Appleby History > Alan Roberts > Early Modern Villagers > The Yeomanry
Appleby Families: Villagers in Early Modern Times
Part 3: The Yeomanry
'Gentlemen in Ore?'
by Alan Roberts
By 1700 about one in ten of the Appleby families were styled yeomen while there were perhaps three or four times as many husbandmen. The exact proportion of yeomen and husbandman at any particular time is unclear since there was an imprecise line between the two groups Thomas Littleton's (c.1480) definition of a yeoman as a forty-shilling freeholder was obsolete by 1550 owing to inflation and the range of differences in local usage. The yeoman's position in the social order varied in different parts of the country. While seventeenth-century Kentish wills and inventories suggest that the Kentish yeomanry were a close-knit wealthy group well connected to the gentry, the yeomen of the midlands were poorer, less socially stratified and more closely aligned with the farming population. The title of yeoman was age-specific - it was rarely attached to a man in his early twenties. The most familiar observations about the yeomanry in the early 1600s are their growing affluence, their dynastic longevity and their upward mobility. Next to the gentry they are given most coverage in the records as those most frequently called upon to act as churchwardens, constables, and tithingmen within the parish, as jurors in the manorial courts or as witnesses and appraisers to wills and inventories. Platitudes like Fuller's definition of a yeoman as 'a gentleman in Ore whom the next age may see refined' show that the term was used as a mark of personal status and worth rather than merely of wealth.
Only a handful of Appleby’s Elizabethan yeomen families can be identified from the records. Four yeoman families, Mould, Walker, Spencer and Wilson, formed the core of the village social order. Five of the six families listed as free tenants of Little Appleby manor in 1594, and three freeholders in Great Appleby, including the Hartills who leased the demesne can also be counted among the yeomanry. This gives a total of twelve families. Of the twelve yeoman families known to have been living in the parish in 1700 at least eight had patronymic links to the Elizabethan parish and two of the gentry families after 1700 (Brown and Stanton) descended from the Tudor yeomen. Overall the yeomanry display remarkable family continuity over the course of the century.
The Elizabethan yeomen can be roughly divided into two groups: wealthy freeholders and 'lesser' yeomen who leased their holdings. While the freeholders retained their status within the parish, some of the lesser yeomen had slipped back into the ranks of the husbandmen by the 1590s. The sources do not always agree as to a householder's exact status - generally the register seems to be more generous in awarding the title than other records - but there is no mistaking their growing affluence.
A closer scrutiny of yeomen's wills and inventories gives some indication of their wealth. Since yeomen derived most of their income from farming, landholdings were of critical importance. Those who farmed the demesnes as tenants or feoffees were offered lucrative means of improvement. The Hartills, as feoffees of Bosworth School acquired the perquisites of Great Appleby manor, including fishing rights in the stream, control of the water mill and occupance of the Moat House. Although Thomas Hartill's eldest daughter Sara married one of the Moores, the mere exercise of manorial rights did not change his status within the parish. When Thomas drew up his will in 1658, he described himself as a yeoman, as he had always done. After this date the family surname disappears from the register which suggests that Thomas’s eldest son had left the parish. The demesne was then leased to the Stantons who eventually began to style themselves gentlemen.
The path to social advancement was strewn with obstacles; only a few obtained sufficient land to set themselves up as gentlemen. However, the profits of agriculture brought increased prosperity to some yeomen and with it a more a ostentatious style of living. Evidence of this growing affluence can be found in the proliferation of rooms and storage facilities in yeomen's houses, in the appearance of luxury goods and in the increasing amounts invested in stocks and bonds. A survey of the relative size of yeomen and husbandmen's houses derived from the lists of rooms in their inventories shows a noticeable increase in the size of yeomens houses, especially after 1660 .
Houses were the most visible symbol of the yeoman's place in the village social order. Only a few families can be matched to individual houses still standing in the village but it seems that Appleby's wealthier inhabitants favoured the better drained sites along Top Street where the Walkers and Moulds lived. Most of the buildings along Top Street and Church Street are built on medieval rubble plinths and many incorporate sixteenth-century box framing. The half-timbered inn on the corner of Top Street and Mawbys Lane is a typical Elizabethan yeoman's house comprised of a box-frame construction on a rubble plinth foundation. The building as it now stands is one of the few surviving timber-framed buildings in the village which has not been substantially altered or refaced in brick. Its site, adjacent to the Street running alongside the church and the moat house, is clearly shown on the 1785 Bosworth School Map which suggests that it was originally occupied by one of the tenants or freeholders enfeoffed on the demesne.
