6. Chester: smallpox, siege and travelling home: 1643

Meanwhile, there was smallpox in Chester and three of Mrs Wandesford's household took the terrifying disease.  

First to fall ill was seven-year-old John, who caught it from their cousin William Wandesford's sons who were also living in Chester.  Alice was forbidden to go near John but she couldn't resist sending him letters tied to a little dog's neck.  Was it because the little dog had been taken into his bed that Alice caught the infection?  Was it the shock she suffered at the first sight of his poor little scarred face – he had been a beautiful child and of a sweet complexion?  At any rate, now she was taken very ill.  They thought this was because the pustules were staying near her heart instead of erupting through her skin.  More fearful, anxious nursing for Mrs Wandesford, more watching by the bedside at night ... and at last Alice, too, recovered.  

But a nine-year-old boy called Frank Kelly did not survive.  Mr Wandesford had been bowling on the Green in Dublin one day when he noticed that Frank was gathering up his bowls for him.  He was taken with this quick-witted, ragged orphan who gladly joined the Wandesford household, which grew very fond of him, and he was duly educated in Anglicanism to save his immortal soul.  His sight was eaten out with the smallpox, Alice remembered, and his mouth very sore.  They cared for him tenderly – Mrs Wandesford, who dressed his sores as attentively as if he had been her own child, two watchers, the doctor and his medicines – but they could not save him and he died after a fortnight's suffering.

Then the war came unexpectedly close.

Early on 17 July 1643, Alice had been at prayer in the first morning and was now standing looking out at the church of St Mary on the Hill from an open window in the tirritt – which must mean the projecting upper bay – of their house.  Out of nowhere there came a shot, passing so close by that the casement window shut with a bang and the whole tirritt shook.  She was left breathless and shaking with fright.  The enemy was at the city walls.

Old Chester: the Cross and Rows, photographed c1895

Sir William Brereton, a wealthy Cheshire landowner, ardent Puritan and very effective military commander, had launched a probing attack against the city's defences.  After two days, his forces moved on.  Alice was told a consoling tale of incompetence and failure on the part of the besiegers.  Three granados – explosive shells fired from a mortar – were shot into the town.  One hit the sconce – a detached fort – within the walls.  Two of Captain Manwaring's men seized an ox hide and smothered it.  The second landed among a company of women out milking in a pasture, but it fell in a ditch and was quenched.  The third, she was told, fell among Brereton's horse and killed many, so that they raised the siege.  In fact, the city was too well defended and Sir William Brereton's forces moved off.  They would return.

While the city fathers strengthened the defences, Mrs Wandesford made her plans to leave for the Royalist North Riding.

Travelling east: 1643

On 28 August 1643, Mrs Wandesford and her three children, now aged between nine and seventeen, set off for Yorkshire.  With them were several servants and also some tenants – they must have been the people who had left Yorkshire to build Mr Wandesford's new town of Castlecomer and had expected, until the rebellion, to make a life there.  They made an inoffensive company and they were travelling light.  Mrs Wandesford's status as a widowed gentlewoman should be some protection – though there were horrid and frightening stories, of course – and she could reasonably hope for the courteous assistance of Parliamentary commanders.  

They had some 125 miles ahead of them and a crossing of the wild Pennines.  Roads across the uplands were hardly ever more than drove roads and pack horse trails, and Mrs Wandesford had a choice.  She could follow the valley of the River Wharfe towards Ripley.  That would allow them to take a coach, but it would lead them uncomfortably close to the Parliamentarian cloth manufacturing districts of the West Riding and the Puritan town of Otley.  Or they could choose the more northerly, steeper crossing past Blubberhouses, but that would be best ridden.  Alice usually makes a point of mentioning a coach journey, and she doesn't here – so perhaps they rode.

The first stages of their journey were through territory controlled by Parliament.  After travelling some twenty miles, they came wearily into Warrington in the West Derby Hundred of Lancashire at ten o'clock at night.

Warrington had been surrendered to Sir William Brereton's forces on 20 May.  It was now under its new governor, the moderate Presbyterian, Sir George Booth.  

Sir William Brereton (1604-61)

They had an uneasy night, as the town was several times alarmed by reports that Royalists from Chester were approaching.  

Leaving Warrington, they would pass through the Blackburn Hundred where Colonel Richard Shuttleworth of Gawthorpe Hall commanded the army for Parliament.  He gave Mrs Wandesford a pass, by means of which they journeyed the dozen miles to the Royalist town of Wigan.  

Parliamentary forces had sacked the town in April and when they left had taken many prisoners and as much booty as they could carry.  The Wandesfords found it, Alice remembered, sorely demolished and all the windows broken.  The trauma was still vivid and the travellers' arrival frightened the townspeople, who were scared that they were Parliamentarians.  The soldiers had cursed them as Papist dogs and had forced them to watch as they burned five hundred of their Bibles and prayer books at the market cross, claiming there was Popery in them.  Mrs Wandesford was gladly welcomed among them once they realised she was the great niece of Edward Fleetwood, who had been their Rector for thirty years in the last century, and whose memory was still treasured.  They flocked to see her and were as kind as could possibly be.  Alice remembered that even though their Bibles and prayer books were burned, they never missed morning prayers at six and afternoon prayers at four.

The next day the party travelled on to the Yorkshire-Lancashire border.  Some thirty miles from Wigan, they reached Downham near Whalley, three miles from Clitheroe.

But they weren't allowed to go on.  A Parliamentary corporal and his men refused to believe Colonel Shuttleworth's pass was genuine and made them get down with threats and oaths.  Their harsh language and abusive behaviour were terrifying.  Mrs Wandesford and her children were forced to take shelter in a poor dwelling where they lay all night with heavy hearts, fearing that they were about to be used barbarously.  All they could do was wait and hope while one of their servants and two of the soldiers went to find Colonel Shuttleworth, who was ten miles away.  He was, not surprisingly, angry when he saw his own pass and heard what had happened and he sent his son-in-law Captain John Ashton of Cuerdale to deal with the matter and punish the soldiers.  Captain Ashton and his men then escorted Mrs Wandesford and her party to the edge of his jurisdiction.  

Now they needed to get to the other side of the Pennines.  Their next destination was probably Skipton Castle, about sixteen miles away.  It was held by the Royalists and was under siege from the Parliamentarians – but the siege was not very active at this point and Mrs Wandesford had her pass from Colonel Shuttleworth and perhaps also the escort of Captain John Ashton.

