It is not known what part, if any, the West family took in the Civil Wars. The Lincolnshire men were under the command of Lord Willoughby of Parham, but the disciplined troops of Cromwell and Manchester thought very little of their lax ways, including their custom of having bands of young women as camp followers. The Royalist gentry had rallied round the Earl of Lindsey, but it cannot be said that Lincolnshire men on either side played a decisive role.
John III
It was, however, during these troubled days that John III and his wife Margaret moved from Sibsey to Wrangle with a considerably increased holding of land, but whether the improvement in the family fortunes resulted from the disturbances in the Fens, the sequestration of Royalist property or merely good management has not been examined assuming that the evidence exists. Luke West, John's younger brother, continued to reside at Sibsey as handicraftman, and though he married twice, he left no issue. By his will of 1679 he left his whole estate to his wife, Joan, subject to bequests of sixpence each to his nephew John IV and sister, and a further sixpence to two nieces. His will is important in the family history, for these bequests from his modest fortune help to establish relationships which would otherwise rest on strong presumption only, as there were no entries in the parish registers between 1642 and 1653.
John West III died at the early age of 48, leaving his wife, Margaret not only to manage the farm but to bring up three young children. Dr. Joan Thirsk, in her pamphlet "Fenland farming in the 16th C", gives a survey of the holdings of 74 Wrangle farmers in 1609. Of the 74, 14 farmed one acre or less, and only 16 held over 20 acres. Two were in a very large way, one farming over 100 acres and the other over 200 acres. Of course, all had grazing rights on the commons. Conditions did not change materially during the next fifty years and it is clear that John III was among the wealthier holders. He was Churchwarden of Wrangle from 1669 until his death in 1672. he appears to have had about £100 in cash in his house or at call, for in addition to minor bequests (including five shillings to his brother Luke, the handicraftman of Sibsey) he left £40 to his son John IV and £20 each to his daughters Mary and Margaret. John, now about 16, was to have his money right away, or at any rate, within a year, but the two girls had to wait until they were 20 to receive their portions. Meanwhile, their mother could use the interest for their upkeep and education. In addition to his farm property, John III had recently purchased a cottage and five roods of pasture in Wainfleet. This was left to Margaret during her lifetime and after her decease it was to go to his son John West "and to his heirs for ever".
John IV
Margaret managed the farm for the next 22 years, by which time, her son, John IV had married twice and had four children surviving, two by his first wife, Ann, and two by his second wife Mary Day, including John V, who was two years old at the death of his grandmother. There is no doubt but that John IV occupied himself fully in the work of the farm, but the property remained in his mother's possession until her death. It is clear that the farm had prospered under her management as she was able to make bequests on the same scale as her husband 22 years earlier. It is clear that Margaret had died in the meantime, but her daughter Mary had married Gilbert Lunn of Croft and had six children. Each of these children was to receive five pounds. Each of John IV's children was to receive ten pounds. Other bequests, including twenty shillings to the poor of Wrangle, amounted to about another twenty pounds. It was customary at that time for Wills to have a preamble with an expression of Christian belief, but both John III and Margaret have wills in which this expression is no mere formula. Margaret gives the impression of being a great lady, who had the satisfaction of seeing both her husband and son Churchwardens of Wrangle, for John IV had occupied that position in 1678 and 1679, while he was still in his early twenties.
Photograph of the Wrangle Bedehouse Accounts, showing the end of the accounts for
1677 -
Among those who signed the accounts was John West (c. 1656 -
John IV was twice married, first to Ann, whose family has not yet been determined,
and secondly to Mary Day, of whose family it should be possible to make further study.
Two of the children by the first marriage, including yet another John, died in childhood,
but two daughters lived long enough to marry -
It is quite clear that John IV was a prosperous yeoman, fully maintaining the standards set by his father and mother. He also left a matter of £100 to be distributed to his dependants and relations. He also left to his son John V the cottage at Wainfleet which his father had bought with its five roods of pasture nearly fifty years earlier from Robert Molshon. John IV tells us a bit more about this cottage. It was in Wainfleet St Gary's "abutting upon ye High Way North & East upon ye lands late Sr.Edward Barkhams South and West." With this information it should be no difficult matter to locate this cottage, which John IV also left to his son and his heirs for ever. John was literate and had signed the parish register while churchwarden. He evidently tried to sign his will, but failed, and his attempt is noted "his mark". He was buried three days later.
In the Archives Office at Lincoln are some 68,000 Inventories of the property of
deceased persons, from the 16th to the early 19th centuries, and these have now been
catalogued and indexed. They are likely to prove an invaluable source of information
about the domestic life of the earlier generations of the West family. The inventory
of John IV shows his house to have contained a living room, a parlour, a dairy, a
scullery and three upstairs bedrooms, over the parlour, hall and kitchen respectively.
