Roadtrip – Little Bardfield, Essex

I slammed down the family tree and adjusted my pince-nez.  No way!  There is no way that one of our Creeds, rural Somerset farming stock by their nature, could have passed through some magic enriching device in London and come out the other side as Lord of the Manor.  Squire at home at Little Bardfield Hall, Essex?  I don’t think so.

And that has pretty much been my angle ever since.  It is 20 years since I saw that tree.  Anyone who has watched My Secret Family will know families can indeed shed their wings and soar upwards economically, and in certain circumstances this change can be lasting.

Richard Creed, Lord of the Manor of Little Bardfield, was born in London in 1847 and orphaned quite soon after.  In a change to Dickens’s script, family friends at Malvern took him in and got him articled to an architect.  He had a successful career in London but had a genuine love of old buildings, none older than the Elizabethan era’s finest manor house, Little Bardfield Hall.

Creed’s obituary mentions his Somerset origins, and his grandmother visiting the crowded Marylebone rooms in the 1851 census confirms that. Like Marianne Mellieux, whose needlework is apparently in Thaxted, grandma Creed was from Glastonbury.  Her husband’s burial at 37 means he simply must be the Creed baptised at West Pennard 1781, which does indeed make him a cousin.

The Hall’s grounds stretch on and on forever.  The Hundred Parishes Society believe this Bardfield has changed little since a pre-war Happy Days film, if anything it’s become remoter yet with the railway gone from the market town.

Little Bardfield is full of lovely landscapes, pastoral views, leafy lanes, woodland and the Hall itself is apparently a movie setting, described by its 2007 owners as:

… a magnificent 15th Century Manor House nestled in a sixteen acre parkland setting.  The grounds include a Medieaval wild flower meadow, beautiful orchards filled with wildlife, four spring-fed lakes that were man-made by Norman monks, and an adjacent Saxon church.

The Saxon church has significant components from Saxon times, given as 1042 inside the building, including most of the wall.  There’s an area where the sacrament was placed inside the wall during Lent, which I didn’t photograph.

More photos of the church are at Tricia’s Tales: http://belfiebird.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/well-it-didnt-rain-so-off-to-little.html

To see the lanes and flowers, and the fabled oxslip of the 1938 movie clip, browse into the gallery here presented.

Images copyright author, Google Images 2009 and Hundred Parishes Society

 

Revue: Surprises from the Back Story

You think you know your ancestors, but keep reading.  I’d never have figured a-plenty without the newspapers: Thomas Hutchins, silversmith, used a specially constructed tricycle for longer journeys after his stair disaster in childhood around 1840. When he was twenty, he had married Charlotte Bond of Ditcheat. For once the children were interesting and not the usual “hopelessly dull” Bonds (a disgrace to my school). The middle girl married in Ireland 1890, attired in a travelling costume of crimson cloth trimmed with feathers and osprey. She and her groom received costly presents over £100 and left under showers of rice to a honeymoon in south-west Ireland. Again, from the newspapers.  At the next wedding, the best man was Alfred Warren, who two months later married the third sister Lena and took her off to South Africa.

One can imagine Mrs Bowgen winking at farmer Read at the funeral of her husband – the newspapers tells us that he was present, wedding her four years later: “Aunt Bowgie marries her toyboy” wrote a relative in her diary, 1915. . .

The death of Joseph down an old coalhole that had opened during the night is a memorable part of his brother’s Padfield Family Journal. With a sigh we drew a line under Joseph being yet another careless bearer of the Padfield genes. Beyond this story lay another, which I’d not considered being so pre-occupied with the coalhole. Shortly after his death, his wife had given birth to a boy. The boy has had an alarming amount of time to do with just as he pleases from that moment up till the present day, and we have, to our embarrassment, remained in ignorance of him. His descendants sprayed their stamp all over the last 150 years of England’s history, not stopping in Somerset. There was the owner of the Quayside Café who died on the south coast age 28, a Staffordshire connection, a drowned mill and a gentleman farmer farming slap-bang in the middle of East Somerset (my supposed speciality).