From Skipton they could ride east to the Royalist stronghold of Knaresborough Castle, or to Ripley Castle, which was held by Sir William Ingleby for the King.  That would be a journey of twenty to twenty-five miles across wild, empty countryside, climbing to 1,000 feet before dropping down to Blubberhouses, a hamlet of a few mining cottages.  Then there would just be the final twenty miles or so to Snape, which lies between Kirklington and Bedale.  Snape was their destination – it was one of Sir Thomas Danby's manors and Catherine was living there while he was with the King's armies.  She had invited them to come and stay with her.  

They arrived at Snape on 2 September 1643.  They had been six days on the road but now they were in their own country.  For about a year they lived, Alice wrote, with great comfort and safety with her sweet sister Danby at Snape.

Next: 7. The Siege of York & Battle of Marston Moor: 1644 

5. War in Yorkshire: 1642-1643

In Chester, the Wandesfords found a welcome and were treated with kindness and friendship by the gentry families.  Within the strong walls of a city well-stocked with muskets, garrisoned by Royalist troops and with armed watchmen night and day guarding the gates, Mrs Wandesford must have felt she had reached a safe haven for her family and especially for her convalescent daughter and troubled son Christopher.  Refugees like themselves from Ireland were coming into the city, and lawlessness in Cheshire was driving people there, but Sir Thomas Danby was able to relieve her of the care of her grandsons and her twenty-year-old son George was safely in France with his tutor.  

She had many anxieties to deal with.  Besides the health of Alice and Christopher, there were matters from her husband's estates in an increasingly chaotic Ireland to settle, and she was short of money because rents from Yorkshire weren't arriving.  She didn't like to accept the offers of help from friends in Chester, but she had the invaluable support of her brother Sir Edward Osborne.  

Sir Edward Osborne (1596-1647)

He, poor man, had never recovered from the death of his eldest boy Edward in 1638.  Sir Edward had taken the place of Strafford as President of the Council of the North and was living at York Manor in York, the official residence, at the time.  A violent storm brought down a chimneystack which crashed through the roof, killing 17 year old Edward and sparing 6 year old Thomas only because, when the disaster happened, he was looking under a table for his pet cat.  Now Sir Edward was busy as a Commissioner of Array for the King, charged with mustering troops.

York Manor (now King's Manor).  [Tim Green CC by 2.0]

Outside Chester the situation was bad.  

The Wandesfords knew that Scottish troops were no longer in easy reach of their Yorkshire estates – they had left England in August – but now dreadful news kept coming in from Ireland of cruelties and massacres.  Even more appalling versions of the same news, of much larger numbers of Protestants dead, of rapes and tortures and murdered babies, came from the London printers and propagandists.  Anglicans like the Wandesfords were shocked to hear of the desecration of the cathedrals of Winchester and Chichester by Parliamentary troops who smashed the stained glass and the memorials.  Alice shared the opinions of everyone she knew – the King's Scottish and English opponents were men who had wantonly tired of a lawful and peaceable government, the Irish nakedly thirsted after the blood and lives of the English, the religious grievances of the Calvinists and Catholics were nothing but pretence, and the Earl of Strafford was a martyr.  

Yorkshire and the Battle of Piercebridge: 1642

Beyond the walls of Chester – and even within the walls – conflicting loyalties were dividing families, towns and villages.  

London grew too dangerous for the King and he set up his Court in York on 19 March 1642.  The city found itself the capital of the kingdom for six months, housing foreign ambassadors, nobles, the important men of state and a committee sent by Parliament to keep an eye on the King.  

Rival Puritan and Royalist groups fought each other in the streets.  Terrifying stories of massacres in Ireland began to reach Yorkshire and wild fears of Catholic Irish invasion took root.  Having two Catholic priests executed – the head of Father Lockwood, aged nearly 90, was put on Bootham Bar, and the head of young Edmund Catterick of Carlton near Richmond, on Micklegate Bar – couldn't convince doubters that Protestantism was safe in the King's hands.  And it was no use the King decreeing that no Catholics could join his army – at the muster, anyone could see that nearly half the Royalist colonels were Catholic.  Recruitment for Parliament surged among the lower classes in the West Riding.  As time passed and the hope of finding an agreement between the two sides faded, the city authorities began to strengthen York's defences.  

On 22 August 1642, the King marched southward and raised his standard at Nottingham Castle.  He was now at war with Parliament.  

On 23 September, the Wandesfords will have seen the King being enthusiastically welcomed into Chester with great civic ceremony.  He was there because it was an important strategic stronghold, the main port for Ireland and the gateway to Royalist North Wales and he spent a few nights in the city, reviewing the troops of his supporters, before moving on to Wrexham.  A month later, his forces and the Parliamentarians met in battle for the first time.  It was at Edgehill, a dozen miles south-east of Stratford-upon-Avon, and both sides claimed victory.

And what about Yorkshire, where Alice's sister Catherine must now have been in great anxiety for her husband, who had gone to join the King's army?

Hull was held for Parliament by Sir John Hotham and Scarborough by the Whitby landowner Sir Hugh Cholmley, and the independently-minded weavers and small farmers of the West Riding were mostly Puritans, but the North Riding was for the King and the few Parliamentarians there had a poor time of it.  They included men like the Earl of Mulgrave, the three sons of Sir David Foulis of Ingleby – their father had spent seven years in prison because of Strafford – and their cousins Thomas and James Chaloner of Guisborough.  The Robinsons of Rokeby near Greta Bridge were ardent Parliamentarians.  John Dodsworth of Thornton Watlass, a kinsman of the Wandesfords, was raising a company of dragoons for Parliament.

Parliamentarian captains met at Bedale in October 1642.  They tried to organise the Trained Bands and they held a public meeting in Richmond to raise funds.  But the fund-raising wasn't very successful and the Trained Bands weren't at all keen.  Very many people wanted to keep out of this argument and in some places communities made neutrality pacts with each other.  Before long, force and threats were being used to get recruits.  Hugh Cholmley of Tunstall near Catterick first tricked his neighbours into mustering for his son's troop of Royalist horse and then forced them to stay in the troop, threatening he would have them hanged and their houses burned if they didn't.

Both King and Parliament needed control of the crossing places on the River Tees.  The Royalists were bringing in supplies of arms from the Continent into the River Tyne.  They were needed for York, which was threatened from the west and from the Parliamentarian ports of Hull and Scarborough to the east.

