Phew! Jill, yesterday was an unusually busy day for me, but let me try and make sense of my notes...
At first I got hold of a bundle of reports and letters from early 1861, and I thought I might possibly be able to photocopy, but there was so much of it, and some of the folds were quite fragile, so I read and made notes - the reference for the bundle is: G/C/AS 37A by the way...
So, all the correspondence was between The Churchwardens Overseers of the Poor for the Parish of St Giles without Cripplegate and, I think, the Overseers of the Cambridge Union, in that they were trying to work out where Anderson MARSH should be settled, or which Parish was responsible for him in Cambridge when he was moved from London.
He is already being referred to as incapable and as a "lunatic", and the problem was which Cambridge parish, Holy Trinity or St Mary's The Great was responsible financially for him. It all hinged on his father James MARSH, a cabinet maker, who when apprenticed to a Thomas CHANDLER on 20th November 1802 (Thomas living at The White Swan, Petty Cury) did not stay/live with his master in that parish, i.e. St Mary's the Great, for the obligatory 40 days during his apprenticeship, but lived in King Street with his father and widowed mother - I've just re-read this, and of course this doesn't make any sense, I must have missed some vital punctuation, or misread something. However, the whole point is that they weren't sure which parish Anderson should be settled in!
As the churches are within spitting distance of one another near the market place, and that the workhouse had become a union of at least these two parishes, people seemed to be spitting feathers in this correspondence over not a great deal. Now, looking in the Minutes of the Cambridge Union, there are almost weekly references to this dispute...more anon...
keith