The Pledge-Book of Ann Seward

by Daniel Defoe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Being a plain account of the pledges taken at a broker's shop in Birchin Lane, in the year of the South Sea, written by the widow who kept it

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My name is Ann Seward, and I am entered under it in the parish books of St Edmund the King, where I was married, and in the book of my own shop, where I was undone; and since the second book is the truer, I shall go by that, and set down nothing in this account that is not in it, or that I cannot remember as well as if it were.

My husband, Thomas Seward, was a broker of pledges in Birchin Lane, which runs out of Cornhill down towards Lombard Street, so near to Exchange Alley that on a still morning you might hear the jobbers at Jonathan's crying their prices through two walls. He took in goods and lent money upon them, at so much the month, and if the goods were not fetched out by the day, he sold them. It is a trade that gentlefolk speak of as if it were a little worse than thieving, and they are glad of it at the quarter-day. He died of a fever in March 1717, in four days, and left me the shop, the lease of it, the book, a girl called Betty to sweep and run, goods in pledge to the value of about one hundred and forty pounds, and seventy-three pounds in money in the iron chest. Two hundred and thirteen pounds, then, was my whole estate; and I could read and write and cast up a column, which he had taught me himself, saying a broker's wife who could not was a broker's widow who would be robbed.

I kept on the shop. There was nothing else to do with it, and I knew the trade, for I had sat at the end of the counter eleven years and written the tickets. Each pledge has its number, and the number is written on a ticket of card tied to the goods with a thread, and the same number in the book with the day, the name given, the thing, and the sum lent. The name given is very often not the name; that is no business of the broker's. The thing is the thing. A silver spoon is a silver spoon, whoever's mother it was, and it weighs what it weighs. Thomas used to say that the whole of our trade was this, that we lent upon what we could hold in the hand, and upon nothing else whatever.

I set that down first because it is the whole of what I forgot.

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For two years and more the book ran as it had always run. Sheets and shirts on a Monday, fetched out on a Saturday when the wages were paid. Watches from young men at the end of the month. A wedding ring now and then, which I never liked to take, and took. I made, one week with another, about thirty shillings clear, out of which I paid the rent of nineteen pounds a year, and Betty, and our victuals, and put by a little; so that by Christmas 1719 the chest had eighty-one pounds in it, and I was content, or as near it as a widow is.

In the spring of 1720 the book changed its hand, and I can show where.

Up to the end of March the entries are what I have said. Then, the 4th of April: A silver tankard, chased, 22 oz., Mr. Wills, lent £4 10s. Mr. Wills was a footman in a family in Lime Street, and footmen do not pledge their masters' tankards and come back for them, and I questioned him, and he showed me a paper that said the tankard was his own, left him by a former master, and was signed, and I believed it, for the reason that he did come back for it, in nine days, and paid the month's money for the nine days without a word, and told me as he went out that he had cleared eleven pounds upon it. I asked him upon what. He said, upon the South Sea; and he laughed, and so did I.

After that the book fills. In April I have forty-one entries where in March I had twenty-three. In May I have sixty-eight. And it is not sheets and shirts. It is watches, rings, buckles, swords, a fiddle, a lady's fan with ivory sticks, a periwig that cost twelve guineas new and that I lent two pounds upon and was sorry, for there is no selling a man's periwig to another man. It is clerks and coffee-house waiters, journeymen, a Fleet Street bookseller's apprentice, two clergymen's widows, a chairman. They came to raise money to venture, some in the South Sea itself, which was then above three hundred pounds for a hundred of stock, and by the end of May above five, and some in the other projects, of which there was a new one every day in the Alley; for making salt water fresh, for insuring horses, for a wheel for perpetual motion, and one which I have from Betty, who had it from a porter, for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it was. I do not say that one was true. I say Betty told me it, and that she believed it, and that the porter had put five shillings into it.

The money came back, too. That is what is not understood now. In April and May, most of them came back in a week or a fortnight, and fetched out the goods, and paid, and some gave Betty sixpence besides; so that my chest, which had eighty-one pounds in it at Christmas, had a hundred and thirty-four by the end of May, and that from nothing but the ordinary premium on pledges, turned over three times as fast as before.

I will set down two of the entries of that time particularly, because I shall have to come back to them.

The first: May the 17th. No. 1,188. A silver watch, Tompion's make (but not his, I think), with a steel chain. Edward Hollis. Lent £2 5s. Ned Hollis was a waiter at Jonathan's, a lean young fellow with a cough, who knew every jobber in the Alley by his first name and was owed money by half of them. He had a mother at Islington. He put the two pounds five into some bubble for a fishery in Greenland, he told me, and did not get it back, and pledged his coat in June upon the strength of the fishery coming right, and that is No. 1,231.