William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, was the Royalist commander-in-chief in the North East.  His army of about 2,000 horse and dragoons, together with 4,000 foot soldiers and ten pieces of cannonry reached the narrow mediaeval bridge at Piercebridge on 1 December 1642.  On the other bank of the Tees was Captain John Hotham with about 120 horse, 400 foot and two small cannons.  

William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle

An advance guard of Royalist dragoons and foot under 36 year old Colonel Sir Thomas Howard forced its way onto the bridge and fierce fighting followed.  Finally unable to hold the bridge, Hotham withdrew his men towards Knaresborough with, he said, only three wounded.  The attackers will have suffered more in their onslaught on the bridge and their leader Sir Thomas Howard was killed.  He was buried the next day at High Coniscliffe while the Marquess of Newcastle and his forces marched on to York.   

Battles at Guisborough and Yarm: 1643

The loss of Piercebridge and the arrival in York of the supplies was an enormous blow to the Parliamentarian gentry of the North Riding.  Their goods and estates were confiscated and they couldn't help their friends in the West Riding because the men of the Trained Bands, who had turned up so reluctantly, simply melted away.  Sir Henry Foulis of Ingleby reported that a Cleveland foot regiment that had mustered 500 men at Yarm had rapidly dwindled to 80 at the approach of the enemy.  

Meanwhile, someone the Wandesfords had known in Dublin had returned home to his estates at Hemlington, just south of the Tees.  This was 32 year old Guilford Slingsby, who had been Strafford's loyal secretary to the end and who had since been secretary to the young Prince of Wales in Holland.  

Slingsby had no military experience himself, so he had brought back with him a few mercenaries to train the troops he intended to raise for the King.  They were needed to protect the arms convoys crossing the Tees and to threaten the Parliamentarians in Scarborough.

Sir Hugh Cholmley in Scarborough learned that his distant kinsman Slingsby had orders from the Marquess of Newcastle to occupy Whitby – which was his own territory, where he had his great house beside the ruins of the ancient Abbey.  Picking up two troops of dragoons in Malton, he took his men on the hard, wintry march across the moors towards Guisborough.  He had with him 80 horse, 170 dragoons and 130 foot – some 380 men in all.

On 16 January 1643, Cholmley's men came down from the moors.  Slingsby's forces – some 100 horse and 400 foot, mostly raw recruits – were so confident that they came about a mile out of Guisborough to meet the Parliamentary troops and they placed their musketeers under the hedges in positions of advantage.  They were able to hold their ground for a couple of hours but they were gradually forced back and defeated.  Slingsby, badly wounded by artillery fire, was taken prisoner.  The surgeons tried to save him, amputating both his legs above the knee, but he died three days later.  He was buried in York Minster.  

When Sir Hugh Cholmley, who had moderate religious views and was becoming ever more unhappy with his choice of allegiance, reported the battle to Parliament, he wrote

I am forced to draw my sword not only against my countrymen but many near friends and allies some of which I know both to be well affected in religion and lovers of their liberties.

He withdrew his men to Scarborough, and he ordered 400 foot, 150 horse and two cannons to Yarm to hold the narrow bridge over the Tees.  

A few weeks later, a very large convoy of 120 wagons and 140 packhorses, guarded by perhaps 2,000 men, was on its way south to the Marquess of Newcastle.  The Parliamentary forces at the bridge had no chance.  On 1 February 1643 the Royalists fell on them and in a very brief time most of them were taken.  The Battle of Yarm was soon over.  The prisoners were taken to Durham Castle, where they were badly treated.  The Royalist convoy left engineers at Yarm to stop future Parliamentarian attempts on the bridge – they broke down its northern arch and put a wooden drawbridge in its place.  

Within weeks, Sir Hugh Cholmley had changed sides.  The King now held Scarborough.  On 30 June, the Marquess of Newcastle won a victory at the Battle of Adwalton Moor, five miles from Bradford.  The North was now almost completely Royalist.

6. Chester: smallpox, siege and travelling home: 1643 

4. War in the Three Kingdoms: 1640

With Wentworth now the King's closest adviser and soon in virtual command of his armies, Mr Wandesford became Lord Deputy of Ireland on 1 April 1640.  

He was left with an increasingly impossible task, as developments in Scotland and England interacted with the grievances of Ireland.  To add to his worries and forebodings, Wentworth had just made another bitter enemy.  On being made Earl of Strafford, he had chosen for his secondary title to be Baron Raby.  Why cause so needlessly such deep offence to Sir Henry Vane of Raby Castle?  Mr Wandesford himself would never accept a title or honours – he felt it was unsuitable in those unsettled times that threatened the King's own future.

Scots musketeers, from website of The Earl of Manchester's Regiment of Foote 

In early September Mr Wandesford will have heard with utter dismay that the King's attempt at another campaign against the Covenanting Scots had only produced the invasion of England and the Covenanters' victory over the Royalist forces at the Battle of Newburn on the River Tyne.  The border between Scotland and England was now at the River Tees.  So Scottish troops were only a few miles from the Wandesford estates.  To add insult to injury, a fortnight after the battle, the King signed the Treaty of Ripon agreeing to pay £850 a day to the Scottish soldiers' upkeep.  

Musket ball: found about 5
miles south of Sedgefield

The Irish Parliament grew ever more difficult to manage and was now trying to  impeach Strafford.  It would be no use Strafford advising his old friend to subdue them by holding firm, saying his "old rule of moderate counsels will not serve his turn in cases of this extremity".  Strafford was always supremely confident that his own bold and dictatorial methods would succeed.  Alice often heard Mr Wandesford speak to his wife of his forebodings for the future of the kingdoms.  

In the middle of November, Mr Wandesford learned that his colleague Sir George Radcliffe was about to be accused of High Treason and that the English Parliament had started impeachment proceedings against his great friend Wentworth, now Strafford.  On hearing this, Mr Wandesford sat in a sort of trance.  

Not long afterwards he was taken ill with a fever and kept at home for some days.  Feeling well again, he attended church but realised on coming home that he had not fully recovered.  He took to his bed again and soon the fever grew on him.  He did not expect to get better and he prepared for death.   

On the Tuesday he called for his Will, which he had executed the month before, to be read over to him in the presence of witnesses.  He spoke at length to his son George, urging him to fear and love God, to do his duty, to love and honour his mother and always to consult his uncle Sir Edward Osborne.  He had no doubt that the three kingdoms were heading for disaster.  He would call Alice, now nearly fifteen, to his bedside and, looking at her steadily, say, "Ah poor child, what must thou see and thine eyes behold," and, praying for her, turn away with a great groan.  

