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).
