Trist Families of Devon: Volume 7 Life in a Farming Community: Trist Families of Devon, #7

By Peter J Trist

If your ancestors were Devon farmers and country dwellers this volume is of great relevance and interest because it examines the daily life of villagers using the statistical data accumulated by social historians. It answers some of the questions we would have asked our ancestors if we could travel back in time to their era. Questions are discussed regarding

• marriage partners

• life span

• bereavement

• re-marriage

• size of families

• mobility

• men's & women's work

• standards of living

and many more everyday issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Trist
• Release date: Nov 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9780648499176

Book preview

Description

If your ancestors were Devon farmers and country dwellers this volume is of great relevance and interest because it examines the daily life of villagers using the statistical data accumulated by social historians. It answers some of the questions we would have asked our ancestors if we could travel back in time to their era. Questions are discussed regarding

• marriage partners

• life span

• bereavement

• re-marriage

• size of families

• mobility

• men’s & women’s work

• standards of living

and many more everyday issues.

Related topics such as Housing and the Farming Calendar were discussed in Volumes 5 and 6

TRIST FAMILIES OF DEVON

Volume 7

TRIST FAMILIES OF DEVON

Volume 7

Life in a Farming Community

by Peter J. Trist

Trist Families of Devon: Volume 7

Life in a Farming Community

By Peter J. Trist

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the author, except for the inclusions of brief acknowledged quotations in a review, thesis, article or published work.

The author and publisher have used their best efforts in collecting and preparing material for inclusion in Trist Families of Devon: Volume 7: Life in a Farming Community, but do not warrant that the information herein is complete or accurate, and does not assume, and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in Trist Families of Devon: Volume 7: Life in a Farming Community, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident or any other cause.

Copyright 2023 by Peter J. Trist

Published by Australian e-Book Publishers

ISBN-13 978-0-6484991-7-6

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover: The village of Stoke Gabriel on the Dart River from the Cornworthy/Dittisham road.

Figure 1. Sign of Stephen Trist (Chart1/1), ca. 1533-1619.

Figure 2 (a) Signature of John Trist (Chart1/2) ca 1570-1637, written in 1610

Figure 2 (b), Signature of John Trist written in 1629

Figure 3 (a) Signature of Thomas Trist (Chart1/5) ca 1619-1702 written in 1649.

Figure 3 (b) Signature of Thomas Trist from document dated 1672.

Figure 4 Signatures of Ambrose Trist (Chart1/42) 1672-1750, and his sisters Elizabeth (Chart1/39) & Agnes (Chart1/43).

Figure 5 Signature of Richard Trist (Chart1/55) 1739-1792.

Figure 6 (a) Handwritten list of the children of Richard Trist (Chart1/70), 1763-1855.

Figure 6 (b) Letter by Richard Trist (Ch. 1/70) to John Pinn, husband of Richard’s daughter, Harriet, on expressing condolences for the death of their child.

Figure 7 (a) Signature of Robert Faremouth Trist (Chart1/94, 1813-1894) on a business letter for the Launceston Turnpike Trust.

Figure 7 (b) Letter from Robert Faremouth Trist (Chart1/94) 1813-1894 to his son Robert William Trist (Chart1/125).in Canada

Figure 7 (c) Two pages from the family bible of Robert Faremouth Trist listing his children. The writing is uniform throughout and refers to ‘Our House’ so was evidently the penmanship is that of Robert or his wife.

Figure 8 Signature of my great-grandfather Richard Trist (Chart1/126) 1847-1933.

Figure 9 Signature of my grandfather Richard Trist (Chart1/141) 1882-1966.

CONTENTS OF OTHER VOLUMES IN ‘TRIST FAMILIES OF DEVON’

Vol. 1 Research Methods

Vol. 2 What’s In a Name? An Etymology

Origins of Trist Surname

Vol. 3 Medieval

Vol. 5 Their Farmhouses

Vol. 6 The Farming Calendar

Daily Life and Work in Devon Farming

Vol. 8 Local Gentry & Country Parsons

Genealogy for a Trist politician & various churchmen (Charts 2 & 3)

Volume 9 Politics and Trade in Devon

Plus a genealogy of Trist families on Dartmoor & at South Brent (Charts 4, 4A, 4B & 4C)