The second: June the 3rd. No. 1,206. A child's coral, set in silver, with six bells and a whistle. No name. Lent 15s. Term three months. It was brought by a woman in a grey hood, about thirty years old, well spoken, not a servant, with good gloves much mended. She would not give a name, and I did not press her, and wrote "No name". She did not say what she wanted the money for, and she did not look like a woman who was going into Exchange Alley. She asked me twice whether three months was the term, and whether I would keep it the whole of the three months without selling it; and I said that was the law of the shop, and wrote her the ticket, and she went out without counting the fifteen shillings, which I remember, because they all counted it in those days, even the gentlemen.

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On the 25th of June it was cried at Jonathan's that South Sea was at a thousand and sixty. I heard it in the shop. Betty ran in from the end of the Lane to tell me, and her face was red, and she said that a man in the Alley had thrown his hat over the coffee-house roof. Whether he did I do not know; it was a high roof. But the figure I had from three persons that day, and from a printed list of the prices the week after, and I set it down as true.

I am now to give my own account of myself, and I shall give it as I would give a debtor's, without favour.

On Saturday the 9th of July there came into the shop a man called Jacob Rudd, whom I knew by sight from the Alley; he was clerk, or man, or runner, to one of the jobbers who did business at Garraway's, a decent dark man in a good coat, not a gentleman, but next door to one. He laid on my counter a paper, which was a receipt for money paid in upon one of the Company's subscriptions, with the Company's name and a clerk's hand and a seal; and he asked me what I would lend upon it.

I said I lent upon goods.

He said it was goods, and better than goods, for it would sell that afternoon in the Alley for four hundred pounds, and he could show me two men who would give it; but he did not want to sell it, because it would be worth six hundred by Michaelmas, and he wanted ready money for one month only, to take up another matter that would not wait. He asked for two hundred pounds, for one month.

I had in the chest a hundred and ninety-six pounds and some shillings, which was everything I had in the world, saving the goods in pledge and the lease.

Now I am to say why I did it, and I find I cannot say it handsomely, and so I shall say it plainly. I had seen two months of footmen and waiters come into my shop with a watch, and go out with two pounds, and come back with eleven. I had made fifty-three pounds since Christmas, by lending to them, and they had made, some of them, I do not know how much, but more. I had heard a thousand and sixty cried in my own Lane. And it seemed to me, standing at the counter with that paper, that I was the only person in Birchin Lane who was still lending upon tankards, and that I was a fool; and I was tired of being a careful widow who made thirty shillings a week, and I wished, God forgive me, to be such another as Mr. Wills.

I asked him what the paper was good upon; that is, what the Company did, that its money was so good.

He told me it was the debt of the nation; and besides that, it had the trade to the South Seas, and particularly the Assiento, which was the contract with the King of Spain for the supplying of the Spanish Indies with negroes, as he called them, so many thousand a year, out of Africa. He told me it as a jobber's man tells you a thing is sound, and I heard it so. I did not ask what it meant, though I knew what it meant, for a Bristol woman lodged over us once whose husband was in that trade, and she told me how they were carried. I put that out of my mind as fast as I had let it in. I say this plainly because it is in my account and I will not leave it out of it. The paper upon which I lent my whole estate was a share in a trade in men and women, carried in ships and sold; and I knew it, and I lent upon it, for the sake of what it would fetch at Michaelmas; and I have entered that on the wrong side of my own book, where it stays.

I lent him a hundred and eighty pounds, not two hundred, which is all my prudence came to. The premium for the month was to be nine pounds. I wrote it in the book in my own hand, and it is there now: July the 9th. No. 1,247. A receipt upon the South Sea subscription. Jacob Rudd. Lent £180. To be redeemed August the 9th, £189. I put the paper in the iron chest, where the money had been, and locked it, and went to bed, and did not sleep, and told myself it was the heat.

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He did not come on the 9th of August. He came on the 10th, civil and pale, and asked for a week, and I gave it him, for the price that day was still above eight hundred, or so Betty heard, and the paper was worth more than the debt by a great deal.

He did not come at the end of the week.

I shall not make a long matter of the next six weeks, for anybody in London who was above ten years old that year can tell it, and it was the same in every street. The price went down, and then it went down again, and then the Alley was so full of people that a chair could not be got through it, and I have seen a gentleman in a velvet coat stand at the corner of Birchin Lane with his hat in his hand, not asking anything of anybody, only standing. By the middle of September the book of my shop had changed its hand a second time. No one came to fetch out anything. They came only to pledge, and what they brought was worse; I have entries of shoe-buckles of brass, and a pair of sheets that were not clean, and a Bible, from the chairman, No. 1,302, upon which I lent four shillings, and would have lent more, if I had had it to lend.

For I had it not. I had thirty-one pounds and the paper. What came back to me in July from the pledges fetched out, I had lent out again in those last weeks upon pledges which were never fetched, and which I could not sell, because everybody in London was selling at once, and a silver tankard that had been worth four pounds ten in April would not fetch fifty shillings in September, there were so many tankards.

