Sunday School Outings & Choir Holidays in the 1890s

Anglican children in the village in the 1890s

Hutton Rudby churchgoers in the 1890s could subscribe to a magazine called The Church Monthly.  It was 'An Illustrated Magazine for Home Reading', with serialised stories, articles, poems, practical advice, quizzes and recipes, and  was published in London.

Inserted into each month's copy was All Saints' own parish magazine, sometimes only two or three pages long, priced initially at One Penny (1d), rising in 1894 to 'Three Halfpence' (1½d).  Several bound volumes of the magazine have survived.

Children's activities are covered in the magazines - confirmations, and outings by rail from Potto Station.  The names listed may be of interest to family historians. 

Hutton Rudby & parish in 1859

The entry in Whellan's Directory of 1859 is lengthy, and the following is an extract.

There are various interesting points in it - the details of the mills in the parish are useful and I don't think there is any other record of the 'Hutton Rudby Brood Mare & Foal Show'.


RUDBY.- This parish, usually called Rudby-in-Cleveland, comprises the townships of Rudby, Hutton Rudby, Middleton, East Rouncton, Scutterskelf, and Sexhow.  The area of the whole is 7,386 acres; population, 1,119 souls.  The township of Rudby contains 880 acres, according to the Parliamentary Return, but 993 acres, according to local estimation.  Rateable value, £1,023.; population, 66.  The land is mostly the property of Lord Falkland, the Lord of the Manor.  The soil is chiefly a strong clay.

The Village of Rudby.- is small, and stands on the north side of the Leven, 3 ½ miles W by S of Stokesley – Hutton Rudby being on the opposite side.

The Church (All Saints) stands on the margin of the Leven, and is an old structure in good repair, which belonged to the Priory of Guisborough before the Dissolution.  It has a body in two aisles, a chancel, and a tower which contains three bells.  In the east window is a shield on painted glass, representing quarterly the arms of Conyers, Darcy and Meinell.  Within a niche is the effigy of an ecclesiastic, bearing a chalice – the top, apparently, of a monumental slab.  There are also a monument to the Layton family, dated 1594; and tablets to the Carey family.  In the north wall, raised above a sepulchral niche, now empty, is what may be termed a genealogical epitaph, traced in large distinct capitals on stone, still in good preservation.

The Living is a Vicarage, with the Chapel of Middleton annexed, worth about £200 a year, having been augmented with a Parliamentary grant of £1,200 in 1814.  It is in the gift of Lord Falkland, and incumbency of the Rev Robert Joseph Barlow.  The Vicarage House, situated on an eminence about half a mile from the village, was built in 1844 by the present Vicar.  The great tithes were commuted for £262, and are in seven shares, belonging to four persons.

Hutton Rudby Township.- Area, 2,341 acres; rateable value, £3,330; population, 777 souls.  Principal proprietors of the soil, Lords Falkland and De L’Isle and Dudley, Kirkleatham Hospital, J. Emerson, Esq., and Messrs. Garbutt, Gray, and Rickerson. 
Mr Mark Barker is Lord of the Manor, and resides in the Manor House, a small farmhouse, situated about a mile west of Hutton.

Errors in the Hutton Rudby parish registers 1831-78

All Saints' church ca1920

If you are researching your family history in 19th century Hutton Rudby - or indeed, in Middleton-upon-Leven or East Rounton - there is one unfortunate snag.

Robert Joseph Barlow, the vicar of the parish of Rudby-in-Cleveland between 1831 and 1878, was a great character, much appreciated in the village and still remembered for his hard work and personal charity during the cholera epidemic of 1832.

But paperwork was not his strong point and researchers have found errors and omissions in the registers during his time in the parish.

He appears to have written up the registers from memory or from scraps of notes that he took at the time, and it seems likely that he occasionally lost the register books (temporarily).  He did not send them up for Bishops’ Transcripts.

Gaps are particularly noticeable in the 1840s.  For several years in that decade, he made few entries in the burials and baptisms registers (and some years have no entries at all), and judging by the small number of entries in the marriages register, that may also be incomplete. 

Errors of dates and Christian names have been discovered throughout his time in office.  Some of these may be due to pressure of circumstances in his personal life, but others are not easily explained.

Family historians will need to bear this problem in mind – it may explain some puzzling entries, or the absence of entries they expected to find.

There are believed to be no problems with civil registrations. 

If you cannot find a register entry, it is worth trying the Memorial Inscriptions of All Saints’, Rudby-in-Cleveland.  There are also a few announcements to be found in The Stokesley News & Cleveland Reporter (1 Nov 1842 to 1 Sep 1844 on British Library microfilm at the Middlesbrough Reference Library) and The Cleveland Repertory & Stokesley Advertiser (1 Apr 1843 to 1 Oct 1845, with fragments of one more edition, on British Library microfilm at Middlesbrough Reference Library).

