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Hawkins Family History

On the 22nd June 1751 "William Hawkins the Elder" of Edlesborough, a village some three miles north-cast of Pitstone, describing himself as a yeoman (a man farming his own land) signed his will. A copy of it is kept in the Bucks County Record Office, an extract reads:-

"I do give Will devise and bequeath unto William Hawkins my Son his heirs and Assigns for ever All that my Messuage or Farmhouse wherein I now dwell situate standing and being on Edlesborough Green in the County of Bucks together with all and singular Outhouses Edifices buildings barns Stables Yards Gardens orchards and backsides thereunto adjoining and belonging And also all my sever all pieces and parcels of Arable land Ley Meadow and Sweard ground lying and being in the fields, and precincts and Parish of Edlesborough aforesaid or elsewhere in the county of Bucks and in the Kingdom of Great Britain".

The family had acquired the farm, about fifty acres belonging to them and as much rented, in about 1700, and were to keep it until 1810 when Samuel, grandson of "William the Elder", sold it to the Earl of Bridgewater for £1,400. Another document at the County Record Office written by a lawyer employed by the Earl of Bridgewater to verify Samuel's title to the land, shows that "William the Elder" died five years after making his will "at the advanced age of 84 years". William's personal effects were valued at under £20 when he died. The family were nonconformists. Another part of the will reads:-

"And also I do give and bequeath unto my poor Brethren belonging to the Meeting at Thorn whereof I am a Member Twenty Shillings to be distributed among as many as my said son William Hawkins shall think hath most need-..."

It was a time when nonconformists had to worship at an out of the way place like Thorn, a small hamlet to the north of Dunstable, if they were not to be molested. A History of Houghton Regis Baptist Church published for the centenary in 1964 reads:-....nonconformists faced many hazards to exercise their right to enjoy freedom of worship. In those difficult times they had to worship when and where occasion served, often traveling long distances to worship with like minded Christians. Thus it was that the secluded hamlet of Thorn, some one and a half miles from Houghton Regis, became a centre of Baptist witness with worshippers traveling from Dunstable, Houghton Regis, Tilsworth, Woburn, Toddington, Chalton and Leighton. Records show that a meeting was established them as early as 1720, an offshoot from Park Street, Luton, although a building was not erected until 1738.

"William the Elder" also remembered two grandsons in his will. One, Joseph was to have £5 when he was twenty-one. Then the will goes on to say:-

"Also I do give will and bequeath unto my Grandson Samuel Hawkins the Sum of Ten Pounds of Good and lawful money of Great Britain .... to put him out apprentice if he shall choose a Trade and if not then the said Ten pounds to be paid unto the Samuel Hawkins when he shall attain the age of One and Twenty Years".

But if Samuel, who was the elder son and fourteen years old at the time, did choose a trade, it did not prevent him from inheriting the farm.

The name Samuel was to be given to the eldest son for the next three generations. The next Samuel (Born 1775) was helping his father on the farm when he married Sarah and they had six daughters while living in Edlesborough. The first named Sarah after her mother was burn in 1799 Samuel continued to work- with his father on the farm for a further nine years during which time he and his wife Sarah had six children- all girls. Then in 1808, when his father was over seventy, he moved from Edlesborough to Pitstone Green as tenant of the Earl of Bridgewater. The farm at Edlesborough was formally conveyed to the Earl some two years later. It is likely that the two transactions were part of a single arrangement. Samuel had chosen to abandon his birthright as a yeoman and to become, at the age of thirty-three, a tenant farmer on a great landed estate. At Pitstone Green during the next ten years he and Sarah had six sons and two more daughters and there his descendants were to live and farm to the present day when the farm is occupied by the writer, his great-great grandson.

The Move of Samuel Hawkins to Pitstone was connected with the extension of the Ashridge estate by the Earl of Bridgewater who had inherited it from relative the Duke of Bridgwater, "the father of inland navigation". The Duke had made a large fortune building and running the canals that provided the development of the industrial revolution in this country. At the beginning of the 19th Century Lord Bridgewater was using money made on the canals to buy up land in the villages surrounding Ashridge. It has been suggested that this buying up of land was to make the estate large and thereby suitable for the Dukedom the family wished to reacquire. No doubt the prices paid were good and it was of benefit to Samuel Hawkins that the small family farm be sold and he became tenant of the larger farm at Pitstone.

In 1807, Lord Bridgewater had bought a farm of 57 acres from Thomas Birdsey that we know was occupied in 1798 by Thomas Eustace. The homestead of this farm was sited where Pitstone Green Farm now stands and is shown an a map dated 1755 from the Ashridge collection in the Herts County Record Office entitled "a farm lying in the several parishes of Pitstone and Marsworth in the county of Bucks and of Tring and Aldbury in the county of Herts being the estate of Mrs Ann Astley".

The farm was made up of eighty- three separate strips in the common fields and three enclosed pieces of land. To this farm was added another bought by Lord Bridgewater in 1804 from Thomas Kerr, occupied by 1800 by James Burt and another bought in 1806 from Billington, occupied in 1798 by William Poulton. Land from these farms together made up a holding of 112 acres, with one or two areas of enclosed land and many strips in the various furlongs of the great open fields of Pitstone. Although the creation of larger farms must have made sense financially (small farms in France today make food cost more there) the fact that the land was spit up into so many small scattered strips must have made farming in larger units more difficult. The small strips were necessary when most farms occupied no more than one or two of them in each of the open fields. So; no wonder that there was some consolidation of them in 1829. Strips were exchanged so as to make larger pieces of land under one farmer. The enclosure act for Pitstone in 1854 finally an end to them altogether. The farm created by the joining together of these three farms was and still is called Pitstone Green Farm this part of the village was known as Pitstone Green as it bordered the Green, a large open area of common grassland some 100 acres in extent.

This amalgamation of three farms to form one was typical of what was happening in England. The concentration of the land into fewer larger holdings was a process that had taken place in the 18th century and was to continue into the 19th. It made for more efficient farming but meant that fewer working on the land were their own Masters, and accentuated the difference in the financial position of the now more prosperous farmers and their workers. Also due to the increase in the Population, fewer people were needed to work the land and as there was little alternative employment, there was surplus of labour and people suffered accordingly. Pitstone Green Farm grew over the years. In 1809 it was 112 acres, in 1841 220, in 1851 250 and 1861328 acres. Besides the increase in size of farms there had also been a tendency for the farms to be owned by people living out of the village and let to tenants to farm them until at the beginning of the 19th century there was very little land in Pitstone that was owned by the man who farmed it.

So Samuel came, with his family to live in the house belonging to one of the original farms as the first tenant of the new Pitstone Green Farm. A map of 1808 in the Bucks County Record office shows the layout of the buildings with a large pond. The only features that remain today are the big barn which as used to store the sheaves of corn at harvest, later to be threshed with the flail on the mowstead or threshing floor it contained, and a small shed, known as "Stevens" barn. No doubt this was the name of an earlier owner or tenant of over 170 years ago, when it was part of another farm. After Samuel took over the farm the barn was lengthened by adding three more bays and another threshing floor was installed. This extension would have been needed to store and thresh the larger amount of cereals grown on the farm. Otherwise Samuel had to make do with the old farm house and building until 1830 when it is recorded in an account book of the Countess of Bridgewater, at present in the Herts County Record Office that the new house and building were built for Samuel Hawkins at a cost of £896 15s 3d.To build the same today would cost more than a hundred times as much.

Jeffrey Hawkins

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