Chapter 3   The Chester Family in Clun (1705–1865)

The start of the story

This part of the story starts in the huge parish of Clun in the south-west corner of Shropshire in 1705. It starts fittingly with a Samuel Chester, since it ends with another Samuel seven generations later in Shrewsbury in the 1930s.

The genealogy of Chesters in Clun and Mainstone is shown in the separate large table.

Samuel Chester and his wife Elizabeth baptised a family of five children[i] - three sons and two daughters in the years between 1705 and 1720. This was long before the days when birth certificates came with Civil Registration in 1837. Records of births, marriages and deaths exist only because the Church of England kept records of baptisms, weddings and burials. In some parishes, records survived from 1538 when Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s Vicar General first ordered them to be kept[ii]. The surviving records for Clun date from 1653. The Reverend Alfred Auden, a curate in Clun between 1898 and 1904,[iii] remarks that -

Unfortunately the Clun Registers only begin in 1653, after the appointment of official Registrars by Parliament. Probably the earlier ones had never been handed over to the Clun official by Thomas Froysell, or if so, were not thought by the Registrar worth preserving. The legend that the previous records were lost in the confusion of the fire during the Civil war is probably baseless. For then the present registers would begin in 1645 or 1646, as is the case of Shrawardine, where the earlier one was so destroyed, but a new one was begun at once.  [A large number of Shropshire Registers do not go back beyond 1653, e.g., Ashford Carbonel, Lilleshall, Loppington, Prees, Stoke St. Milborough and Upton Magna. At Cheswardine, Chetwynd, High Ercall, and Whittington, the earlier book is preserved, but a new one is begun in 1653. At West Felton the one up to that date is preserved, but the one begun then is lost. 1n Shrawardine Register is a note, saying that “ the old Regyster Book was burnt on June 22, 1645," but the present one begins Oct. 10th, 1645, so that very little time was lost in getting a new one, in obedience to the order of the Directory of Aug. 23, 1645.] This absence of a Parish Register during the war doubtless deprives us of many interesting notes which would go far to fill up the numerous gaps in our knowledge of what took place during that time at Clun.

It seems unlikely that the Chesters were in Clun much before 1705. Samuel Chester was probably in his mid twenties when he married, so if that was in 1704, he would have been born and baptised somewhere around 1680. Since neither his nor any other Chester baptisms are to be found in the Clun registers between 1653 and 1705, it is probable that Samuel and Elizabeth came from some other parish. It seems likely that there was another son Richard born in about 1709 between Robert and Elizabeth. There is a gap in the baptisms of Samuel and Elizabeth’s children, between Robert in 1705 and Elizabeth in 1712. The gap is 78 months, while only 35, 20 and 41 months separate the remaining three baptisms. It therefore looks as though there was another child born early in 1709, either baptised in another parish or unrecorded in Clun.

Of these six children, only Richard appears again in the Clun registers.  In about 1731 (based on the date of the baptism of their first child, William in 1732) he married a woman called ‘Sinai’. Her origins and the place of their marriage have not been traced, but if the assumption that Richard was born and grew up in Clun is correct then it was probably not far away - perhaps over the Welsh border in Montgomery. The name ‘Sinai’ is an unusual one, but it persisted in the Chester family, spelt variously as Sinah and Synah through at least two further generations. The fate of Richard’s brothers and sisters does not seem to have been in Clun. None of them married, baptised their children or was buried[iv] in the Parish Church at Clun. This is actually rather puzzling, but there is a possibility that might explain things. It is assumed that the family did not die in Clun as children - they would have been buried there, and the gaps between baptisms are not suggestive of early mortality.  It is possible that Samuel and Elizabeth together with the younger children moved to another parish and their marriages and families are recorded there. Perhaps they moved when the oldest children, including Richard had already left home to work as farm servants for a local farmer. The registers do not suggest that there were any other Chesters in Clun before Samuel and Elizabeth. Nor is there any indication of any other Chesters after Samuel and before Richard and Sinai with the exception of a William Chester who was buried on 13 December 1726. The origins of the Chesters who were already widespread by 1732 are discussed in more detail in Chapter 10.

