Chapter 4   The Chester Family in Mainstone (1805-1881)

Thomas Chester’s youngest son William, baptised in 1774, founded a branch of the family in the parish of Mainstone. The genealogy is detailed in the large separate table. William had married Margaret Francis in Clun on 9 May 1803 and their first child William (II), was baptised in Clun about three months after the marriage. The family was in Mainstone by the time another son Thomas was baptised in 1810. Perhaps Margaret Francis was a Mainstone girl, working in Clun when she met William Chester. That she was heavily pregnant when she married was not uncommon. The general situation[i] is illustrated by the diagram below (Figure 15 on page 35) which ‘makes it vividly clear how frequently marriage did not represent the beginning of intercourse in early modern England. Although more children were born in the tenth month after marriage … there were as many births in the months preceding the peak … as there were in the months immediately succeeding the peak.’[ii] William and Margaret’s situation was typical of one in ten couples, but there can be little doubt that it caused her embarrassment. They were still together in 1841[iii] at ‘Cwmfreath’ as the census enumerator spelled it, an isolated farm in the west of Mainstone parish. The modern map (Figure 16 on page 38) shows the location of the farm, still called ‘Cwmfrydd’. This is beyond Churchtown where the parish church was build, well away from the centre of the village, near the point where Offa’s Dyke crosses the Cwm Frydd.

Patricia Theobald[iv] describes Mainstone in this period from a wide range of sources. It had (and still has) the township of Castlewright in Wales and the townships of Mainstone, Edenhope and Reilth in England. A ‘township’ was the smallest unit of local government[v], and an ancient one. Parishes consisted of a single township in many parts of England, but in districts where the parishes were large - like south-west Shropshire, they were sub-divided into townships. The Welsh connection was strengthened by the existence of the Kerry Ridgeway along the north border of the parish. This was an old drove road used to bring livestock from the Welsh uplands to the market at Bishops Castle and thence to the lowlands for fattening. Mainstone was a thinly populated agricultural parish with sheep farming in the uplands and a little arable in the valley of the River Unk. In 1841, 449 people were spread over 4121 acres. Three-quarters of the land in the parish were owned by landlords who did not live in the parish, with the Earl of Powis owning over a quarter. William Chester would have been a tenant at the farm in 1841.

Tenancies were often quite short and people moved about regularly. The pressures on the lower order of the ‘ag labs’ were discussed above. Mobility of labourers and the small tenant farmers was endemic at this period, and not just in Shropshire. Thomas Hardy, an acute observer of the agricultural scene of this period, albeit in Dorset, wrote the following passage about this phenomenon[vi]. The head of the family has just died and the daughter, Tess has brought disgrace.

‘At length it was the eve of Old Lady‑Day, and the agricultural world was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular date of the year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to be now carried out. The labourers ‑ or 'work‑folk', as they used to call themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from without ‑ who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to the new farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here. When Tess's mother was a child the majority of the field‑folk about Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch. With the younger families it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an advantage. The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became in turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village life did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A depopulation was also going on. The village had formerly contained, side by side with the agricultural labourers, an interesting and better‑informed class, ranking distinctly above the former ‑ the class to which Tess's father and mother had belonged ‑ and including the carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript workers other than farm‑labourers; a set of people who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of their being life‑holders like Tess's father, or copyholders, or, occasionally, small freeholders. But as the long holdings fell in they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer for his hands. Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the depositories of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as 'the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns', being really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.

This tendency to upheaval may explain the rather odd nature of William and Margaret’s family. There were at least five of them judging from the parish registers and the census. The intervals between their births - 1803, 1810, 1821, 1825 and 1826 suggest that there may have been other children born elsewhere than Mainstone. If the family had moved from tenancy to tenancy, they might well have been born in any of the surrounding parishes.

