Act 1
The Cradle
Thirteenth Century Farndale
The crags of Middle Head, Farndale,
where Edmund the Hermit used to dwell
I suggest that you follow the
Farndale Story in the order of the numbered chapters. The family story begins
when the dale first became known, and follows a chronology into the early
thirteenth century, when enserfed tenants started to clear the dale for
agriculture.
Scene 1 – Farndale emerges from the
mists of time
First
Contact
In 1154, the
year when the Plantagenets started
their long dynasty, Roger de Mowbray,
lord of the lands of Kirkbymoorside, gave land in perpetual alms to the
brothers of Rievaulx Abbey. The lands included Midelhovet where Edmund the Hermit used to
dwell and another meadow known as Duvanesthuat,
lands in the valley of Farndale,
together with common pasture rights and permission to take building timber and
wood for those who stay there. Duvanesthuat is an
Irish Norse personal name, but there is nothing to suggest that it was a
functioning settlement by the mid Twelfth century. The whole area was regarded
as a private forest of the Mowbrays. The grant was made “saving Roger’s wild
beasts”, and it seems to have been anticipated that the monks would want to
build a new dwelling there, probably to use as a grange or cote.
Roger of Molbrai, to all the faithful, both his own and strangers.
Let it be known that I have granted . . to the Rievallis
brothers, in perpetual alms, Midelhovet - scil. that
meadow in Farnedale where Edmund the Hermit dwelt,
and another meadow called Duvanesthuat, and the
common pasture of the same valley - scil., Farnedale: and in the forest wood for material, and for the
own uses of those who remained there, save the salvage.
There had
been a previous grant of lands including at Middelhoved
during Roger de Mowbray’s minority, by his mother Gundreda
on his behalf, during the period of his minority. Roger became a ward of the
crown in 1129 when his father Nigel d’Aubigny died
and reached his majority in 1138. It was therefore in the 1130s that Gundreda managed the estate on his son’s, and the Crown’s,
behalf. So whilst the earlier reference is not dated, it was probably in about
say 1135.
Gundreda, wife of Nigel de Albaneius,
greetings to all the sons of St. Ecclesiff. Know that
I have given and … confirmed, with the consent of my son, Eogeri
de Moubrai, God and St. Marise Eievallis
and the brothers there. . . for the soul of my husband Nigel de Albaneius, and for the safety of the soul of my son, Roger
de Molbrai, and of his wife, and of their children,
and for the soul of my father and mother, and of all my ancestors, whatever I
had in my possession of cultivated land in Skipenum,
and, where the cultivated land falls towards the north, whatever is in my fief
and that of my son, Roger de Moubrai, in the forest
and the plain, and the pastures and the wastins,
according to the divisions between Wellebruna and Wimbeltun, and as divided from Wellebruna
they tend to Thurkilesti, and so towards Cliveland, namely Locum and Locumeslehit,
and Wibbehahge and Langeran,
and Brannesdala, and Middelhoved,
as they are divided between Wellebruna and Faddemor, and so towards Cliveland.
These
lands, though part of the Kirkbymoorside estate, were at its periphery. They
were largely forested lands, part of a vast noble possession, used only rarely
for hunting. Edmund the Hermit who lived at Midelhovet was a holy man
who performed miracles, who some said was descended from Alfred the Great.
This was the
first time the name Farndale had been used, and the name first appeared in the
Chartulary of Rievaulx Abbey. The
grant by the House Mowbray was
made at the end of the lordship of that House over the settlements of our
cradle lands. In the same year, 1154, Robert de Stuteville was reclaiming the
ancestral lands of that rival House, and by the end of the century, the House Stuteville were overlords.
There were
ancient settled communities living on the Kirkbymoorside estate, but no farmers
had yet reached the forested inner dales. Th settled communities of the estate
were focused in the small town of Kirkbymoorside, in the more rural cultivated
lands around the church of Kirkdale. These folk, of Anglo Scandinavian
descent, farming only a few miles south of Farndale, were the ancestors of a
small group of villeins who would soon clear land in Farndale, and start
cultivation there too.
In 1154
those living in the communities of the Kirkdale lands would have wondered in awe at
the Elven halls of the Cistercians of Rievaulx
Abbey, which had risen out of the soil on a vast scale in a nearby valley
in only twenty years since the Cistercian monks had first arrived there. This
was a Lord of the Rings world of strange lands of a Middle Earth,
which included such places as Midelhovet and Duvanesthuat,
dimly known to the folk of the shires around Kirkdale, where strange monks had so recently
arrived, bringing French Cistercian traditions and constructing wondrous
towering halls.