Whatever the origins of the Chesters in Clun, the descendants of Richard and Sinai stayed in Clun for at least six generations. They baptised a family of ten children there between 1732 and 1750[v]. For the next century there were always Chesters and their kin in Clun parish. At least four or Richard and Sinai’s children married in Clun church. Two of the girls, Elizabeth and Ann married into the Gough family. There were several families of that name in Clun at the time. Elizabeth was only about seventeen when she married Richard Gough on 20 February 1750. That day was a significant one for the Chesters because Elizabeth’s youngest sister was christened Sinai after her mother on the same day. It was unusual for girls to marry as young as seventeen, so a combined wedding and christening of two sisters could not have been common. The next to marry in Clun was their seventh child, Thomas. He was baptised on 24 March 1744 and married Hannah Clee on 30 May 1762 when he was 18 and she was 25. In Western European societies including England, women generally married well after sexual maturity. By contrast in eastern societies, it was normal for women to marry soon after puberty, and for the men to marry much later[vi]. Thus, in eastern societies grooms were often much older than their brides, while in western European societies, there was a tendency for small age gaps between spouses and greater occurrence of marriages in which the woman was older than her husband. The occurrence of spinsters older than bachelors by between 5 and 9 years was 91 per thousand in the period 1600-1729 and 58 per thousand in 1750-1837. So, in 1762, we can say it was about 66 per thousand or about one marriage in 15 - unusual, but not rare.

Richard married Sarah Lewis seven years later, and Ann married another Gough – William in 1774.

The registers pose a further mystery among the generation of Richard and Sinai’s family. A Thomas Chester was baptised on 12 February 1772, the illegitimate son of Mary Chester and Thomas Chester. The mother might have been Richard and Sinai’s daughter Mary, baptised in 1736 who would thus have been 36 years old. Unless the father was her own brother, there must have been another Thomas Chester in the parish. Unfortunately, the parish registers do not reveal any further detail.

Samuel Chester was born in the late seventeenth century, probably about the time that the Glorious Revolution ended the Stuart dynasty and saw William and Mary on the throne. The effects of the Civil War would still be remembered for there had been excitement in Clun. The church had been badly damaged, and the demands of both sides in the war had led to the emergence of the ‘Clubmen’[vii] in south-west Shropshire. This movement consisted of citizens who banded together to resist the depredations of both sides in the war. The earliest bands were in Bishop’s Castle and Clun.

Clun was a very wild, thickly wooded and thinly populated area. There are some similarities between Clun and the parish of Myddle in north-west Shropshire that was the subject of a very detailed study by David Hey[viii]. Both parishes were wooded, pastoral communities close to the Welsh border and largely concerned with cattle rearing for beef. Myddle was about half the size of Clun in 1801 when the first census was taken. The population of south-west Shropshire is discussed in more detail in Chapter 11 and it can be assumed that Clun probably had around 60% of its 1801 population in 1701 being about 800. Hey estimates the population of Myddle as around 600.

Assuming that Clun was similar to Myddle when Samuel and Elizabeth were there in the early eighteenth century, they would have lived in a pastoral economy that had fewer extremes of poverty and wealth than in contemporary arable areas. About half the male population of about 400 were farmers, graded through gentlemen (about 6%), yeomen (about 20%) and husbandmen (about 25%). These people would be the owners and renters of substantial amounts of land - perhaps two hundred or so of them in Clun, farming the 22,000 acres that comprised the parish - an average of about 100 acres each, including the commons. The farmers employed a further third of the population as agricultural labourers. The final large group were the craftsmen - blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, masons, tailors, shoemakers and so on - who comprised about 15% of the population, making somewhere between 50 and 60. At this period, most of the effort in the community went into feeding themselves, with relatively little available to sell in the markets. Indeed, during the years of bad harvests, Shropshire as a whole had to buy in corn from the eastern counties, importing it through Bristol.[ix] It seems likely that the medieval open fields had already been enclosed by this period, so the commons (which were largely wooded) were vital to the survival of the poorer people. They relied on the commons for acorns (pannage) for their pigs, firewood, timber and grazing for their cattle. A typical farm would have had about 15 head of cattle including fully-grown oxen used for ploughing and draft work. These were sold off for meat at the local fairs - probably Ludlow when they were too old to work. Some of the cattle were kept for milk and calves were reared for the beef market. Flocks of sheep were small by modern standards, with usually fewer than 40 on any farm, kept almost entirely for wool to supply the Shropshire woollen industry. Very few draught horses were kept, with perhaps only a mare for travelling. Pigs were widely kept with some farmers keeping a dozen and the labourers often having a pig for their family.  There would have been geese and poultry to complete the catalogue of livestock. There was probably a considerable amount of corn grown on the lower more fertile areas. Barley was grown for malting with either wheat or rye for making bread.

