HEATHS, BLOMFIELDS and VLIELANDS: FAMILY RELATIONS in NORFOLK

 Heaths, Blomfields and Vlielands: family relations in Norfolk

What connection could Jerome Nicholas Vlieland the Elder, a refugee fleeing

famine and the Napoleonic Wars, have to William Heath and Charles James

Blomfield, a leading landowner and a distinguished cleric in late Georgian and

early Victorian England?

William Heath was born in 1762 in Hemblington, a small Norfolk parish 8 miles

from Norwich. The Heaths were an Anglo-Saxon family with a ‘topographical’

surname – the name showing the poor uncultivated scrubland on which they

first settled. Versions of the name are found in York (de Heth, 1279) and

Ringstead Parva in Norfolk (Atte-Heth, 1316) but by 1583, when Thomas Heath

flourished as a mathematician and fellow of All Souls, Oxford University, the

modern spelling was largely settled. By 1700, when Hemblington Hall was built,

the family were gentleman farmers of broad acres, with a crest and French

motto, once used as a war cry in battle, ‘espere mieux’ (‘hope/expect better’).

William became a leading voice in the county and Captain of the Blofield and

Swaffham troop of Yeomanry, charged with defence against a Napoleonic

invasion.

In March 1783, when he was 21, William married Ann Johnson, daughter of the

noted cleric and writer John Johnson of Ludham in the Norfolk Broads; they had

10 children, losing only the first-born Philip and the first-born Sarah to infant

death. The second-born Sarah, their seventh child, was tutored by Monsieur

Jerome Jansen de Vlieland; she eloped with him but they married in June 1824,

giving Jerome a secure foothold in Norfolk society.

Charles James Blomfield was a schoolmaster’s son from Bury St Edmunds in

Suffolk, who excelled at Trinity College in Cambridge and was Bishop of London

for 28 years. His was an ancient Norman-French family from Pont- l’Éveque in

Normandy; like the Heaths, their name was recorded as it sounded, so

‘Bloomefield’, ‘Blundeville’ and ‘Blumfield’ were all common until the 17 th

century. Thomas de Blundeville (d. 1236) was Bishop of Norwich, and Miles

Blomefield (b. 1525) a noted alchemist and family chronicler.

Charles James married William’s eldest daughter Anna Maria in 1810, so at his

own marriage Jerome acquired a brother-in-law who became godfather and

promoter of his own eldest son, Jerome the Younger. This patronage seems to

have ended with the Bishop’s death in August 1857: we know that Jerome was

demoted from his living in Turnham Green to the one in Stalisfield the following

year.

Anna Maria had six children in seven years, dying in February 1818, just after the

birth of her sixth son, Charles James, who did not survive the year, as had been

the case with her first son, also Charles James, her daughter Anna Maria and her

son Charles William; Edward died at six and only Maria lived into old age. Anna

Maria herself died at Hildersham near Cambridge, and was buried at Great

Chesterford in Essex, the parish that had been Charles James’ first curacy in 1810

and where he returned as vicar and rector of Great and Little Chesterford from

1812 to 1824.

In 1819, Charles James married Dorothy Fox, a lawyer’s widow with a son of her

own; of their 11 children only the first, named after his father, failed to live until

at least their 30s. In fact, only with the birth of their second Charles James, in

1831, did the Bishop have a long-lived son bearing his own name.

Hemblington Hall Farm, Gables Farm, Wood Farm and a cluster of cottages in

Pedham village all passed to the Burroughes family of the neighbouring

Burlingham estate in the mid-19 th century, and were held by them until 1919,

when all 3500 acres were sold off, possibly to help pay heavy death duties after

the First World War: one of the Burroughes’ family lost their elder son, Randall,

at Gallipoli in 1915 and their younger, Stephen, at the Sambre-Oise Canal in

1918, in the last week of the war, the battle in which the poet Wilfred Owen also

died.

The information in this post builds on what we already know on the blog about

the Blomfields (February 2010) and the Heaths (July 2012).

THE KENT VILLAGE THAT MOVED TO DEVON

 With lot of thanks to Barbara for her lovely article!

Otterden: the Kent village that moved to Devon

We know from our posts in 2021 that the village of Otterden, the next-door

parish to Stalisfield and in particular its vicar, William Paxton, became a place of

sanctuary for Jerome Nicholas Vlieland’s children after the death of their mother

Frances in August 1865. She left seven children, aged between 11 and 3, and we

know that the Millens of Syndale and the Shoves of Queen Court in Ospringe also

helped Jerome until he married Ann Johnson a year later.

All three families were important in the later Vlieland story: Charles James

Vlieland married Alice Edith Millen and her younger sister Bertha married

Herbert Samuel Shove.