On the Wednesday night, the doctors laid live pigeons, cut in half, to the soles of his feet – a sure way to bring down even the most malignant fever.  "Are you come to the last remedy?" he asked them, smiling.  He knew that his illness would outwit their skill.  He died on Thursday 3 December 1640 at home in Damas Street, after declaring his faith and hope in God to Bishop Bramhall of Derry, a Yorkshireman he had known for many years, who gave him absolution.  He was forty-eight.

When they embalmed his body, they found that his heart was decayed on one side and this was felt to be because of the burden of work and care that he had carried.  They buried him with state in Christ Church under a marble slab before the Lord Deputy's seat.  

Mr Wandesford had faced many problems but he believed in conciliation and moderation and he didn't make enemies.  At his funeral, the Irish paid him the high tribute of keening for him – singing a lament.  It was never known to be have done for an Englishman before, Alice remembered, and when the unearthly, mournful cry of 'Och – Ochone' was raised, it so terrified her grieving twelve-year-old brother Christopher that from that time, she said, he fell into a fit of the spleen – a serious depression.

Cannon ball: found about 5 
miles south of Sedgefield

Notes

The King's campaigns against his Scottish kingdoms in 1639 and 1640 are known as The Bishops' Wars.

Keening, which in time became a profession for women, was strongly discouraged by Protestant clergymen in later years.  A BBC World Service Documentary called Songs for the Dead, including audio recorded in the 1950s of one of the last professional keeners, Brigid Mullin, can be heard here 

And a hint of how it must have sounded at Christ Church in 1640 when it so frightened young Christopher Wandesford can be gleaned from this video of Professor Ó Madagáin giving a verse of the Caoineadh Art Ó Laoghaire (Keen for Art O’Leary) followed by the Cry or Gol, the "Och ochón", which is the "hone" that Alice mentions.  Imagine this being unexpectedly sung full-throated by a great gathering of people

War comes to Ireland: 1641

The shocked and grieving family stayed on in the house at Damas Street.  Mrs Wandesford was a woman of great strength of character.  She was preparing to leave, but she kept up the great household as befitted the Lord Deputy's widow while she paid off the debts and discharged the servants.  The expense was a worry because she couldn't get at her own money in England, but the King had promised that the funeral would be paid for out of the Treasury and that the estate wouldn't have the cost of George's wardship – he was yet another underage Wandesford heir.  George was now seventeen and she sent him out of Ireland to finish his education. 

So Mrs Wandesford, the three younger children and her two little grandsons were still in Dublin when they heard that their family friend the Earl of Strafford had been condemned to death by an act of attainder when legal proceedings by Parliament against him had failed.  He was executed before a large crowd on Tower Hill on 12 May – murdered, as far as Alice and her family were concerned.  His many enemies, including Sir Henry Vane of Raby Castle and Sir Thomas Layton of Sexhow, had finally succeeded and his King's slipperiness and political mistakes had been fatal to him.  

And the Wandesfords were still in Dublin when the Irish Rebellion broke out on 23 October 1641.

Long-term grievances and the short-term hardships of poor harvests and economic difficulties had come to a head.  The descendants of the Norman French lords and the descendants of the Irish whom they had conquered had drawn together in the face of hostility from their Protestant rulers.  Ulster landowners had planned a preemptive strike so they could, like the Scots, take over their kingdom and force concessions from the King.  They succeeded in Ulster but they were betrayed in Dublin and they failed to take the city.  Their bloodless coup had failed.  Massacres of Ulster Protestants and bloody war were the result.  The extreme violence of the uprising was followed by the extreme violence of the retaliation.

When the plot was discovered, wild rumours spread through Dublin.  That night Mrs Wandesford and her household, with everything they could take, fled into the safety of the Castle.  

The next fortnight was spent in the city, packing up to leave in a nightmare time of fear and constant alarms.  Terrified, short of sleep, food and rest, fifteen-year-old Alice fell ill of a desperate flux, a dysentery which they called the Irish Disease.  But Mrs Wandesford found a ship that would take them all and they had a safe and quiet passage across the Irish Sea.  

Safely ashore, they stayed several weeks in the beerhouse at Neston Quay because Alice was so ill.  Sickness and grief had taken a heavy toll on this tender, loving, sensitive girl, who was prone all her life to ominous dreams foretelling family deaths.  A doctor came out from Chester to see her and she was cared for lovingly by her mother until at last she gained enough strength to make the journey by coach to Chester, or Weschester as it was still often called.

Note

The Irish rebellion and the war that followed is known as the Confederate War, from the Confederation of Kilkenny formed by the rebels in May 1642.

5. War in Yorkshire: 1642-1643 

3. Dublin & War: 1629-1639

Until the Duke of Buckingham – who was all-powerful as King James' favourite and then as King Charles' adviser – was assassinated in 1628 by an army officer with a grievance, Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth had opposed him and the King.  

Duke of Buckingham: 1625

They had stood against King Charles when he tried to get round the need to have taxation voted for in Parliament by raising Forced Loans – imprisonment without trial was the penalty for those who, like Sir Thomas, refused to obliged the King with a loan – and by using martial law to force ordinary householders to lodge his soldiers and sailors in their own homes and keep them in food and clothes.  Mr Wandesford played an active part in the opposition to the King.  But by 1629 the rift between the King and Parliament widened to a gulf and positions were hardening on both sides.  The King was already viewed with great distrust and now it was feared by some that the bishops he had appointed were working to undermine the Church of England and move it towards the Church of Rome.  

If common ground couldn't be found between King and Parliament – and it was clear that it could not – then the time had come for men to make decisions.  Which side should have the upper hand?  The increasingly Puritan House of Commons or the intransigent King?  For many it was an agonising choice – a man might be as repelled by the aims and the religious position of the Puritan faction as he was by the King's past political manoeuvres and his slippery tactics.  But a choice had to be made.  Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth chose the King.

Now began the period known as Charles I's Personal Rule, when he governed without a Parliament from the spring of 1629 to the spring of 1640.  But it was not the end of the two friends' public life.  With the Duke of Buckingham assassinated in 1628, the King needed a new adviser and it would soon be Sir Thomas Wentworth.  He was made Viscount Wentworth and President of the Council of the North.  So he was able to help his friend to office and Mr Wandesford became the Deputy Bailiff of Richmondshire, Deputy Constable of Richmond and Middleham Castles and Master of the King's forests.  

