Orientation

Moors, Dales and Vales

An introduction to the Farndale Story

 

 

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The Farndale Story

This is the story of one family’s journey through two thousand years of British history.

The modern Farndale family descends from the original inhabitants who first cultivated Farndale from the early thirteenth century. The family linkage to this relatively small, rural valley in North Yorkshire provides a beacon which makes it possible to navigate the medieval records. We’ve found significant records of individuals back to the thirteenth century, who themselves were descended from the first inhabitants of the dale.

Farndale was itself part of the large medieval estate of Chirchebi or Kirkbymoorside. Whilst much of that estate including Farndale remained a wild place until well after the Norman Conquest, there was a smaller region, only a few kilometres south of Farndale which was a known area of stability and settlement. So we’re able to tell our deeper ancestral history through the story of the people of that antique place which takes us through Anglo Saxon back to Roman times.

Work on the story of the Farndale family was started by Martin Farndale in the 1950s.

After about 1500, when parish records started, we have detailed records of all, or nearly all those who were or are called Farndale. All modern Farndales, or anyone descended from Farndales, are part of the same wider family, and can trace their ancestry back to the families who lived around Skelton north of the North York Moors from the mid sixteenth century.

We therefore all share the same deeper ancestral history of the period before 1500, of which the early chapters of the Farndale Story will tell.

This is as much the story of those who still use the name Farndale, as anyone who has a Farndale ancestor.

Before the thirteenth century, the place that came to be known as Farndale was an unknown place, a forest flowing down through the valley from the high moors. By the Anglo Saxon period, Farndale formed part of the great estate known as Chirchebi, which is called Kirkbymoorside today.

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The Venerable Bede described the area around Farndale in the early eighth century:

among steep and distant mountains, which looked more like lurking-places for robbers and dens of wild beasts, than dwellings of men.

It was a place where nobles sometimes hunted, a small section of enormous lands, which would be passed about from unfaithful nobleman to faithful nobleman, across the giant chessboard of England of the Middle Ages where the Kings and the aristocracy played out their game of thrones.

To the south of Farndale, along the Hodge Beck as it flows out of Bransdale, the dale which runs parallel to Farndale, lies Kirkdale which is located at the edge of the wild lands of the dales and the moors, but at the northwest corner of vast agricultural lands, long settled, the Vale of York which sweeps south towards York and the Vale of Pickering, once a prehistoric lake, which sweeps east towards Pickering and beyond.

We know from the Domesday Book survey that Kirkdale was at the centre of a smaller northwest section of these flat agricultural lands. This smaller region stretched from Kirkby Misperton and Muscoates to the south and up to Gillamoor at the approach to the dales in the north. The River Dove and the Hodge Beck flowed out of the dales and through Kirkdale and Chirchebi (Kirkbymoorside) and met at a confluence in these lands.

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Kirkdale was therefore the centre of the Anglo Saxon, and before that Roman, community that would, in the early thirteenth century, extend its lands of cultivation into Farndale, as the wooded dales were slashed and burned (a practice called assarting) to provide extensions of the farmed land, into Farndale and Bransdale.

Therefore, knowing that the modern Farndale family is descended from those who once eeked out their survival in Farndale in the mid thirteenth century, it is probable that those villeins or serfs from Farndale from whom we descend, themselves had their ancestral roots amongst the folk of Kirkdale and its agricultural surroundings.

It’s therefore probable that our distant ancestors are those people who inhabited the region around Kirkdale in Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and early Norman times.

 

The Stage for our Story

The geographical setting of our story should be imagined in three distinct landscapes.

The moors are the windswept and barren heights which have always been a harsh and bitter place.

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The dales were probably largely impenetrable and heavily forested for much of their ancient history. They are relatively steeply sided valleys, with Bransdale following the Hodge Beck and Farndale running parallel and following the River Dove.

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The vales are ancient agricultural lands of two vast vales, of York and Pickering.

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Nestled at the edge of the dales, as they pour out into the flat agricultural lands, is Kirkdale, the original cradle of our family. And it turns out that Kirkdale has quite a story to tell.

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Glossary

As you start exploring our history, in the box immediately below this Orientation you will find a glossary, which might help if you encounter some medieval language or words from time to time with which you need some assistance.

 

The beginning of one family’s story

A genealogy is the assembly of a multiplicity of related stories, of struggle, initiative, tragedy, achievement, ambition, of following calls to battle, taming our own lands, and travelling to new ones.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

 

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

 

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school.

And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.

Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth.

And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part.

The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound.

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

 

(William Shakespeare, As You Like It)

The Farndale story will tell of puking infants, whining schoolboys, sighing lovers, bearded soldiers, wise lawyers and law makers, slippered sexagenerians, and includes the final scenes of many of our ancestors.

The matrix is your portal into these multiple and ancient worlds, though many of them might not be so very different to our own.

 

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