I
began working on the history of my father’s family just over 2 years
ago. I had to start almost from scratch, with very little information
to go on. Although I have been able, with the help of many others,
in particular Gill Shapland and her splendid colleagues at the Record
Office, to discover quite a lot about the family, I am also acutely
aware of the many gaps in my knowledge. Maybe some of you may be
able to help me fill one or two of them this evening.
Before I get into my family, perhaps
I should say a word about the geographical setting, which is South
East Cambridgeshire. I will be talking mostly about the village
of Lode, familiar to many as the site of Anglesey Abbey. A lode
is of course a local word for a canal used for drainage and sometimes
for navigation too. Bottisham Lode is such a cut, running through
Bottisham Fen and joining Quy Water to the Cam. The village of Lode
grew up around the water mill on the Lode and the adjacent (and
misnamed) Abbey. Lode, together with the nearby hamlet of Longmeadow,
lay in the northern half of the parish of Bottisham. Bottisham proper,
if I may call it that, and Lode always seem to have functioned as
separate communities, although part of the same parish until the
parish was finally split in the second half of the 19th
century. I shall generally be referring to the ancestral village
as Lode, although it would be more accurate to call it Bottisham
Lode. It is one of a number of villages that lie on the edge of
the Fen, taking advantage of the slightly higher ground, between
Cambridge and Newmarket. Others include Quy, and the Swaffhams.
I
begin with a simple table (see Appendix A)
setting out the 13 ancestors whom I have been able to trace. It
starts with John Hart who married Elizabeth Amey in West Wratting
in 1585.Their grandson Bartholomew left West Wratting around the
1650s and settled in Burwell.
The
next Hart, Robert, was a prosperous carpenter who trained five sons
and through them spread the business throughout the neighbourhood.
One of them, James, my seven times great-grandfather, went to live
in Lode – then part of the parish of Bottisham. He was of course
a carpenter but his and then his eldest son’s premature deaths brought
that business to an end in my branch of the family and thereafter,
for five generations, we were smallholders and agricultural labourers
in Lode.
By the mid-19th century
we were in real difficulty. Matthew, my five times great-grandfather,
had divided up his own tiny landholdings between seven sons, all
of them illiterate. Fortunately, this was the time when emigration
became a serious option, and many of the Lode Harts took it. One
branch went to Australia, another to the USA, and then my own great-grandfather
chose to move to London. You will of course be only too familiar
with this story of rural poverty in the 19th century
leading to mass emigration from Cambridgeshire. It must be a part
of the family history for many of you, as it is for me. But I am
pleased to say that I still have some relations living in Lode although
they are outnumbered at least a hundred-fold by those in the New
World.
So
much for this very brief over-view of the family history. I now
want to explore some aspects in greater depth, beginning with religion.
When I first began excavating the family roots, I found, as many
had before me, that the trail ran cold when I got back to the marriage
of James Hart to Ann Jordan in 1735 and try as I might I could not
find a record of his baptism or therefore of his parents. There
were several Harts listed in the registers of various parishes throughout
Cambridgeshire, who could have been James’s father; but which one?
Eventually I struck lucky, in the way that we all dream about. I
found a will that answered the question. It became clear that James
was the seventh of eight children of Robert Hart and Honor Reeve,
of Swaffham Prior. And the reason why the otherwise well-organised
Robert did not baptise any of his children in the parish church
was that he was a strong non-conformist.
Cambridgeshire had of course a number
of flourishing non-conformist congregations at this time, the late
17th century. A founding figure was Francis Holcroft,
Vicar of Bassingbourn and Fellow of Clare College, who like many
others, was ejected from his living in 1662. Although he spent several
years in prison in Cambridge Castle, his gaoler let him out at weekends
and Holcroft was able to establish a vigorous independent church
with hundreds of members in the county. I believe my family has
two connexions with Francis Holcroft.