Wentworth was by now a formidable public figure, much in the King's favour, but his gift for making enemies only grew.  It was particularly on display as President of the Council of the North.  Among the enemies were two Cleveland landowners – Sir David Foulis of Ingleby Greenhow, an old Scottish courtier of King James, and Sir Thomas Layton of Sexhow.  They clashed with Wentworth over a cynical ploy by the King to raise money by fining gentlemen who could have attended his coronation and been knighted, but who had not done so.  Sir Thomas Layton found himself in 1633 in the frightening position of being brought before the King's Court of Star Chamber.  He escaped lightly, but Sir David Foulis ended up in the Fleet Prison for seven years.  His sons would be no friends of Wentworth or of the King.  

To Dublin

And now Alice's life took a very different course.  When she was eight, the family moved to Dublin.  Her father had become one of the great men in the viceregal court, one of the small group of close advisers around Wentworth, now the Lord Deputy of Ireland.  

Some of Wentworth's friends had been against him going to Ireland.  They thought the post was a poisoned chalice and one he should refuse.  It was a job in which it was almost impossible to succeed and being away from Court left his enemies free to plot against him.  Perhaps Mr Wandesford thought it was a bad idea himself – he was always cautious and moderate where Wentworth was bold and dictatorial.  However, Wentworth accepted and the King agreed that he could take Mr Wandesford with him, to fill the legal and administrative post of Master of the Rolls.  

In July 1633, Wentworth, his family and advisers left for Ireland.  Mr Wandesford took with him his ten-year-old son George and his young son-in-law Thomas Danby.  Mrs Wandesford stayed behind with the younger children Alice and Christopher and they all travelled to Dublin some months later, together with baby John who had been born in London in the meantime.  The family settled into their new home in Damas Street – a very elegant house, according to a descendant, in a very wholesome Air, with a good Orchard and Garden leading down to the Water Side.  

Speed's map of Dublin in 1610

The small walled city of Dublin was a fraction of the size of London, though it had grown in size and prosperity since this map was drawn by Speed in 1610.  It had its own university, Trinity College, founded in 1592 under the encouragement of Queen Elizabeth to bring Ireland into the world of European learning and to strengthen Protestantism on the island.  It soon had a theatre – Wentworth dearly loved going to a play and he encouraged his children's tutor John Ogilby to set up Ireland's first custom-built theatre in Werburgh Street.  He had great plans for Ireland.

Life in Ireland

Six happy years followed for Alice.  She had the company of Wentworth's daughters as she learned her lessons – Anne was younger than she was by eighteen months and Arabella by four and half years – and her education was of the best.  On her father's orders she learned to speak and write French, to sing, dance, and play on the lute and theorboe, a 14-string lute with a long neck.  She was taught the arts of huswifery that her mother thought suitable for a young lady of her birth – such skills as silk embroidery, making sweetmeats, and making decorative leaves and flowers by gumming together layers of silk and cutting them into shapes.  

Wentworth's daughters, Anne & Arabella

Genteel indoor physical exercise was included, on a swing – she and the Wentworth girls used to "swing by the arms" as the ladies did for recreation and exercise, and Alice found it did her good.  Until, that is, one day at the house of Sir Robert Meredyth, when the girls wearied of the game and a page boy was instructed to push Alice.  Alice did not like this idea but could not get off the swing in time before he came over and gave it a violent shove – which resulted in her losing her grip and falling forward onto the floor onto her chin and being knocked quite silly for a while.  Sir Robert Meredyth was a member of the Privy Council; Alice's life – and that of her mother and brothers – was spent in government circles among the Protestant English rulers of a Catholic island.  

Beyond those circles lay people that Alice hardly knew or never encountered.  There were the Old English, descendants of the Norman lords who had conquered the island centuries earlier – they were still mostly Catholic.  And there were the Irish that they had defeated, also Catholic, excluded from their ancient lands and from civic life.  And there were Protestant incomers.  King James, to subjugate Ireland, had begun the Plantation of the province of Ulster, importing Protestant, English-speaking colonists from England and especially Scotland to settle there.  Wentworth, Mr Wandesford and the other close advisers believed that planting Protestants in other areas of Ireland – on land claimed by quibbles and legal loopholes to be the King's – was the way forward to a productive, modern country.  It would civilise the Irish.  Discontent simmered.

Wentworth's aim was to ensure the King had absolute power over Ireland, to bring order and prosperity to the country, to bring its Calvinist Protestant church in line with the King's High Church Anglicanism, and for Catholicism to dwindle away.  His goal was for Ireland was to be as like England as possible – but dependent on England.  He was ruthlessly efficient – everyone was glad when he put an end to piracy – but he and his policies were far from popular.  He was high-handed and his short temper was made much worse whenever he was in pain with that excruciating complaint, the gout. 

Alice's time was not only passed in the city.  In 1635 Mr Wandesford bought the manor and castle of Kildare, some twenty miles from Dublin, and for a couple of years it was the family's country house.  Perhaps it was here that Alice learned to ride.  It was while living here in 1636 that Mr Wandesford wrote a book of advice for his son and heir George, for the "regulating of his whole life", with instructions on such vital points as what to study and how to choose a wife, clearly setting out the universal understanding that marriage for the gentry was a very practical matter.  The greater a wife's fortune, the greater would be George's own comfort and the gratitude of his descendants.

On one terrifying occasion which Alice remembered vividly – it was on 6 October 1636 – they had driven out of Dublin to go to Kildare.  Mrs Wandesford, Alice and the three boys were inside the coach and Mr Wandesford and his men rode alongside.  They came to a narrow place where the riders had to fall back.  On one side of their road was a deep river – the Liffey? – and on the other a dry bank.  Was there no space for the coach?  Did the ground begin to give way?  The riders watched with horror as the coach began to slip – but the coachman, with great presence of mind, forced it to overturn against the bank.  Some of the family inside were hurt, but they escaped plunging into the river.  

The following year, Mr Wandesford gave up the estate to his great friend Wentworth, who had taken a liking to it.  Splendour and ceremonial were part of his plans for imposing royal authority on Ireland and he began to build a viceregal residence there, at Jigginstown near Naas.  Mr Wandesford had already begun to plan his own plantation – a new town in County Kilkenny, nearly sixty miles from Dublin.  He bought the estate of Castlecomer on which he began, with his usual efficiency and energy, to build a model market town with a new church, manufacturies and collieries, using the labour and expertise of artisans who came over from Yorkshire with their families.  For his own family he built a house and enclosed a deer park.  Besides all this work and his other financial plans in Ireland, he was busy in Parliament and as Master of the Rolls, and he deputised when Wentworth went to England.  His family can't have seen much of him.

