous farm accounts.
• Folios 39v-63 are blank.

The Sequestration Committee was ordained by Parliament on 27 March 1643 and sat until 1649 in the Painted Chamber at Westminster. Its purpose was the seizure and confiscation of, or the levying of fines and compositions for, the estates of 'delinquents', that is, those who took the royalist side in the Civil War or who came under the description of papists or recusants. On an information of delinquency the estate in question was seized and held until the accusation could be investigated. If the delinquency was proved to the satisfaction of the committee the delinquent was deprived of his whole estate, with one fifth being allowed to him for the maintenance of his children, and one fifth of the proceeds of the estate being allowed to the informer.

The manuscript is available for consultation by any accredited reader.

Presented to the John Rylands Library by G.G. Horsfall esq. of Oldham in August 1941.

Description compiled by Jo Humpleby, project archivist, with reference to http://www.catalogue.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ for information relating to the Sequestration Committee.

Catalogued in the Hand-List of the Collection of English Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library, 1937-1951 (English MS 957).

Former owners: Thomas Whitehead, William Whitehead (folios 1, 81v, 85v), both in 1754.