PEOPLE passionate about local history in hundreds of years’ time might uncover the fact that Judith Withyman was lobbying Pinchbeck Parish Council about wind farms last week.
Lobbying the council is not new to her, as it’s what got her on to the council 25 years ago, the former clerk, the late Bill Cunningham, saying she might as well be a part of it as she spent so much time at meetings.
A local girl from the age of eight, Judith has only just retired from that role, happy to have been in a position to be able to do something about things “distressing people” within Pinchbeck.
She feels she has been lucky to have been involved in the parish council that she served. “We have always had a council that’s been prepared to stand up and speak out about things,” she says. “We have had some wonderful councillors, and some of them have been on the council far longer than I have, and we have a superb clerk. I have been very happy on the parish council.”
However, Judith has been interested in the lives of Pinchbeck residents for far longer, and in 1974 started researching people who lived in the parish in Early Modern England. Those years of inquiry have led to a book to be published in the autumn, Gowts, Geese & Galligaskins, Pinchbeck 1560-1660, which will be available from Bookmark.
“We know a fair bit about the Victorians, less about the 18th century and then when you go back to Early Modern England which started in 1485 I feel people don’t know about that,” said Judith. “People think the Fens doesn’t have history because we don’t have cosy cottages and village greens. Our straight roads have been there since then and before, whereas a lot of people think they have come within the last 100 years.”
What started her quest was unearthing something called an Acre Book for 1611, a drainage record of everyone who held land and its exact location, which she found in the parish chest in St Mary’s Church.
It was in Jacobean English so took some transcribing, but Judith says: “It was like Pandora’s Box because once I opened it and saw what was inside life was never the same again. It was an amazing moment. I have always been a history nut, and I just wanted to know what it was like then.”
A visit to the Lincolnshire Archives at Lincoln produced three more Acre Books for the same period, and then Judith’s researches moved on to wills and probate inventories before further research in court records and muster rolls held at The National Archives in London revealed more of the story.
It becomes apparent why Judith spent so many years on the project as those documents all needed transcribing and Judith had begun an enormous index of births, deaths and marriages, a method of family reconstruction in which cards are matched as new information is gleaned.
It was also a spare time occupation because Judith at that time, as well as looking after her home and husband Roy, had three children, Tom and twins James and Kate – as well as a cow.
Interestingly, when Judith began the research the family moved to Northgate where they have a piece of land across the road from the house where she kept the cow and a pig and fattened calves – and then discovered she was leading the kind of life the people she was researching had also lived. As a result, references in old wills to leaving the “cow with the crumpled horn” to a relative had more meaning for Judith, who now keeps alpacas.
Judith also discovered that a house existed in 1521 on the same spot as her own home, having found a reference in a book of wills, and that the then nearby market cross was where stock was gathered in the spring and driven on to the North Fen.
Stray animals were gathered in the pound, which was Judith and Roy’s piece of land over the road.
Her book puts together the information that has been discovered, focusing on the Ogle and Walpole families in particular and to a lesser extent the Custs, and describes how people lived, what agriculture was like, life in the Fens, as well as the diseases that killed them off.