Some examples

An example of an error in remembering/transcribing dates

In one of Mr Barlow’s few surviving notebooks appears the following jotting:

Charlotte Sidgwick           
Sept 26  - Aged
Mary Imeson  -   aged 30  -  Octr 25       
Nancy Suggett aged 81 [?]  Oct 23   

In the burial register books he made three successive entries:

Charlotte Sidgwick buried on 26 Sep 1852 aged 34
Mary Imeson buried on 28 September – and her death certificate actually gives her date of death as 4 October. 
Nanny Sugget buried on 26 September. 

An example of a burial and baptism not recorded

Bartholomew Goldsborough death in 1844 is not recorded - but his headstone is listed in the Memorial Inscriptions and his death was announced in The Cleveland Repertory & Stokesley Advertiser.  Soon after he died, his wife gave birth to a son - an event noted by The Stokesley News & Cleveland Reporter.

Three examples of errors in Christian names
(these examples were found by Beryl Turner)

13 Dec 1855 baptism of John Herring Redhead, son of John & Hannah, Sexhow, farmer.   
The father’s name should be William
23 Dec 1871: Dorothy Garbutt, daughter of Thomas & Dorothy Caroline, Hutton, farmer.   
The child was called Annie
17 Jun 1873:  Thomas Watson Garbutt son of Thomas & Sarah, Hutton, farmer.   
The mother’s name was Dorothy Caroline.

Stately Homes of Hutton Rudby

The title was just a joke really.  This booklet began as a talk to the Hutton Rudby History Society in November 2000, and we couldn't find a suitable title for it until Judy Kitching (currently Secretary of the Society) came up with 'Stately Homes'.  

It incorporates the research that wasn't suitable for inclusion in 'A History Walk round Hutton Rudby' and later research done at the request of various people in the village.  I revised the text in 2006.

29 February 2020:  I have not revised the section on John Mease and Leven House, but my latest research on John and his brother Thomas can be found in the series of posts beginning here.  You can find there the story of their ambitious plans and how they fared, and where John Mease was at the time of the 1851 and 1861 censuses.

Map by Michael Brabin

Contents

Sexhow Hall: the 'stately home' that disappeared?

The Manorial Hall

The Manor House of Hutton

Rudby Hall (mediaeval)

Skutterskelfe Hall (now called Rudby Hall)

Linden Grange

The Elms, North Side

Leven House

Drumrauch Hall

Hutton House & Enterpen Hall

Changing Names

Some Interesting Deeds

A History Walk round Hutton Rudby

This booklet, which I originally published in 1997, was written above all for families and primary school children.  It is a brief history of Hutton Rudby told through its buildings and the reminiscences of older villagers.  It can also be used as a guide for anyone walking around the village - the original map drawn by Michael Brabin for the centre pages of the booklet appears at the end of this post.

I was very lucky to have been able to spend time talking with people who knew the village before the Second World War and I am glad I was able to record their memories for future generations.  So much of the world they knew has now disappeared, even to the extent that people now living in the village are under the impression that it is prohibited to walk on the village Green!  How surprised the former villagers, who for centuries played, grazed their livestock and wore well-established paths across the Green, would be to hear of that ...

I revised the text in 2005 shortly before moving to Darlington.  Hutton Rudby History Society now produces the booklet, which is still on sale in the village.

The illustrations were made by Penny Pinkney in 1997.

A History Walk round Hutton Rudby

An Introduction to the Walk

Hutton Rudby was once known as Hutton-juxta-Rudby, or Hutton-nigh-Rudby, because it is really two villages:  Hutton and Rudby, separated from each other by the River Leven.

How old is the village?

There have been people living here for thousands of years.  Stone Age tools have been found in North End.  The people of the Bronze Age buried their dead on Folly Hill in a 'round barrow', excavated in 1889 by Canon Atkinson, the famous vicar of Danby.  Bronze Age arrowheads have been found and the quernstones with which people ground their corn.  There were Iron Age villages near Sexhow and Hundale.

From the 1st century AD the Romans invaded and colonised Britain, and they lived here too.  There are the remains of a hypocaust (the heating system for a house) by the river between Hutton Rudby and Stokesley.

Next to come were the Anglo-Saxons, warriors who came across the North Sea to Britain from the 5th century.  In areas under their control most villages took Anglo-Saxon names – this village became "Hutton".  After a time Christianity, which had come to Britain in Roman times, grew strong again and a church was built in Hutton, but we do not know where.

