legal bill June 1825 - February 1828The chief interest in these bills stems from the glimpse they offer of the financial affairs of Andrew during an important period when his position seems to have been steadily worsening. By 1825 Andrew appears to have been living at Ashford, and as executor and residuary legatee of his uncle William in that year things might have been expected to improve. But from the evidence of the return to the estate duty office the numerous bequests left him with nothing, and things had also gone badly wrong in his wife's family whose difficulties are a major preoccupation throughout the period of the bills. Just how they affected Andrew is not entirely clear, but there is an early reference to a debt to Andrew against the security of an estate that had been sold, a dispute over a marriage settlement, again evidently in the Robins family, in respect of which Andrew was being pressed for money, and difficulty over convincing other Robins creditors that Andrew was also owed money as he claimed. The only sum of money mentioned is £100 in respect of that creditors' meeting, but it is very unlikely that this was the full extent of it. There may well have been a marriage settlement on Sarah which was lost in the debacle, and more besides.
Possibly as a result of the problems posed by the Robins affair Andrew evidently decided to sell property which probably consisted of all the Holbeton land remaining to him, some or all of which will have passed to him from William. There may have been nothing of the Holbeton property left to him by his father, because at some stage, perhaps more than a decade before, he had moved from Holbeton and probably sold up at that time. The buyer for this latest sale was a Mr Bulteel, probably already a local landowner of substance, though as I note elsewhere perhaps not as long established as his family subsequently liked to claim. It looks as though the sale raised about £2800, and the will which Andrew made at the end of the period covered by the bills, in March 1831, suggests that Andrew may have felt reasonably secure as it looks as though he then had about £2000 in cash investments in addition to his farms at Ashford and Bigbury and some commercial interests. But things must have continued to slide as by the time of his final will in 1834 there was little to bestow apart from the farms. Either the money was lost in lost in speculation, or more likely there were further fallouts from the family problems elsewhere.
legal bill June 1825 - February 1828
legal bill February 1828 - March 1831