First, his Church Book of 1675 lists
the members of the church including- in a section listing dead members
- a Brother Hart and a Sister Muns. It is a reasonable conjecture
that these entries refer to Bartholomew (third in the Table in Appendix
A) and his wife Elizabeth Munsey; indeed they may have met through
their membership of the church. Bartholomew was highly peripatetic
in the 1660s and it would be no surprise if, having been a member
of Holcroft’s congregation, he later lost contact with him. The
family’s second connexion with Holcroft is more definite. It was
handed down in family lore, and recorded in writing in the 19th
century, that Robert Hart the son of Bartholomew, “was converted
to God by the preaching of Mr Holcroft in Burwell Wood.” Note that
at this time Holcroft would not have had a church building and was
ministering to his congregations in the open air or, no doubt, in
secular buildings such as houses and barns.
Robert’s
conversion probably took place in the 1680s when he was a young
man living in the family home in Burwell. In 1691 he married Honor
Reeve in Swaffham Bulbeck and thereafter made his home in Swaffham
Prior. The next year, 1692, Robert was a founding member of a new
independent church set up in Soham and Burwell by George Doughty.
And his first two sons were baptised by Doughty. By 1696, however,
Robert had transferred his allegiance to another even newer independent
church meeting in Soham and Isleham under the ministry of David
Culy. The Church Book of this new church survives; it records, for
example, that Robert testified in 1696 “against marriage in the
Church of England”, which was presumably a protest against the laws
which required all marriages to take place in the Established Church.
The Church Book also makes it clear that in moving to Culy’s Church,
Robert was joining two other members of his family, his sister Elizabeth
and his brother Ralph, who were already members.
I
think it is hard for many of us today to appreciate the hugely important
part which religion played in the lives of these ancestors. Religious
issues were of burning importance to them. I particularly like the
story about David Culy, the Minister of the Burwell and Isleham
Independent Church in the 1690s. Apparently the authorities of the
time were far from happy with his teachings. They therefore had
him prosecuted, but this plan came unstuck when the jury refused
to convict Culy. The authorities’ next idea was to have the troublesome
preacher press-ganged. He was put on board a ship at Kings Lynn,
no doubt bound for distant parts. Culy’s reaction was worthy of
John Bunyan himself. His protest took the form of singing hymns,
which he had composed himself, loudly and continuously until the
captain could bear it no longer and had Culy put ashore at Yarmouth.
Nor
was religion simply a matter of personal belief. It dominated the
lives of many people, determining who their friends were, indeed
who they married, and who they did business with. It provided for
many the whole framework within which their lives were lived.
And so it was, for example, that
one of Robert’s daughters, named Honor after her mother, married
another member of the same church, Robert Fuller of Wicken. This
couple’s grandson Andrew Fuller was to become a famous Baptist Minister
later in the 18th Century, whose writings expressed an
approach to Baptist beliefs which became known as Fullerism. Later
in the 18th century my own direct ancestors seem to have
lost their enthusiasm for non-conformity, though they found it again
in the next century. But other branches of the family did maintain
their loyalty to the Baptist Church. An interesting example of this
is one Joseph Hart and his wife Martha, cousins of my ancestors,
who moved from Burwell to Grantchester around 1750, giving up the
family business of carpentry for farming- an exchange which several
of my family made at about that time. Joseph and Martha were pillars
of St Andrew’s Street Baptist Church in Cambridge. They had a son
also called Joseph who seems to have been an interesting character.
He was in fact expelled from his parents’ church for being vexatiously
argumentative but it did not stop him from setting up in business
with another member of the St Andrew’s Street congregation, one
Joseph Ansell. Together in 1782 they set up a drapery and haberdashery
business in Market Street, Cambridge, a business that was to grow
and prosper until it became the well-known shop Eaden Lilley.