From the end of the 8th century the Vikings began raiding the coast and at last took control of the north-east of England.  Hutton now lay in the Viking Kingdom of York, and the villages of Rudby, Skutterskelfe and Sexhow have Viking names.

When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 he divided the land amongst the men who followed him from Normandy.  But in the North fighting against William continued and in 1069 William ordered his soldiers to lay waste the land, murdering the people, burning their homes and crops and killing their animals.  There was nothing left to feed the people who survived, and they sold themselves into slavery or fled south to find food.  The following year it was written that there was still "no village inhabited between York and Durham; they became lurking places to wild beasts and robbers and were a great dread to travellers."  As a result of this, the Domesday Book in 1086 shows Hutton and Rudby to be "waste" – hardly inhabited or farmed.

The new Norman lords, the Meynills, built a church by the river, and each of the mediaeval townships, Hutton, Rudby, Skutterskelfe and Sexhow, had its own manor house.  Hutton began to take the shape we know today with houses gathered around a village green, which was probably where animals were kept safe at night.

What do the place names mean?

Hutton (the –ton ending shows this is an Anglo-Saxon name) means "village on a hill".
Rudby (the –by ending shows this is a Viking name) means either "Rudi's village" (a man's name) or "Rudda's village" (a woman's name).
Sexhow means either "Sekk's hill" or "the six hills".
Skutterskelfe means "village on the bank of a stream".
Leven is a Celtic word, from the people who lived here before the Romans.  It probably means "smooth".

How did the people make their living?

For hundreds of years the villagers worked in farming or at the trades which were essential for village life – as blacksmiths, millers, carpenters etc.  By the 18th century Cleveland was becoming famous for its wheat, butter, cheese, cattle and horses.  The villagers of Hutton Rudby had always made cloth for their own use, but from about 1700 many worked in their own homes spinning and weaving flax into linen to sell.  Some flax was grown locally, but most came from the Baltic into the ports of Yarm and Stockton. 

Spinning was done by the warmth of the fire with the help of light from a little window near the fireplace, while weavers worked generally in a shed near their house.  The cloth they made was taken by mules to markets all over the North East.  

This linen industry became more and more important, until by 1831 the village had more weavers for its size than any other village in the North Riding of Yorkshire.  

The coming and going of the weavers themselves, the bales of flax and the webs of finished cloth, made the village an active and outward-looking place.  In the heyday of smuggling between 1750 and 1830, when vast amounts of tea, coffee, gin, tobacco, wines and soap were being brought ashore by the smuggling gangs on the Cleveland coast, people in Hutton Rudby were engaged in the secret trade of getting the smuggled goods into the towns and villages of the countryside.  In those days, people of neighbouring townships claimed that the village was so notorious for its smugglers and thieves that no one would give Hutton Rudby women work as servants, and they were fond of quoting the rhyme:

Hutton Rudby and Enterpen

Far more rogues than honest men

In 1834 a power-driven spinning mill was established alongside the Hutton corn mill, beside the bridge over the Leven.  From then on this was the centre of the village weaving, and for over 70 years sailcloth was made here, first by water- and then by steam-power.

What was life in the village like in the past?

A hundred and fifty years ago, when the mill was working, the village was obviously much smaller than it is now, but there would have been many more people around in the day because they did not need to leave the village to go to work or to shop.  Weavers, cobblers, cartwrights, tailors, shopkeepers etc all worked in the village, which was a busy and lively place, noisy with the clatter of the weavers' looms.  Bricks were made on Campion Lane, there was a sawmill in Enterpen, and there were even miners who lived in the village and walked to work in Swainby over the fields.

  

Hutton Rudby and parish in 1840

From White's Directory 1840:-

RUDBY-IN-CLEVELAND is a small village on the north bank of the river Leven, 3 ½ miles W. by S. of Stokesley, and has in its township 81 souls, and 880 acres of land, mostly the property of Lord Falkland, the lord of the manor, impropriator, and patron of the Church (All Saints,) which is a perpetual curacy valued at £185, and augmented with a parliamentary grant of £1200 in 1814.  The Rev. Robt. Jph. Barlow, M.A., is the incumbent.
The parish comprises also Hutton, Middleton, East Rouncton, Scutterskelf, and Sexhow townships. 

