First World War centenary – useful resources

Posted on January 7, 2014 by admin

2014 will, of course, mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

The ERO’s collections contain a great deal of material relating to the First World War that tell us about life in Essex during the War years, and the experiences of Essex people service abroad. We will be using this blog over the year to highlight particular stories, so watch this space for those.

We are also planning a special event later in the year to mark the centenary – further details will be coming soon.

In the meantime, we thought it would be useful to bring together a range of resources that researchers might find useful for family history, local history, and community projects, both at the ERO and elsewhere.

Essex Record Office resources

You can of course search Seax, our online catalogue, to begin your research. A video tutorial on how to use Seax is available here.

Surviving First World War service and pension records and medal roll indexes are available on Ancestry, which can be accessed for free in the ERO Searchroom or at your local Essex Library

ERO First World War source list

Essex Sound and Video Archive sources on the First World War

Paul Rusiecki’s book The Impact of Catastrophe: The People of Essex and the First World War (1914-1920) is an essential companion for anyone interested in Essex during the War years, and is available to purchase from the ERO Searchroom, by e-mailing ero.enquriry@essex.gov.uk

We are in the process of compiling a session for schools on Essex during WWI – if you would like to book a session please e-mail ero.events@essex.gov.uk

Resources for Essex

Now the Last Poppy has Fallen project

Now the Last Poppy Has Fallen is a project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Essex County Council which will focus on the lives of individuals, families and communities in Essex during the First World War. The ERO is taking part along with 6 Essex museums, and the project will be producing a travelling exhibition as well as working with schools. You can follow the project on:

Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest

Women working at Hoffmann’s ball bearings factory in Chelmsford, 1914 (Frederick Roberts Collection, Anglia Ruskin University, held at ERO)

Essex Regiment Museum

The Essex Regiment Museum in Oaklands Park, Chelmsford, tells the story of the Essex Regiment and the Essex Yeomanry.

East Anglian Film Archive

The East Anglian Film Archive has 200 hours of film footage online, including some fascinating pieces relating to the First World War, such as the following:

Zeppelins over East Anglia (watch from 18:30 for segment on Essex)

Women at work on a farm in Willingale, 1916

A roll of honour of men from Braintree who served in WWI

Presentation of a tank to Chelmsford, 1919

Chelmsford War Memorials

The Chelmsford War Memorials site details biographical information of the men included in Chelmsford’s war memorials, and is a really fabulous resource if you are interested in Chelmsford, or any of the men on the memorials.

Essex Branch of the Western Front Association

The Western Front Association was formed to further interest in the Great War and to perpetuate the memory, courage and comradeship of those who served on all sides. The Essex Branch of the Association has a whole programme of talks which will be running in 2014 which can be found here.

Resources for the United Kingdom

Imperial War Museum online resources

www.1914.org is the IWM’s centenary site which highlights events and resources from across the world. If you are running a project or event of your own relating to the centenary you can join the website as a partner and add your event. As a partner you will also have access to a tremendous range of resources that the IWM has compiled to help you with your project. You can also follow the First World War Centenary on Facebook and Twitter.

Lives of the First World War is the IWM’s major WWI online project, bringing together material from museums, libraries, archives and family collections from across the world together in one place. IWM wants your help to explore these documents, link them together and start telling the stories of those who served in uniform and worked on the home front.

Voices of the First World War allows you to hear about the First World War from those who were there, using recordings from the IWM’s sound collection. The podcasts can be listened to on the link above, or downloaded from iTunes, and include everyone from soldiers, sailors and airmen to munitions workers, schoolchildren and ambulance drivers.

Faces of the First World War is a set of photographs of WWI servicemen on IWM’s Flickr pages. These images are some of the first items collected by the IWM; in some cases, bereaved families donated their only family of their lost loved one. Some have only a name, rank and unit, so the IWM is asking for help from people to add information to the photographs.

