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).