The Bathurst Charity School in Hutton Rudby

The connection between Hutton Rudby and the Bathursts began in the first half of the 17th century with the founder of the family fortunes, Dr John Bathurst.  

Dr John Bathurst (d 1659)

By the time he died in 1659, the eminent physician Dr John Bathurst [left] was a very wealthy man, whose estates were said to have been worth £2,000 a year.  The date of his birth is unclear [1].  According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he was born in Sussex and came of a Kentish family.  A reviewer of a history of Richmond and Swaledale in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal [2] in 1979 described him as "one of the most famous of the Old Boys of Richmond Grammar School".

On 27 January 1636 (recorded as 1635 at the time, when the calendar was still in the Old Style) he married Elizabeth Willance at Marske in Swaledale.  Elizabeth and her sisters were the heiresses of their father Brian Willance of Clints Hall and shared his estates between them.  As a result, by his marriage Dr John Bathurst became the owner of Clints, a few miles from Richmond.  

Little is known of Elizabeth's father but her great-uncle, the draper Robert Willance, is one of Richmond's celebrities.  He was nearly killed when his young horse spooked and sprang down the cliff at Whitcliffe Scar, killing itself and breaking its rider's leg.  Famously, Willance saved his own life by cutting open the dead horse's belly and putting his broken leg into the carcass to keep himself warm and alive until help finally came.  His leg had to be amputated, and is said to have been buried in Richmond churchyard where its owner joined it years later.  Willance marked the spot on Whitcliffe Scar – Willance's Leap, as it is known – with a stone in thanksgiving for his preservation from death.  

In 1644, in the early days of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Dr John Bathurst was in practice at York where he successfully treated young Christopher Wandesford from Kirklington near Bedale who had been left in a pitiable state from the trauma of his father's death and funeral in Dublin.  Christopher was from a Royalist family;  Dr Bathurst's most celebrated patient was Oliver Cromwell himself.  

In 1656 Dr John Bathurst represented Richmond in the parliament reluctantly called by Cromwell (the Second Protectorate Parliament) and in 1659 when Oliver's son Richard Cromwell called the Third Protectorate Parliament, Dr Bathurst again represented Richmond.

He made his Will on 23 April 1659, the day after that parliament was dissolved and he died three days later.  

His family would benefit for the next hundred years from the fortune he had accumulated and the investments he had made.  Above all, they drew their wealth from the Arkengarthdale lead mines, where the well-known CB Inn is named after his descendant Charles Bathurst.  He had taken a lease on the mines in about 1650 and by 1656 he had bought the whole of the dale and the mining rights from the Crown.  

At his death he owned property in Swaledale, Richmond, London and Cleveland, including the manors and estates of Skutterskelfe and the nearby hamlets of Thoraldby and Braworth.  In his Will he established a charity in Richmond to maintain two poor scholars at Cambridge and to put out every year a poor boy as an apprentice, and among his charitable legacies he left a rent charge of twenty shillings on his manors to be paid by the churchwardens of Hutton Rudby to the poor on 20 December every year [3].

Theodore Bathurst (c1646-97) of Leeds & Skutterskelfe

The estates at Skutterskelfe passed to Theodore, one of Dr John Bathurst's sons.  He knew the Leeds antiquary Ralph Thoresby  F.R.S. (1658-1725) and was "the Lawyer Bathurst, whom Thoresby speaks of with respect more than once, and calls 'a learned and ingenious gentleman'" [4].  His wife was Lettice, only daughter of Sir John Repington of Leamington.  On the death of his elder brothers, Theodore inherited the Richmondshire estates.  

He seems to have been a rather bold and forthright man.  He was indicted at York Assizes in 1685 for calling the King a "rogue".  I suspect this was the new king James II, but it isn't clear from the History of Parliament website whether this was happened at the beginning of the year when the king was Charles II or after 6 February when his brother James came to the throne.

In 1689 a Chancery Court case was brought against him over his title to the Yorkshire estates he had inherited from his father.  He won the case but then his possession of the Forest of Arkengarthdale and its valuable lead mines was challenged by a widow who claimed James II had given her husband a 51 year lease.  He may have stood for Parliament for the protection from litigation that being an MP would give him, and he was successfully elected MP for Richmond in 1690.  He spoke frequently in the House, generally against the government of William & Mary.

His problems didn't go away.  Court proceedings over the Arkengarthdale forest had been halted on his election as MP but in 1694 he had to take leave of parliament to deal with the matter.  By then he seems to have been in financial trouble.  He stood in the 1695 election but was unsuccessful; the expense of standing had not brought him any benefit.  When he died in 1697, a creditor was granted administration of his estates and his legal and financial troubles passed to his son Charles.

Charles Bathurst of Clints & Skutterskelfe (died 1724)

Charles Bathurst was married on 23 Oct 1701 to Frances, the daughter and heir of Thomas Potter of Leeds, merchant [5].  