William’s (I) eldest son, William (II) spent his life in Mainstone where he married Sarah Whittall. She came from outside Shropshire, perhaps from Montgomery like some of the other girls that the Mainstone Chesters married. They married in 1824 and had a large family, all christened in Mainstone. William (II) and Sarah certainly did move from tenancy to tenancy in Mainstone. In 1833 their daughter Sarah was born at Two Crosses (Figure 13 on page 33). This was just over the boundary in Clun parish, in the remote Clun Forest region, near the Welsh border and the Kerry Ridgeway. In 1841[vii], when the census was made on 6 June, the family was split up. William (II) was a shepherd, and with two of his sons, William (aged 12) and Robert (aged 10) was at Spoad near Newcastle. His wife Sarah was at home in Edenhope with their eldest daughter Hannah and the four youngest children. Lower Edenhope farm was a large enterprise covering 800-1000 acres in 1851[viii], when it was farmed by Edward Jones. Such a large undertaking would employ a number of specialists like shepherds as well as agricultural labourers, and William (II) was probably one such. Just why William (II) was near Newcastle at the time of the 1841 census is not clear, but he did have a number of relatives there including the ‘clan’ at Fron End (Figure 7 on page 20). His uncle Thomas Chester had died in Newcastle two years before and his aunt Mary was still there. In 1851 the family was still at Edenhope, where William (II) now aged 46 described himself as a ‘farmer of 30 acres’[ix]. The older children were no longer at home except for his eldest daughter Ann who was looking after the youngest three, Margaret (11), Joseph (9) and John (6). Their mother, Sarah was not there, and it is possible that she was either ill, or already dead, because at the next census in 1861 William was a widower. The absence of the remaining children was the usual pattern in agricultural households until the last quarter of the century when compulsory education began to change the age at which children left home. At this period it would be normal for the children to leave home to work as soon as they were big enough to be useful. Typically, the boys would go as agricultural labourers to some neighbouring farm where there was enough work to justify employing outside help, or the farmer had no family at home. The girls would go either to farms as labourers or into domestic service. Typifying this, William’s 18-year-old daughter, Sarah was working as a domestic servant in Bishops Castle[x].

William (II) now a widower had moved by 1861[xi] and was farming 50 acres in Reilth township. His daughter Sarah, still unmarried at age 28 had returned from Bishops Castle. She now had an illegitimate daughter, Hannah, aged four, who together with her brother Joseph, aged 19 and a 15-year-old cowman, George Harris made up the establishment.

The oldest son, William (III) had taken over the ‘family farm’ at Edenhope, known as Drebeshwen – the spellings vary from census to census. He was 32, with a 26-year-old wife from Castlewright, the Welsh township of Mainstone and a year old son called William, what else! The fourth generation William!

Two others of William’s (II) sons, Joseph and John, although not in Mainstone in 1861, returned to the village as farmers. In 1881[xii] when the census was taken, they were both farming in a large way - at least in terms of the area they held, although on some of the high rough pasture in the parish, large acreage simply meant a longer walk to find the sheep. Joseph, married to a Welsh girl from Sarn on the road to Kerry was farming 163 acres, while John, whose wife was also from Montgomeryshire, was farming 270 acres. This later generation of Chesters in Mainstone had taken to Primitive Methodism, as Chesters occur in the baptism registers of the chapel[xiii]. Mary Jones of Edenhope, where William (II) had been shepherd left a bequest for the building of a new Primitive Methodist chapel, so it is perhaps inevitable that the Chesters were drawn into that community. The spread of Primitive Methodism in Shropshire is illustrated in Figure 14.

Barrie Trinder in ‘A History of Shropshire’[xiv] describes the Evangelical Revival as it affected Shropshire. During the two centuries before the conversion of the Chesters, there was a general revival of interest in religion with ‘a proliferation of new denominations, a new awareness of theological issues and an increased level of attendance at services.’ The remote area of south- west Shropshire had probably been largely immune from these influences, content with the traditional worship and routine of the parish church. Primitive Methodism spread from the industrial areas to the north and east of Shropshire, and Bishops Castle was one of the early areas where a circuit was established, of which Mainstone was a part. During reorganisations in the latter part of the nineteenth century the people of Mainstone expressed a wish to remain in the Bishops Castle circuit[xv]

It is intriguing to note that all of the four wives of the Mainstone Chester men that figure in this story came from across the border in Montgomery  (Sarah Whittall, Elizabeth, Hannah and Susannah). None of the men married Shropshire girls. This is perhaps coincidence given the very small sample of marriages, but it does indicate very strongly that this parish looked west for its social relationships. Perhaps the Kerry Ridgeway and the droving traffic from Montgomery was a more important influence on life in Mainstone than the urban delights of Bishops Castle. Or perhaps the girls from that town looked askance at the country bumpkins from the hills in the west. The girls came from Sarn, Castlewright and Kerry - places along or close to the Kerry Ridgeway. This suggests that the young men of Mainstone frequently went to work as drovers when they were young. During the overnight stops along the way there would have been plenty of opportunity to get to know the young women of the Welsh villages. Regular meetings would have turned to friendship and marriage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

Where the Chesters lived in Mainstone