Nicholas de Farndale

c1230 to c1310

Perhaps the earliest identifiable individual member of our family, who cleared and then settled in Farndale

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The first individual referenced to the name Farndale

From sureties of persons indicted for poaching and for not producing persons so indicted on the first day of the Eyre Court in accordance with the suretieship due to Richard Drye. There follows a long list of names including,…..1s 8d from Roger son of Gilbert of Farndale, bail from Nicholas de Farndale, 2s from William the Smith of Farndale, 3s 4d from John the shepherd of Farndale, and 3s 4d from Alan the son of Nicholas de Farndale. (Yorkshire Fees, 1280).

This medieval record from 1280 provides us with a list of names of Farndale in the Yorkshire Fees of 1280. This particular record was found by my father and I am still trying to reconcile it. It may be a record from the Yorkshire Feet of Fines.

It is clearly a record of bail payments for a group of folk from Farndale. It tells us that Roger’s father was Gilbert and Alan’s father was Nicholas. It was Nicholas who paid bail for Roger. The most likely deduction seems to be that Nicholas was the older brother of Gilbert. If we assume that Nicholas was about fifty years old when he bailed out his nephew, and perhaps his son Alan at the same time, then he would have been born in about 1230. Perhaps Gilbert was born in about 1235.

The early thirteenth century was the time when the land in Farndale was first cleared, at least on a significant scale. This record therefore provides us with an introduction to the earliest individuals who started to be referred to by its name. It must have been these individuals who first cleared and cultivated the land in Farndale.

This far back in time, it is inevitable that we can only use our logic and imagination to fill gaps and build a historical picture from the records that exist.

However this information provides us with a start point to identify the very first people who used the name Farndale, and from this information together with other records, we can start to mesh together our earliest roots by constructing the most probable early family tree.

It is possible that Nicholas was the person called De Nicholao de Ellerscaye, who paid 4s 7d in the 1301 Lay Subsidy when he would have been about seventy years old. This would place the early family lands at Eller House, near to the Duffin Stone on the west dale road, at the place previously referred to as Duvanesthuat.

There is another possibility that he was Nicholao filio Galfridi who paid 5d in 1301. Given his likely age, it doesn’t seem likely that an old man would still be defined by a patrimonial name. If it was him though, it allows is to go back one further generation, to Galfridi, who perhaps farmed around Kirkdale before Farndale was settled.

Whilst we cannot be certain, we might imagine Nicholas as an original inhabitant of Farndale in the area referred to as Duvanesthuat, who cleared the land there for agricultural use, and had a family who would in time leave the dale to begin the story of the modern family.

How does Nicholas de Farndale relate to the modern family?

It is not possible to be accurate about the early family tree, before the recording of births, marriages and deaths in parish records, but we do have a lot of medieval material including important clues on relationships between individuals. The matrix of the family before about 1550 is the most probable structure based on the available evidence.

If it is accurate, then Nicholas de Farndale might be a common ancestor of all modern Farndales. This is by no means certain and is based on a model, assembling the information which is available. He might have been one of the first tenants who toiled to turn the dale into cultivated land in the early thirteenth century and it is possible that it was his sons and grandsons who then grew restless, and eventually started to leave the dale, taking its name.

This provides a likely explanation for our direct line to the early thirteenth century. Before Nicholas it is impossible to identify individuals, because Farndale was only then starting to be recognised as a place at all, so there can be no individuals who might be identified as direct ancestors. However we do know a lot about the community of the wider estate, back to Roman times. So whilst we can’t identify individuals, we can still tell the story of our more distant ancestors and of the place where they lived.

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