At about this time he was involved in an unsuccessful lawsuit with Lord Wharton over the boundary between Swaledale and Arkengarthdale [6].  This will have been Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton of Aske Hall, whose colourful history (his great charm and political acumen, his debauchery) can be found in the wikipedia entry for him.  Lord Macaulay wrote of him

"His mendacity and his effrontery passed into proverbs. Of all the liars of his time he was the most deliberate, the most inventive and the most circumstantial."

In 1713 Charles Bathurst stood for Parliament for Richmond unsuccessfully with Sir Marmaduke Wyvill of Constable Burton Hall.  Both electioneering and litigation will have further depleted the family finances.

Bathurst House by Warofdreams 

Charles built a smart townhouse on Micklegate in York for himself and Frances [7], with their initials impressed on the heads of the downfall pipes (see the History of York website).  

Frances died aged 42 in early 1724 and was buried on 24 January at the church of St Martin-cum-Gregory (now the Stained Glass Centre), across Micklegate from her house.  The floor slab in her memory  reads 

"a person of excellent accomplishments both of body and mind, and adorned the several stations of life she went through."

Charles survived her by only a few months and was buried at Hutton Rudby church on 3 July 1724. 

Charles Bathurst of Clints & Skutterskelfe (c1703-43)

This Charles Bathurst was the founder of the Hutton Rudby charity.

He was born in about 1703 and educated at Richmond School.  He entered Peterhouse College, Cambridge in 1720 at the age of 16 [8], and he inherited his father's estates and the fine house in Micklegate four years later in 1724.

He was a prominent Freemason and was Grand Master, York in 1726-8 [9].  He was active in his civic duties, being appointed High Sheriff of Yorkshire in 1727.

In the same year he ran for Parliament jointly with Sir Marmaduke Wyvill, as his father had done before him.  They won the election but their opponents successfully petitioned the House of Commons to overturn the result on the grounds that the mayor William Davile, who was the presiding officer at election, had blocked the votes of men who were entitled to vote and allowed unqualified men to vote instead [10].

He is then said to have become insane.  The stories of how he threw the waiter down the stairs at the King's Head at Richmond and how in 1730 he killed his butler at Skutterskelfe, are told here: Charles Bathurst of Skutterskelfe kills his butler: 1730.

By 1737 it seems he had recovered his equilibrium – possibly the episodes can mostly be put down to excessive alcohol in an age of heavy drinking or perhaps the traditional tale of his insanity is something of a myth – because on 16 February 1737 he married Anne Hendry at Crathorne parish church [11].   She was the daughter of John Hendry, yeoman of Norton and Elton, Co Durham.  

They had been married only seven years when Charles Bathurst died in 1743.  The Rudby parish register records that he "was interr'd the 24th Day of September in the Parish Church", so it seems he was buried inside the church.  His widow died in 1747 and was buried in the church on 4 January.

As they had no children, the Bathurst estates in Cleveland and Swaledale – encumbered with debts and mortgages – passed to Charles' three sisters.  His sister Jane's son Sir Charles Turner of Kirkleatham bought his aunts' shares and came into the possession of the whole estate.  He sold Skutterskelfe to the Hon. General George Cary, whose wife Isabella Ingram had inherited the contiguous Rudby estate at Rudby.

The episodes with the waiter and the butler are all too memorable, but in Charles Bathurst's obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1743 he was described as "a man of vivacity, integrity, and generosity." 

And at the school beside the churchyard in Hutton Rudby, the Revd Graves found this inscription "on a blank leaf of an early edition of Ainsworth's Dictionary, belonging to this school":

Ex Dono

Caroli Bathurst, armigeri illustrissimi,

Scholae Hutton-Rudby;

Quam ipse prius erexerat, (bonis quibusdam adjutus)

Et largo stipendio donaverat;

Literarum bonarum amans, literatus ipse

Boni studiosus publici, sui securus,

Doctis honoratissimus, omnibus amabilis,

Et per omne ævum memorandus.

Which I have ineptly translated, my Latin being very rusty, as 

From the gift of

Charles Bathurst, distinguished gentleman,

to Hutton Rudby school

which he himself had previously built (for which he had some help)

Donating a generous stipend;

A lover of good literature, learned in the public good, cheerful,

Most honourable of learned men, dear to all,

And to be remembered throughout the ages.

I'm not at all sure about the translation of "bonis quibusdam adjutus."  I think it literally means "with the help of certain goods" (goods being material or otherwise) and I think this probably means that he was helped by donations or funds from other men, which fits with the Revd Graves' description of the building of the schoolhouse.  That's why I've translated it as "for which he had some help".

Rudby School and the Bathurst Charity

By the late 1730s, the gentlemen and well-to-do yeomen of Hutton Rudby had become concerned about the state of education in the village.  A few months after Charles Bathurst's marriage the first step towards establishing a school was taken.

On 15 October 1786 the Revd Jeremiah Grice, vicar from 1781 until his death in 1820, wrote an account of the building of the schoolhouse and the founding of the charity by Charles Bathurst.

Land for the schoolhouse was donated by Sir Arthur Ingram of Temple Newsam (c1565-1642) [left] who was at that point the owner the manor of Rudby.  He was a wealthy man with a shady reputation [portrait] and his story is told here in Stately Homes of Hutton Rudby.  