The IWM is also in the process of transforming its First World War galleries to reopen in July 2014 – more here

The National Archives

Advice from TNA on First World War records

Soldiers’ wills

Search for soldiers’ wills on a database on gov.uk

Read more about the digitisation project here

Wales in WWI

Find out about the Welsh experience of the First World War on www.cymru1914.org; this project has conducted mass digitisation of primary sources relating to the First World War from the Libraries, Special Collections and Archives of Wales

Great War Nurses blog

The Great War Nurses blog contains lots of information about women who served as military nurses from the Boer War through to the end of the First World War

The same author also writes about military hospitals and the Army Nursing Service.

Further afield

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website includes a database which lists the names and place of commemoration of the 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died during the two world wars.

Centenary News provides independent, impartial and international coverage of the First World War Centenary and Centennial 2014-2018.

Europeana is running a Europe-wide project to collect pictures, letters, postcards, souvenirs of other items relating to WWI. You can add your own stories, perhaps from family papers or photographs, or explore stories contributed by others.

Putting Art on the Map – a joint project between the Imperial War Museum and HistoryPin focusing on First World War artworks (PS, HistoryPin is a wonderful resource for sharing and exploring historic images – you can upload pictures and virtually ‘pin’ them to a map, and explore what others have pinned)

This list is by no means exhaustive, so if you have any other suggestions that you think researchers – especially those interested in Essex – would find useful, please let us know leaving a comment or e-mailing us.

If you do undertake research into the First World War using ERO’s collections we would love to hear from you.

Conservation: cleaning a 629 year old seal

Posted on December 16, 2013 by admin

To accompany The Fighting Essex Soldier: Recruitment, War and Remembrance in the Fourteenth Century conference on 8 March 2014, Dr Jennifer Ward is preparing a display of documents for our Searchroom. We are in the process of preparing the documents for display, which has included cleaning a beautiful wax seal from 1384 which has survived remarkably intact.

This seal belongs to an indenture between Thomas Holland and Richard II concerning the governorship of Cherbourg, made in 1384 (D/DRg 1/62). Thomas Holland (1350-1397) was earl of Kent and Richard’s older half-brother, and the seal is his badge.

Thomas was the son of another Thomas Holland and Joan, ‘The Fair Maid of Kent’. After her first husband’s death in 1360, Joan married Edward, Prince of Wales, known as the Black Prince, son of King Edward III.

Richard was the second son of this marriage, born in 1367, although when the elder boy, Edward, died Richard was thrown into the direct line of succession to the English throne. His father died in 1376, and his grandfather Edward III died in 1377, making Richard king at the age of just 10 years old. Richard was ultimately deposed in 1399 by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV. Richard was imprisoned and it is believed he starved to death in captivity.

His elder half-brother Thomas Holland was one of Richard’s councillors, and acquired great influence over the young king. Thomas had spent his early career from 1366 in military service abroad, in Spain and France, under the Black Prince. He received gifts of money and valuable jobs from Richard once he was king. In his later career, his military experience was used to help suppress the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and then as governor of English-held Cherbourg from 1384.

This indenture (more on which in this post) assigned Thomas £4,000 a year as governor of the castle and town of Cherbourg in consideration of his providing sufficient garrison and artillery.

Our Seax description for the seal takes a little unpicking: ‘Seal of the earl: a hind couchant regardant, wearing as a collar a crown from which is suspended by a chain a shield of the arms of England.’

The hind, or deer, is described as ‘couchant’, which means an animal which is lying down but with its head raised, and ‘regardant’, which means an animal with its head turned backwards to look over its shoulder.

The seal has been cleaned using a detergent applied with a small brush, which is then cleaned away with cotton wool dipped in water. The aim of this was to remove the worst of the surface dirt; the dirt from the front of the seal came away easily, although the dirt on the back was more ingrained.

A special box is now being made to protect the seal, and it will be on display in the Searchroom from January to accompany the run up to The Fighting Essex Soldier: War Recruitment and Remembrance in the Fourteenth Century on Saturday 8 March 2014. More details here.

PS Essex Library card holders can access biographies of all of the people mentioned in this post on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The Fighting Essex Soldier: the background

Posted on December 12, 2013 by admin

Ahead of The Fighting Essex Soldier: War Recruitment and Remembrance in the Fourteenth Century on 8 March 2014, we asked one of our speakers, Dr Jennifer Ward, to fill us in on some of the background of what Essex society looked like in the 1300s.