1639:  shipwreck & war

The year 1639, when Alice was thirteen, was marked for her forever by escape from shipwreck and drowning.  She had travelled to England with her mother, who was suffering from the stone – bladder or kidney stones – and had decided to take the waters at St Vincent's Well, just outside Bristol.  In late August they set off back to Ireland, bringing with them Alice's nephews from Yorkshire, eight-year-old Thomas and seven-year-old Christopher.  They were the eldest sons of Alice's sister Catherine, now Lady Danby – during Thomas Danby's short stay in Dublin in 1633 he had been knighted by the Lord Deputy – and the boys were coming to Ireland for their education.  When the party reached the quay at Neston on the River Dee estuary, ten miles from Chester, they found they were kept ashore for a week by contrary winds and a great storm during which five ships were cast upon the shore.  One ship was so close to the house in which they were staying that its mainmast nearly touched the window.  

At last, on 22 August, they were able to go aboard one of the King's new ships, only to find that, within an hour of sailing, they were driven by a storm miles beyond Dublin to Skerries.  The anchor was lowered but for ten hours they were in peril until a Mr Hubert sent out a fishing boat to help.  And now Alice was nearly drowned.  She was somehow caught by the cable stretched between the boat and the ship and was half overboard when a seaman, coming up onto deck, saw her and pulled her back just in time.  At last, at eight o'clock in the evening, they were all brought safely ashore to Skerries where Mr Hubert and his family made them most comfortable until the next day when Mr Wandesford and some friends came out by coach from Dublin to bring them home.

Charles I by Van Dyck: 1635 or 1636

Mrs Wandesford's illness and the shipwreck were just a part of Mr Wandesford's troubles.  In 1638, King Charles' attempts to force his own brand of religion upon Scotland had ended in crisis.  The Scots created a National Covenant, an agreement signed by the people across the country, opposing the King's new prayer book and the existence of bishops.  So the King had begun the year 1639 by announcing his intention of raising an army against his Scottish kingdom.  

At this time, there was no standing army – just the Trained Bands, local militias made up of householders and their sons, who were obliged to turn out when summoned for training and action.  Their effectiveness was improved by the many men who had served in the religious wars in Europe.  The cavalry were the shock troops.  The foot – the infantry – was made up of pikemen, each with his ash pole, which could be up to 18 feet long and was tipped with a 2 foot long iron spear, and musketeers.  Dragoons rode light ponies and dismounted to fight on foot.  The ordnance – artillery – was of a range of sizes, from the large siege guns to the lighter and more easily transportable field guns.  

Battle was a fearsome, bloody business of hand-to-hand fighting.  The musketeers would stand doggedly firing at each other at point blank range.  The pikemen would advance, their weapons at shoulder height, until the opposing sides were jabbing at each other.  Then they would lock in the Push of Pike, two solidly massed bodies of men each attempting to force the other to give way.  The cavalry would come in with their pistols, short muskets and swords, firing, hacking, slashing.

Pikemen by John Beardsworth

By the end of March 1639, Charles and his troops had reached York.  On 30 May he was at Berwick with an army mostly made up of raw conscripts and the Trained Bands of the northern border counties.  When it became clear that he wouldn't be able to defeat the Covenanter army, he decided to negotiate.  But he was still determined to succeed by force and he summoned Wentworth to England.  

Notes:

The story of Sir Thomas Layton's clash with Sir Thomas Wentworth is told at Sir Thomas Layton finds himself before the Star Chamber 1633    

Damas Street is now Dame Street – it also appears as Damask Street and Dames Street [Wikipedia entry] 

 4. War in the Three Kingdoms: 1640 

2. Mr Wandesford enters politics: 1620-1630

From schooldays at Well near Kirklington – or perhaps only from university days at Cambridge, nobody is sure – Mr Wandesford was the friend of Sir Thomas Wentworth of Wentworth-Woodhouse in the West Riding.  Mr Wandesford had a talent for friendship; Sir Thomas Wentworth had a talent for making enemies.  But Sir Thomas was much loved by his small circle of close friends and perhaps they loved him the more because his enemies hated him so much.  However it was, the friendship between Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth was real and deep.  

Sir Thomas Wentworth

So when in November 1620 King James found himself obliged to call the third Parliament of his reign – needing it to vote funds for military operations he planned in Europe – and Sir Thomas was engaged in a contested election to be one of Yorkshire's two MPs, he was able to persuade his friend and supporter Mr Wandesford to join him.  Mr Wandesford became one of the two MPs for the little borough of Aldborough in the West Riding and moved with his family to London.  

It was a sadly reduced family – little Joyce had died in 1620 at the age of two.  They remained in the South for a while after the King had brought the Parliament to a close in a fury, swearing never to call a Parliament again.  They set up housekeeping together with Mrs Wandesford's brother Sir Edward Osborne and his wife at Stratford Langton in Essex and it was there that a second son, George, was born to them in 1623.  

Then the King, needing funds, found himself obliged to call Parliament once more and Mr Wandesford once more joined Sir Thomas Wentworth in the House of Commons.  But only briefly – Parliament sat for a couple of months before the King prorogued it, not just once but repeatedly.  And then, on 27 March 1625, King James died and the Wandesfords returned to the peace of Kirklington.  

But Sir Thomas Wentworth was fully committed to a life in politics and Mr Wandesford followed him.  From early 1621 to the spring of 1629, he was in the House of Commons.  All in all, he was there for the last two Parliaments of King James and the first three Parliaments of King Charles, and each time the division between King and Parliament grew deeper and more bitter.  

So from the beginning Alice knew her father as a man who was sometimes immersed in the care of his estates and sometimes embroiled in fierce politics.  Family life was divided between Kirklington and London.  When she was born in Kirklington in February 1626, he was in London in the thick of the business of King Charles' acrimonious second Parliament.  So he will have met his new daughter for the first time when he went home in the summer.  She was by then a few months old, a strong and thriving child.  He could take up family life and the management of his estates once more – for a couple of years.   

Alice's early childhood

Mr and Mrs Wandesford were tenderly attentive to their children's upbringing.  Family life was filled with the practice of their Anglican religion.  There were household prayers three times a day and, every morning before breakfast, the children would gather round their mother who would hear them pray, repeat Psalms and chapters of the Bible and kneel for her blessing.  