He gave a plot measuring 14 square yards next to the churchyard wall on 12 May 1737.  This was done by a lease for 999 years to Charles Bathurst and others at a rent of twopence a year on St Mark's day (25 April), if demanded. The cost of building the schoolhouse was borne by Charles Bathurst and other leading inhabitants of the village.  Unfortunately, neither the Revd Grice nor the historian the Revd John Graves recorded their names.

It was customary for public-spirited landowners to create an endowment to pay for the education of poor scholars and on 13 March 1740 Charles Bathurst executed a deed by which he gave

"a charitable donation for the establishing a schoolmaster in the parish of Rudby, for the instruction or education of the children of poor persons in the said parish at a school built in the township of Rudby at the expense of the inhabitants of the said parish." 

According to the Revd Jeremiah Grice, the charitable donation was of £100, to be laid out in land or placed out at interest, and payment was to begin within 6 months of Charles Bathurst's death.  

In 1786, when the Revd Grice wrote this account, the trustees of the charity were Matthew Appleton and James Appleton of Hutton, and the donation, "being meant to be laid out in land or placed out at interest for the best interest", was in the hands of the Hon. General George Cary, the new owner of Skutterskelfe, who "pays for it at the rate of five per cent per annum.  The said donation is one hundred pounds (£100)."

During the second half of the 18th century, it had become the custom that the payments, which came to £5 a year, were paid by the new owner of Skutterskelfe, the Hon. General George Cary, to the schoolmaster of Rudby School.  This would pay him for teaching some poor children whose parents could not afford the fees, but the majority of his pupils must have been fee-paying.

According to the Revd John Graves, Charles Bathurst had originally intended there also to be a rentcharge of £10 a year from his Skutterskelfe estate, but this was lost at some point when there was a hiatus in the proper appointment of trustees.

There was more confusion in the 19th century, probably because the Revd Robert Barlow was in charge – a man with many virtues but no great aptitude for administration (see here, for errors in the parish registers in his time ) – and because Lord Falkland, the new owner of Skutterskelfe, failed to pay the annual sum for several years.  

Fortunately, Allan Bowes Wilson and Thomas Bowes Wilson of the Hutton Sailcloth Mill and their brother John George Wilson, a leading solicitor in Durham, were at hand to put the charity back onto a firm basis.  They attached it to the school which Mr Barlow had succeeded in building in Enterpen (leaving the school beside the church redundant) and they were undoubtedly the driving forces behind the new scheme settled by the Charity Commissioners in 1895, with Thomas Bowes Wilson acting without salary as Secretary and Treasurer to the trustees.  

The school in Enterpen, possibly in the 1940s
from the collection of the Hutton Rudby & District History Society
(see their Facebook page)

There is an account of the Rudby schoolmasters here and a more detailed account of the most well-known schoolmaster, John Jackson, here.

 

Notes

[1]  Dr John Bathurst's age:  as ACAD, the University of Cambridge's alumni database says "If his age as given by Munk is correct, he must have matriculated at the age of seven, which seems hardly possible"

[2]  Leslie P Wenham, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, Vol 51, page 172

[3] Revd James Raine, Archaeologia Aeliana or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity, 1861, p.76; and Revd John Graves, The History & Antiquities of Cleveland (1808), p.178

[4]  Revd James Raine, Archaeologia Aeliana or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity, 1861, p.76.  The Bathurst family tree is on p.75

  

[5]  Bishop's Transcripts of Leeds parish registers

   

[6]  The Wharton family went, as the Zetland Estate website puts it, "spectacularly bust in 1727".

   

[7]  This website is inaccurate on Charles the younger, who did not die unmarried but did die childless.  

[8]   Alumni Cantabrienses, from ACAD, website of the University of Cambridge

   

[9]  Richard Andrew Berman, The Architects of Eighteenth Century English Freemasonry, 1720 – 1740 (2010)

   

[10]  "Copy petition of Sir Conyers Darcy and John Yorke to House of Commons, alleging that William Davile, mayor of Richmond, as presiding officer at election, violated the ancient customary electoral rights of the owners of burgages with pasture rights in Whitcliffe Pasture by refusing to allow some of them to vote and admitting freemen of trades in the borough and others thereby illegally allowed Sir Marmaduke Wyvill and Charles Bathurst to be returned members"  [ZQH 7/44/1 at NYCRO]

According to Clarkson's History of Richmond [pp.138-141] there was a longstanding issue over the exact terms of the voting qualification in the borough and after 1727 two families, the Yorkes and the D'Arcys of Sedbury, began to buy up the burgage tenures that carried a right to vote, and "by means of sham conveyances which afterwards prevailed, either sat themselves for the Borough, or deputed whom they pleased" [p.141]

[11]  Feb 16 1736: Charles Bathurst of Scutterskelffe Esq and Ms Anne Henry of Stockton Married by virtue of a Licence granted by Mr Cooke of Stoxley [Crathorne parish registers]