The Chesters were probably part of the labouring group and would have worked for a wage paid partly in cash to pay their rent and partly in produce. This would have been supplemented by a smallholding of a few acres cleared from the woods yielding corn for the family’s immediate needs and keep for a few animals. Their rights of pasture on the common land would have been vital.

The third generation of Chesters in Clun is represented by three families who take the story to the end of the eighteenth century. Richard Chester (II) married Sarah Lewis in 1769 and they had at least four children, all baptised in Clun between 1770 and 1780. Richard’s (II) younger brother Thomas married Hannah Clee in 1762 and their six children were baptised between 1763 and 1774. The two families remained in Clun and the burials of Richard, Sarah, Thomas and Hannah are all recorded in Clun between 1795 and 1817. The third family is that of the illegitimate Thomas, son of Mary Chester and Thomas Chester.

The name ‘Sina’ was given to two daughters of this generation of Chesters. Grandmother ‘Sinah’ died in 1766, and Richard’s (II) daughter was baptised Sina in 1780. His sister Anne who married William Gough also baptised her first daughter ‘Sina’ in 1777. The name Sina also occurred in Myddle, where a Sina Davies was exempted from the hearth tax on the grounds of poverty[x].

The end of the eighteenth Century - Newcastle on Clun

The next generation is the first one where there is more information than the parish registers alone provide. The parish registers themselves are a little more forthcoming and include some information about occupations and ‘abodes’. It is clear that the families of Richard (II) and Thomas (I) Chester lived in and around Newcastle, three and a half miles west along the Clun valley. It is therefore very likely that the preceding two generations also lived there. With very few exceptions, the Chesters baptised in the early part of the nineteenth century were all in Newcastle. Without exception, they were all recorded as labourers.

Richard’s (II) eldest son, Richard (III) married Elizabeth Bytheway in October 1796. Although they married in Clun, Elizabeth came from Onibury, ten miles away on the way to Ludlow. Perhaps she was working in the area. She had clearly known Richard (III) for at least six months before they married because their son Richard (IV) was baptised in the following February.

Thomas Chester (I) had six children, and of the eldest four, little more is known than appears on the genealogical chart. Mary and Thomas (II) remained in Newcastle. Robert moved from Clun, because he figures in the 1851 census[xi] aged 80, having retired from farming (at least that was how he described himself) to Castle Hill in Bishops Castle, where he was living with a servant, Ann Pritchard. The youngest of Thomas’ children William (I) left Newcastle for Mainstone a few miles north towards Bishop’s Castle where his descendants lived for a further three generations. Their story is told in Chapter 4.

Newcastle today gives the impression of being a separate and distinct community from the town of Clun. At 3000 acres, it is as big or bigger than many parishes even in this area of large, sparsely populated communities. It was described in Bagshaw’s 1851 Directory[xii]

The existence of the chapel of ease - a building used for religious worship that was created for the ease of the inhabitants of an outlying part of a parish - indicates the sense of independence that existed in Newcastle. Typically the tithes of the inhabitants of a chapelry went to the rector of the parish and curates served the chapels. Many chapels-­of‑ease obtained rights of baptism, marriage and burial. Most were made into parish churches during the 19th century[xiii] and it seems[xiv] that this was the case with Newcastle in 1849 (It would not be surprising if Bagshaw’s directory was a little out of date). By 1871 Newcastle was described in Cassey’s Directory[xv] as follows

 

 

The next generation of Chesters in Clun is the fifth – the great-great-grandchildren of Samuel Chester who first came to Clun in about 1705. This generation would have long since lost any connection with their ancestry outside Clun, and probably outside Newcastle. There were three Chester families of this generation in Newcastle. Because they lived in the period of detailed censuses and the tithe surveys, there is more information about their lives than about the previous generations.