A Royalist family in 1640: Arthur, Lord Capel, wife & children

Many years later when Alice looked back, she was filled with love and admiration for her parents, "through whose care and precepts," she wrote, "I had the principles of grace and religion instilled into me with my milk."  And so she recorded, in vivid detail, the accidents and illnesses of her childhood and praised God for her deliverance from them.  Children's lives were precarious – her eldest brother Christopher died from an accident when Alice was a year old and he was ten.  He had broken a rib in a fall, apparently from a child's coach, and it injured his lung.  When Mrs Wandesford bore her sixth child the following year, she and her husband named him Christopher after the boy they had lost, as was often done.

Among the earliest memories that Alice recorded were a horrid accident, a frightening illness and an escape from fire.  

She had been well looked after by her wet nurse and Mr and Mrs Wandesford engaged the same woman to nurse the new baby Christopher – she had milk because she had had a child herself in the meantime.  Alice had passed into the care of her dry nurse Sarah Tomlinson once she was weaned, and it was when she was following Sarah, who had Christopher in her arms, that her first bad accident happened.  Alice, a toddler of three, was clutching Sarah's coat and trying to keep up, when she stumbled and fell on the cornerstone of the hearth in the passage chamber which led to her mother's bedchamber.  She was like to have bled to death from the grievous cut on her forehead and the skin of the brain was seen, she said – but her mother's careful nursing and a kind Providence left her only with a great scar as a reminder of God's goodness in preserving her.

Then a year or so later, while her parents went to London, Alice was left to stay at St Nicholas, the house just outside Richmond which was the home of her beloved aunt Anne, who was her father's sister and the wife of Maulger Norton.  And there she fell so ill, so low and weak, that Mrs Norton and Sarah Tomlinson almost despaired of her life.  The little girl had eaten some beef that was not well boiled – or perhaps not well digested – and this brought on vomiting, which had driven her into a fever and then into the measles.

St Nicholas in 1824

When Alice was about five, the family went to London and took a house in St Martin's Lane.  One evening, while Mr and Mrs Wandesford were attending Court – the Court of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria was renowned for its splendour, ceremonial and elegance – a fire broke out in the house next door and began to spread to their own.  While the servants fought the blaze, Sarah Tomlinson carried the terrified children to Lady Livingston's and safety.

During this time, the future of Alice's sister Catherine was decided.  In 1630 she was married to Mr Wandesford's eighteen year old ward, Thomas Danby of Thorp Perrow.  Catherine was fifteen.  Marriages were arranged to be advantageous for the family and in this case her father could be sure of the state of the young man's affairs because he himself had put the Danby estates upon a sound footing.  As Catherine and her husband were too young to set up house together, they lived for some years at Kirklington – but of course Catherine was not too young to be pregnant and she was soon expecting her first child.  

And in these same years, Alice's father's career and the future of the country both reached a turning point.

3. Dublin & War: 1629-1639  

1. The Wandesfords of Kirklington

When Alice Wandesford was born, she was put in the care of a wet nurse – pregnancy and labour always left her mother far from well.  It was 13 February 1626 and at the time the family was living at the Hall at Kirklington on her father's estates in Richmondshire in the North Riding of Yorkshire.  

At her baptism by the Rector of Kirklington, it must have seemed to everybody that the future – if, with God's grace, she survived all the childhood perils of illness and accident – looked promising for her and for the country.

Young King Charles

Queen Elizabeth had died childless in 1603 when Alice's parents were small children, and the Stuart king James VI of Scotland had become the ruler of the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland – Wales had been conquered by England 350 years earlier.  With one king ruling both England and Scotland, there was at last not even a lingering fear of war between the two countries.  No more need, after many centuries, for either country to keep troops on the border, no more low level warring and sudden incursions, and the violent outlawry of the Border Reivers had finally come to an end.  

And the new King James VI & I was a Protestant king – the Wandesfords, and those of their opinion and allegiance, could feel that the Church of England was secure.  A little more than fifty years earlier, a longing among many for the return of Catholicism had brought about the Rising of the North in 1569.  Alice Wandesford's great-grandfather Christopher Wandesford had ridden aged twenty to reinforce Sir George Bowes' garrison holding Barnard Castle for the Queen against the besieging rebel forces.  In Kirklington itself, twenty-two men who held to the old faith had joined the Rising, including the village constable.  When the Queen exacted her terrible retribution against the ordinary people – far more terrible than anything her father King Henry or her sister Queen Mary had done – three of them were appointed by the Queen's commander to be hanged in the village.  And as a dreadful warning for the future, the bodies of the hanged men were to be left "till they fall to pieces at the hanging place".  But those days were over.  The Church of England now looked secure.

And now King James had been dead for less than a year and his son Charles was monarch of the three kingdoms – in fact, his coronation in England had only just taken place.  

The new King Charles was a shy, sheltered young man of twenty-five.  He would soon prove to be a man of fixed ideas and little experience.  And not a little slippery.  There were worries.  Many of his English subjects were already wishing heartily that he had broken with his father's example and come to respect the ancient, hard-won limits on his power over the people of England.  If only, people thought, he wasn't so completely dependent on the Duke of Buckingham, his late father's handsome favourite.  

Charles I by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1628

And if only, many of his English and Scottish subjects began to fear, the King's religious policies did not look so suspiciously hostile to their own dearly-held Puritan and Presbyterian beliefs.  This was a serious matter.  Religious toleration was not a virtue in those days – the future of the immortal soul was at stake, and how could a nation be secure and peaceful if people incurred God's wrath by heresy and irreligion?  What if, some people began to wonder, the King was actually planning to draw the country back to Catholicism, the religion of his own French Queen?  Catholicism was reviled and dreaded by all Protestants, however much they might live peaceably alongside their Catholic relations and neighbours.  They feared the reimposition of the Pope's authority and tended to greatly overestimate the number of Catholics.

But how peaceful and hopeful the future was for the three Kingdoms of the British Isles, especially compared to Europe, which was mired in conflict and suffering from the appalling toll of the terrible Thirty Years War.

