The Early History of the Edgars

Notes:

Direct ancestors are in bold when first mentioned.

Much of this post is based on the research of my late cousin Bridget Adams (13 December 1952-June 19, 2012).

My grandfather Herbert Sidney Edgar (1880-1960) was one of the Edgars of Preston (now Preston St. Mary) in Suffolk. The Edgars lived in that general part of Suffolk in the first quarter of the eighteenth century and had settled at Preston by the end of that century.

How did they get there?

The first well-established reference to our branch of the family (i.e. the descendants of Herbert Sidney Edgar and Alice Stephenson) is this:

John Edgar son of John Edgar of Dunwich living at North Glemham Hall in 1273 from him sprang branches at Combes, Brantham and Eye.[1]

Brantham is south of Ipswich and Eye is in the northern part of Suffolk, four to five miles south of Diss. But we're from the Comb(e)s Edgars. Combs is a tiny village about one mile south of Stowmarket. It was too small to be on this Victorian map, but it will give you an idea of its location - it's between Stowmarket and Battisford, a little closer to the former:

Image from A Vision of Britain Through Time

Dunwich is 33 miles from Combs and Little Glemham is about 23 miles to the north, so we didn't come far.

Occasional glimpses of the Edgars at Combs are visible, but I don't know as yet which ones were our direct ancestors.

Some members of the family were obviously doing well in the middle of the fourteenth century: a reconstruction of an Edgar farmhouse is now on show at the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket:

 

Nevertheless, the most interesting source for this period of our family history (like much else it was Bridget who pointed me to this) is the Poll Tax record for 1381 - it was the attempt to collect this tax that led to Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt. It reveals that the Combs Edgars, about 200 years after they arrived, occupied very positions in the social scale. Johan Adgor (an earlier form of Edgar, as is Adgore, Atgoore etc.) is listed as 'artificiarius' which means an artisan or skilled tradesman. On the other hand, Radulffo Edgar is a 'famulus' or servant. Ricardus Adgor was actually an assistant collector of the poll tax (boo! hiss!).[2] So not everyone lived in state-of-the-art Suffolk farmhouses.

The earliest Edgar who can definitely be identified as part of our branch is the landowner Robert Adgore. Robert's date of birth is unknown, but in about 1589 he married Margaret Eland; he was from Combs and she was from nearby Cratfield. Their fifth child was Edmund Edgar of Combs, who was born in 1597 and in 1620 married Anne Clark of Great Finborough.[3]

Edmund and Ann  produced Richard, another fifth child, born in 1629.

In 1654 he married Susan Mills from Barking[4] - not, as this otherwise excellent website[5] states the town in Essex but a village close to Combs. There's a Richard Edgar who died at Combs in 1664[6] but according to Bridget 'our' Richard lived a long life and died in 1712.[7]

The second Edmund Edgar was born to Richard and Susan at Combs in 1669/1670 and he married Hannah Bright of Great Finborough in 1696.[8] He died in 1741.[9] Their son Thomas (born 1700[10]) married Mary Johnson from Great Finborough in 1719[11] and died at Stowmarket in 1762,[12] so he probably still lived in the nearby ancestral village of Combs. Mary's surname became a family heirloom: their son, Johnson Edgar ('the first'), was born 1722/1723 and married Ann Green[13] (born about 1725). This Johnson Edgar was linked to Great Finborough, where he died on May 21, 1790. It' s not clear if Johnson was still living at Combs and just visiting, Great Finborough, which  is two and a half miles to the west, or had moved there. In any case, the village was on the 'main' road (now the B1115) so perhaps the connection  with Great Finborough got the family dreaming of the wide world far away from tiny Combs, because the first Edgar who can be linked to our new home village, Preston, was their son Johnson Edgar ('the second') (born in 1761) who died there on March 20, 1835.[14] Interestingly when this Johnson Edgar married in 1721 his parish was recorded as being Aldham[15] In Essex - not too far from the Suffolk border perhaps, but it makes him tne first Edgar who I can prove left his home county! His wife, Hannah Osborn, was from the town of Brettenham, which is only three miles from Preston. I shall show in a later post that an Osborn, who may or may not have been Hannah's father, occupied Down Hall Farm in Preston, which was later to be farmed by Johnson and Hannah's son.

So I suspect it was the Osborn connection that brought us to Preston (now Preston St. Mary).



This tiny town is about 9 miles south west of Great Finborough, and it's in the orbit of Lavenham, the new family metropolis, replacing Stowmarket, the nearest community of any size to Combs:

 

Google Map

In any case, it's obvious that like the vast majority of English families in pre-modern times, our branch of the Edgars had strictly local horizons. It took us over half a millennium to move about ten miles:

 

Google Map

They were pretty conservative when it came to names too: Johnson Edgar ('the second') begat Johnson Edgar ('the third') in 1793/1794,[16] and in 1818 he married Sarah Makin,[17] from Kettlesbaston, a next-door parish to Preston (HS, Marriage Licences, Sudbury, part 4, 1815-1839, vol 72; Author: Ed: W Bannerman & G Bannerman; Publication Date: 1921). Sarah and the third Johnson had seven children, the last of whom, Thomas, was born 6 January 1843.[18]

All I know about Johnson Edgar the Second is that in 1798 he was. a tenant of Mrs Ann Hitchcock and paid 6. 6d. a year in land tax in the parish of Preston (Ancestry.com. UK, Land Tax Redemption, 1798 [database on-line]).

For more than forty years Thomas, and Harriet Worters, who he married in 1874, [19]stayed on or at least close to the family farm in Preston St. Mary. But in the second half of the 1880s things began to change.

In the next post I'll tell the story of Johnson Edgar (the third) and set the scene for Thomas and Harriet's dramatic move from Preston that laid the foundations for our global family story in the twentieth century.

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[1]https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TP8HAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA180&lpg=PA180&dq=edgar+family+suffolk&source=bl&ots=0LeFjVbmS8&sig=FCo3hER9nMhXt1ZHH-LeRRT5P9o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBDgKahUKEwiJnvm7zYfHAhULqR4KHf0KBEQ#v=onepage&q=edgar%20family%20suffolk&f=false

[2]  Edgar Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381, Cambridge, 100-101.

[3] http://www.jeanajin.webspace.virginmedia.com/pages/edgar.htm; http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbprs%2fm%2f753704136%2f2

[4] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbprs%2fm%2f753772689%2f2

[5] http://www.jeanajin.webspace.virginmedia.com/pages/edgar.htm

[6] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbpr%2fd%2fnbi06100198

[7] Family Tree drawn up by Bridget Adams.

[8] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbprs%2fm%2f753785542%2f2

[9] Family Tree drawn up by Bridget Adams.

[10] Family Tree drawn up by Bridget Adams

[11] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbprs%2fm%2f753826711%2f2

[12] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbpr%2fd%2fnbi06187552

[13]hthttp://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbpr%2fd%2fnbi06099970tp://www.jeanajin.webspace.virginmedia.com/pages/edgar.htm

[14] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbpr%2fd%2fnbi05551391

[15] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbprs%2fm%2f201079736%2f1

[16]http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbc%2f1861%2f1134%2f00467a&parentid=gbc%2f1861%2f0006631537&highlights=%22%22

[17] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=r_850895456

[18] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=bmd%2fb%2f1843%2f1%2fah%2f000966%2f031

[19] http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=bmd%2fm%2f1874%2f2%2faz%2f000086%2f317