| Description | A file under the title "Agreements" is listed among the contents of Box B in the Catalogue of Papers compiled by William D. Brown in 1791. But there is no subsequent reference to the file, and, when the Index of the Catalogue was later annotated, the name was simply struck through and no indication was made of the file’s new location. Under the Assay Master’s arrangement the agreements listed below were incorporated into the "General Catalogue" or "Alphabetical Sequence."
The documents in this file are employment agreements of various kinds, and are evidently the remnant of what must once have been a great number of such documents. The reason for the survival of these particular agreements is unclear; possibly they were kept as formulas for drafting new ones.
Nearly all of the agreements are styled indentures, and most of these are similar in size and form, being handwritten on foolscap sheets indented at the head; the apprenticeship indentures of Benjamin Blakeman, John Scott, John Ives and Thomas Shaw, however, are on smaller printed forms, filled up by hand. The agreement of Hannah Owen (transcribed below) and Elizabeth Allen are of a quite different form. Some of the indentures appear not to have been executed. In several cases, the spellings of names in the body of the text differ from those of the corresponding signatures. Two of the documents (4 and 21) are worm-eaten. |