However
I must not get ahead of myself. There are a number of interesting
features of this episode. I think it all began when Joseph Hart
the elder died in 1779. Although I cannot find his will, I think
it must have been a legacy of his that enabled his son Joseph to
expand his business activities. His choice of partner is also very
interesting, for Ansell was not only a member of the same Baptist
church to which Hart belonged; Ansell was also married to Honor
Fuller of Wicken. Now this lady was a granddaughter of Robert Hart,
of whom I spoke at some length earlier, and therefore a cousin of
Joseph Hart. This is thus a very good example of the ties of religion
and family resulting in a business relationship.
The
CRO has a copy of the draft partnership agreement of Ansell and
Hart. It was planned to last for 14 years. Hart was apparently the
junior partner since he was required to live on the premises and
light the counting house fire and keep the staircases and passages
clean. In fact within two years Ansell had quitted the firm- whether
through death or other cause I do not know- and it became Hart and
Hovell. By this time the firm had engaged a William Eaden as apprentice.
As soon as young William Eaden completed his apprenticeship, he
married Elizabeth Hart, almost certainly the niece of his boss Joseph
Hart. Soon William was a partner in the firm. And his daughter Elizabeth
eloped and married one David Lilley and their son William Eaden
Lilley was a key figure in the development of what became one of
the foremost retail businesses in the city.
I
should now like to describe some further episodes in the family
history that seem to me to be of some interest. The first is the
migration that Bartholomew Hart – No. 3 in my family roll - undertook.
He was born in 1632, one of nine children of John Hart and Phillip
Woolward of West Wratting. By the 1650s, however, the name Hart
disappears from the records of this parish. Three of Bartholomew’s
brothers died young, while Bartholomew and his two surviving brothers
moved away. But why should Bartholomew and his two brothers have
migrated? We can only speculate. The religious and political turmoil
of the 1650s and 1660s may have some bearing on the question. My
own guess is that these Harts, like their descendants, were carpenters,
and that their business got into difficulty. Certainly West Wratting
seems to have expanded in size very markedly in the 100 years up
to the Civil War, a period during which carpenters- who were house-builders
as much as anything, - would have prospered. Then the growth slowed
and the local manor was sold to a man who may have been an absentee
landlord, which would not have been good for business. In short,
my guess is that the motive for migration was economic.
I should now like to turn to Bartholomew’s
son, Robert- my 8 times great-grandfather and no. 4 in the roll.
I think he must have been a pretty unusual individual. By the time
of his death in 1737, he had 5 sons working as carpenters in Burwell,
Swaffham Prior, Swaffham Bulbeck and Lode. In other words this was
a substantial business. At his death he was worth about a £100,
or more than twice the average wealth of a craftsman of the time.
Moreover, as indicated earlier, he was a pillar of non-conformist
churches and he married his three daughters to comparatively well-off
tradesmen or farmers who were also non-conformists. One might therefore
have expected the family to go on to even greater things on the
foundations that Robert laid. Alas, it was not to be. Although some
of his children prospered moderately, none really took off. The
family business of carpentry survived down two of the five male
lines after Robert, until the last two Hart carpenters died in the
1860s - they are both buried in Bottisham Churchyard. But most of
the lines either died out or quickly turned to farming in a small
way, a choice which seems to have been popular in the 18th
Century but which does not seem to have been rewarding, at least
for my forebears.
This
brings me very appropriately to my 5xgreat-grandfather Matthew Hart.
He was a small farmer though of some pretensions who managed through
a long life - 1763 to 1849- to achieve a modest prosperity but whose
main contribution to the family history was a truly remarkable fertility.
As we shall see, his descendants are scattered in their many hundreds
across three continents – though continence was hardly something
he could be accused of.
