Commoners, Comyn, Cob and Coincidences

Thomas and Mary Renyard had nine children that we know about. Of these we can trace and therefore know the fate of seven of them1. The middle of these, and the third son, was Thomas named after his father. The first two sons had been named Dennis after Thomas seniors younger brother, which makes me think the senior Denis had died young2 and William after Thomas seniors father. There were also two older sisters, Mary junior and Sylvia. All four of Thomass elder siblings were christened in Beaulieu parish church, as were his younger brother Henry and three younger sisters Hannah, Fanny and Betty, but frustratingly there is no christening record for Thomas. Since all of the other children were christened it seems strange the Thomass record is missing. Thomas (junior) and his siblings grew up in the burgeoning hamlet of Beaulieu Rails and would have known no other existence. They were all illiterate3; as has already been noted, schooling was either basic or non-existent and in fact it was not until 1791 that the first proper school was built from an endowment by Rev. William Gilpin at Pilley (2 to 3 miles west of Beaulieu Rails). Even then it is unlikely that children from the rough settlement of Beaulieu Rails would have attended. Thomas would instead have been one of those children who at a very young age (as young as seven) were taken to the fields or the shipyard to labour with their father, and equally would have been taught the trade of poaching and smuggling, subsisting as best they could from what the Forest has to offer. In his 1791 treatise Remarks on Forest Scenery, William Gilpin spoke of the Beaulieu Rails squatters (by this time a wellestablished if unruly community) in these terms: The advantages which the borders on forests enjoy, such as rearing cattle and hogs, obtaining fuel at an easy rate, and procuring little patches of land for the trouble of enclosing it, would add much, one should imagine, to the comfort of their lives; but in fact it is otherwise. These advantages procure them not half the enjoyments of common day-labourers. In general, they are an indolent race; poor and wretched in the extreme. Instead of having regular returns of a week's labour to subsist on, too many of them depend on the precarious supply of forest pilfer. Their ostensible business is to commonly cut furze, and carry it to the neighbouring brick kilns; for which purpose they keep a team of two or three forest horses; while their collateral support is deer stealing, poaching, or purloining timber.
1 2

Only William (born 1761) and Betty (born 1780) are untraced; maybe they died young It was standard practice to name firstborn boys after the father or grandfather, so to name his firstborn after his brother meant either they were very close or there had been some tragedy prompting Thomas to do it. Since there is no record of the senior Denis after his birth and also no record of him being with Thomas in the Boldre area I think it most likely that the senior Denis died young and Thomas named his first son Dennis as a tribute to his memory. 3 Their marriage registrations are signed with a mark

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Despite what I have said so far about Thomas (senior & junior!) being most likely a day labourer of some sort it is equally possible that they were as Gilpin describes here: unemployed opportunists subsisting on ill-gotten gains from poaching and smuggling. Since we dont and probably never will know, it is better to think otherwise! It is very easy, when writing these accounts, to forget that with the sweep of a pen we write off a thirty or forty year period. Thomas junior was born in 1765. Many of the preceeding statements are from the 1790s, thirty years later. Even in a quiet backwater like Beaulieu Rails, a considerable amount could change in 30 years

Figure 1: The "Haves" and the "Have-Nots" Commoners toiling in the fields compared to Beaulieu Abbey (c. 1783, from Francis Grose's "The Antiquities of England and Wales".)

The biggest single impact on their lives would have been the continued local political tensions caused by the fact that they were squatters encroaching on Crown land. In the earlier years of the mid-1700s the illegal settlement of this land had been tolerated and even encouraged. The Beaulieu Manor estate had benefitted greatly (albeit they had been manipulative in the affair to their advantage) and even some of the Boldre parishioners looked upon their new lodgers benignly. But as the settlement grew it became more unruly, and demands on parish aid also increased to the point where the tax burden on Bolde was unsustainable. Tension turned to anger and in some cases anger turned to violence. In the Boldre Poor House book of 1797 the following entry was made: 4 July, 1797. At the request of Mr Wm Piper, Keeper of Lady Cross walk, that a number of encroachments being made in the forest within the Parish by the erection of mud cottages and of his inability to suppress them without the assistance of the parish, it was resolved that a sufficiency of men be hired to aid in throwing out the encroachments, at the expense of the poor rate. In 1799 the New Forest Commission was appointed by an act of parliament to look into the claims of encroachment on crown land. They were given the powers to investigate and examine all claims. The same act authorised that any land that had been in use for a period of 15 years or more which was much of the Beaulieu Rails settlement could be granted a legal lease of the land. In fact in many cases the result of the investigation was that many parts of the land could not be legally proven to be crown land at all and so