Vol. 10 Farewell to Devon:

Genealogical charts for Devon Trists in USA (Charts 8A & 9); Canada (Chart 8), Australia (Charts 6, 6A & 7); New Zealand (Chart 5)

Vol. 11 Selected Documents, Wills & Court Cases

Vol. 12 Trist Names Index

Including Unresearched Family Groups (UFGs)

GENEALOGICAL CHARTS AND NOTES

Genealogical Charts and Notes are located as follows:

Volume 1

Charts 1, 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D (Harberton, Cornworthy, Dittisham, Dartington) Chart 2 (Harberton and Totnes) Chart 9 (Philadelphia, USA)

Volume 8

Chart 2 (Harberton)

Chart 3 (Veryan, Cornwall)

Volume 9

Charts 4, 4A, 4B, 4C (South Brent)

Volume 10

(Chart 5 (N.Z.)

Charts 6, 6A (N.S.W. Australia)

Chart 7 (Victoria, Australia)

Chart 8 (Canada & USA)

Chart 8A (USA)

Chart 9 (Philadelphia, USA)

Volume 11

Selected Documents, Wills and Court Records

CONTENTS

Trist Families of Devon

VOLUME 7: Life in a Farming Community

General Preface to the Series

Introduction

Chapter 1 Farm Food

Chapter 2 Brewed Drink

Chapter 3 The Importance of a Water Supply

Chapter 4 Medicines, Herbs & Gardens

Chapter 5 Farm Clothing

Chapter 6 Emotional relationships in the Family

Chapter 7 Bereavement, Re-Marriage, Blended Families & Lifespan

Chapter 8 Size of Families

Chapter 9 Local Kinship Networks

Chapter 10 Size of Communities

Chapter 11 Geographical Mobility

Chapter 12 The Virtue of Neighbourliness

Chapter 13 Litigation

Chapter 14 Drunkenness

Chapter 15 Education

Chapter 16 Language & Style of Speech

Chapter 17 Parish Governance

Appendix A

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Endnotes

PREFACE

This is the seventh in a series attempting to write a social history of Trist families in Devon over a period of six hundred years. It is the last volume devoted to village life in the Tudor, Stuart and Georgian eras (roughly 1530-1830). This social history is not unique to the Trist family. Nearly all English-speaking families today would have had many forbears who followed a similar way of life in a rural community.

Amateur historians have many varied and personal reasons for starting a family history. My own motivation has been simply to satisfy my curiosity. How did each generation of my forbears live their lives? Discovering each link in the chain and joining them together into a coherent narrative, from past to present, has motivated my writing of this family history.

My motivation owes very little to genetics because a surname is a legal, not a biological, construct. I cannot claim any close genetic connection with any of my ancestors except perhaps my parents. Modern biological science tells us that the gene pool is halved with each passing generation, roughly every twenty-five years. Consequently, even my paternal grandfather is seventy-five per cent biologically different from myself, even though the male surname remains unchanged. After only one hundred years, or three generations, the resemblance is down to about twelve per cent. By the fourth generation what remains of the original gene pool is so negligible that one’s ancestors should really be considered as genetic strangers. My genetic similarity to Richard Trist, my great-great-great grandfather born in 1763 is theoretically a mere three per cent, so that he is genetically quite a different person. Any biological resemblance we may have is insignificant and roughly equivalent to my thirty-one other forbears of the same vintage from whom I am also descended, most of whom I have not identified. For this reason, we cannot really claim an identity with our ancestors on a biological basis. The idea that one can inherit a blood-line is illusory: a mirage created linguistically by the inherited surname.

Whilst a one-name study is largely independent of genetics, it is a lot more relevant when considered from a social and local point of view. Suppose that I could investigate the lives of all thirty-one of my forbears back to 1763. What would I find? In all probability, their social histories would be remarkably similar to those of the Trist families described in these volumes. Most people in the pastoral age married (and were usually obliged by community pressure to marry) within their own social class and did not generally move very far away from their parents’ parish.¹ There was considerably less social and geographical mobility than there is today. Consequently, the experiences of one family would be subject to the same influences as other families belonging to the same social class living in the same region at the same time.

This is particularly true of everyday life in a farming community which is the focus of the present volume. The way of life discussed in this book would have been shared by a broad section of the population.