HUTTON RUDBY is an extensive village, on the southern acclivities of the picturesque dale of the river Leven, 4 miles W.S.W. of Stokesley.  Its township increased its population from 707, in 1801, to 1027 souls, in 1831; and contains 1890 acres of land, including many scattered farm houses, bearing different names.  Part of the village is called Enterpen, and many of the inhabitants are employed in the manufacture of linen cloth, ticks, drills, checks, diapers, &c., there being here a large flax-mill, and about 250 weavers.  The executors of the late Mark Barker, Esq., are lords of the manor, but a great part of the soil belongs to other proprietors, and the co-heiresses of the late Geo. Weatherill, Esq., are impropriators of the great tithes.  The Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists have each a chapel here, and the former have a Centenary School.  Here is also a National School, built in 1836, and a Free School erected in 1740, and endowed with £5 a year, left by Chas. Bathurst, Esq.  The poor have a yearly rent charge of 20s, left by David Simpson in 1783, and the dividends of £100 three per cent. consols, purchased with £70 left by James Young, in 1807.

MIDDLETON-UPON-LEVEN is a small township and chapelry of scattered houses, in the picturesque dale of the river Leven, 4 ½ miles S.E of Yarm.  It contains 89 souls, and 850 acres of land, mostly the property of Colonel Wyndham and Lord Falkland, the former of whom is lord of the manor, and the latter impropriator of the tithes.  The Chapel of Ease is a perpetual curacy united with Rudby, and augmented with £1000 of Q.A.B., from 1740 to 1824.  Directory:- Jas Coulson, corn miller; Walton Fawell, vict., Chequers; and Hy Colbeck, Bartw. Gouldsbrough, Thos Legg, Thomas Righton, Wm Sleigh, Wm Smith, and John Tweddale, farmers.

ROUNCTON (EAST,) 7 miles S. of Yarm, is a small village on a lofty eminence, and has in its township 127 souls, and 1600 acres of land, belonging to various families.  The Grange is the seat and property of John Wailes, Esq.  The Chapel of Ease is a perpetual curacy annexed to Rudby, and augmented with £1000 of Q.A.B., from 1747 to 1817.  Directory:- Wm Carnagie, gardener; Mrs Ann Granston.; Wm Hildreth, tailor; Wm Lilburn, vict. and smith, Black Swan, Trenholme Bar; John Wailes, Esq.; Thos Wailes, shoemkr; John Atkinson, Ann Kilvington and Son, and Rd Scarth, farmers and owners; and Jph Fidler, John Hall, Rt Kendall, and David Smith, farmers.

SCUTTERSKELF, or SKUTTERSKELF, 3 miles W.S.W. of Stokesley, is a small township containing only 38 souls, and 880 acres of land, all the property of the Rt. Hon. Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland, and Baron Carey, a Scotch peer, whose seat is Scutterskelf Hall, a handsome Grecian mansion, erected in 1831, in the sylvan dale of the river Leven, near Leven Grove, which was the seat of the late Lady Amherst, but was taken down a few years ago.  The farmers are John Dodsworth, John Redhead, and John Wrighton; Pp. Hibberd, gamekeeper; and Roderic McRea, gardener.

SEXHOW township, on the south side of the vale of Leven, 4 miles S.W. by W. of Stokesley, has only 35 souls, and 540 acres of land, all the property of Sir Wm. Foulis, but formerly belonging to the Laytons, whose ancient hall is now occupied by two farmers, Geo. Redhead and Thos. Chapman.  The other farmers are John Duck, Rt. Newsam, and Stephen York.

Hutton Rudby in 1823

The parish of Rudby-in-Cleveland as described in Baines' Directory 1823:

HUTTON, in the parish of Rudby, wap. and liberty of Langbargh; 4 miles SW of Stokesley.  An extensive, pleasant and populous village adjacent to the small village of Rudby, wherein is situated the parish church, there being at Hutton only a Methodist chapel, and one for the Primitive Methodists lately erected.  Here is likewise a Union Sunday School, capable of containing one hundred and ten children.  Linen is manufactured at this place to a considerable extent.  Population, 919.

RUDBY, in the wap. and liberty of Langbargh; 3 ½ miles WSW of Stokesley; a small village, pleasantly situated near the banks of the Leven.  The church is an ancient plain structure, dedicated to All Saints; the living is a vicarage, in the patronage of the Hon. Lady Amherst; incumbent, Rev. Richard Shepherd.  Here is a small school, with an endowment of £5 per annum, for teaching six poor children of the village.  Population, 76.

SEXHOW, a small hamlet, in the parish of Rudby, wap. and liberty of Langbargh; 4 miles SW of Stokesley.  Population, 38.

SKUTTERSKELFE, or LEVEN GROVE, in the parish of Rudby, wap. and liberty of Langbargh; 3 miles WSW of Stokesley.  Near to this village is Folly Hill, a conspicuous seamark, which may be seen at the distance of twenty leagues upon the German Ocean.  Population, 32.