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Bentle Surname Ancestry Results

Our indexes 1000-1999 include entries for the spelling 'bentle'. In the period you have requested, we have the following 12 records (displaying 11 to 12): 

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Freemen of Canterbury by Redemption (1392-1800)
No man or woman could trade in the city of Canterbury without having obtained 'freedom' of the city, unless they paid an annual fee to do so. Admissions of freemen were recorded on the Chamberlains' Accounts of the city, which were prepared annually from Lady Day (25 March) to Lady Day until 1752, and thereafter each set runs from 1 January to 31 December. The accounts for 1392 are incomplete, but thereafter until 1800 there is a complete series except for the years 1455 to 1457 and the year 1552-3. Joseph Meadows Cowper, Honorary Librarian to the Corporation, produced this extract of the names from 1392 to 1800, and the volume was privately printed in 1903. There are five groups of freemen: those who obtained freedom after serving out an apprenticeship to a freeman; the children of freemen; those who married a freeman's daughter; those who claimed freedom by 'redemption', i. e. by purchase; and those who were honoured by a gift of the freedom from the Mayor and Court of Aldermen. Cowper published his lists divided into the five categories: the sample scan is from the list of those who obtained freedom by marriage. This is the index to those who gained their freedom by redemption.

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Freemen of Canterbury by Redemption
 (1392-1800)
National ArchivesBritish merchant seamen (1835-1840)
At this period, the foreign trade of ships plying to and from the British isles involved about 150,000 men on 15,000 ships; and the coasting trade about a quarter as many more. A large proportion of the seamen on these ships were British subjects, and so liable to be pressed for service in the Royal Navy; but there was no general register by which to identify them, so in 1835 parliament passed a Merchant Seamen's Registration Bill. Under this act a large register of British seamen was compiled, based on ships' crew lists gathered in British and Irish ports, and passed up to the registry in London. A parliamentary committee decided that the system devised did not answer the original problem, and the original register was abandoned after less than two years: the system was then restarted in this form, with a systematic attempt to attribute the seamen's (ticket) numbers, and to record successive voyages. The register records the number assigned to each man; his name; age; birthplace; quality (S = seaman, &c.); and the name and official number of his ship, with the date of the crew list (usually at the end of a voyage). Most of the men recorded were born in the British Isles, but not all. The system was still very cumbersome, because the names were amassed merely under the first two letters of surname; an attempt was made to separate out namesakes by giving the first instance of a name (a), the second (b), and so on. During 1840 this series of ledgers was abandoned, and a new set started with names grouped together by surname. BT 112/4

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British merchant seamen
 (1835-1840)
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