In this sense, a family history is really a branch of local or parochial history. Any generalizations that can be adduced apply mainly in the local area or region. A family history establishes two facts basic to any history, namely a time and a place. Knowing where an ancestor was at a particular time supplies a focus and narrows the range of possibilities. For example, the acquisition and disposal of leasehold farms by tenant farmers was of enormous importance to the farming families examined in this history. This is a topic which would probably only be investigated by a family or local historian. Likewise, the details of the rise and fall in the fortunes of this or that branch of the Trist family is of less importance than recording what windows of opportunity were opening and closing at the local level. These opportunities and problems were similar for contemporary families from the same social class living in the Dart Valley or South Hams.

We are living through an era launched in the nineteenth century by the industrial revolution. As a consequence, we have largely lost touch with country life. What preceded this urbanised way of living was the long period of the pastoral age which was dominated by farming the land. And I felt that by resurrecting the lives and times of my ancestors in this history, I was repaying a debt of gratitude by finding out about each generation as they travelled towards the present.

INTRODUCTION

One of my aims in researching and writing this family history has been to explore and set down some of the main features of the daily domestic and personal life of my ancestors.

The obvious questions a twenty- first century person wants to ask about a way of life are related to material standards of living: occupations, income, food, clothing and so on. Other questions concern recreation and the emotional qualities of people’s lives: how much leisure time did our forbears have and how did they choose to spend it? How was their family life organized? At what age did they usually get married? What was the size of their families and how soon did the children have to leave home to earn their own living? How many people lived in their households? What was the relationship between husband, wife and children, and between the family and the wider community? What was the type of education parents thought appropriate for their children?

These questions although apparently simple are not necessarily easy to answer because few people ever consider their daily routine worthy of written description. This was especially true of ordinary working people in the pastoral age, few of whom had the leisure or inclination to keep journals, or any written records at all, except where these were related to earning their living. As one might expect, farmers’ diaries or journals have survived only in the most fragmentary way and even those which have been preserved, record personal details only incidentally. Fortunately, there are historians who have combined this meagre record with statistical analysis of parish and government records in order to give us a much more complete answer to these questions.

There are also historians who have used hundreds of sources to examine the way people actually lived day-to-day. Prominent among these researchers is Janet Few who has been able to re-create an everyday context for the way of life followed by most people in the ‘world we have lost’.

We will start with the most basic information concerning the food and drink of the farming household.

CHAPTER 1

FARM FOOD

Diet was governed by the availability of cooking equipment and in Volume 5 it was pointed out that by about 1650 most farmhouses would have had a brick chimney and a big open fireplace. Most of these would have had a bread oven built into the thickness of the chimney wall using furze for fuel and a cream oven using charcoal or peat as a slow burning fuel for heating milk. Otherwise for general cooking purposes wood was used to heat pots and pans as a kettle could be boiled within about twenty minutes. Huge wood and furze ricks were built up during the summer to enable the goodwife to continue cooking and warming the house during the long winter.

The combustion stove was uncommon until the nineteenth century. Janet Few is of the opinion that roasting food was not a practical option for most families.² For this reason she says that the easiest way of cooking was boiling and this method was universal. It also required less fuel than roasting. ‘Boiling was done in a large pot or cauldron over the open fire. Grain was added to make pottage, a form of porridge to which vegetables, meat or fish could be added. The contents of the pottage varied with the season and the wealth of the family.’³

To some extent I think that cooking equipment available to at least some of my direct ancestors may have been somewhat more versatile. In Devon an earthenware cloam oven was commonly used in farmhouses to place in the fire to act as a baking vessel.⁴ Although Janet Few considers roasting to have been a method avoided by many households, the inventory of the will of Richard Trist, who died in 1710 includes four spit irons and a ‘dreeping pan’.⁵ Evidently, at Gitcombe Farm roasting was one cooking method which was used.

It seems probable that Gitcombe may not have been exceptional in its roasting equipment because roasting equipment seems to have been quite common in Devon farmhouses. Margaret Cash’s analysis of Devon inventories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries says that spits sometimes called ‘broches’ were often mentioned.⁶ Likewise Margaret Tucker’s description of equipment listed in the Uffculme inventories included spits and also baking ovens or kettles which would have