With the conference on The Fighting Essex Soldier: War Recruitment and Remembrance in the Fourteenth Century being held at the ERO on 8 March next year, we shall all learn a lot about warfare and the ways in which most Essex people were involved in the wars. 2014 marks a significant anniversary in the history of Scottish warfare, since it marks the defeat of the English at the battle of Bannockburn.

Much of the history of the fourteenth-century wars with Scotland and France can be reconstructed from documents and books in the ERO. Society was hierarchical, and leadership was undertaken by kings and nobles. The great Essex lords – the de Bohuns of Pleshey and Saffron Walden, the FitzWalters of Little Dunmow, and the Bourchiers of Stansted Hall in Halstead – were all involved. John Bourchier was unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner by the French in 1370, leaving his wife to raise his ransom and to take charge of his estates. William de Bohun, earl of Northampton, was one of the commanders at the battle of Crecy in 1346.

All lords had their retainers who wore their livery and received fees. In 1315, Sir John de Northtoft became the retainer of Sir Thomas de Vere (D/DCw T46/2). He was to receive two robes a year at Christmas and Pentecost, a saddle to match those of Thomas’s other knights, and a yearly fee of £4. The arrangement was to last ten years. Retainers were used for peacetime and/or wartime duties.

Click for a larger version

For the Hundred Years War, the Crown raised cavalry by drawing up indentures with military leaders, specifying how many men they were to bring, their pay, and the terms of their military service. An indenture of 1384 between Richard II and his half-brother, Sir Thomas Holland, earl of Kent, (D/DRg 1/62) laid down the details of Thomas’s governorship of Cherbourg. He was to have as large a fighting force as he thought necessary, was to have all ransoms and profits of war, and he was to be paid £4,000 a year by the king. A later indenture of 1417 between Henry V and Sir Roger Fiennes (D/DL F15) provided for Roger to serve the king for a year with ten men-at-arms. Again, pay and conditions of service were laid down.

Click for a larger version

Seal of Thomas Holland, earl of Kent and Richard II’s half-brother

Reverse of seal of Richard II, complete with medieval fingerprints

Reverse of seal, complete with medieval fingerprints

Click for a larger version

Infantry, including archers, were recruited by commissioners of array in each county. Many Welsh contingents of archers served in the wars. Merchant ships were used for transport, and were confined to the ports if a campaign was being planned.

During the fourteenth century, the gentry of the county became increasingly prominent in local administration and justice, as well as serving in the wars themselves. Sometimes they fought as young men, and took on administrative tasks as they grew older. They served as commissioners of array, as keepers of the peace, and from the mid-fourteenth century as justices of labourers and justices of the peace. It was essential for the king’s peace to be kept in the county while the king was campaigning abroad.

Moreover, much money was needed for the prosecution of the war. England, unlike many other European countries, had a national system of taxation, with each levy of taxes having to be agreed to by parliament. Parliament, comprising the king, the nobility, and the commons made up of two knights from each county and two burgesses from each town, grew rapidly in importance from the reign of Edward I onwards. The taxes were originally levied on people’s movable goods, but from 1334 each village or town had to pay a fixed sum. The assessment for Boxted survives (D/DRg 1/35), and here the 1334 tax was levied on landholdings, both small and large.

Click for a larger version

Most Essex people were affected in some way with the wars, and the 1340s and 1350s brought great victories at Crecy and Poitiers. However, in 1348-9, the Black Death reduced the English population by at least 0ne-third, and the court rolls for Essex show that many villages and towns suffered severely, such as Blackmore and Margaretting (D/DK M108, D/DP M717). There are signs in the court rolls of increasing peasant restiveness after the Black Death. This culminated in the Great Revolt of 1381, sparked off by refusal to pay the third poll tax. Men of Essex were no longer willing to pay taxes and put up with serfdom in an era of population decline and military defeat.

Find out more at The Fighting Essex Soldier: War Recruitment and Remembrance in the Fourteenth Century on Saturday 8 March 2014. More details here. Dr Ward has curated a display of documents to accompany the conference which will be in the Searchroom from January-March.