The Tithe Surveys were made between 1836 and about 1850[xvi] in order to implement the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. This act resulted from discontent and rural violence by farmers who objected to paying one tenth of their production to maintain the Established Church which did not contribute to their business at a time when farming was suffering harsh conditions. In addition, religious dissent was becoming more widespread and those who were not members of the Established Church felt particularly aggrieved. In principle, tithe payments were made in kind, by giving every tenth beast or every tenth bushel of corn to the parish priest for his own maintenance and charitable uses. Over the centuries many parishes had substituted money payments for this custom. The 1836 Act consolidated this process by converting all payments in kind to a rent-charge regulated according to the price of corn. Commissioners were appointed by Parliament for each parish to carry out this process which was formalised in a document called a Tithe Agreement listing land holdings in great detail and referring to a large scale map to identify them precisely. The part of the map[xvii] for Clun parish that refers to the township of Newcastle is shown in Figure 7 above. All three of the Chester families in Newcastle feature on the map, Thomas (V), Richard (IV) and William.

Thomas was by this time a widower aged 54. He was apparently the only son of Thomas (IV) and Mary Davies. He married Elizabeth Morris in Clun in 1823 and they had seven children before she died in 1838 possibly as a result of the birth of their last daughter, Elizabeth. Thomas worked as an agricultural labourer all his life and like most of the labourers at this period, he moved from place to place depending on his employment. This phenomenon will be discussed again in Chapter 4 about the Chesters in Mainstone. Thomas and Elizabeth’s first child Thomas (VI) was born in Clun, and the next two in Bicton. After that, the family settled in Newcastle, which was in a sense their ancestral home. The remaining four children were born there and the last two brought disaster. John was born in early 1836 and died 15 weeks later. Elizabeth was born about eighteen months later and her mother died aged 40 in August 1838. The child survived, for she appears in the 1851 census, aged 13. Although Thomas never claimed to be more than a labourer, the tithe map shows that he had a smallholding in the village illustrated in Figure 7 and Table 1.

 

 

Thomas owned the two meadows so he probably had stock on them - a few cattle perhaps and any sheep he had would have been on the common ground on the hills. No doubt he acquired common rights along with his ownership of land.  It was at this period that the systematic enclosure of considerable areas of upland common in the old Clun Forest began[xviii]. One Parliamentary Enclosure Act passed in 1847 enclosed 8,600 acres in the ‘Honour or Lordship and Forest of Clun’. The map (Figure 10 on page 24) shows Newcastle enclosed by upland except in the Clun valley and the Folly Brook. The photograph (Figure 6 on page 12) shows how little arable there is in the uplands round Newcastle even today.  Compare this with Guilden Down just north east of Clun where there is a great deal of arable (Figure 8 on page 22). It was probably the same in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thomas was probably working as a labourer during the day and tending his stock and cultivating his half-acre of arable ground in any spare time that he had. This would have been a family enterprise involving not just his family but perhaps also his relatives who were also his neighbours. In 1851[xix] there were six living in the household. Thomas’ youngest son Samuel was still at home, aged 17 and also working as an agricultural labourer. Eliza, the eldest daughter was keeping house in place of her mother who had been dead for 13 years. She had her own 5-year-old son with her. There are a number of occasions in this history where illegitimate children were raised in their grandparents’ house. There seems to have been very little tendency to expel the erring child and her offspring. This must have had the effect of lowering the overall fertility because, typically, these women either did not marry or married much later thus limiting their family to a single child.

Also in the house were Elizabeth, the youngest daughter, born when her mother died and a lodger, William Pritchard. He was a 60-year-old mole catcher whose wife was dead and who presumably had no family with whom he could conveniently live.

Their neighbours were[xx] William and Mary Chester with four of their children and William’s aunt Ann. The oldest girl, Mary aged 19 was a seamstress and the younger children were listed as ‘scholars’ in the census. That probably meant that they went to school when there was no work to be done around home. William’s wife Mary was from Whitton in Radnor, a little way south of Knighton.

By 1851 Richard Chester (IV) had left Newcastle but in 1845 when the Tithe award was drawn up, he was living next door to his cousin William (see Figure 7 on page 20) in a house and garden that he owned. At that time all the Chesters who lived in Newcastle were living in a row along the road to the church. They represented about a tenth of the 176 inhabitants of Newcastle so they must have been a powerful little group dominating that corner of the village.

