"Felsham and Gedding History Group" website

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Local history studies: List of publications

A photomontage showing what Felsham windmill may have looked like before its removal in 1867.  The mill would have rivalled the church tower in height and must have dominated this part of the village. The building to the right of the windmill is the Live and Let Live beer-house on Upper Green, while the house to the left is Windmill Cottage on the Cockfield Road.  

Christopher Bornett has been researching the history of Felsham and Gedding since 2010.  

He has written and published booklets on many aspects of Felsham life in the 19th century including a biography of Thomas Anderson (Rector of Felsham 1822 to 1872), a history of education in Felsham and Gedding, and a description of the lives of local farm labourers and their families.

Many of these studies are now available on-line.  Click HERE.

The list also includes access to all the Census Returns for Felsham from 1841 to 1911 and for Gedding for 1841 and 1851

A Felsham Philanthropist: Mary Montgomerie Anderson 1836 to 1914

A hundred years ago, a woman who closely involved herself in improving the conditions of Felsham’s inhabitants over many decades, died at Kilmarnock in Scotland at the age of seventy-eight.  Her name was Mary Montgomerie Anderson and she was the niece of the Rev Thomas Anderson who lived at the Felsham Rectory from 1822 until his death in 1872.

On her uncle’s death she married his eldest son, John, who was also her first cousin.  They lived first in Bury St Edmunds and then at Yewlands (now called Felsham House).  After her husband’s death in 1894, Mary continued to live in Felsham but eventually retired to live near her birthplace in Ayrshire.

During the first thirty years of her life, Mary and her mother frequently travelled to Felsham from Scotland to stay at the Rectory.  She was quite an accomplished artist and during her twenties she made numerous sketches of local landmarks including Gedding Hall, Felsham Hall and the cottage now called Swallow’s Nest.

While living at Yewlands, Mary closely involved herself in village life and in activities connected with the Church.  Along with the then rector, she made a significant contribution to the restoration of the church that took place during the last three decades of the 19th century providing money for a range of projects including the re-roofing of the nave in copper and the provision of a modern organ in the chancel (1899).

Bury & Norwich Post 17 Dec 1878

  In 1897, she provided land on which a new village school was built (now the Village Hall) and made a contribution to the building costs.  In the summer of 1900, Mary attended the annual school treat in the new schoolroom, where “cheers were given for the Rector, Mrs Anderson and other kind friends, who assisted the children to spend a happy day.” (Bury & Norwich Post, 14 Aug 1900)

After the death of her husband, Mary spent more of her time in Scotland but she still took a close interest in Felsham.  In 1906 she paid for the construction of a small Reading Room situated next to the Rectory and which was used by villagers for many years before it was demolished sometime in the mid-20^th century.

In her will, Mary left £100 to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts which in today's money was the equivalent of around £10,000.  A very generous woman indeed.

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Note 1: Mary Montgomerie Anderson and Sir John Tilley

Mary Montgomerie Anderson was the sister of Susanna Anderson Montgomerie, Sir John Tilley's mother.

In her will, Mary left Yewlands with all its furniture plus a lump sum of £5,000 to her nephew (Sir John Tilley).  On his retirement from the diplomatic service, Sir John came to live in Felsham and renamed Yewlands, "Felsham House".

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    Note 2: St Peter's Church and Mary Montgomerie

After her death, a copy of Raphael's "Charge to St Peter" was placed above the Altar in her memory.

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology

Read about Mary's husband - John Thomas Anderson - and local politics here.

Felsham in 1674 during the reign of Charles II

The Suffolk Hearth tax returns provides us with a list of some of the people who lived in Felsham in 1674.

"National taxation records are of particular value to historians, providing rare snapshots of both the extent and distribution of wealth and population across an entire country. The Hearth Tax of the 1660s and 1670s provides one such detailed picture of the socio-economic and demographic structure of England and Wales. In addition, the information on hearths sheds invaluable light on vernacular architecture and on developments in building during the later seventeenth century."
http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/Research-Centres/Centre-for-Hearth-Tax-Research/

The Hearth Tax was introduced in England and Wales by the government of Charles II in 1662 at a time of serious fiscal emergency. The original Act of Parliament was revised in 1663 and 1664 and collection continued until the tax was finally repealed by William and Mary in 1689.