Matthew’s
first wife was called Avis Mott. Only two or three months pregnant
when she married Matthew, she bore him 6 children before dying at
the age of 35. Two years later, in 1803, Matthew married another
Avis- Avis Miller who was the first Avis’s cousin. My guess is that
she lived in with Matthew as his housekeeper before the marriage;
at any rate, she also was two or three months pregnant at the time
of the wedding. She bore Matthew 3 children before in her turn dying
in 1818. In 1822 at the age of 59 Matthew married his third wife,
this time eight months pregnant, Mary Ann Watts. In all then, he
lived 86 years, had three wives and 11 children.
Unfortunately
he did not have much to leave them. He owned his own house and a
couple of acres and rented a few more. He was well enough off to
vote and clearly had some kind of business going, because he was
fined by the magistrates for a breach of the law on weights and
measures. But I suspect that he was somewhat envious of his more
prosperous cousins, particularly those I mentioned earlier who were
doing well in the retail trade in Cambridge. This might explain
an otherwise rather odd incident. In 1809, when Matthew was 46,
he was baptised at the very same St Andrew’s Street Baptist Church,
Cambridge that his well-to-do relations attended. The church is
very inconvenient for someone living in Lode, who by the way had
not hesitated to baptise his own children in Bottisham parish church.
His membership of the Cambridge church does not seem to have lasted
long and my guess- perhaps a rather uncharitable one- is that Matthew’s
motives in joining the church were to strengthen ties with relations
or other contacts who might be advantageous to him. But who knows?
It is fair to say, in his defence, that when Lode finally got its
own Baptist Church in the 1820s, Matthew did take his new children
there for baptism.
When
Matthew died in 1849, he left behind a widow, two married daughters
and seven sons, all in or near Lode and scratching some kind of
living from the land. Matthew’s death made little difference to
their standard of living because he divided up his meagre lands,
which had just about sustained him, between all the survivors, most
of whom by this time had large families of their own. A proud man,
who had described himself somewhat optimistically as a yeoman, he
left seven sons who were unambiguously agricultural labourers.
The first half of the 19th
century was a very hard time for farmers and their workers. My favourite
piece of evidence relates to Caroline Howard of Quy, who was my
3xgreat-grandmother by reason of her marriage to Matthew’s grandson
Edward Hart. Caroline was one of “Widow Howard’s girls” who in January
1832 were paid 3/9d by the Surveyors of Quy for stone picking. Thus
were the poor enabled to survive, if they were lucky.
As
it turns out, Matthew’s death in 1849 came at what was a pivotal
period in the history of rural Cambridgeshire and thus of my family
too. The 1851 Census records that Lode and its neighbouring hamlet
of Longmeadow - which together then formed the northern half of
the parish of Bottisham, - had 771 inhabitants. Of these 771, no
less than 51 were close relatives of the recently deceased Matthew
Hart, while a further 16 were living in villages nearby. Over the
next 40 years, these numbers were to fall dramatically, mainly as
a result of emigration. As you will know this was the time when
circumstances came together to enable very large numbers of farm
workers to seek their fortune elsewhere, and my relatives were not
slow to do so.
Essentially
there were three destinations for these emigrants. Some went to
Australia in the 1850s; more went to the USA in the 1850s and later;
and a few including my own great-grandfather went to London in the
1870s and ‘80s.
I
have managed to research what happened to my family members from
Lode in the period 1851 to1891. As I said earlier, there were 51
of them living there in 1851, and a further 29 were born there in
the next 40 years, a total of 80. I have traced the history of 70
of them. They fall, oddly enough, into three roughly equal groups.
One third of them stayed in Lode and were still alive in 1891. One
third stayed in Lode and died locally. And rather remarkably, one
third left for distant parts – 8 to Australia, 8 to USA, and 7 to
London or SE Essex.