Furniture was limited to the severely necessary. In the kitchen were three tables,
two forms, nine chairs, a cupboard, a pewter case, a chest of drawers, bacon hooks
and fire irons. The parlour contained one bed, two tables, nine chairs and one chest
of drawers. In the bedroom above the parlour, John had three beds, a linen chest
and three chairs. In the bedroom above the hall he had a bed, a quantity of corn,
some cheese, two wheels, two leather bags "and other things". He also kept his fish
nets there, for we must remember that Wrangle lies within easy distance of the deeps
of East Fen and that fowling and fishing were a normal part of life. In the bedroom
above the kitchen were no beds at all. It was evidently the junk store, containing
a rope, old iron and "other necessaries". The valuers placed a price on its contents
equivalent to the price of a poorer class ewe -
John V
After the wealth of information provided by the Will of John IV and the inventory of his property, it is disappointing to find that there is no similar information for John V, who was born in 1692 and died in 1751. From the Wrangle parish registers we know that he married twice, first to an Elizabeth by whom he had three daughters all of whom died as babies. John soon married again after the death of his first wife, for the first child of his second wife followed just within two years of the birth of the third child of his first wife. This wife, Frances, bore him a second daughter three years later, and then after an interval of seven years, a son who was John VI, the only male representative of his generation. The records describe John V as 'Householder', but a householder of those days (cf. the use of the word in the Authorised Version) was evidently a man of substance.
Photograph of the Wrangle Bedehouse Accounts, showing the complete accounts for the
year 1727 -
Contemporary with John V in wrangle was the prosperous yeoman, grazier and churchwarden, Nathaniel West, who may well have been a kinsman, though the relationship has not been established Nathaniel married four times and had fourteen children, ten of them daughters, and of the sons, two died in childhood, and although one of the sons lived long enough to marry, he was only eleven years old when Nathaniel died in 1735. His fourth wife survived him, and, in fact, married Richard Lancaster five years later. Nathaniel left considerable property but no will, and it fell to the widow Isabel to administer the estate. There is in the Lincoln Archives, a Bond in £500 of Isabel West, widow of Wrangle, John West of the same and John Doe of the City of Lincoln, yeomen, that Isabel, administratrix of the goads of Nathaniel West will well and truly administer them. This bond does not establish a relationship, but it does signify that John was a yeoman of sufficient substance and standing to enter voluntarily into this undertaking. The only other fact known for certain of John V is that he lived and farmed in the Low Grounds, which are on the East Fen side of Wrangle Bank. The parish register records him as 'John West in ye low grounds'.
John VI
With John VI (1733 -
John VII
The present writer is indebted to the Rev. Isaac Elsom who began to write his "jottings" in 1922, for much information relating to John VII. He was born 13th June, 1780 and christened in Wrangle Church on September 24th. For his time he was well educated. He became Parish Surveyor, and when required, measured the land for farmers and labourers in Wrangle and the adjacent parishes. At the age of 33 he became landlord of the White Horse Inn, where he remained until he was 70. He then retired to a cottage in the parish of Leake, where he lived until he was 89. He is buried in the churchyard of Wrangle.
The White Horse, Wrangle, for many years the home of Mr. John West (1780 -
In his later days he was a well-
During his apprenticeship he climbed up the outside of the steeple of the parish church and played "God save the King" on his flute. After serving his apprenticeship, he enlisted for a soldier and served his country in India in a regiment of 'Sappers and Miners'; but the climate not being favourable to his health, he returned home and died November 9, 1837".
So much for John's first family. When Jane died, he was left with four young children, the oldest of whom was only 8. It was clear that he could be expected to marry again. His second wife was Elizabeth Hall, daughter of Joseph and Mary Hall, and it seems likely that she had kept house for John after the death of Jane. The marriage was solemnised at Wrangle on 21st March, 1816; and Joseph, the first of Elizabeth's fourteen children, was born two months later. A year before she died, nearly sixty years afterwards, Elizabeth presented to James, her eleventh child (and grandfather of the present writer) a family Bible, in which she recorded the dates of birth of herself and her husband, and the dates of birth, not only of her own 14 children, but of Jane's 5 also. The Rev. Isaac Elsom says of her, "so well did the second wife discharge the duty of mother to the first wife's children that some of these children did not know that she was not their real mother". Incidentally, it was her gift of this Family Bible which inspired the present study of the family.
The fourteen children of the marriage were Joseph (1816), William (1817), Mary (l8l8), Sarah (1820), Henry (l821), Elizabeth (l823), Eliza (1824), Edward (1826), Joanna (1828), Thomas (1829), James (1831), Charles (1833), David (1834) and Frederick (1837).