But it was Otterden that seems to have had the biggest emotional impact: Charles

James and Alice Edith named their first married home in Exeter after the village,

as a cherished memorial, and the house name remained for many years even

after the family moved to 20 Southernhay, where Charles James set up his own

doctor’s practice.

What we know of Stalisfield could also be said of the village of scattered ‘meanly

built’ cottages originally known as Otterden-street. Another Domesday

settlement, it shared the barren, windswept location and red, flint-scarred soil,

and the beech, hazel and birch coppice wood. Being higher up the hill and a little

drier, the corn crop was supported better than at Stalisfield, so that its tithe

income was more productive, but daily life was still a struggle.

The crucial difference was that Otterden had a very big ‘big house’, Otterden

Place, home as we know to the Aucher, Lewin and Curteis’ families, with a

succession of wealthy owners who handsomely endowed St Lawrence Church on

the estate. In 1758, the living’s value was £62.17s.10d., with tithes of £13s.6d.

and further small income from the decayed villages of Bordfield and Monketon.

William Paxton did not marry until he was 53 and was childless, and his will in

1892 estimated his income at nearly £9,000 (£600,000 today), a painful

reflection on Jerome’s £796 a year from 1858 to 1870.

Some of the information in this post is taken from Edward Hasted, The History

and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 1798. Cornhill Farm and

Longbeech Wood near St Mary’s Church in Stalisfield clearly took their name

from the topography the first farmers found, just as Syndale Bottom, where the

Millens farmed, is evocative of life in the valley at the foot of the hill.

'"The Dutch ones on the windy hill

 

I hope you will enjoy reading this lovely article from our dear Barbara. Its with a lot of plesure to I may publish it here!

‘The Dutch ones on the windy hill’: Jerome Nicholas Vlieland the Younger in Stalisfield ‘The Dutch ones’, the locals called their new vicar when he arrived on the North Downs with his wife and children in 1858. With his strong Norfolk accent and broad Dutch face, he must have seemed like something from another planet, but by his death was so beloved that the parish erected two memorial windows in St Mary’s Church. We know that Jerome arrived in Stalisfield a disappointed and unhappy man. After a stellar university career, he had expected to do well in the Anglican Church. His first curacy was in the Essex village of Great Ilford, 8 miles from London, notable only for its fishing fleet and the Roman remains found in Uphall Camp. Then, in 1854, he was appointed to the coveted vicarage of Christ Church, Turnham Green, on the River Thames. The suburb was part of the fashionable expansion of west London after 1830, and its middle-class residents demanded a young, charismatic and eloquent priest. Jerome was in his 20s, but he was bereft by the stillborn death of his eldest son and offered slow, pedantic oratory, and the Church Commissioners decided after only four years that he would not do. What they found for him instead was a humiliation: a parsonage on a ‘windy hill’ 650 feet above sea level in an ‘unfrequented and obscure’ corner of north east Kent, with 94 acres of land and 9 of coppice wood, and an impoverished flock of 378 people, 35 of whom were dependent on parish relief. Stalisfield was called ‘Stanefelt’ (stone field) in the Domesday Book, and the flinty soil and high rainfall meant that ‘stiff tillage’ was the best that could be achieved from the harvest. The fields were over-worked and there was no money for fertilisers or improved drainage so yields, and their income, fell. John Elvy Chambers, a farmer aged 67 with 11 children, ‘having had a great deal of trouble with his stock and crops, more than he could bear’ and having ‘lost a horse and thirty sheep this year, and the wet harvest’, hanged himself on a beam in the granary, and this cannot have been an isolated case. ‘Small tithes’, one-tenth of the village produce – grain, lambs, hay, wood and milk – were meant to be paid to support the parish, valued in 1858 at £362 a year, with £174 a year from the glebe (‘parson’s pasture’) land. Jerome’s stipend (salary) from the Canterbury diocese was £240 a year, from which he had to support his wife, educate his surviving children and maintain the church, whose tiled roof required constant repair, quickly slipping into dereliction. By 1870, even the Church Commissioners recognised the gulf between Jerome’s income and his needs, and made a capital payment of £51 16s. 10p. (£7,000 today), backdated to 1869, from the fund for the ‘augmentation and maintenance of the Poor Clergy’, and a new tithe for repair and upkeep of the church. On 20 August 1865, Jerome’s wife Frances died aged 38, the same day as her stillborn daughter, leaving 7 children aged between 11 and 3; after his remarriage to his cousin Ann Johnson a year later he began to suffer from depression, though everyone said he remained assiduous in tending to the sick and indigent among his flock until he died in 1877, aged only 51. Some of the information in this post is from the History and Topographical Survey of Kent, vol. 6 (1798) and the Topographical Dictionary of England, ed. Samuel Lewis, 7th edition (1858). The report of John Elvy Chambers’ inquest is from the Kentish Gazette, 23 October 1860