Tolkein’s Rivendell
Rievaulx
By 1166
Roger de Mowbray had fallen out of favour with the
English King, Henry II, and the lands of Kirkbymoorside passed to the House Stuteville. In the Games of Thrones between
barons across the chess board of England, the folk of the Kirkbymoorside estate
had fallen under a new authority. In 1166 Robert de Stuteville granted rights
to timber and wood in Farndale to the Cistercian nunnery at Keldholme, close to
Kirkbymoorside town. In 1209 the Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of St Mary’s in
York obtained rights
in the forest of Farndale from King John. By 1225 there was reference to pastures
in Farndale.
In 1229
Henry III decreed that ‘the whole of the forest of Galtres
and the forest between the Ouse and the Derwent, and the forest of Farndale,
are ancient forests’ and that the people were deceived in exercising their
rights of perambulation of the forest, and the forest should be guarded. The
forest of Farndale had become part of the royal forests, reserved for the King.
However in 1233, the Abbot of St Mary’s came to an agreement with the Stuteville family granting
free passage through the wood and pasture of Farndale. There was a
reference to the Botine Wood and the Swinesheved, which suggests that cattle and pigs
were being grazed there. In that same year, Nicholas de Stuteville died, and the estate
passed to his daughter Joan, the wife of Hugh Wake, who was known as the Lady
of Liddell. By 1241, her first husband was dead and she married Hugh le
Bigod. In
1253, The King committed to Hugh le Bigod the whole forest of Farnedala, which the king had lately recovered by
consideration of the court against the abbot of St. Marie Ebor, to be kept
until the return of the King from Vasconi, or as long as it pleased the king.
This was confirmed in 1255, for a payment of 500 marks.
So the
estate of Kirkbymoorside fell once again under the noble ownership of the Stuteville family by the
beginning of the thirteenth century. Joan, the Lady of Liddell, through
husbands Hugh Wake and Hugh le Bigod, held the primary interest in the cradle
of the Farndale family by 1233. The King withheld the forests, including the
Farndale forests, from 1229 as royal hunting grounds, but this did not appear
to stop the Stutevilles starting to clear small areas of land for agriculture
whilst the deeper forested areas had become royal hunting grounds. By 1253 the
Farndale forests passed back into Stuteville hands for payment of a significant
sum of money. Since 1154 the Cistercians had interests in Farndale and may have
used it first to supply wood to their monastic empires, but might also have
used meadows as pasture for the sheep which would give them their wealth. By
the beginning of the thirteenth century, there is evidence that pigs and cows
were grazed there.
The stage
for our family to build their new home was set.
Scene 2 – Making a Home
Settlement
In the early
thirteenth century the lands of Farndale, which had been the peripheral lands
where hermits used to dwell, were being cleared for agriculture, a process
known as assarting. The House
Stuteville were putting serfs into their land holdings in Farndale, to
clear the land, and then for all time coming, or so they hoped, to allow them
to eek out a desperate living from the land, whilst
more importantly paying rent, agreeing to loyalty, and providing service when
required, to the Stutevilles for the right to do so. Thereby, in a clever
rouse, the Stutevilles turned their useless landholdings into a profitable
enterprise.
The dale in
the early thirteenth century must have been a place of intense activity. Large
acreages of forest were assarted and the plough teams followed, to turn the
soil and begin cultivation. The people who did this work, were the villeins of
Anglo-Saxon-Scandinvian origin, under the
Norman Yoke for some two centuries, vastly
experienced agriculturists, whose own ancestors had cultivated these lands
since the Roman estates over a thousand years before them.
We might
suppose that the clearing of Farndale was undertaken by the villeins, the serfs
or ‘peasants’, who were then put onto the land to work it, compelled to pay
rents for tiny holdings of marginal land. The serfs who were relocated into
Farndale were likely to have been Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavians reduced to serfdom
by the Norman Yoke. However
the newcomers were an ancient people who had farmed the lands only a few
kilometres to the south for a thousand years through the years of stability of
the Roman empire, the periods of Anglo-Saxon dominance, and the influx of
Scandinavian influence. The evidence of rents being applied in Farndale by 1276
suggest a campaign on a large scale. Though no doubt suppressed by Norman
domination for two hundred years, these ancient people may have had influence
themselves in this period of the clearance of new lands.