Of the nine sons of John VII and Elizabeth, two, Charles and David, died in infancy;
of the remainder, all except Henry, who "lived for years in a cottage adjoining that
of his parents and was never more than a field or two away from them", sought their
fortunes away from the Wrangle home. Joseph became a plumber and gasfitter at Grimsby;
William a florist and fruiterer at Spalding; Edward, after a spell as foreman on
his brother-
It is significant that only Henry and James continued to work on the land and that only one of the girls married a man who did. The long connection between the West family and the East Fen area was coming to an end. John VII was probably the last of the family even to rent land there, though Arthur Edward West (b.1877) continued to work there as a labourer, well into the 20th century. He was a grandson of the Edward West named above.
It is not clear how John earned his living before he took over the White Horse. It
may well be that this was the time when he practised as a 'schoolmaster. Certainly
he was a good schoolmaster to his youngest son, to whom he taught surveying. However
that may be, he held his three acres all the time he was at the White Horse, paying
his £3.5.0 each half year (raised to £4 in 1841) until his last payment was made
in 1850. Incidentally, the rent for this Bede Land was paid at the White Horse, as
the Leake and Wrangle Bede Accounts show on each rent day some slight variant of
the entry for 12th October, 1835, "J. West for ale etc. at Rent Day -
John was certainly both a talented and an active man. Speaking more particularly of his son, Frederick, the Rev. Isaac writes,
"In addition to the usual school course, he was taught land surveying by his father, whom he accompanied on many of his land measuring expeditions .... On Horncastle Fair Day, June 21st, 1849, when he was 12 years old and his father 69, they walked from Wrangle to West Ashby, near Horncastle, a distance of over 20 miles, to visit his father's brother, who kept a toll bar there."
From letters written by this Frederick to his son, Albert in 1917 and 1925, we glean items of information concerning John VII and his times. All farmers held Harvest Suppers for their men, usually at their farms, but at least one of them, a Mr. Render, held his at the White Morse. The local musician, John Sherriff, a reputedly simple creature, was welcome at all the suppers, carrying the large sections of his German flute in his pocket and screwing them together on the spot. In reply to questions, he always admitted that he could not read a note of music, but always played by ear. This reply never failed to amuse, as the whole village knew that John was as deaf as a post. They were good trenchermen in those days, and there are stories of men attending two suppers on the same night and doing ample justice to both. In one letter we learn that when John left the White Horse he went to live in a cottage about, a quarter of a mile from Fold Hill Methodist Chapel in the parish of Old Leake.
The only point concerning John VII which has come by the oral tradition of his father
and grandfather to the present writer relates to his abstemious habits. He solved
the problem of never declining a customer's invitation to drink and not overindulging
by always having a "gin" -
The Rev. Isaac Elsom was a grandson of John VII, but his "Jottings" are soberly written. He does not say that he knew his grandfather personally, but he was 17 when his grandfather died and the internal evidence suggests that he did. Writing of him more than 50 years later, he says of him, (Jottings, p4)
John West was a good man; a consistent member of the Church of England; but broad-
As we have seen, in his retirement, John lived only a quarter of a mile from Fold Hill Methodist Chapel. Certainly Isaac knew very many of his uncles and aunts and has given outlines of their careers which conforms closely to other evidence available. Quite naturally, and possibly quite correctly, he speaks of his mother, Eliza, as "taking all in all, the pick of the family", but he had a high opinion of the family as a whole of whom he speaks in these terms, (Jottings, p.8)
"Speaking of the Wests generally: They have been a credit to their parents, their training and their native village. As far as I know, there has not been a profane or intemperate, or dishonest or lazy person among them. In addition to home influences they have had the advantages of a good elementary Church of England school, under a good master and mistress, by whom the boys were grounded in reading, writing and arithmetic; and the girls, in addition, were taught plain sewing. The Bible was one of their chief lesson books. All had a considerable religious element in them, and most of them were decisively Christian."
This is a high tribute to John and Elizabeth West.
The roads and highways of England have a history of their own and can be mentioned only casually in a family history. The condition of the North Dyke Way has been noticed in connection with the Will of John West of 1557, and the High Way Rate and statutory labour on the roads in connection with William West, the brother of John VII, during the Napoleonic Wars. It is sufficient for our purpose to note that between those times, very little had been done to maintain, still less to improve, the highways of England. Now, however, the demands of trade mere leading to improved transport. As Trevelyan points out in his "English Social History", (p.382):
"Between 1700 and 1750 as many as four hundred Road Acts were passed; between 1751 and 1730, sixteen hundred!"
This legislative activity led to improvements so that by 1840 there were 22,000 miles
of good turnpike roads in England, with nearly 8,000 toll gates and side bars. How
were these toll gates manned? It seems unlikely that townsmen would take kindly to
work of this nature unless it were just on the town boundary, or they themselves
were disabled in some way. It seems more probable that they were manned by the landless
younger sons of farmers or the more educated farm labourers -