Kirklington & Yorkshire

Alice's birthplace Kirklington lies in a sheltered basin in the pleasant, undulating country between Bedale and Ripon.  Fifteen miles to the north lay another of her father's properties, and Alice was to come to know it well.  This was Hipswell Hall in the parish of Catterick on the southern bank of the River Swale.  The North Riding stretched from the northern dales of Swaledale and Wensleydale, the high fells at the Westmorland border and the source of the Tees eastward to the important ports of Whitby and Scarborough.  It was a vast and thinly populated agricultural area, home to perhaps some 120,000 of England's five million people – and about 2,800 of them lived in Scarborough.  

Kirklington Hall by David Rogers CC BY_SA 2.0

At the centre of Yorkshire lay the Ainsty and City of York, the second capital of England, the centre of the King's government in the North, and quite as good – its inhabitants were sure – as London.  The East Riding, like the North Riding, was agricultural.  It bordered on the independent borough of Hull, Yorkshire's most important port.  The West Riding – where most of Yorkshire's population could be found – was increasingly industrial.  Its inhabitants made their livelihoods through the woollen industry, mining and metalworking, many of them living in large villages and thriving cloth towns like Leeds.  The West Riding's independent and self-sufficient workers were strongly Nonconformist and Calvinist – not for them a respect of church hierarchy and ritual observance.  

Mr & Mrs Wandesford of Kirklington Hall

Alice's father, Mr Christopher Wandesford, had inherited his estates fourteen years before she was born, when he was only twenty.  Auburn-haired and ruddy-cheeked, he was a good, serious and devout young man.  He had just decided to become a clergyman when his father died, leaving him with his younger siblings to provide for out of an inheritance burdened with debts – the late Sir George had been both careless and extravagant.  To be fair to Sir George, it was not only his extravagance that had left his son with impoverished and reduced estates.  Misfortune played a part.  For a hundred years, each heir had been under age and that meant that most of the rents had been taken by the monarch, who also had the right to marry the heir off as they pleased.  Christopher was the fifth under-age heir in succession and it cost his grandfather Ralph Hansby £900 to buy off King James so that Christopher could choose his own bride.

Christopher Wandesford (1592-1640)

After his father's death, Christopher left his studies at Cambridge for Kirklington, where he set about restoring the family fortunes, diligently studying law and providing for his siblings.  Within two years he was able to look about for a wife and his choice fell on Alice Osborne, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in London.  Carefully brought up by her mother in all that a good education and the Court could provide, she was proficient in writing, singing, dancing, and playing the harpsichord and the lute.  And she was as serious and devout as Christopher himself.  They married in 1614 and settled at Kirklington Hall.  

Mr Wandesford took in hand some of his land and, by farming it himself, provided for his own household while giving a weekly allowance of corn to the poor of the townships and villages on his estates.  He provided his cottagers with wool so that they might add to their income by weaving and Mrs Wandesford encouraged spinning for the linen industry by growing hemp and flax.  The Hall had been rebuilt by Mr Wandesford's grandfather Sir Christopher in about 1571.  Mr and Mrs Wandesford's additions were practical:  new stables, a large walled orchard and a new dairy, its water supplied by lead pipes running from a cistern near St Michael's Well, close by the mill race.

Their daughter Catherine was born the year after they married, and Christopher and Joyce soon followed.  And perhaps the Wandesfords might have remained always on their Yorkshire estates, improving their land and developing new industries, if it had not been for a strong and lasting friendship that was to determine the direction of Mr Wandesford's life.

Next: 2. Mr Wandesford enters politics: 1620-1630 

Alice Wandesford in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms

The next series of posts are set in the 17th century.  It is my retelling of the life of Alice Wandesford during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms – the much more accurate name now given to the English Civil War of the 1640s.  

Alice was a girl of the Yorkshire gentry, thirteen years old when the Wars began and thirty-four at the end of the republic and the restoration of the monarchy.  It was a time of tumultuous upheaval in which Britain was permanently changed and during those years the North Riding witnessed skirmishes, small battles, sieges, large armies, and military occupation.

Alice Wandesford (1626-1707) began to write about her life when she was 47 years old, to defend herself against slander following a disastrous rupture with a woman she had looked on as a friend.  Her work is known – and studied – as The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton.

She rewrote it and added to it and in all, she wrote four books.  In 1875, the Surtees Society published a composite version edited by Charles Jackson and this is available online for free on Google Books.  

The second of her books, thought for the last hundred years to be lost, was found in the Durham Cathedral Archives in 2019 by Dr Cordelia Beattie, a Senior Lecturer in Mediaeval History, University of Edinburgh.  Dr Beattie also found the fourth book among papers in private hands.  With luck, before long all four will be available in print and online.

I have used the Surtees edition and Raymond A Anselment's 2014 edition of My First Booke of My Life, available as an ebook.

I hope I've written an account which brings the times to life.  I decided not to use footnotes for that reason.  But I've used so many sources – these are the invaluable ones:

The Story of the Family of Wandesforde of Kirklington & Castlecomer ed. by Hardy Bertram McCall 1904.  It can be found here 

The BCW Project  

This is an endless source of information – Timelines, Biography, Military, and Church and State.  And there is plenty on Wikipedia.

For the Parliamentarians of Yorkshire: 
The Extent of support for Parliament in the Yorkshire during the early stages of the First Civil War by Andrew James Hopper (1999) here 

A guide not to be missed:
The First Great Civil War in the Tees Valley 1642-1646: A Guide by Robin Daniels and Phil Philo here

For Ireland:

This interview with Dr. Micheal Ó Siochrú by Cathal Brennan gives a very useful overview: here  

The personal and professional relationships between Thomas Wentworth, Earl of
Strafford and his closest advisors by Charlotte Kate Brownhill 2004: here 

The King's Peace and The King's War by C V Wedgewood

Perhaps before long the re-enactment socities will be able to hold events again – until then, and for a taste of the 17th century, why not watch the 2016 promotional video made by the Sealed Knot?  It's on youtube here 

A note about Richmondshire and the North Riding

Yorkshire was divided into three Ridings (thirdings): North, East and West.

For a map of the pre-1832 parishes of the North Riding, see here

The North Riding covered a smaller area than today's administrative area called North Yorkshire, which has a population of about 1.16 million.  (The population of England is nearly 67.9 million).

Richmondshire was the name given to the western part of the North Riding.  It contained the Borough of Richmond and the wapentakes of Gilling West; Gilling East; Hang West; Hang East; and Hallikeld.  See here.  Nowadays, Richmondshire is the name of a district council within the county council of North Yorkshire.  

(I've explained the part of the North Riding called Cleveland here)

Next post: 1. The Wandesfords of Kirklington