As we have seen, the household as a unit of accounting has received the most attention from scholars who usually focus on married or widowed women. Though some studies have tackled the domestic consumption of unmarried women, their relationship to the household remains underexplored. 42 As Tanya Evans points out, widows and single women need to be differentiated as the former were much more likely to become heads of households. 43 It was not impossible for a single woman to become the head of her own household, and Jon Stobart has traced the expenditure of the elite and unmarried Mary Leigh, who inherited her family’s estate. 44 Nevertheless, this was rare. Looking at how clothing appears across the account book of the single Sarah Mellish sheds further light on both her relationship to the household and to her family, as well as the impact of her unmarried status on the consumption of clothing. Several contemporary account books belonging to various members of the Mellish family of Nottinghamshire have survived, which is relatively rare (Figure 6). The family were London merchants in the seventeenth century, but by the early eighteenth century had risen to the ranks of the minor Nottinghamshire gentry. 45 In 1670, Joan Harvey married Samuel Mellish, and the couple went on to have three children. Joan Mellish kept an account book in the final years of her life, which mentions various items of clothing belonging to her daughter Sarah Mellish as well as clothing purchased for her granddaughter Molly Harvey. 46 Sarah Mellish similarly kept an account book, dating from 1708 to the year of her death in 1718, in which purchases of clothing and textiles are frequently described. 47 Sarah Mellish’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Mellish, also kept an account book of sorts, begun in her early twenties. While it contains some accounts as well as a record of preparations made for the birth of one of her six children, it is perhaps best described as a commonplace or receipt book. 48 Joan Mellish also had another three children from a previous marriage, and her son John Harvey’s account book survives for the years 1705 to 1720. 49 Sarah Mellish was in her late thirties when her account book began in 1708, and presumably lived with her mother until her death in 1709. It is clear that she did not head her own household after this as, though she employed her own servants, her accounts show that she spent much time moving around, often staying with family members and friends. Amanda Vickery found a similar pattern in the single Diana Eyre, who lived in her brother-in-law’s household. 50
It is possible to calculate Sarah Mellish’s annual expenditure as well as her expenditure on clothing from her account book, though, as already highlighted, this is not without its challenges. Between 1708 and 1718, she spent on average £210 a year, although this fluctuated wildly between £61 6s 6d spent in 1717, and £336 18s in 1716 (Table 1). To put this expenditure into perspective, in December 1709 Mellish recorded a payment of £3 to her servant Molly Shaw for ‘her years wages Due at martlemass’. This sum represented just under 1 per cent of her total expenditure for that year. Sarah Mellish received an income of between £123 and £528 each year from interest on sums of money, rents from property in Bolton, as well as a survivorship, and seems to have lived within her means. Her expenditure on clothing can be calculated for each year between 1708 and 1718 as shown in Table 1, and included in these totals are purchases of clothing, accessories, and textiles, payments for making, mending, or altering garments, as well as the purchase of clothing for other people. Money ‘laid out’ on clothing for family members is not included, as she would expect to receive these sums back in due course. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to establish just how much money Sarah Mellish spent on her clothing, not least because her own calculations are often incorrect. For instance, she frequently recorded paying bills to people from whom she usually purchased goods and services, without specifying what the payment was for. In 1711, for example, she spent about a third of her yearly expenditure on her wardrobe. However, once we include unspecified bills paid to her usual clothing suppliers, this rises to just under half of the total. Table 1 demonstrates how taking these bills into account impacts on estimates of her expenditure on clothing, and it is likely that all the accountants looked at in this chapter made payments for clothing which we will never know about.