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anyone inhabiting that land was granted the freehold, while in almost all other cases a lease was granted. Meanwhile the tensions caused by the imbalance of funding for parish relief reached a tipping point in 1801. The Boldre parishioners finally challenged their neighbours in Beaulieu over providing financial support for labourers employed by them but forced to live just outside the boundary. The challenge threatened to go to court but in the end was settled in arbitration. In September 1802 the decision of the arbiter was that of the 50 debated properties in Beaulieu Rails, Beaulieu was given financial responsibility for 13 and Bolde for the remaining 37. Thomas Renyard incidentally, at that time married and with a family, fell under Boldres jurisdiction. Local politics would not have been the only pressure he felt. Even in rural Hampshire the effects of the agricultural revolution pioneered in the early and mid 1700s would have started to take effect by the turn of the century. Pure physical labour was no longer at a premium and wages were slow to increase if at all after 1760. Worse, the price of basic provisions in the same period (between 1760 and 1805) rose by from 50 to 100 percent4. This put an increasing financial burden on day-labourers. Another pressure came from above, from the farmers and land owners. Their taxes rose in the latter half of the 18th century to fund the increased national debt due to trade wars and colonial wars. This caused the yeomanry5 who were increasingly becoming challenged financially, to both raise tenant rents and to switch their own investments from agriculture to industry (this was the early stages of industrial revolution remember). Those yeomen who remained farming needed to farm more intensively because of the same financial pressures and this required more land; so any tenant who could not prove common rights might be driven off land; this clearly targeted squatters in particular. Any cottager6 trying to run a small farm was hit by this trickle-down financial effect and many of their smallholdings failed financially, returning the land to the larger farmer and themselves to the day-labour force. In Beaulieu Rails itself it was clear that this financial pressure was felt. H.E Widnell in his 1973 book The Beaulieu Record described the locals as sturdy, independent and stubborn and says that they objected to paying the poor rate to Boldre parish as the law required. At the Boldre parish meeting on 7 May 1812 an anonymous paper was shown which purported to be the joint resolution of the people of Beaulieu Rails to resist the
A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, William Hasback (1908) A yeoman was a freeholder of a respectable class, only next in order down from gentry. Usually they were farmers with medium-sized holdings and also held political rights. 6 A cottager was a labourer who had been lucky enough to lay claim to enough common land for a long enough period to attain the freehold and to also have managed their own meagre finances sufficiently to build some independent source of income (for example, manufacture of butter from having an acre or two on which to keep a cow). The more successful cottagers could attain the next rank of small farmer but most lived a tenuous financial existence and were severely impacted by the changes in the late 18th century described here. It is possible, although I think unlikely, that the Renyards attained the status of cottager. More likely they were the lower class of labourer: the day-labourer (paid only a wage and only for short term contracts they could secure).
5 4

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collection of rates and taxes in that district and in case of any such demand upon them to set fire to the buildings of any officer employed, with a personal threat against William Chandler before whose house it was affixed to a tree. That a reward of 50 be offered for the discovery and conviction of the writer of the said paper and of the person who affixed to the tree. And that 100 handbills be printed and distributed wherever they best lead to an enquiry7. These socioeconomic influences must have made life very difficult indeed for Thomas Renyard junior and his young family and it is easy to imagine him as one of those sturdy, independent and stubborn residents who resisted paying any taxes. He married Sarah Beck (her parentage is unknown but there were Becks known in the Milford area at that time8) in November 1788i at the church in Beaulieu and between 1788 and 1807 had eight children all except one of which survived9. The fact that he continued to associate ecclesiastically with Beaulieu rather than Boldre (or indeed the new independent chapels that started to appear around the turn of the century in Beaulieu Rails itself) means that I believe it is most likely that he or his wife was employed in some manner by the estate. With the first census not until 1841 we can know very little about his life. Luckily a little like Uckfield in Sussex and the Farleys there was one amazing documentary exercise taken specifically in that area in 1817 that is as good as in many ways better than a census. Henry Comyn was appointed as the curate of Boldre in 1812 and remained there until 1819. As well as his religious duties Comyn was a very active commentator and archivist and this culminated in 1817 with his detailed survey of all of the parishioners and residents of the Boldre area10. In 22 separate notebooks each representing an area of settlement, Comyn recorded both meticulous maps of every sub-district and the members, ages and professions of every household: effectively a full census. What motivated him was concern both about the social wellbeing of his parishioners but also their spiritual welfare because of the perceived (actually, in Beaulieu Rails especially, real) increase of dissenters11.