As
already mentioned, my own great-grandfather Alfred left Lode in
about 1880 to seek work in London. I should like to show you here
a nice little extract from the 1881 Census that is both historically
interesting and rather thought-provoking in terms of today (Appendix
B). It relates to a house-not I think a very large house- at
106 Monier Road, Bow, London E3. The house contained two households
numbering 14 people in all. The main householder was Esther Howe,
a 25 year-old widow who cleaned offices for a living. Recently widowed,
she had living with her her one-year-old son Arthur, and two female
relations visiting. She was also putting up Alfred Hart-my great-grandfather,
a 20 year old labourer, who was in fact Esther’s nephew, as well
as Eli,28, who was Esther’s brother. The other family in the house,
consisting of John and Mary Fordham and their 6 children, were in
fact also relations, for Mary Fordham was the sister of Esther and
Eli. Note also that John Fordham is described as a railway servant,
and I am sure it is no coincidence that Alfred soon also got work
in the nearby Works of the Great Eastern Railway at Stratford. These
works were the biggest employer in London with over 5000 workers
and played a key part in the lives of several members of my family,
including my mother’s father.
So
this extract from the Census seems to me to cast an interesting
light on how people were able to move relatively easily from rural
poverty to the very different world of East London and find new
job opportunities. Of course, Alfred soon got established in his
own home but the family ties were crucial in determining where he
went in the first place and what work he got.
This
story has also caused me to reflect on the contemporary parallels.
I think we could find essentially the same story replicated in thousands
of cases today, except that in all probability the extended family
huddling together in an overcrowded terrace house in the East End
of London would be from Bangladesh or West Africa rather than from
the edge of the Fens.
Before
we finally leave the subject of Cambridgeshire, perhaps I could
reflect briefly on the fact that my family first came to Lode, then
part of the parish of Bottisham, in the 1730s. Their numbers grew
greatly to a high point about 1850 before beginning to run down
to the small numbers who, I am glad to say, are still there today.
With the aid of the newly transcribed and indexed Bottisham Registers,
I have done a simple count of the names most often occurring in
the Registers from their inception in 1561 to 1855. The Table in
Appendix C shows that the most frequent
name is Benstead (296 cases) followed by Webb (292) and then Hart
(269). If I had taken a later period, beginning with the time when
James Hart moved to Bottisham in 1735, I am sure that for a hundred
years or more, the Harts would be the most common name in the village.
What is also interesting, if not surprising, is that the Harts inter-married
with every other family listed in the 12 most frequently occurring
names, bar one (Smith). So if you are connected to any of the names
in the list, maybe we have a relationship in common.
I
have greatly enjoyed the last two years of digging around in my
Cambridgeshire roots. My ancestors turn out, as I expected, to have
been pretty ordinary folk but nonetheless interesting. Through them
one feels somehow in touch with the great sweep of history extending
over centuries. But much remains mysterious: I suppose the most
challenging questions are about the earliest origins. Where did
my ancestors come from before we find them in West Wratting in 1585?
Searches in the obvious places have not been all that productive,
though I have recently turned up a John Hart who was a land owner
in West Wickham, next door to West Wratting, in the mid 1500s. I
have also begun to play about with the distribution and meaning
of the name Hart as a possible source of clues.
I
am afraid that I have been able to get nowhere with the name itself.
All the surname dictionaries tell you that it derives from the word
“hart” meaning a male deer or stag and may originally have been
a nickname perhaps referring to someone who was a particularly good
runner or jumper. Well, maybe. 27.What is more interesting is the
geographical distribution of the name as recorded in the 1881 Census.
I have been able to calculate the comparative frequency of the name
as a percentage of the inhabitants of each county. What this shows
is that the name occurs widely- in fact in every county,- but in
greatly varying densities. The name is found most in the four adjacent
counties of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
On the whole, the further North and West you go, the less it appears.
What it would be nice to show is that the great majority of Harts
do ultimately derive from a single ancestor probably coming from
somewhere in East Anglia. I must however admit that the evidence
is not all that powerful.
I
should like to conclude by saying that I also have a dream of being
able to show a family connection between all the East Anglian Harts
at least. If therefore any of you have some information about Harts,
do please get in touch with me.