The Time Traveller’s Handbook
Invitation to travel
through 2,000 years of British History
This is the
story of one large extended family and its footsteps through the history of
Britain, focused on its Yorkshire origins, over two millennia. What is extra
ordinary is that this is not an aristocratic family, but a family of ordinary
men and women , representative of those who provided
the power banks which drove the national story. It is a story of
agriculturalists, soldiers, mariners, and pioneers. It is a story of adventure,
hard graft, passion, poverty, sometimes of breaking the law, sometimes of
inspiring achievement. The reason this story can be told is:
· The family has surname, derived from
a small valley at the edge of the North York Moors, which has a uniqueness
which made it possible to extract our detailed story from the vast pool of
source material.
· That uniqueness has provided the
means to find multiple records of our family back to the thirteenth century.
· Our known rooting to a small valley
in Yorkshire, itself part of lands which formed a composite estate back to
Roman times, means that whilst we lose sight of individuals before the
thirteenth century, we can still explore the deep ancestral past of our ancestors
through Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian to Roman times.
· We can then briefly consider the
primordial swamp, the bubbling cauldron of unknown folk, who continued their
footsteps yet further back through time, told through locations in the very
place where our known ancestors trod their paths.
This story
is the product of two generations of research, which started three quarters of
a century ago in the 1950s. It comprises a thoroughness of genealogical
analysis that means that we have a complete record of all members of the modern
family back to the start of parish records in the mid sixteenth century, and
their stories. It comprises an ambition of historical research and medieval
genealogy which has allowed an unusually accurate story to be told back to the
thirteenth century. It comprises the story of our known ancestral lands into
the deep historical past.
When Martin Farndale began
the research in the 1950s, he also collected stories, photographs, and family
artefacts, before they were lost to time, which has left us with the benefit of
an unparalleled richness of record to the Victorian period.
This Farndale
story matrix page is the hub of our family story which will direct you on a
journey through time. The wider website also comprises the underlying research
and analysis. You can use hyperlinks in the story to explore more detail. The
wider website is also a genealogy including a network of family lines
which binds together separate family
groups which make up the whole family. Every member of the family, modern
and historical, has their
own webpage where the detailed story of every historical individual is told
in chronological detail. So if you choose to explore the detail, you can explore the
thousands of pages which make the detailed research available. All the work
behind the story is available on the website.
Alternatively,
you can focus on the Farndale Story, reading the tales of the family’s main
adventures, dipping only into the detailed research, through hyperlinks, as the
mood takes you.
Who should use this
story to travel through time?
Family. The first purpose of this website
is to make available the genealogical research to all who are descended from
the Farndale family, whether or not they continue to
adopt the surname. For that purpose this story may
provide the best starting place, but you can also return to the home page of
the website and explore your own ancestry in detail, finding the individual
pages of each of your direct ancestors, and explore your own unique story.
Those interested in
Yorkshire’s past. The
family story finds a path through Yorkshire’s unique history, telling of its
place in the birth of
Christianity, and of a national identity. It tells of Lastingham in 653 CE, at the mouth of
Farndale, and it tells the story of the breathtaking minster of Kirkdale. It tells of the origins
of the valley of Farndale and
of Rievaulx Abbey. The story
includes histories of Sheriff
Hutton, the home of the Nevilles and Richard III during the Wars of the
Roses and of medieval soldiers;
and of medieval Doncaster.
It explores the Yorkshire roots of the Robin
Hood stories. The story then moves to Cleveland to tell Cleveland’s
history from the sixteenth century in detail through to the industrial
revolution, of mariners
of Whitby, the lost village of Kilton,
ironstone mining, and of early industrial Leeds, Bradford,
Coatham, Hartlepool and Stockton. The story provides a new perspective on
Yorkshire’s history, by following one Yorkshire family’s path through time. The
family story provides a unique path, which tells Yorkshire’s story with novelty
and adhesion.
Historians. The family story also goes to the
heart of the national story. It is a family’s eyewitness account of the origins
of the English nation, the Scandinavian influence on the northern lands, and
the period of Norman whitewash. The family footsteps continue through the whims
of aristocratic games of thrones, medieval confrontation, and the founding of
towns. The story, one of ordinary rural folk is the dominant national story
before the industrial revolution. The story then follows the course of those
folk as they encountered fundamental change. It follows adventures at sea, and
pioneers to the new lands which defined the national spirit of a new empire
Britain. It emerges into the twentieth century, to face the trenches of the
First World War and the total war of the Second. The story provides rich
analysis, supported by links to the detailed underlying research. The story
provides a distinctive source for a unique perspective on the national story.
