Blog – Page 3 – West Haddon History

John Warde: an unspeakable grief

On the day of the fire, John Warde and his wife Elizabeth had buried their daughter Clement. And the following day they buried their son James.

It’s just possible that the children were casualties of the fire, but it seems unlikely that funerals would have been arranged quite so quickly in the aftermath of the disaster.

How old were Clement and James? The earliest entries in the baptisms register date from 1653 and their names don’t appear there, so they must at least have been older than four. Was it accident or illness that killed them? Why were they not buried on the same day? So many questions and no answers. But the loss of both children and their house and belongings all within a few days must have left John and Elizabeth reeling.

We know very little about the couple except that John was a small farmer. Records of various property transactions in the years running up to the fire show him selling a number of parcels of land in West Haddon. Around 1631 he had joined with his father Thomas in the sale of about 10 acres to Robert Miller for £23. Then in the 1640s he sold about 15 acres to Edward Clarke – but we don’t know how much money changed hands there – the purchase was simply mentioned in Edward’s will in 1649.

In 1650 John sold a house with a little yard and one bay of his barn to his neighbour Mark Bonner, for £17. And the following year he sold a close of pasture with Sandy Lane to the East and Nathaniel Brabson’s close to the south. (Subsequent deeds in the bundle suggest that the pasture was behind the houses on the corner of Northampton Road – aka Sandy Lane – and High St.) He sold it, presumably for grazing, to Samuel Newman the butcher, for £24. The following year Samuel Newman sold the same close to Thomas Kirtland, for £28. There must be another story there…

There is no evidence to suggest that John and Elizabeth were still living in the village in the years following the fire. Did they move away to make a fresh start and try, at least, to put the terrible memories of 1657 behind them?

Samuel Newman: butcher and brawler?

The year before the fire Samuel and his wife Mary had a son, Sam junior. The register of baptisms recorded the proud father as a butcher.

A 17th-century butcher wasn’t only a man selling sausages from a shop. He was a man with a good eye for livestock and access to good grazing. He would have bought young stock, often reared many miles away, turned them out onto rich Northamptonshire grass, then seen them through fattening, slaughter and butchering to the eventual sale of the meat. As village tradesmen went, butchers tended to be at the prosperous end of the spectrum.

Since most of his wealth was probably out at pasture during the fire he may have found it less difficult than some of his neighbours to get back on his feet and rebuild in the years following the fire.

Twenty years later a Hearth Tax return for West Haddon shows that Samuel Newman paid tax on three hearths – that’s a larger than average house.

But the court records that give us the report of the fire also throw up questions about his conduct in the following winter –

On 11 November 1657 Samuel Newman, with Henry Cosby and Richard Wills, all of West Haddon, were bound over to keep the peace…chiefly towards Thomas Cawcutt of Church Brampton…

Then on New Year’s Day, 1658, just a couple of months later, the boot was on the other foot. Samuel Newman was set upon at Harlestone by three other butchers: Henry Cosby and Thomas Kirtland of West Haddon and Edward Smith of Long Buckby …so that his life was despaired…

What was all that about? We shall never know. But his life, though despaired of, continued into the early years of the next century and he saw his little boy grow up and present him with nine grandchildren, including another Samuel.

Elias Page: Living by his loom

The families who lost everything in the fire have left very little trace behind them. But using a few surviving scraps of evidence we can put together a fleeting, patchy impression of their lives, leaving our imaginations to speculate over the gaps…

Elias Page was a handloom weaver. His father was a small farmer, but Elias wasn’t the first member of his family who had gone into weaving – his grandfather had also earned a living at the loom.

When his father had died in 1624 his elder brother Tobias had inherited the farm. His sisters, Judith and Frances, had been left dowries of £10 to be paid when they came of age or married. Elias, still an apprentice at the time of his father’s death, was left £5 to set himself up in business at the end of his apprenticeship.

This doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but he could probably have bought a loom for a pound and still had enough to rent a cottage and a workshop and cover other expenses until he could establish himself with a regular income stream. He probably worked as a journeyman for another weaver before setting up on his own.

In May, 1656 he married Mary Greene of Northampton. I wonder how the two of them first got together.

They had been married for just over a year at the time of the fire. It must have been devastating to watch the business going up in smoke – there would have been no time to dismantle the loom and get it out of the workshop, even if smaller equipment was saved.

The following year his first child was born – a son called Richard. But family life was not destined to last. For whatever reason, there were no more children and Elias died before his son’s 10th birthday. His widow Mary lived for twenty years after the fire. And a labourer called Richard Page was buried at Crick in the winter of 1703.

The great fire of West Haddon, 1657.

There were no local newspapers to report on a village disaster 360 years ago.

The only reason we know about the fire in West Haddon is because the report of the Court of Quarter Sessions at Northampton Castle in the autumn of 1657 has survived the centuries.

…upon the first day of August last there happened at West Haddon a sudden and lamentable fire which in a short space consumed and burnt down the dwelling houses and outhouses of

Elias Page
Samuel Newman
John Ward
Thomas Bonner
Mark Bonner
Mary Clark, together with much of their household goods whose loss amounted to £320 and upwards…

£320 was a considerable loss, at a time when a cottage could be bought for less than £40! Over the next month we will discover more about the victims and their neighbours and track down clues that may point to the location of the fire, as well as exploring the life of the village soon after the ending of the Civil War.