Jude James in East Boldre: A New Forest Squatters Settlement 1700 1900, quoting the Minutes of the Vestry Meetings, Boldre Parish (G. Belasyse-Smith's transcription). 8 I do have a copy of the 1766 baptism registration of a Sarah Beck daughter of William Beck from Hordle I am not certain this is our Sarah; there was also the marriage of another Sarach Beck in Hordle to George Abbott in 1788 which is more likely the 1766 Sarah. 9 Unlike some of the other family lines we have looked at in the 18th and 19th centuries the child mortality rate was low and survival rate high in the New Forest community which suggests that a more rural and less populous location is better able to regulate sanitation and to quarantine or be quarantined from disease 10 Jude James believes that Comyn compiled his notebooks specifically to make it easier for his successor, Rev Charles Shrubb, to quickly come to know a new and widely dispersed parish 11 Comyn referred to anyone who strayed from the Church of England a dissenter. In fact the majority of religious independents who grew in the area were Baptists; in his 1817 census there was only one recorded Catholic. But Comyn lumped them all together in the same bucket and his suspicion and distaste for those who chose to follow a different religious path was arguably his main motivation for compiling the notebooks

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Comyn divided the two parishes into manageable divisions for recording purposes. He identified 22 of these geographic divisions and interestingly Beaulieu Rails which had grown so fast in the space of 60 years was taken as a whole the largest which he was forced to sub-divide into three notebooks (north, middle, south) to be able to handle.

Figure 2: The area covered by Comyn's notebooks showing the 22 settlement areas. The location of Thomas Renyard and family is shown with a red circle. Source: Comyn's New Forest by Jude James

In fact it took Comyn 18 months (from July 1817 to January 1819) to compile all 22 censuses. Coincidentally, Thomas Renyard who resided in the area that Comyn designated Sheepwash12 but which today and even back then was referred to as East End, was almost the first to be surveyed. Comyn started in July 1817 with either Sheepwash or Pille (now Pilley) and this means that the information recorded for Thomas is part of the oldest and accurately dated July 1817. The information that Comyn recorded was substantial. As well as the name of the head of a household he also recorded the wifes maiden name and any previous marriages. All known children whether resident in the house at the time or not were listed usually with birth dates. Where children were married or had left home, they were recorded with married names and/or locations (so many appear twice in other notebooks at their actual
12

The area surveyed by Comyn was actually called Sheepwash & East End. The northern section of that area, being a cluster of houses at the southern tip of Beaulieu Rails, was actually called Sheepwash and the southern section (where Thomas Renyard lived) was East End. Sheepwash was so named because a small stream in that area was regularly dammed to form a pool in which local sheep could be dipped.

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residences). Comyn also recorded professions apart from, in general, labourers; any annual rent payable and the name of the landlord; and any special physical or financial conditions of the residents. This, taken together with the meticulous maps showing properties and boundaries, makes it one of the most comprehensive views of the community better even than the 1841 census. Comyn spelled Renyard as Rhineyard in his notebooks. This is the entry for Thomas and Sarah from July 1817: 3 Mr. Weld Thomas & Sarah (Beck) Rhineyard Hannah (Hendy) 1791 George Nov. 1793 Stephen 11 July 1797 Sarah 18 Aug 1799 Charlotte 14 Aug 1801 William 31 July 1803 John 17 June 1807 This tells us many important things about Thomas: 1. He leased his property for an annual rent of 3 from Joseph Weld. The Honourable Joseph Weld esquire was by far the biggest landowner in the area. He owned 9 of the properties (including Thomass) and he also owned the two farms: East End Farm in Sheepwash and Vinings Farm in East End as well as Pylewell Mill and Farm shown on the southern edge of the map. Joseph Weld himself lived in Baddesley at Pylewell House. The fact that Thomas paid 3 annual rent is interesting because many of the other properties in Sheepwash and Beaulieu Rails, being former squatters cottages, were freehold; Thomas must therefore have been one of the unlucky ones forced to become a day labourer. 2. Thomas is listed without an occupation. Comyn gave details of anyone with a clearly identifiable trade so for there to be none of Thomas means that he must have been some sort of labourer. Combined with the location and the patronship of Mr Weld, it is very likely indeed that Thomas worked as a labourer for either Vinings Farm or Pylewell Farm. John Hyde was the tenant farmer at Vinings and that property is noted by Comyn as covering 200 acres, so would require plenty of labour. Thomas must have had a steady income to afford the rent and since it seems to have been a comparatively well off area13 it is reasonable to assume that he did enjoy the trust and protection of Joseph Weld and his tenant farmer. 3. His wife Sarah is confirmed as a Beck.

East End 66 Regt. Leagreen unhealthy

13

According to Jude James, who cites the better buildings in the area, the fact that many cottages are freehold, and the fact that eight of the children in the area are noted as attending Gilpins school in Pille.

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4. Two, perhaps three of the children were not present in the house. Eldest daughter Hannah was already married and living with her husband Thomas Hendy only a few doors away. Sarah, actually their third daughter (second daughter Lucy had died at only 7 months old so was not recorded), was unmarried but living away from home in Leagreen14. And eldest son George, who is noted as being attached to the 66th Regiment (Comyn always noted military regiments), was almost certainly also away somewhere with the army. 5. Charlotte is noted as unhealthy. Comyn noted many ailments and conditions but most were non-specific. Jude James speculates that those individuals described by Comyn as sickly, delicate or unhealthy may all have been suffering from tuberculosis, a common disease in the 18th century. Whatever ailed Charlotte it cannot have been too serious; she married and lived to the age of 58. This simple description from Comyn therefore gives us quite a distinct picture of Thomas (by then aged 52) and Sarah (54). They lived in a rented cottage near the farm that he worked for, but relatively isolated from the houses around him on the edge of the fields that he worked. His closest neighbours were tradesmen: Simeon Batt a joiner on one side and Joseph Lancaster a blacksmith on the other. Next door to Joseph Lancaster lived John and Mary Batt, she a schoolmistress but also noted by Comyn as a dissenter (probably attending the Baptist chapel just a little further up the road in Sheepwash). In the same small settlement of 35 houses as well as the two tenant farmers there is also another blacksmith, a tailor, a shoemaker, and also William Gardiner the gamekeeper to Lord Montague of Beaulieu manor. From Comyns map it looks like Thomas had a reasonable piece of land around his cottage, maybe one acre, which could have helped sustain the family with produce. After more than sixty years of settlement, the habitation in Beaulieu Rails would have been well established. Temporary wooden structures would have long since been replaced by cob cottages. The squatters had to make do with what materials they could find easily at hand, and building from cob became the standard practice. Cob is produced by digging quantities of loam and clay from shallow pits close to the proposed dwelling. This material once dug is mixed with water and some binding material, commonly chopped straw, heather or horse manure, until it attains the consistency of putty.15 A space for the dwelling was cleared and compacted (sometimes foundations were made from stone) and then the walls were erected by one of two methods. The first was achieved by throwing the cob mixture onto the foundations and building up a layer of about 1 to 2 feet thick and 18 to 30 inches wide, which was then banged down with spades and left for a week to ten days to dry before a second layer was added, and so on until the required wall height was reached. The effect was rough, though, and needed some smoothing to finish the building. The second method employed timber
It is not certain where Leagreen was. It could have referred to Leygreen Farm in Beaulieu, but Im not sure why the spelling would be unknown being so nearby. The only other and more likely Leagreen known of in that area is Leagreen Cottage on the outskirts of Downton (just north of Milford). 15 Vernacular architecture in the New Forest: domestic building in cob from c.1750 to c.1900 Jude James
14

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shuttering to act as clamps to define the shape of the wall, each layer reaching a height of about 2 feet. The shutter was removed when the cob was sufficiently dry, and used to build the next layer, and so on.

Figure 3: The Sheepwash & East End area map made by Comyn (as re-drawn by Jude James). Thomas Renyards property is shown inside the red circle. The location of his daughter Hannah, who married Thomas Hendy, is shown inside a blue circle.

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Figure 4: The same area, showing the location of Thomas Renyard's 1817 house. The house has been demolished and today it is just scrub, but the plot still shows where the farmer has presumably had to plough around the rubble and foundations. The building marked Southlawn, roughly where the Hendys lived (with Thomass daughter Hannah) is now a hotel!

There is a natural taper on cob walls from the base to the eaves, with lower walls some nine to twelve inches thicker than those at the top. Lintels and door jambs were built into the structure as it rose and the roof timbers were made from Forest trees such as larch or, at a later date, from sawn softwood. Thatch was the usually roofing material, although some roofs were later replaced by slates as the familys finances allowed.16

Figure 5: Cob construction. LEFT: Modern cob wall showing the "layers" built up and allowed to dry and the taper. RIGHT: The cob walls of this ruined cottage, photographed in 1963 illustrate the durability of cob as a building material; originally this building was two adjoining cottages occupied in the early nineteenth century.
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Report on New Forest Traditions by Jo Ivey

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The original squatters cob cottages were simple: a basic rectangle with a porched door in the centre, small windows either side, a single or perhaps two partitioned rooms downstairs, a hearth and chimney at one end, and usually a wooden first floor occupying the full or part length of the roofspace. Floors were just compacted earth covered with straw or heather. Decades later these same cottages may have been extended with wooden lean-tos, had roofs replaced with slate, had floors replaced with brick, but for simple constructions of, essentially, mud they lasted an amazingly long time some even still in existence today (although much modified).

Figure 6: Contemporary photo of a surviving cob cottage, from Jo Iveys Report on New Forest Traditions

Although probably not intentional, this meant that the Beaulieu Rails settlement over time actually began to look quite quaint and pastoral perhaps even like these rather idealistic 19th century oil paintings by E.W. Haselhurst painted between 1900 and 1912:

Now a decade or two into the 19th century, Beaulieu Rails and the Boldre area continued to evolve. It has already been seen that by 1817 the squatters settlement had turned into

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an established village (albeit spread out in a thin north-south line17) in its own right with tenant farmers, school teachers, tradesmen and chapels all settling there. The local political tensions were for the most part resolved and the squatters themselves, of which the Renyards were amongst the original families, had become long term, well known residents. Local industry was beginning to flourish, with the establishment of a Rope and Twine factory in 1816, set up to supply the Bucklers Hard shipyard. In 1839 Beaulieu Rails became an ecclesiastical parish in its own right and was renamed East Boldre (although the old established nickname of Beaulieu Rails was still used in the censuses until 1871!). So Thomas Renyard and the other residents of Beaulieu Rails had made the transition from illegal squatters to reputable and established parishioners of the newest parish in the area. After Comyns ad-hoc census there would be no other systematic accounting of the area until the 1841 census, which took place on the 6th June 1841. This census would have at least confirmed whether Thomas was a tradesman or just a labourer but coincidentally Thomas Renyard died18 on exactly the same day as the 1841 census, the 6th June, before the census-taker could visit their house. Sarah is shown age 75 living in Beaulieu Rails with no occupation, with a Hannah Phillips age 50 with her19. So Thomass occupation is never recorded. However since all of his sons and son-in-laws who were recorded in the 1841 census are all shown as either Ag Labs or simply Labourers Im sure that if Thomas had been there he would have been shown as a labourer too.

Visiting Beaulieu Rails today it is noticeable that the houses are not only in a 2 mile line but that, as you drive along the small road, almost all of the houses are on the east side of the road facing open heath land to the west. Unless you knew the history you would maybe suspect that there was a national park boundary on that side. 18 The cause of Thomass death is described as water on the chest, known as hydrothorax today; basically a build of fluid in the pleural cavity. Sarahs cause of death was recorded as paralysis which at that time probably meant a stroke. 19 Who was Hannah Phillips? I am sure just a friend. She was not a neighbour (no other Phillips nearby in the 1841 census) and there is no evidence that she was related. The most likely Hannah Phillips in Comyn is Hannah Gregory who lived in the southern part of Beaulieu Rails and married William Phillips. Comyn shows her as born in 1795.

17

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