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Appleby History > Alan Roberts > Early Modern Villagers > The Gentry

Appleby Families: Villagers in Early Modern Times

Part 1: The Appleby Gentry

The 'Richer Sort'

by Alan Roberts

Although they comprised only a handful of families throughout the period, the gentry occupied a position of prominence in the parish.  One in twenty of the surviving wills and inventories belonged to gentlemen.  Their names frequently crop up as witnesses to wills and land transfers.  They also head the lists of subscribers to the Protestation Oath and hearth tax. The gentry were distinguished from those immediately below them on the social ladder by wealth, hereditary title, office and landholding. As in Myddle and elsewhere their place in the village social order was symbolised by seating arrangements in the parish church. Nichols records that the north and south aisles of Appleby church were traditionally reserved for the use of the two manors: the north side with its 'stone seat and inclosure' for the lords of Great Appleby; the south side for the lords of Little Appleby. 

The gentry seats in the church would have been only occasionally used in Appleby by the late Tudor period, as many of the Appleby gentlemen were absentee landlords.  In 1575 George Brereton, lord of Little Appleby, farmed out the manor to Peter Warburton and Ralph Arden, neither of whom are recorded in the parish register. George's son, William, who held land adjoining the rectory glebe in 1606, was also an absentee landlord, as was William Dedick, whose daughter, Alice, was baptised in the parish in 1588 although neither Dedick nor his daughter are heard of after this date. Perhaps they sold up and left the parish. Great Appleby manor was held for a while by Edward Griffin of Dingley, Northamptonshire who sold it to Wolstan Dixie of Bosworth.  Dixie helped to continue the tradition of absentee ownership when he gave the manor to the trustees of Bosworth School, who promptly leased the manor house and demesne to local yeomen. It was not until the Moores acquired the other lordship in the early 1600s that there was a resident lord of the manor and some continuity.

The Moores thrived and prospered.  This is evident in the wealth displayed in their wills and inventories, in the furnishing of the hall, in the apprenticeships of younger sons to London merchants and in the building of the grammar school in the late 1690s.  The appearance in their wills and inventories of luxury goods such as fine furniture, wainscoting, leaded glass, Turkeywork cushions, and painted wall hangings testifies to their increasing affluence over the course of the seventeenth century.  Admittedly such luxury goods were not the exclusive preserve of the gentry.  By the early 1600s silver tableware, possession of which once served to separate the wealthy from their social inferiors, had permeated to the ranks of the husbandmen though gold belonged exclusively to gentlemen and clergymen of means. Gentlemen are distinguished more by the range of luxury goods listed in their inventories than from any particular item.

The wealth of the Appleby gentry mostly depended on farming, their houses as well as being visible symbols of affluence and power served as agricultural processing workshops. By the late 1600s they were veritable hives of activity for bread-baking, beer-brewing, cheesemaking, bacon-curing and other subsidiary industries.  In 1717 George Moore's outbuildings at Little Appleby Hall housed a cheese press and a stock of cheeses worth £10, boulting troughs, sieves and other utensils for baking bread, mash tubs, churns and malting equipment for brewing ale and a kiln for drying meat.  Twelve quarters of malt, thirteen and a half flitches of bacon and three and a half hogsheads of beer were stored in the cellar. His neighbour, Hugh Stanton, who rose from the yeomanry to gentry status, left 800 cheeses in storage on 9th October 1717 (the second day of the Atherston cheese fair).

With the Restoration in 1660 there was an influx of minor gentry into the parish.  These are not often mentioned in the registers because they were in the main retired elderly or middle-aged householders, rather than young men and women who were likely to marry and produce offspring. They included John Ball, a retired ironmonger from Lichfield, Ralph Swinfield from Ticknall and Euseby Dormer, an ex-Parliamentarian captain of dragoons. Other local gentry, such as Matthew White of Stretton and John Wilde of Longwhatton, established links through possession of Appleby lands acquired as part of their marriage settlements.

Relations between the newcomers and the established families were not always cordial, as is shown by the religious differences between Euseby Dormer and Abraham Mould in the 1680s. Acceptance into the village required the assent of the established families and the lords of Little Appleby took a keen interest in new arrivals. In 1699 Thomas Moore prevented William Smart a prominent Austrey freeholder, from purchasing a house in Appleby on the grounds that he and his family were 'not beloved' where they were.  We are not sure why Moore opposed the move but it is clear that he was able to exert influence in the matter, as Thomas assured his wealthy cousin in London. ‘wee shall take what care wee can to keep both them and others out of our towne as much as in us lyeth', as indeed he appears to have done.

Sources and Notes

'Observations Concerning the Seates in Myddle and the Familyes to which they Belong', Gough's Myddle, ed.  D. Hey (1981), 77.

Nichols IV, 434; A seat in the church went with the transfer of a tenement in Little Appleby in 1688.  See L.R.O. DE 23/119-28.

Nichols IV, 439; Cal.Pat.Rolls (1572-75), 405. L.R.O. DE 43/63-4; Dixies later reappear in the Appleby register eg. Richard Dixie's will, 1627: P.R.O. PROB 11/153/53.

In 1621 use of precious metals 'in guilding and silvering of beds, houses, swords, stools, chairs &c.' listed among the 'Causes of Want of Money in England and Wales': See Seventeenth Century Economic Documents eds.  J. Thirsk, J.P. Cooper (Oxford, 1972), 12; John Ball of Appleby, gent., set aside gold coin and plate to settle his funeral expenses (L.R.O. wills, 1694/101); Elizabeth Mould, rector's widow (1686), had a ring and gold plate worth £10 (PR I/88/109). Thomas Taverner had 'a long pike staff' (L.R.0 wills, 1622); William Proudman had a gun worth 20s (1692): (PR I/97/26).

P.R.O. PROB 11/132/71 (John Perkins, 1618)

Appleby ale was evidently sent as far as London. cf. an undertaking by George Wait, the schoolmaster, 'to send ... a small Firkin of our Appleby Ale' to Sir John Moore (1702): L.R.O. Moore Correspondence, DE 1642/57; Inventory, George Moore, gent., 1718. inventories, Hugh Stanton, 1717.

For new arrivals, L.R.O. wills.  John Ball, 1694/101; Ellen Swinfield. widow, 1681/42; P.R.O. Ralph Swinfield. 1669.  PROB 11/336/69; Nichols IV, 430.

L.R.O. Marriage Settlements. 1D 32/1 (1651); Allegation Book IV, f50. wills, Mathew White, 1729. Archdeaconry Court Proceedings. 1D 41/4/XLI/69-70. Moore Correspondence, DE 1642/40; There is no further trace of William Smart or any bearing this family surname in Appleby after 1700.

©Alan Roberts

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