Genealogists. The Farndale Family Website, from
which the Farndale Story derives, provides a novel approach to genealogy which
has built on the important but more mechanical processes of sifting records of
births, deaths and marriages, and census records, to build stories onto the
genealogical framework. It has used two generations of family research
experience to explore new approaches to provide depth and story
telling, to push the possibilities of genealogy to its maximum. It
recognises the constraints of genealogical research before the time of parish records, but has not shied from a methodology to provide
detailed medieval genealogical analysis, using models of relationship to
present the most probable story. It uses the author’s professional legal
experience in the application of rules of evidence to present a genealogy which
meets the higher standard of proof where that is possible, but presents the
probable, ‘more likely than not’, analysis when certainty is impossible. It
finds ways to go boldly beyond perceptions of constraints on genealogy to
provide breadth (the story of a whole family) and depth (probing into medieval
records) and it also explores how, when the genealogical research can go no
further, historical research can continue to tell the family story into deeper
time.
The Time Traveller’s
Handbook
The Farndale
Story comprises a matrix of stories, each taking you on a journey into the
past.
Please start
by reading the Orientation, top right of the
matrix in a light green box.
You can
travel through time by exploring these stories in any order you like, or you
could take a more structured approach. The main story is told through numbered Stories
with links to them in bold red text. You can explore these in any order, but it
would make more sense to start with Story 1. I suggest that you then follow the
story in the numbered order, which will first take you back in time through the
history of the ancestral lands of the family, and then take you forward in
time. It’s up to you though. Just go where the mood takes you.
To provide
more depth, you will find the
Explainers in purple text. These provide more depth which you
might like to explore as you read the main story. They tell
of places and historical events, and of historical factors which influenced our
family. You will find the Explainers
adjacent to the Stories
to which they apply.
You can also
meet a few select individuals from the family, who best illustrate our
story at different periods of time. Whilst you can find every member of our
extended family from the
Farndale genealogies, the individuals here comprise a few folk who help to tell the main story. Again you will find the individuals
adjacent to the Stories
to which they apply.
You can also
find some detail about objects
and places which
tell our family story. The Story of our
family in thirty places and objects. If you find yourself in Yorkshire, you
could visit these places. Whilst one object is in the British Museum, the
places are otherwise clustered around the North York Moors, the Dales, the
Vales of York and Pickering, and Cleveland. These pages will tell you how to
get there and what you will see. If you can’t get there, they will describe the
places and objects. Again you will find the objects and places
adjacent to the Stories
to which they apply.
On each page
you will find hyperlinks. These will
generally take you to the more detailed research in pages on the wider website.
At the top
and bottom of each page you will find a link back to the main matrix. At the
bottom of the Story
pages, you will also find a link to the next chapter. So
if you want to read the story in order, you don’t have to return to the Matrix
each time.
Our Ability to Time
Travel
We know that
the modern Farndale family are descended from the thirteenth century
agriculturalists, who cleared the land in the place known as Farndale from
about 1200, and were established tenant farmers by the
end of that century.
Since Farndale
was a part of the estate of Kirkbymoorside, which was centred in the town of Kirkbymoorside and the
agricultural lands around Kirkdale, in
the time before lands started to be cleared in the Dales, our family can
explore its path through Norman, Scandinavian, Anglo Saxon and Roman times,
throughout which time the estate was a settled agricultural centre, at a place
of political influence and significance to the regional and national story.
When our
ancestors were clearing the valley of Farndale in the thirteenth century, this
was the same time when surnames started to be
used and then became hereditary. These thirteenth century individuals chose
to define themselves, and their descendants to follow, as Farndale. In some
cases, the medieval records tell us who were father and son and daughter. It is
not possible to be certain about the precise relationships of all these
individuals to each other. However we have been able
to compile the most probable family tree of these early
ancestors.
It seems to
me to be likely that all modern Farndale descendants share the same ancestors
from one family, because in the early sixteenth century (when we know how they
were related to each other) almost all members of the family lived in
Cleveland, north of the moors for the next couple of centuries, and probably
descend from two individuals, Nicholas
and Agnes
Farndale. There is some evidence that suggests that their son William
Farndale who died in Skelton in
Cleveland was the same William Farndale who married Margaret Atkinson in Campsall, just north of Doncaster in 1564. So
it seems likely to me that all modern Farndales descend from the thirteenth
century folk who lived in Farndale via the medieval Doncastrians.
There are other possibilities, but we can build a model for the most probable
early ancestry, using the extensive medieval evidence available to us.
Some advice for Time
Travellers
The Time
Traveller’s Matrix is a historical observation tool. When you travel back in
time, avoid the predestination
paradox, but enjoy reading and observing our story. Absorb the stories, and
let your imagination stretch out the family tales, to provide perspective to the
regional and national story. Use these building blocks to understand your own
story alongside the wider local and national story. Notice the historical
repetition, that reverberates into the contemporary age.