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].
