The Marriage of Hester Crakanthorp

THE MARRIAGE OF HESTER CRAKANTHORP

Imogen Wedd

In the early part of the eighteenth century my ancestor Benjamin Wedd of the village of Fowlmere, between Royston and Cambridge, married Hester Crakanthorp, daughter of the Rev. John Crakanthorp, rector of the parish.

As a child I was entertained by the Victorian genealogy of the Wedd family, of which my father had a copy, and which purported to trace the pedigree of Hester Crakanthorp back to Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville[i].However, it wasn’t until I became interested in the family history recently that I became curious about this marriage. Unlike the Crakanthorps the Wedds were apparently unable to trace their descent beyond Benjamin's grandfather; did the RevJohn Crakanthorp actually welcomed the marriage of his only daughter to the son of a local wool-stapler - a yeoman - of apparently uncertain origins? Even early in the present century my mother's clergyman father was reckoned as one of the gentry, and social contacts with those "in trade" were really not possible.

My curiosity grew when I began to check the pedigree against the parish registers of Fowlmere and adjacent villages. There were to be found the birth of Benjamin Wedd in 1686, the births of Hester and Benjamin's children, his death and much later the death of Hester Wedd, daughter of Mr. Crakanthorp, aged 80, in 1760. Backtracking I found the baptism of Hester in 1680; so Hester was six years older than Benjamin. Was the young man encouraged into a marriage with a woman some years his senior because it was a good match?

Even stranger, however, was the fact that I could not find the marriage; inconceivable, surely, that there wasn't one! This mystery was short-lived, for in the process of searching the IGI for the name Wedd, almost immediately I came across it, on 5 June 1705, in, of all places, St.Bride's Fleet Street. Hazy recollections of "Fleet”marriages culled from the reading of romantic novels during a misspent youth, immediately came to mind. After all, why should a Cambridgeshire vicar's daughter be married in London? Why not be married at home by her own father? My brother, called upon to show an interest in this family phenomenon, looked it up[ii], and sure enough 1705 was in the peak of the Fleet marriage boom; nearly 3000 runaway marriages are believed to have taken place in the first four months of that year alone in the Fleet area.So there it was, Hester Crakanthorp, aged 25, daughter of the vicar with a long pedigree, had eloped romantically with the 19 year old son of a local tradesman.

Or had she? By one of those fortunate chances two small notebooks containing the accounts and harvest notes of RevJohn Crakanthorp between 1682 and 1710 have survived and arenow in the County Record Office. Recently theCambridgeshire Records Society produced a printed edition.[iii] There, in June 1705 I found the following entries for 1705:

June 7: Given to servants at Mr. W.:6d;
to the ringers the same day for Hester Wedd5s 6d

June 9: Spent by Nat: going to London at his
sister Hester’s wedding 2 days9s 6d

June 2~0: Item for daughter towards 3 months
board ended about July 6 1704£2 10s0d
Item for her expenses coming down10s0d

June 23: Item [to daughter] going to London in
May and comingdownagain the 15 instant, to
provide her self wedding cloaths, and in money
since she came downe, 4s in all£12 6s 6d

So Hester's father paid for her wedding clothes and her stay in London and for the ringing of the bells for her marriage; and her brother Nathaniel attended the wedding, though not, apparently, her father or mother (to be fair, there is no record of their having attended Nathaniel's either!). Not only this, but the notebooks record various small payments on Hester's behalf, including the doctor's bills during the next few months which makes me wonder whether the young couple were at first living at the rectory. In June 1706 a loan or gift of £i00 was made to Nester by her father; could this have been a form of dowry? When the midwife attended at the birth of the first child in November 1706, it was Hester’s father who paid her. If further proof were needed that the marriage was at least accepted, at the end of his life, John Crakanthorp made Hester and Benjamin executors and beneficiaries of his will.

I also observed from the notebooks that, unlike most of the men of the parish,Benjamin Wedd senior is unfailingly referred to as Mr. Wedd rather than by name or as ‘Goodman’ suggesting at least a certain social standing. Later I found his father in the 1674 Hearth Tax, with 6 hearths, and his father's will in 1691 referring to property in Fowlmere and elsewhere. Although I think the family may originally have been immigrants from Holland or Germany I have now been able to trace them back with reasonable certainty to aRobert Wedd who died in Great Shelford in 1492, so they would presumably have been well known locally in the eighteenth century. Certainly by 1707 Mr. Wedd was in a prosperous position in life, for in that year he was building a house in the village - possibly The Green - the substantial house in the main street which was the family's home in the nineteenth century and which remained in their ownership until 1946.

Sadly, I have also recently had to abandon the Henry VII link; this depends on Berry’s assertion that Hester Crakanthorp's great-grandmother was Rebecca Brydges, wife of Thomas Pride junior. Since it was Thomas Pride senior who "purgedf the Commons in 1648 prior to the execution of Charles I, this is clearly quite impossible, even if all involved married at 16! I was therefore faced with the prosaic conclusion that my original assumption of social discrepancy might have been mistaken.

What then was the explanation of this curious Wedding? Not to be balked of my romance, I asked myself if it was in fact Mr. Wedd who objected to his son's marriage rather than the other way around. It was, of course, Benjamin and notHester who was the minor at the time. Was is to break the news of the unwelcome marriage to Mr. Wedd that Rev John Crakanthorp visited him on 7 June? Was Hester's three month stay away from home in 1704, an attempt by the Crakanthorps to keep the young couple apart in the light of the Wedds" disapproval, or does the curious fact that it was not paid for till the following year, suggest that it might even have been an act of filial rebellion?

Benjamin seems to have been Mr. Wedd's only survivingchild, for although his wife Mary Bayly did not die until1712 no further offspring are recorded, and he may have been reluctant to see his son marry so young. It also emerged fairly early in my researches that the Wedds were dissenters; later generations were leading members of the Independent movement; three Wedd brothers, grandsons of Hester and Benjamin, financed the building of the now United Reformed Church in the village, and my branch of the family continued to be staunch Congregationalists well into this century, so perhaps there were religious differences which hindered the marriage.

However, even this second theory seemed to become less and less likely as my researches progressed, for it emerged that Hester's maternal grandfather, William Sherwin, was one of the ministers ejected from his living in 1662 for his dissenting views, and all the family seem to have had shared this nonconformist tendency, John Crakanthorp junior ending his life as a member of the Royston Friends Meeting where his death is recorded in 1749.[iv]

So for the moment: the circumstances surrounding the marriage of Hester Crakanthorp remain a mystery. Hester and Benjamin had seven children, but Benjamin died in 1720 when his youngest child was only two. The children grew up and prospered, and married into other nonconformist business families; two more intermarriages took place between the Crakanthorps and the Wedds in the next two generations.

After eight years of widowhood, Hester married Benjamin’s cousin Peter Weald, himself a widower by that time, and both lived well into old age. I trace my descent from BenjaminIII, Hester and Benjamin's second son.

[i]In Berry's Genealoqies of Hertfordshire Families 1858

[ii]See Brewer's "Phrase and Fable"

[iii]"Accounts of the Reverend John Crakanthorp of Fowlmere 1682-1710' Ed. P. Brassley, A. Lambert, P. Saunders, Cambridgeshire Records Society Vol 8

[iv]The Monthly Meeting minutes record him as being buried on the 13th day 3rd month 1749 ‘in the Frds new Burying ground at Royston'.

Published in the Cambridgeshire Family History Society Journal

© Imogen Wedd 1994

For more information, see the WEDD family history website: