Notes on the Skydmore Era at Burnham, Buckinghamshire: Preface
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Occasional Papers, no.27 NOTES ON THE SKYDMORE ERA AT BURNHAM, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE: PREFACE This study of the Skydmore family at Burnham has been in progress for some 35 years. In 1971 John Lucas-Scudamore of Kentchurch Court in Herefordshire asked me if I would revise the old 1952 account of his family in Burke’s Genealogic and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry for the new 18th edition then in preparation. I did, sending off a typed manuscript of 18 pages for the approval of Hugh Montgomery-Massingberrd, the editor, who happily accepted my account of the family without a single exception. It went into print soon after, together with Commander Lucas- Scudamore’s addition on his Lucas ancestry, in 1972.1 There were two major changes in policy for the 18th edition. A gentleman could now be included and known as “formerly OF” an earlier estate that had gone out of the family, and (more importantly) it was now possible to include cadet branches with their older and more important cousins. I took advantage of this provision to include accounts of the families at Upton Scudamore, Rowleston, Holme Lacy, Ballingham, and a good many other less important places, including Burnham. Later I broke down these segments, enlarged them, added others, and published this in a very small manuscript edition revised as Thirty Generations of the Scudamore/Skidmore Family in England and America.2 It simplified my life to retain Burke’s style of not numbering generations, but instead to move forward with a variety “of whom’s.” For the reader a major confusion was the listing all of a gentleman’s sons before his daughters, a Burke’s proviso carved in granite, which I did not presume to change. The Skydmores at Burnham were one of those families who held on to the old Catholic faith long after it was politically incorrect to do so. Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy may have helped produce a male heir to the throne, but it ruined the sort of life the family knew at Burnham. Sir Philip (ca. 1545-1611), childless and locked into a failed marriage, was the last of the name at Burnham. He went off in 1609 to Flanders perhaps so he could still hear a Roman mass said daily, and where he was buried in a proper Catholic church. His departure left several smaller cadet families, cousins, who had by necessity to eventually confirm sooner in matters of religion. They came out of younger sons (or sons of younger sons) who moved up and down the social scale either by chance or native ability. I included several of these “loose” families in my Thirty Generations, who lived hard by Burnham, with the suggestion that they had come of out of the earlier family there in some unknown way. The discovery of a previously unknown manuscript set down by John Stow (ca. 1525-1605) at the British Library that 1Landed Gentry (18th edition, London 1972) III, 811-6. 2The hardbound edition has long been out of print, but a revised second edition is now available on the Scudamore/Skidmore CD-ROM issued in 2006 (along with several other full-length books and innumerable articles). For a description see the Scudamore/Skidmore website. −1− happily tied most of these yeoman families into the principal family at Burnham. If this memoir of the family at Burnham has a hero it has to be John Stow. He was admitted as a freeman of the Merchant Taylor’s Company in 1547. Beginning at least as early as 1560 he occupied himself with collecting and transcribing old manuscripts on the history of London, and then later with producing several fine histories. Snow was, like the Skydmores, partial to the old faith, and was charged several times between 1568-70 with possessing popish and other dangerous writing, but seems to have always escaped chastisement. He had spent most of his small personal fortune on collecting and publishing, and later survived on charities from his readers. His last great work was A Survey of London done in 1598 and 1603, an invaluable account of the ancient city, it customs, and it citizens which survives as a manuscript at the British Library.3 In 1601 Richard Skudamore (1561-1625), an ironmonger in London, contributed an account of himself, his wife, and their four children to Stow. To this he added what he knew about his distinguished cousins at Holme Lacy in Herefordshire, and the yeomanry at Uxbridge and Kingsbury in Middlesex. The old motto Nil deparendum says it all, for the discovery of Stow’s notes on several of the living members of Skydmore family in 1601, taken together with DNA specimens from the descendants of other presumptive cadet branches, led to the supposition that they all are from the same stock. Out of this from this has come a study of a family which can be called, in a Burke term, “formerly OF” Burnham. For the general reader, I have tried to make these notes into a “case history” by including in Appendix Two the full texts and translations of some of the most useful (but seldom used) documents that may frequently be found by the family historian. For the future it should be noted that if there is ever any kind of easy access to the enormous mass of medieval plea rolls it will mean that the histories of almost every family, including this one, and whether out of a noblemen or an agricultural laborer, will probably need to be rewritten. A number of interested descendants of the Burnham family (of which I am not one) have had an input into these notes. The late John S. Hunt of Potton, Bedfordshire, turned up many of the documents which have been digitized for Appendix Two.. William F. Skidmore, of Winchester, Tennessee, started the search after the DNA connections between his Rickmansworth family and dozens of other branches on both sides of the Atlantic. George Skidmore of Ilford, Essex did much of the work on the allied families in Hertfordshire. Linda (Skidmore) Moffatt, the founder in 1986 of the Skidmore Family History Group, read all of the manuscript and added some details on recent descendants both from her library and a forthcoming edition of the whole of the British family enumerated in the 1841 census. A great many other descendants, archivists, librarians, and others have had a hand in the making of this work but none of them are to be held accountable for what may turn out to be my errors in judgment. Warren Skidmore 3Stowe Mss. 624. Elsewhere a modernized and annotated edition by C. L. Kingsford of the manuscript of A Survey of London was published in1908. There was later an inexpensive edition (Everyman Library, no. 589) which can still be easily found. −2− INTRODUCTION The Skydmores of Burnham have several proven ancestors found in the Domesday Book. There is the paternal Ralph “de Scudemer” (mentioned five times in 1086) who did ward at the castle of Ewyas Harold on the Welsh border for his lands in Wiltshire and Herefordshire.4 In a maternal line the Skydmores also came out of Walter fitz Otho, the Constable of Windsor Castle, who held manors in five counties including (most importantly for present purposes) at Burnham in Buckinghamshire.5 This manor descended to the Huntercombe family, then to the Skydmores, and remained with Walter fitz Otho’s descendants until 1606 when Sir Philip Scudamore sold Burnham to Sir Marmaduke Darrell, a neighbor of Fulmer, Buckinghamshire.6 The eventual Huntercombe heirs in 1391 were three sisters Margaret, Elizabeth and Agnes, who married respectively Richard Lyle, Thomas Bekering, and Philip Skydmore. The sisters succeeded in their claim to the estate in 1391 and recovered two-thirds of the whole, which was eventually divided among Margaret Lyle, John Rouse (after the death of his mother Elizabeth Bekering in 1402), and Philip Skydmore.7 Philip’s wife Agnes de Huntercombe had died before her husband on 14 May 1411 and her interest passed to her son George on the death of his father in 1419.8 In the Middleton MSS at Nottingham University Library there is an undated rental list of Burnham Abbey and attached to this, and in the same hand, are the rents due George Skydmore “of his Manor of Huntercombes” set down in the general period of 1430. Obviously the abbess and the lord of Huntercombe were employing the same steward, Andrew de Windsor, a common practice in the middle ages. Previously, whose ancestor had been one of the witnesses to the foundation charter, was chief steward of Burnham Abbey as well as that of the Minoresses without Aldgate in London, and the Benedictine Ankerwyke Nunnery at Wraysbury, Buckinghamshire. Windsor earned about £3 for his duties at Burnham.9 George Skydmore (alias Ewyas) died on 28 February 1441/2, and was succeeded by his son Phillip. In time all three interests (Lyle, Bekering, and Skydmore) in the two-thirds part of Burnham were acquired either by George Skydmore or his son Philip.10 Philip, the son, had married Joan 4Warren Skidmore, The Scudamores of Upton Scudamore, a knightly family in medieval Wiltshire, 1086-1382 (2nd edition, Akron, Ohio, 1982) 1-8. 5Walter fitz Other was the Domesday lord of lands in Berks, Bucks, Hants, Middlesex, and Surrey. The caput of his fief was probably at Eton. 6Victoria County History, Buckinghamshire, III (1925) 170/1, 265. 7Phillip Skydmore was also known as Phillip Ewyas, by right of a small inheritance and a presumptive descent from Harold de Ewyas, another early tenant-in-chief of the Conqueror.