The medieval
records provide us with three snapshots of the progress of settlement in
Farndale in 1276, 1282 and 1301.
The power
lay with their noble overlords, who had held the estate since the Norman
Conquest, arbitrarily distributed by the Conqueror to his supporters and battle
heroes. Until now the forested lands of the dales had been little more than
prestige holdings, where they sometimes hunted. Their estates provided them
with a simple way to pay their premiums in gifts of land to monastic houses in
their insurance deals with the Cistercian and Benedictine monks, to ensure
their continued good fortune after they died. As the new thirteenth century
dawned however, they had come up with a new idea to make their otherwise
useless holdings profitable. If they encouraged or bullied the villein classes
who lived in their estates to clear the forest for agriculture, they could then
impose obligations in rent and service on those same folk, thereby deriving a
perpetual income.
It is
difficult to know the extent to which the agriculturalists of Kirkdale
and Kirkbymoorside were coerced
or saw opportunity. It was this band of folk, placed into the new lands of Farndale
in the early thirteenth century, who were the direct ancestors of the modern
Farndale family.
In the mid
thirteenth century, Lady Joan de Stuteville
successfully prosecuted the Abbot of St Mary’s York, for exceeding his rights
taking wood from Farndale and as she did so she cleared 100 acres of land.
Joan died in
1276, and an Inquisition
Post Mortem (“IPM”) recorded her landholdings as they passed to her
son, Baldwin Wake. IPMs
were held when members of the elite died for the benefit of the monarchy, to
identify the income and rights due to the Crown. Nearly eight hundred years
later, this record gives us direct evidence of a farming community within
Farndale on a significant scale, paying a standard rent of 1s (12d) for each
acre, providing a combined rent of £27 5s 0d, suggesting some 545 acres in
production.
In 1280, we
are introduced to the first
individuals who adopted the name of their new home, when a group of lads
found themselves in trouble for poaching offences including Roger
son of Gilbert
of Farndale; William
the Smith of Farndale; John
the Shepherd of Farndale, and Alan,
son of Nicholas
de Farndale. In 1293, Robert,
son of Peter
de Farndale was fined at Pickering
Castle for poaching. Also in 1293 Roger
milne (or ‘miller’) of Farndale, another son of
Peter, was fined after he killed a soar and slew a
hart with bows and arrows.
It seems
likely that the three Dads, Gilbert, Nicholas and Peter, would have been born
in about the 1230s, just as the process of land clearance was building
momentum. Indeed so many of our distant ancestors were poachers in Pickering
Forest, that the earliest class of our family might be defined as the Farndale Poachers,
and we’ll explore them some more in another chapter. The first individuals who
introduce themselves to us in the records seem to have been the hard working
agricultural folk, pioneers of new lands at the edge of the North York Moors,
whose sons enjoyed the adventure of illegal expeditions in the royal forests.
Joan’s son,
Baldwin Wake died only six years later when another
IPM was held. The Farndale rents now amounted £38 8s 8d together with a nut
rent and a few boon works. Astonishingly, assuming the same rent applied, the
cultivated acreage therefore had increased to 768 acres in only six years. This
was organised and planned agricultural development, led no doubt by Joan Wake
of Stuteville descent, but a
process in which our ancestors seem to have been engaged throughout the
thirteenth century.
In 1301 a subsidy
was imposed across Yorkshire to help Edward I pay for his wars with Scotland. A
detailed assessment was held in Farndale, which listed the 35 tenants
required to meet the subsidy demand.
They
included individuals defined by places within Farndale that are still part of
the landscape today.
De Willelmo Wakelevedy was William
of Wake Lady Green on the East Dale Road.
De Radulpho de Westgille was Radolf of the West Gill stream that runs into modern Low Mill.
De Willelmo de Monkegate was William of Monket Gate, now Monket House at the entrance to the West Dale Road.
De Waltero de Ellerscaye was Walter
of the lands which are now Eller House on the West Dale Road.
These were
settled tenants of sufficient wealth to be stung for royal taxes to pay for the
Scottish wars. By 1301 there were no individuals defining themselves by the
Farndale name left in Farndale itself. The inhabitants of the dale were more
settled, and they could not use the name of the dale to distinguish themselves
since they were all folk of the dale. Logically those who started to use de
Farndale to define themselves were those pioneers who left Farndale at the
end of the thirteenth century and settled in other places. In those other
places, by calling themselves de Farndale, they gave themselves a uniqueness to
serve as an identity. It seems likely that Nicholas
de Farndale, the bailer of his son in 1280, might have been De Nicholao de Ellrischaye listed in
the 1301 Lay Subsidy, who paid 4s 7d in subsidy, by then an established member
of society at Farndale defining himself more precisely than just a person of
the dale where all his community lived.