Your Favourite ERO Documents: Map of Chignall by John Walker, 1599

Posted on November 25, 2013 by admin

As part of our 75th anniversary celebrations this year, we asked you, our users, to nominate your favourite ERO documents. Today’s nomination comes from Rosemary Hall, and is a map made by John Walker of Chignall in 1599, or to give it its full title, ‘A true platt of Beamond Oates measured and taken the laste of Nouember 1599 for the right worshipful Sir John Petre knight by John Walker’.

The map covers an area of 241 acres about a mile and a half north of Writtle in the modern parish of Chignall. It shows a farm which was part of the estates of the Petre family of Ingatestone Hall, called variously Beamond Oates, Otes, Moates, Motts and Mottes. The map shows the site of a former farm house, labelled as Beamond Moates, and the current house and surrounding barns (see extract below). It measures 17 x 22 inches, and is at a scale of about 26.6 inches to 1 mile. The map seems to have been a draft – it has Walker’s characteristic accuracy, but lacks the finish of some of his other maps, which perhaps suggests that Sir John Petre was happy with the draft as a practical record of the farm.

We’ve written a little already about John Walker and his map of Chelmsford (here); Walker was an incredibly skilled map maker, and his son, also John, took up the profession. A.C. Edwards and K.C. Newton in The Walkers of Hanningfield (well worth a read – available in the ERO library), suggest that this map is the first work we have of John Walker junior – the use of a yellow to represent thatch on the farmhouse is seen in his later maps, and is distinct from the brown his father usually used, and the handwriting of both father and son appears on the map.

Walker map of Chignall, 1599, D/DP P6

The farm house and barns

Rosemary Hall writes:

[My favourite ERO document] is a Map of Chignal D/DP P6, “A true platt of Beaumond Otes…[drawn] for Sir John Petre.” I grew up in Chignal Road, and walked over that area, and well remember my fascination and delight upon discovering that many of the woods that I knew dated back 400 years! It was one of the things that triggered my interest in local history; along with the encouragement of the Essex Record Office. Alas! I am an exile from Essex now, but I am continuing to research the history of my adopted city of Coventry.

Thank you to Rosemary for turning the spotlight onto this wonderful piece from our collections. If you would like to nominate your own favourite ERO document, we would love to hear from you. Simply download this form, and return it to the Searchroom desk or by e-mail to hannahjane.salisbury[at]essex.gov.uk. There are also paper copies available at the Searchroom desk.

Diary of John Farmer of Saffron Walden, Quaker, of his travels in America 1711-1714

Posted on November 1, 2013 by admin

Regular Searchroom visitors might have noticed that each month we display a different Document of the Month. November’s selected document is a diary made by John Farmer of Saffron Walden, describing his travels in America between 1711 and 1714 (Acc A13685). Here, Archivist Allyson Lewis tells us about this fascinating document…

The members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers or Friends) were early settlers in America, escaping religious and social persecution in England. In America they were similarly persecuted by the Puritans in New England and settled further South in what is now New Jersey. William Penn, a Quaker who was educated at Chigwell School, was granted a huge tract of land which he called Pennsylvania and which became a model for religious tolerance and a refuge for many European sects including Mennonites and the Amish who continue to practice their separate way of life there today.

Amongst the Quakers there is a tradition of asking for permission to travel to witness their faith amongst other people. John Farmer, a Quaker living in Saffron Walden in the early 18^th century, asked for permission to travel further than most – to America.

On his return he wrote a journal about his travels, recording meetings with other Quakers. He boarded the Thomas of London bound for Maryland, arriving in January 1712. He went on to North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the Jerseys, New York, Rhode Island, and Nantucket Island meeting Friends in local meetings and attending the Dover, New Hampshire Quarterly meeting. He records that many Quakers being pacifists refused to make use of weapons and garrison houses to protect themselves from raiding Indians during the ongoing war and were left unharmed.

