Vouchers for the parish of Sandon contain a quantity of settlement examinations, the potted biographies of ordinary working people that chart their employment and rate-paying past. The examination of Jesse Harris taken on 24 August 1813 (exactly 205 years to the day before this blog post) offers a curious side-light on the working life of ostlers.  Harris had been born in Cheadle, Staffordshire and was not apprenticed to any trade. Instead he made a living as a pot-boy and later as a  ‘hostler’.  In the latter capacity he took care of the horses belonging to the customers of an inn or coaching house, perhaps by feeding and rubbing them down, or seeing that they were accommodated in stabling suitable to their owner’s status.  But the life and particularly the income of an ostler was a precarious one.  Harris’s settlement examination refers to ‘the usual manner of hiring Hostlers, Viz to have board and lodging, no wages but such perquisites as the customers pleased to give him’.  At the same time he had no fixed term of employment.  Jesse Harris must have been reasonably adept at his job, however, as he held down the post of ostler at the White Hart in St Albans Hertfordshire for nearly six years before traveling back to Staffordshire.