Under the terms of the grant, each liable householder was to pay one shilling for each hearth within their property for each collection of the tax. The tax was payable by people whose house was worth more than 20s a year and who contributed to local church and poor rates. Large numbers of people were exempt from paying the tax. Those individuals who were not liable to pay for reasons of poverty were required to obtain a certificate of exemption from the parish clergyman, churchwardens and overseers of the poor, countersigned by two Justices of the Peace. As a result, the hearth tax assessments cannot be considered to provide anything approaching a comprehensive census of the population.

Payments were due twice annually, at Michaelmas (29 September) and Lady Day (25 March), starting at Michaelmas 1662. However, the administration of the tax was extremely complex and assessment and collection methods changed radically over time. As a result, the majority of the surviving documents relate to the periods when the tax was administered directly by royal officials, who returned their records to the Exchequer, namely the periods 1662-1666 and 1669-1674.

Outside these periods, the collection of the tax was ‘farmed out’ to private tax collectors, who paid a fixed sum to the government in return for the privilege of collecting the tax. These farmers were not required to send their assessments into the Exchequer, although a few returns from these periods do survive. (Source: M, Durrant, History of Badley).

FELSHAM HEARTH TAX RETURNS 1674

John Fryar	4
John Motham	4
William Deekes	5
John Groom/Widow Spurgeon	3
John Spurgeon	6
William Scare	4
Mr [Thomas ] Brundish [the Rector 1646-1680]	4
Anthony Hayward	3
James Hayward	4
Thomas Warren	4
Mr Nunn [Also owned a house in Gedding with 4 hearths]	5
Robert South	7
Mr Robert Goodrich	5
Dan. Mount/Richard Kemball	3
John Banham	5
John Hayward	6
John Sterne	5
Charles Sterne	5
George Cockseage	4
Widow Worth/ George Partridge	3
William Grimwood/ Thomas Todd	3
Hezekiah Draper	3
Jos Ranson	3
John Ely	4
Total hearths	99
CERTIFIED for.
Robert Groome/Anthony Groome/John Groome	3
Widow Alexander/Edward Hawkins	3
Augustus Heylder/James Mayhew	2
John Hamont sen. & jun.	2
John Grimwood/William Lockwood	2
Towne houses	3
Exemptions	15

With the number of hearths averaging about 4, the people of Felsham were mostly living in farmhouses and cottages.  There is no large house listed.  The Lord of the Manor in 1674 was John Risby Esq. who lived in Thorpe Morieux in a house with 11 hearths.

To help put these village statistics in some sort of perspective it is worth noting that the house with the largest number of hearths in Suffolk was Hengrave Hall with 55, while more locally we have Rushbrook Hall with 33.

Mr Robert Goodrich is, perhaps, the most interesting person among the list of Felsham  tax payers.  Certainly, we know more about him than some of the others.  To begin with he is buried in the centre of the chancel of St Peter's Church and the flagstone that marks his grave bears his impressive coat of arms:

He died in 1731 at the age of 80 years.  Furthermore, a “Robert Goodrich” was a High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1727 and the Felsham gentleman may have been the same person.
(The High Sheriff is the oldest secular office under the Crown and is appointed annually (in March) by the Crown. He was originally the principal law enforcement officer in the county and presided at the Assizes and other important county meetings.)

Sir John Tilley in his “Notes for a history of Felsham” (1951) mentions that in 1718 Mr. Robert Goodrich, Senior, bestowed upon the Church a silver flagon bearing his arms; its "first appearance”, says the register was on Easter Day. It is still in use and, so the Rector tells me, is German work and very valuable."

The earliest mention of the Goodrich family in Felsham was in 1470 in the Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury.  The record includes the will of "Rose Goddrych of Felsham, widow", dated 2nd August 1470.

For more general information about "hearth taxes" see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearth_tax

Felsham in 1911

I have just started work analysing the Felsham Census Returns for 1911. Below is just a taster of the sort of analyses that we can carry out on this census in readiness for work on Felsham 1914-18

Birthplaces

1911 (351 living or staying in Felsham on night of census)

93% of villagers in 1911 were born in Suffolk. 7% were born outside the county.

Of those, 43% were born in Felsham.

61% of villagers were born in Felsham or one of the neighbouring villages of Brettenham, Bradfield St George, Cockfield, Gedding, Rattlesden, and Thorpe Morieux.

The map shows the birthplaces in Suffolk of those not born in Felsham itself:

Hard Cheese!

I was interested to read in the EADT (16 January, ‘Make time for a traditional farmhouse breakfast this weekend’) that next week is Farmhouse Breakfast Week.  We are told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and plays a key role in helping tackle obesity and reducing heart disease and diabetes.