Richard (IV) was the fourth generation to be baptised with that name in Clun. He worked as an agricultural labourer all his life and moved around a great deal. He worked in Kempton, where he married, returning to the Clun area where he had been born. Table 2 and Figure 9 on page 23 show the places where Richard is known to have lived. Considering the size of his family, with seven or eight children, moving days must have been quite a performance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 4 August 1820, when he was 23, Richard (IV) married[xxiii] Sarah Partridge in the Parish Church at Clunbury a few miles east down the valley of the Clun. Sarah was the daughter of Samuel Partridge and Mary Crow and she was 3 years younger than Richard[xxiv]. The Partridges had been blacksmiths in Kempton since 1800. Richard must have been working as an agricultural labourer in Kempton, or Clunbury when he met Sarah, because they spent their early married life at Kempton. Their first child Samuel was born in Kempton and baptised[xxv] in the Parish Church at Clunbury on 11 March 1821 about 7 months after their marriage. In 1841[xxvi], Richard and Sarah were still living in Newcastle but their eldest son Samuel was living away from home, working as a blacksmith with his grandfather Samuel Partridge and his uncle Richard Partridge in Kempton. The four youngest children, Jane, Clara, Richard and Edward were at home.

In 1861 daughters Ann and Clara, both unmarried were living at home and the family had a visitor, Charles Rowland, aged 4 who appeared 10 years later visiting Richard’s eldest son Samuel at Wettleton Hill. Who was he? In 1871[xxvii], Richard was 73 and Sarah was 70. They were still living in Clun with two unmarried daughters, Jane and Mary. Mary’s two-year-old daughter Fanny was there too in much the same way that Thomas Chester’s (V) grandson John was living with that extended family in Newcastle.

 

 

 

 

 

The Later Years – the Chesters who stayed in Clun

 

The family history that forms the thread of this story leaves Clun with Samuel Chester, the eldest son of Richard (IV). In general, the Chesters seemed to have looked west for their wives as many of them came from Wales. That topic will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 looking at the branch of the family that settled in Mainstone. Samuel’s life, however, was bound up with his mother’s family, the Partridges of Kempton. His grandmother, Elizabeth Bytheway was also a ‘foreigner’ from Onibury in the opposite direction to Wales. Perhaps it was her influence that directed one branch of the Chester family away from their roots in Clun. Before following Samuel it is appropriate to record the story of those of his siblings who stayed in Clun.

Richard’s younger brother William was born at Clunton Coppice in 1823.  He left home as a youth, working as an agricultural labourer somewhere in the area. In 1855 he married Harriet Davies, the daughter of John Davies, shoemaker in Clun. He was 32 and she was 19. Their first child, George was born in Clun and baptised in May 1856. They had at least six more children over the next sixteen years. They were in Bucknell in 1858 when their second child was born and back in Clun in 1861[xxviii], although the address (Brick House, Hodindred) has not been traced – perhaps it was ‘Hopebendrid’. Ten years later they were at Rock Hill, Treverward. Figure 11 below shows the area, though it is not possible to identify the precise location. William’s father Richard (IV) had been at Treverward in 1851. The census gave an address of ‘Uper Foest’ for schedule number 2, so this was probably near Rock Hill (schedule 1 in 1861).

Richard’s (IV) second son, Richard (V) was born in Newcastle in 1835, 12 years younger than William and 14 years younger than Samuel. In 1851[xxix], at the age of 16, he was working as a farm labourer at ‘Agley’ in Hopton Castle Parish. This was probably the farm called ‘Great Hagley’, half way between Hopton Castle and Chapel Lawn. He went to Kerry, across the border in Montgomery, where he married a girl called Eliza in about 1863 and their first child was born. They moved to Wentnor, Hopesay and Guilden Down, a large farm a mile or so north of Clun (Figure 8 on page 22).

Richard (V) had a younger brother Edward, born in 1839, the youngest of Richard’s (IV) sons to survive. The youngest boy Thomas died in infancy. In 1861[xxx] Edward was working in Clungunford as a carter for Aron Wooley who farmed 380 acres. Edward married a Clunbury girl called Ann, and like his oldest brother Samuel he moved eastwards. In 1891 he was living in Ne wton (Figure 12 on page 26) in Craven Arms with his wife Ann and their daughter Martha and he was still an agricultural labourer. At this same period his brother Samuel had a coal yard in nearby Craven Arms with his son John who was only ten years younger than his uncle Edward.

 

Notes

Clun in the Nineteenth Century

Before leaving Clun, it is appropriate to picture life in the town and the surrounding country at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. Samuel Bagshaw’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Shropshire for 1851 gives a detailed contemporary account of the area.