During the
thirteenth century, we have a picture of serfs, who together formed a body of
folk who must have included our ancestors, toiling the soil in a dreadful
battle of survival, but who by the end of that century seem to have acquired a
degree of wealth, sufficient to be tapped for royal taxes.
Activity
in and beyond the Dale
Our theory
that the individuals who actually used the Farndale name were the pioneers who
started to leave Farndale is borne out, because in the same subsidy of 1301, we
find two individuals living outside Farndale, who called themselves de
Farndale. De
Willelmo de Farndale had moved to Danby in the
heart of the North York Moors in the Wapentake of Langburgh,
where he paid a significant rent of 3s. He appears to have been a tenant of
relative wealth. De
Johanne de Farndale had moved to Egton,
on the north side of the moors, at the boundary of modern Cleveland, where he
paid rent of 22d. Perhaps they were brothers who had left the dale to farm in
new places. Perhaps they were younger sons of Nicholas
de Farndale, who left the dale to find new lands. Indeed it was the common
fate of younger Farndale sons for the following half millennium to leave the
family farm to find new lands when their elder brothers took over the family
lands.
In 1323,
another wayward son, Adam,
the son of Simon
the Miller of Farndale, took two hinds in Pickering
Forest and was delivered to the Keeper of Pickering
Castle to be imprisoned. In 1332, Simon’s son Robert
was fined at Pickering.
In the
1301 subsidy, De Simone Molendinario paid the
highest subsidy of 7s and 9d for the King’s Scottish Wars. Molendinum
is Latin for Mill. So Simon seems to have been the miller of Farndale who by
1301 was perhaps the wealthiest of the Stuteville tenants. He had two sons, Adam
and Robert,
and may have had others.
An
Inquisition in 1350 referred to an early fair
held in Farndale. In 1388 licence was granted to allow the inhabitants of
Farndale to celebrate
mass in the chapel there. One hundred years on from the first spade in the
ground, the dale had become a place of commerce, celebration, and religion.
The Close Rolls in 1361 recorded the transfer of
lands, including Farndale, from Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent to his widow
Joan, Countess of Kent, descendant of the Stutevilles. Joan, the Fair Maid
of Kent, who passed down her new side-saddle style of horse riding to modest
female equestrians, married Edward, the Black Prince on 10 October 1361. The
Black Prince, son of Edward III, who earned his spurs at the Battle of Crecy, and
Joan, Fair Maid of Kent, of Stuteville descent and landholder of the Farndales
lands, would beget Richard II, last of the
Plantagenet line.
Our
ancestors were at the centre of the political world of the Plantagenets from
the start to the end of that dynasty. As their Anglo Saxon forebears before
them, they were living at the heart of the political landscape.
The First
Farndales
And so, it
appears that the earliest members of our family who took the Farndale name were
the hard working settled inhabitants of Farndale itself; the restless sons who
poached in the royal forests; and the pioneers who left Farndale not so long
after its early cultivation, to settle in new places.
Since the
pioneers were those who adopted the name of our ancestral home, it was the
adventurers who started to shape the family’s future lineage. As we meet many
Farndale pioneers in later ages, we might reflect that they were descendants of
ancestral pioneer folk. The adventure gene in the family is strong.
Although we
cannot be certain of family relationships before 1500, the wealth of evidence
does enable us to build a reasonable model. So it is possible to introduce the first family tree of
our family’s known ancestors into the most probable order of relationship.
However
before we take the family journey forward in time, the historical evidence,
whilst not revealing individual ancestors of those we encounter from the
thirteenth century, does allow us to explore the history the folk in the place
where we know our distant ancestors lived.
If you follow the Farndale Story, as
I suggest, in the order of the numbered Chapters, we will next travel backwards
in time, before later taking up the story again with the generations which
would follow, from Act
7.
Go Straight to Act 2, the Primeval Swamp
or
I suggest that before leaving this
period of our family’s history, you:
Read the story of Farndale to 1500
Meet Nicholas de Farndale and Simon the Miller of Farndale or the whole
family
Visit a viewpoint overlooking Farndale and then drive through Farndale to the 1301 locations and other key
features