While in North Carolina he heard of a Friend who was in dispute with his local meeting in Pennsylvania so moved himself and his family to North Carolina. However he refused to join the local meeting of Friends but settled about 20 miles away amongst “very wicked people” for the sake of “very cheep and good land which they and he forceably took from Indians: whereas he might have bought his land of Indians for an iron pottage pot but would not. These Indians having been much wronged by English French and Pallitins [Palatines, German refugees transported to the colonies by the British government in 1710] did at last com suddenly upon ym and killed and took prisoners as I was told 170 of them and plundered and burnt their houses. Amongst the rest the said Friend was killed as he lay sick in his bed and his wife and 2 young children were carried away captive and indured much hardships. But upon a peace made with ye Indians they were delivered and returned to Pennsylvania.”

The Quakers’ message of equality before God and respect for all was well received by the Indians. Their fair dealing in trade and refusal to carry weapons were also factors in their good relations with the Native Americans. John Farmer had meetings with many Native Americans in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. He met with a group of natives in Maryland and speaking with the help of an interpreter told them about his beliefs in God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, “to which ye Indians severall times gave their approbation in their way by a sound.” They followed him to a Friends’ meeting at George Truit’s house in Mulberry Grove near the ‘Poakamoak’ [Pocomoke] River on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay.

Another meeting was held in “the Indian king’s palace” near the Susquehanna River about 60 miles west of Philadelphia, where he slept on bear skins on platforms in front of a fire as it was a cold and frosty night.

John Farmer calculated that he had travelled 5,607 miles around North America before he continued his mission in the West Indies where he visited Quakers who had been banished to the Caribbean from New England. He returned to Saffron Walden in 1714.

The diary will be on display in the Document of the Month case in the Searchroom thoughout November, and will be available for searchers to order in due course.

Explore Your Archive: ‘A world without records is a world without memory’

Posted on October 31, 2013 by admin

Saturday 16 November will see the launch of the new Explore Your Archive campaign, which aims to raise public awareness of the essential role of archives in society, celebrate our network of collections, and underline the skill and professionalism of the sector.

Developed by the Archives and Records Association and The National Archives, the campaign is designed for all types of archives, whether they be local, university, business, specialist, private or national archives.

The campaign will showcase the unique collections held in archives and how people can use and enjoy those collections.

You can find out more about the campaign and what’s going on across the country on the Explore Your Archive website, which includes a wonderful interactive map of archives across the nation – it makes you realise just how many of them there are! You can also find the campaign on Facebook and join in on Twitter using the hashtag #explorearchives, and the good people at Explore Your Archives have made a series of short films about the value of archives, which you can watch below.

To mark the beginning of the campaign we will be heading to Chelmsford Library on Saturday 16 November to raise local awareness about the treasure trove of material held at ERO, and how people can access it. We’ll be there from 10am until 3pm, so do come and say hello!

Favourite ERO documents: interview with Mrs Champion about the Canvey Island Floods of 1953

Posted on October 27, 2013 by admin

Today is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, organised by the International Association of Sound and Video Archives, and this year’s theme is “Saving Our Heritage for the Next Generation”. We thought that this was a good opportunity to dip into the Essex Sound and Video Archive as part of our favourite documents series.

As well as asking our users about their favourite documents from our collections, we have also been asking ourselves. Here, Sound Archivist Martin Astell tells us about one of his favourite recordings in the Essex Sound and Video Archive, an interview with Mrs Champion about the Canvey Island Floods of 1953 (SA 6/306/1).

Choosing a favourite item from the Essex Sound and Video Archive is difficult for me as I have heard and watched so many wonderful recordings of all kinds relating to Essex people and places. The archive holds numerous recordings which can be enjoyed for their entertainment value – beautiful music, amusing anecdotes, interesting documentaries, dramatic productions, and so on.

However, I have chosen one of our oral history interviews which, rather than being entertaining, is sobering, shocking and moving. It is an interview with Mrs Peggy Champion, recorded in 1978, in which she remembers her experiences during the floods which engulfed Canvey Island and other parts of Essex on the night of 31 January 1953.

In this interview – which lasts only 7 minutes – Mrs Champion (who, at the time of the floods was Mrs Peggy Morgan) tells the story calmly and without hyperbole of how she woke in the night to find sea water in the bedroom of her home on Canvey Island and how, during the course of that night, she witnessed the deaths of her husband, her mother-in-law, and her five-year-old son.