The “traditional breakfast” is often portrayed as the “full English breakfast” – eggs, bacon, mushrooms, etc.  But readers may be interested to know that workers in the Suffolk farmhouses of the mid-nineteenth century were eating something quite different.

During 1894 and 1895, the Suffolk Times and Mercury featured a series of articles entitled  “The autobiography of a Suffolk Farm Labourer: with recollections of incidents and events that have occurred in Suffolk, during the sixty years from 1816 to 1876”.  In his ‘autobiography’, the farm worker recalls his memories of breakfast in the farmhouse kitchen:

“... The meals were taken in the old-fashioned kitchen, which had an open fire-place.  During winter a large block of wood made the room comfortably warm.  Master, mistress, and servants were all in the same room, though not at the same table.  Visitors, who often dropped in sat with the family, but the conversation went on regardless of our presence….

For breakfast we had pork, bread, Suffolk cheese, and a pint of mild beer. 

 

Suffolk cheese has been a subject for much deserved satire.  An unimpeachable authority – Robert Bloomfield – describes a piece of it as

‘Too big to swallow, and too hard to bite.’

 

… I well recollect that the cheese we ate was cut in half by a hand saw; one half was at breakfast time placed on a “footman” with its face to the fire, till it began to “sizzle” and turn brown, then we cut off the cooked slice and ate it with fat pork.”

(NB: A footman is a piece of furniture made of brass or steel, similar in design to footstool, that was commonly used for keeping dishes warm in front of fires.)

Metal footman

Where was Felsham’s Baptist Chapel?

During the19th century, non-conformists had a considerable presence in Felsham. Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, and Congregationalists all had official meeting houses though we know little about the size of their congregations. The exception is to be found among the Baptists. It is recorded in the Religious Census of 1851 that they had a Chapel in Felsham which adjoined a dwelling house, and that on Sunday 30th March (the date when the census was taken), a hundred people attended the evening service.

The Religious Census also records that 248 people attended the evening service in the Parish Church of St Peter’s. The population of Felsham at this time was about 400. If the congregations of the Baptist Chapel and the Parish Church were all drawn from within the village, the figures suggest that over half the population attended the established church and that a quarter of the population were dissenters.

If these figures are accurate it is quite remarkable that the religious practices of such a large proportion of the population in Felsham in the mid-19^th century have received so little attention. The reason must be to do with the relative dearth of information.  The parish records are fairly comprehensive in providing information about the Parish Church but are absolutely silent with reference to non-conformist or dissenting places of worship.

The mention of a Felsham Baptist Chapel in the religious census leaves us with a number of questions:

• Where was this chapel situated in the village?
• What did the building look like?
• Who were the 100 people that attended the evening service?
• When did the chapel fall into disuse?

Some answers are to be provided in the Minute Book of meetings of the Rattlesden Baptist Church. In 1851, both Felsham and Rattlesden shared the same Baptist Minister and it is clear that the Felsham Chapel was a “daughter” chapel to that at Rattlesden. A clue to where the Felsham Chapel was situated is provided in a Minute of a meeting held on 16th July 1850:

‘Mr Gladwell of Felsham having made an offer of a room in his house for occasional preaching on condition of paying him 5/- to have it whitewashed etc. and afterwards an annual collection of about 10/- and to defray the expense of lighting and cleaning. We agreed to accept the offer.”

It is highly probable that this is the same house that was recorded as a Baptist Chapel during the 1851 Religious Census that took place about eight months later.

It is also likely that the Mr Gladwell mentioned was Mr Joseph Gladwell, a master shoemaker, who was living and working in a house on the south side of The Street between the Church and the Rectory. The Minute Book mentions ‘a room’ which would have hardly been large enough to house the 100 people mentioned in the religious census. However, maps show that the house was surrounded by many outbuildings and barns. It is probable that it was one of these buildings which housed the hundred members of the Baptist congregation that attended evening service on that Sunday in 1851.

Joseph Gladwell’s house with its attached ‘Baptist Chapel’ no longer exists. It was demolished sometime between 1851 and 1895 when the 1st edition of the OS map for Felsham shows that the whole area between the Poorhouse [the current PO Stores] and the Rectory gardens had reverted to fields.

In 1897, a new school was built on the site of Joseph Gladwell’s house and is now the Village Hall.

A fully referenced article on the Felsham Baptists, with illustrations and maps, is available online at http://felshamhc.onesuffolk.net/articles/