We recently came across an 1806 lease of possession (conveyance). It’s from Grantham, so slightly outside the Loveden area, but it contains a rather unusual name.
Posthumous Bullivant was born to Elizabeth in Oakham in August 1778. His father, Daniel Bullivant, a surgeon and apothecary, had died three months before the birth. Daniel and Elizabeth (nee Freer) had married in Oakham in 1769.
In 1797, when Posthumous was 18 or 19 (so not of age) his guardians – John Freer of Oakham and James Bullivant of Wymondham – signed articles of clerkship, making him an articled clerk (effectively an apprentice) to Edmund Smith Godfrey of Newark, to train as an attorney, solicitor and conveyancer for 5 years.
Posthumous qualified around 1802 and moved to Grantham. It was common for solicitors to take on official part-time roles and he was appointed clerk and treasurer of the Grantham to Nottingham Turnpike Trust.
In April 1806 he bought the property he’d been renting in Grantham (see below) and in October that year he married Ann Hussey Coles at St Wulframs Church. The first part of the conveyance reads:
This indenture made the fourth day of April in the forty sixth year of the reign of our sovereign Lord King George the Third and in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and six between the Reverend Thomas Wayett of Pinchbeck in the County of Lincoln, doctor in divinity and Mary his wife (who is the only child and heir at law of Joseph Tubney, late of Little Gonerby in the parish of Grantham, in the said County of Lincoln, gentleman, deceased, who died intestate) of the one part. And Posthumous Bullivant of Grantham aforesaid, gentleman of the other part. Witnesseth that for and in consideration of the sum of 5 shillings of lawful money of England to them, the said Thomas Herdson Wayett and Mary his wife, in hand well and truly paid by the said Posthumous Bullivant at or before the sealing and delivery of these presents. The receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged, then the said Thomas Herdson Wayett and Mary his wife have and each of them hath bargained and sold and by these presents do and each of them doth bargain and will sell unto the said Posthumous Bullivant all that messuage or tenement with the brewhouse, outbuildings and appurtenances in Grantham aforesaid in a street there called Westgate, now in the occupation of the said Posthumous Bullivant, sometime since erected and built upon the ground whereon a messuage or tenement, butchers shop and stair case formerly stood, bounded on the west and south by a certain road or lane called the Old Shop Lane, on the east by a new erected messuage or tenement belonging to William Fletcher, now in the occupation of Miss Kelly and on the north by the said street called Westgate. And also all those three erected stables at the south end of the said premises as the same, were late in the occupation of the late William Dunhill and are now in the respective tenures or yards, gardens, fronts, backsides, ways, paths, passages, wells, waters, watercourses, pumps, spouts, lights, liberties, easements, profits, privileges, advantages, commodities, rights, members hereditaments and premises whatsoever to the said messuage or tenement, stables, outbuildings, hereditaments belonging or in any way appertaining or so with the same or any parts thereof usually set, let, occupied or enjoyed or accepted reputed deemed taken or known as part parcel or member thereof……..
A messuage is a house, together with its outbuildings and adjacent land. The legal definition is still current. A tenement was a parcel of land occupied by a tenant, so effectively the same thing.
Old Shop Lane became Guildhall Street. The solicitor may have mixed up west and east, in which case the property could have between Westgate and Guildhall Street, probably south of the Kings Arms (previously the Blue Ram). The location would have been handy for the original Guildhall, on the corner of Guildhall Street and the High Street, which incorporated a courtroom and gaol, so very handy for practising solicitor.
We don’t know what happened to Ann – perhaps she died in childbirth – but Posthumous died in April 1807, aged 29, and was buried at St Wulfrums. A few weeks later his possessions were auctioned off.
The area south of the Kings Arms seems to have been rebuilt in the early 19th century.