A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 10, Cheveley, Flendish, Staine and Staploe Hundreds (North-Eastern Cambridgeshire). Originally published by Victoria County History, London, 2002.
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A F Wareham, A P M Wright, 'Stow cum Quy: Charities for the poor', in A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 10, Cheveley, Flendish, Staine and Staploe Hundreds (North-Eastern Cambridgeshire)( London, 2002), British History Online https://prod.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol10/pp246-247 [accessed 5 November 2024].
A F Wareham, A P M Wright, 'Stow cum Quy: Charities for the poor', in A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 10, Cheveley, Flendish, Staine and Staploe Hundreds (North-Eastern Cambridgeshire)( London, 2002), British History Online, accessed November 5, 2024, https://prod.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol10/pp246-247.
A F Wareham, A P M Wright. "Stow cum Quy: Charities for the poor". A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 10, Cheveley, Flendish, Staine and Staploe Hundreds (North-Eastern Cambridgeshire). (London, 2002), , British History Online. Web. 5 November 2024. https://prod.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol10/pp246-247.
CHARITIES FOR THE POOR.
Robert Lawrence (d. 1650) intended that the income from 10 a. of arable should be given to ten poor parishioners, chosen by succeeding lords of Holmhall manor. In 1675 his grandson John Child conveyed 10 a. for that purpose to the parish, (fn. 1) which already possessed (fn. 2) 4 a. of Town land. In the 1730s £2 of the rent, £6 4s., was given to 20-25 people in alternate years. (fn. 3) About 1783 £5 5s. from Child's land went to poor widows, £2 from the other 4 a. being given indiscriminately. (fn. 4) By 1820 the whole 14 a. yielded c. £30, given annually in cash doles to families. From 1826 the land was let as allotments of 1-3 a. to labourers. In the 1830s, though legal costs and fen taxes almost absorbed the income, small distributions, £14 going to 47 people in 1835, continued. (fn. 5) Of 10 a. south of the turnpike allotted for the land at inclosure in 1840 (fn. 6) and still let as allotments in 1910, (fn. 7) 2 a. was sold in 1978 for road widening. (fn. 8) Cash distributions from the rent, which came to £10-15 between the 1860s and the 1960s, continued to be made, in the 1960s to 25-30 people yearly. (fn. 9) From the mid 1970s the income from Child's charity, increased to £30 by 1985, was given with Quy's quarter share, under a Scheme of 1913, of the net income from Bottisham Poor's Fen. That income rose steadily from £30 in the early 1970s to £119 by 1979. Cash was given yearly among 25-30 people, mainly old age pensioners and the widowed; such households each received £15 in 1990. (fn. 10)
By 1720, as in 1839, the parish owned six Town houses, gardenless cottages off the Stow road, sometimes called almshouses (fn. 11) and inhabited in the 1850s by elderly paupers. (fn. 12) They were pulled down c. 1870. (fn. 13)
By 1783 the poor were entitled to the interest of £1 from £20 left by Henry Bowstick. That sum, probably that supposedly given by a drunken tinker which was later in the Martins' hands, was by 1800 apparently diverted to schooling. James Martin (d. 1744) left £50 for the poor: no interest was paid after 1761. (fn. 14) James Thomas Martin, who regularly gave £5 yearly to 10 or more widows at Christmas, went on paying it after he sold the Quy Hall estate in 1855. By will proved 1872 he left £100, yielding £3 5s., to maintain that gift, which the vicars distributed into the 1920s. (fn. 15)
From 1959 the parish received for general charitable purposes, under the Scheme regulating Quy's Poor's Fen, a third of the net income from letting grazing rights there, initially producing altogether £30-50, (fn. 16) by 1977 £350, and by 1986 £700. Quy's share, worth £120 in 1979, was accumulated until needed for such public purposes as fitting up the new village hall in the 1980s. (fn. 17)