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 Woodvillei. 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 Rev John 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 upii, 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 Rev John Crakanthorp between 1682 and 1710 have
survived and are now in the County Record Office. Recently the Cambridgeshire
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 Wedd
5s 6d
June 9: Spent by Nat: going to London at his
sister Hester’s wedding 2 days
9s 6d
June 2~0: Item for daughter towards 3 months
board ended about July 6 1704
Item for her expenses coming down
June 23: Item [to daughter] going to London in
May and coming down again the 15 instant, to
provide her self wedding cloaths, and in money
since she came downe, 4s in all
£2 10s 0d
10s 0d
£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 a Robert 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 not Hester 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 surviving child, for although his wife
Mary Bayly did not die until 1712 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 Benjamin III, 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:
www.geocities.com/weddfamily