Walker's Hall a three storey brick building embellished with limestone quoins and mullions is perhaps typical of the seventeenth-century rebuilding. It was probably constructed around 1650 by David Walker, the descendant of a family well established in the parish, when the Walkers shifted from Little Appleby. His father Richard Walker was one of the 'richer sort' cited as an incloser in the 1638 Star Chamber suit brought by the parson and some of his poorer neighbours. David's inventory, drawn up in 1663, describes a spacious house containing eight rooms and outbuildings, including a two-storey cowhouse with servants' quarters aloft. The downstairs hall and parlour, furnished with joined furniture and wall hangings, were both chambered over. There was also a chamber over the kitchen used for storing grain. Two other chambers over the hall and stair head were furnished with bedding, while the 'cockloft', in the roof, contained a 'parcel of cheese'. The increasing profits from dairying and other subsidiary activities encouraged yeomen to rebuild their farmhouses adding additional rooms for storage and food processing.
Servants will be dealt with separately but it might be useful to examine some aspects of servant accomodation because the hiring of servants was a mark of social prominence. Only one in ten yeomen identify servants in their wills, usually in service bequests, but the proportion of yeomen who kept servants was undoubtedly higher than this. Of the thirty-one Appleby inventories drawn up between 1550-1700 at least a third contain evidence of servants living in. Almost all of these are from post 1650. In the 1650s for example, two small chambers over the parlour and below the entry in William Houlden's house were probably his maid-servants' quarters. In 1672 John Mould had 'a servant's bed' among his household furniture and in 1682 Hugh Stanton's house contained a 'furnished maid servant's chamber'.
There are several explanations for considerable variations of wealth within the ranks of the yeomanry. The wealthiest among them, men like Hugh Stanton (1682), were worth well in excess of £200 at their death. However a small group of 'impoverished' yeomen recorded assets worth less than a tenth of this amount. Richard Mould, who had goods worth an estimated £20 in 1581, Richard Wathew appraised at £20.19.8 in 1665, and John Heafield, worth £4.3.9 in 1679 are representatives of this group. Heafield, the poorest of all, had only three sheep, a few coins and the clothes on his back when he died. Yet he had reached a ripe age and his son had enough to set himself up as a yeoman and to marry his daughter into the gentry. The most obvious explanation is that John had retired and passed on his farm and most of his goods to his son. The other two may well have done the same. Despite the reduced value of these ‘retired’ yeomen’s inventories it is apparent that the economic gap between husbandmen and yeomen was being maintained, and widened over the period.
Sources and Notes
In North-East Kent some yeomen were worth £1,000 to £1,500: 'sundry yeomen ... for wealth comparable with many of the gentle sort', W. Lambard (c. 1570) in C.W. Chalklin. Seventeenth Century Kent (London, 1965), 194-5, 233.
Farnham, Leics.Med. Village Notes VI, 21; L.R.O. wills. Richard Mould, 1581/63; Charles Walker, 1600/4; PR I/18/33; P.R.O. PROB 11/278166.
L.R.O. DE 40/37/1, 43/108; William Boreyard of the Beadhouse held Appleby freehold but lived in Leicester, Henry Petcher held land in fee at Appleby Parva, his son Joseph married Elizabeth Hartill, 1619: Nichols IV, 440. L.R.O. DE 43/108. P.R.O. PROB 11/278/66; Hartill held lands in Buckleston and Tamworth, also links with Claythorpe, Derbyshire.
For observations on historical sites within the parish I am greatly indebted to Mr Richard Dunmore, Appleby churchwarden, 1981; See also, Report to European Architectural Heritage Year, 1976. L.R.O. DE 1761/1/1-3. One of the sites which can be identified is Mould's 'Ducklake' tenement shown on a sketch map reputedly copied from the now lost Appleby Enclosure Map, in a notebook owned by the Parker family of Appleby who later acquired the holding.
Walkers house is recorded in David Walker's inventory in 1663 (L.R.O. PR 1/61/122); 1664 hearth tax return for Repton Hundred (E179/245/10) reveals that John Walker paid for only one hearth: was this perhaps because the house was still under construction; Cf. Reference to 'Walker's Hall' in George Moore’s inventory, 1718.
For the 'housing revolution' in the midlands see M.W. Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage (London, 1961), 146-56.
John Heafield was 71 when be died. His son Thomas is described as a yeoman, his granddaughter Mary married Thomas Moore in 1680; Another Mary Heafield was married to George Moore, 1 Jan. 1688, by licence: Nichols IV, 443-4.
6 out of 58 Appleby wills refer to servants.
Cf. ref. to servants in inventories PR 1/84/177; PR I/73/131; PR I/64/155
©Alan Roberts
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