It has been said that listening to an oral history interview is the closest one can come to time travel since it involves real people from the past talking about real events as they were genuinely experienced, and the emotional impact of this one recording can perhaps tell us more about the experience of natural disaster than any number of statistics or written reports.

I believe that hearing this recording was one of the things which spurred Patricia Rennoldson Smith to gather testimony from other survivors of the 1953 floods for her book The 1953 Essex Flood Disaster: The People’s Story, and every time I hear it I am reminded of why it is so important that sound and video recordings are preserved and made available alongside the other records held in the Essex Record Office.

Favourite ERO documents: Grant of Arms to Thomas Barrett-Lennard (formerly Thomas Thomas)

Posted on October 24, 2013 by admin

As well as asking our users about their favourite documents from our collections, we have also been asking ourselves. Here, Archive Assistant Edward Harris tells us about one of his favourite documents, the Grant of Arms to Thomas Barrett Lennard 1st Baronet (D/DL/F170).

This document recites a royal warrant of 13 March 1786 which directs the Garter and Clarenceux, kings of arms, to grant to Thomas Thomas the right to adopt his father’s surname, title and arms as per his father’s will.

Thomas Thomas was an illegitimate son of Thomas Barrett-Lennard, 17^th Baron Dacre, and Elizabeth FitzThomas. He went on to be MP for Essex South and a Deputy Lieutenant of Essex. He was created 1^st Baronet of Belhus in 1801. His eldest son Thomas became an MP for Maldon, but predeceased Thomas Sr who died aged 95 as the most senior member of the baronetage in 1857. He was succeeded in his baronetcy by his grandson Thomas (why give up on a good name?).

This document has always stood out for me as it was one of the first documents I noticed on when I began working at the Record Office, as its distinctively shaped box caught my eye. I am sorry to say that it was only recently that I actually unrolled it and discovered the wonderful illumination inside.

The purpose-made box for D/DL/F170 , with special containers for the two pendant seals.

For me it was always the meaning behind it that appealed to me. This is a document which was the making of this one man. It transformed him from a relatively wealthy gentleman into one of the foremost members of the nobility in Essex, an opportunity that he clearly didn’t squander. Without this document his life would have been somewhat different. The esteem in which he held it is obvious. The box is carefully made and decorated and the document itself is pristine to the point of looking almost brand new.

We have a portrait of Thomas’s painted by John Opie, and it now hangs on one of the walls in the Searchroom, next to a portrait of his first wife. I very much recommend having a look at it on your next visit – he looks every bit like a man who had to prove himself, and this document certainly helped.

Letters Close

Posted on October 15, 2013 by admin

Archive Assistant Edd Harris is back with some more medieval matters for you…

Close relations of the Letters Patent that we have looked at previously are the Letters Close (if you will pardon me the pun?)

Letters Patent are the open public proclamations of the royal court intended for anyone and everyone to read. In contrast, the Letters Close are the court’s private correspondence, intended only for the individual to whom they are addressed.

Like the Letters Patent, Letters Close still include wax seals, but rather than hanging from the letter the wax was used to seal the folded letter closed, in the way we often see in period dramas.

They deal with the more day-to-day activities of the court and as such the original Letters as sent out to the individual are extremely rare and often difficult to identify in collections. As the seal had to be broken in order to read the Letters, the seals are even rarer and at the moment only one known example exists of an unopened Letters Close, dating from the reign of Henry VIII.

Like the Letters Patent, they were recorded on rolls which are now stored at the National Archives in Kew. The first Close Roll begins in the year 1204, although there had been Letters Close before that date. The entries from the Close Rolls are also calendared (transcribed and/or translated from Latin, and indexed) in the Public Record Office (PRO) calendars, which are invaluable for researchers. Our collection of calendars in the Essex Record Office Library runs from 1227 through to 1509 (though the rolls for 1227-1272 are only recorded in the original Latin).

Following an extensive search through the catalogue of documents held at the Essex Record Office (Indiana Jones style hats were optional for those involved in the quest), we eventually identified what may well be the only original Letters Close in the archive, D/DP T1/1487.