On the 22nd of September I took the paper out of the chest, and put on my hood, and carried it myself to Jonathan's, which I had never been in. It is not a place for women, but I was not, that morning, a woman so much as a creditor. Ned Hollis was there, carrying dishes of coffee, and he went white when he saw me and came and stood by me, without my asking. He took the paper and went among the jobbers with it. He came back in a quarter of an hour, and said the best he could get was thirty-one pounds. I would not take it. I said it would come up again. Ned said nothing to that, but looked at me as I have looked at a good many people across my own counter, and I took the paper home.

On the 30th of September, the day after Michaelmas, the day on which Mr. Rudd had told me it would be worth six hundred, I sent it by Ned, and took twenty-four pounds ten shillings for it, and was glad of the ten shillings.

Mr. Rudd I never saw again. I heard he had gone to Holland; I heard he was in the Fleet; I heard he was dead. I do not know which. I have entered him as not known.

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I am now to draw the line down the page, as my husband did at the end of every year, and as I did at the end of that one, sitting up in the shop on the last night of December with one candle, for I would not burn two.

Against me. I lent a hundred and eighty pounds upon a paper, and had back twenty-four pounds ten shillings; lost, a hundred and fifty-five pounds ten. I lent forty-four pounds besides, in August and September, upon goods that I could not sell for more than nineteen; lost, twenty-five pounds. The premium owing to me upon both, which I never had, I do not count, for a broker who counts the money she was promised is keeping a book of wishes. My estate, which had been two hundred and thirteen pounds when Thomas died, and nearer three hundred at midsummer, was, at Christmas 1720, by the best reckoning I could make, sixty-eight pounds, of which the half was in goods. My rent was owing for the quarter. I lent upon a trade in men and women, and am the worse for having done it, whether it had paid or no.

Notwithstanding. I was not in debt to anyone but my landlord, and he gave me till Lady Day. I had sixty-eight pounds, which is more than the chairman had, or the clergymen's widows, or Ned Hollis. The shop was not taken from me; I gave it up of my own accord, at Lady Day 1721, and took a smaller one in Shoreditch, where the rent is nine pounds, and the pledges are sheets and shirts on a Monday, as God intended. Betty came with me. Ned Hollis came to the shop in Birchin Lane every Saturday from October to the February following and paid two shillings, and sometimes one, upon his watch, which he could have let go for less than it would cost him to redeem it; and on the 18th of February he paid the last of it, and took it away, and the coat with it; and I set that down here, because there were not many entries of that kind in the winter of 1720, and I wish it known that there was one. And I was not drowned, as a great many were that year, in the river and out of it.

That is the account, and it is the whole of it, except for one thing, which I must enter, though I cannot give a sum against it.

The coral, No. 1,206, which the woman in the grey hood pledged on the 3rd of June for fifteen shillings, was due to be fetched out on the 3rd of September. She did not come. By the law of the shop I might have sold it on the 4th, and silver was silver, even that autumn; it would have fetched more than fifteen shillings. I did not sell it. I do not know why I did not, except that she had asked me twice whether I would keep it the whole term, and it seemed to me a hard thing, of all the things in that book, to be the one that was sold on the first day it might be. And then October came, and I did not sell it in October, and so it went on. I have asked at the shops round about, and of two midwives, and of the clerk of St Edmund's, whether a woman of that age and that hood had a child christened or buried in the parish that summer, and I have had nothing that I could be sure of. I do not know what she wanted the fifteen shillings for. I do not know whether she put it into the Alley like the rest, or into bread, or into a doctor. I do not know whether there was a child. She had good gloves, much mended, and she did not count the money; and that is all there is in the book.

I have been asked since, by a minister who lodges two doors from me in Shoreditch, whether I do not see the hand of Providence in my having been brought low, as a correction for my folly and my covetousness, and a warning to me; and I said I did not doubt it. He asked whether I did not also see it in my having been preserved, with sixty-eight pounds and a trade, when so many were left with nothing; and I said I did not doubt that either. Then he asked me how both could be true, and I said that was his trade and not mine. A broker keeps the account and does not pretend to know the mind of the man who pledged the goods. I was brought low and was not raised up again; I am in Shoreditch yet, and I shall die there, and no ship is coming for me. I have written Providence on the right-hand side of my book, against all that, nonetheless. I do not know that I am right to. I have entered it, and I let it stand.

The coral I have in the drawer under the counter now, in the fourth year since it was pledged, with the ticket on it, No. 1,206, tied with the same brown thread Thomas used. Once in a month or so I take it out and shake it, to be sure the bells are not grown stiff, and I put it back.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Daniēle Dēfoe, simulācrō, per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Daniel Defoe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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