This may be the only original Letter Close in the ERO’s collections (D/DP T1/1487). It is shown with its entry in the Close Rolls. You can see the remnants of sealing wax along the top of the Letter.

D/DP T1/1487 contains two mandates (or instructions) from the King with two separate dates, one from the 30^th of May and the other from the 2^nd of June 1358. They are addressed to two different people, the Sheriff of Essex and the Barons of the exchequer. Presumably the barons are effectively being copied into the message to the Sheriff as it impacts them too. The instructions relate to a rather intriguing case.

It appears that a dead man was discovered in a ditch on the Priory of Thoby’s demesne land in Mountnessing. He had apparently been killed by robbers. Eight pounds was discovered on his person, which was delivered to the Prior of Thoby to be held “to the use of” whoever it belonged to (what we would call “holding in trust” today). The rightful owner of the money, however, could not be identified nor could the King claim ownership, so the mandate orders that Prior is discharged from his duty and was presumably allowed to keep the money.

Unusually the mandates use the same text as a previous entry accidentally sent to the Sheriff of Kent earlier that year, so presumably the letter we have is the second attempt to send it to the right Sheriff.

Black History Month

Posted on October 11, 2013 by admin

Archivist Sarah Dickie writes for us about records of Black communities at ERO…

As October is Black History Month, we thought we would look at one or two Black people who are recorded living in Essex in previous centuries. Although the perception is that not many Black and Asian people were present here until relatively recently, this is not the case. The Record Office keeps a running list of references to Black people found in parish registers and other documents and the current total is 156, covering the period from 1580 to 2011. In most cases the only record is that of a baptism, marriage or burial and from these we can only guess the background details. For example, Sarah Drake had her daughter, Jacoba, baptised in Broomfield on 26 July 1725 naming the father as ‘Jacob, the Blackmoor servant to Mr. Hill at the Parsonage.’ [Mr. Hill was not the vicar.] In 1736/7, Rebecca Magarth, a Black maid, belonging to Edward Kelsall of New House, Broomfield was baptised. Did Jacob at the parsonage know Rebecca – we can only surmise, although with the size of the parish at that time, they may well have known of each other’s existence. What about Ann Madre, the daughter of Charles and Margaret Madre, baptised in 1736 in the neighbouring parish of Great Waltham and described in the margin as ‘Black’? She lived only a short distance away but may never have come into contact with Rebecca or Jacob; we will never know.

Baptism of Rebecca Magarth, recorded in the Broomfield parish register in January 1736/7 (D/P 248/1/1)

What is tantalising about these entries is how little we know about the people concerned. Sometimes, as in the case of Maria Sambo, they have left a bit more information behind. Maria first appears in Essex records in January 1732 when she signed as a witness on the marriage bond of Henry Dunnings for his marriage to Mary Seabrook. Her own marriage took place in Earls Colne in November 1737 when she married Warren Hull, a glover. She was 25 then but no record of her baptism has been found in Essex. However, there is a record of the christening of a Maria Sambo, the daughter of Thomas and Mary Sambo, at St. John Zachary in London on 14 November 1712. Maria and Warren Hull had four daughters, although as two were given the same Christian name it appears only three survived. Maria’s death is recorded in the Earl’s Colne burial register for 1766 ‘Maria a Negro the wife of Warren Hull was buried May 4 1766’. Her three daughters all died, unmarried, within a year of her so we cannot trace the family further.

Marriage of Maria Sambo to Warren Hull in Earls Colne, 1737 (D/P 209/1/4)

Burial of Maria Hull nee Sambo in Earls Colne, 1766 (D/P 209/1/5)

However, although there is certainly further information to be found in the records, it is only with the help of staff and searchers passing on details they have found using parish registers and other documents that we are able to compile a list of references for further research.

Black and Asian communities in Essex today are under-represented in our collections and we welcome deposits of records from new (as well as old) communities in Essex so if you have any records that you would like us to have, either on loan or as a gift, please contact ero.enquiry@essex.gov.uk It is important that archives record everyone’s history so that we can leave an accurate picture of Essex today for future generations.