Introduction.
In
writing these notes I have three aims. Firstly to record the history of a
fisher family in Leigh, Essex since its foundation in the late 1600's.
Secondly, to provide a starting point for those of the family today who might
wish to add a chapter or two on their own branch. Lastly to provide a typical
example of a family history that those interested in that subject might wish to
read, although they themselves might not be related to the family. Of the
readers, I would expect that most would, however, be members of the family or
have connection with it through the female line. Most would not be interested
in family history as an academic subject but might be intrigued to read of
their ancestors' exploits. Never the
less I have quoted sources so that those with the skill, knowledge and
inclination can check each point and read more detail than I have space to
record.
I
have confined the notes to a great extent to the period before 1900. This means
that most of the oral history still within he family is excluded and I leave it
to some of my cousins to collect these tales together to write Volume Two. For
the same reason there are very few photographs of the Cotgroves although I have
included some pictures that have a connection with the family.
This
is not intended to be a great work of literature but a record as far as the
surviving archives allow of a single family in its original habitat. There must be errors both in fact and in
deduction that I have failed to find or correct but I hope this book will help
provide future generations with basis on which to work as well encourage a few
to continue where I have stopped.
Why Cotgrove ?
With
such a close knit family it might be asked why should one with the surname
Holding be writing a history of the Cotgrove's?
The reason is simple; my great grand mother was Eliza Cotgrove. She was born in 1831 the daughter of Henry
and Sarah and became the second wife of Golden Thompson. My grand mother was the first child of this
marriage, arriving just three weeks after the ceremony in Bethnal Green. The
Thompsons were also a well known Leigh family, although at the time of the
marriage they had only a minor interest in fishing. Golden, who was the third generation of that
name, was at that time a general dealer and his sons by his first marriage were
destined to travel the world rather than the Thames estuary. His father, then in his late
seventies, had been a fisherman but now spent his declining years reminiscing
over his days in the Royal Navy and his reputed exploits during the 1798 Nore
Mutiny[2];
a fund of stories that was to keep him in beer for the next twenty years
although as I have now found most had been "improved" to provide his
audience with a more entertaining evening.
When
I first saw the names Cotgrove and Golden Thompson on my great grand mother's
marriage certificate, I knew that I had two names which were to prove most
interesting. In all there have been eight generations of Goldens and the
unusual nature of that name has enabled me to trace a branch in the USA in spite of the commonness of the
surname itself. It also took very little
effort to confirm that the name Cotgrove was unique to Leigh and that every one
of that name today could be traced back to the first known man to bear the name
in 1689. With this in mind I set out to construct a family tree showing all
branches of the family. Today that tree is some 36 feet wide and contains over
1000 names. A tree without leaves is of little interest so I have endeavoured
to add a few facts on the life and times of the Cotgroves from their first
appearance in Essex up to the present day.
I
have attempted to include all born with the name Cotgrove, at least as an entry
on one of the many trees. I would have
liked to have had a chapter on each
member but this was limited by space and by the sad fact that many
completed their time here on earth without leaving behind any material evidence that I have been able to find.
I
have a long list of Cotgroves who can not be placed on the Tree but an
examination of these shows that the Tree is more complete than it would first
seem. Most of the "unknowns are
children who died at a young age, most
of the rest are those who died in adulthood without marrying and the rest are
female Cotgroves who were the wives or widows of male Cotgroves. In all I am confident that any one with the
name Cotgrove will find his ancestors on the tree.
Origins
Fig
1 The Church of St
Clements Leigh as it was in 1900.
It was in this Church that almost every member of the family was
Baptised, Married and Buried until 1850.
|
If
you speak to a present day Cotgrove about his, or her, origins you will be sure
to hear the story that they came over from Holland to drain Canvey Island and
that the name was once Croppenberg, Coggery or something similar. There is another version which says that the
first Cotgrove came to England to escape religious persecution and
became ship wrecked on the sandbanks in the Thames
estuary.
The
first version appears in print in the collection of stories about the people of
Rochford Hundred published about 1880.[3] In spite of much research it has not been
possible to confirm or deny these traditions.
However some facts do come to light which support it in part.
The
first reference to Cotgrove in the Leigh area is the baptism of Thomas Cotgrove
the son of Benjamin Cotgrove on 22nd February 1686/7[4], who was to be buried a few days later
on the 26th February. Before that date
there is not a single reference to the family to be found. This is not
surprising when one considers the poor state of Parish Registers in that area.
The registers for Leigh do not start till 1684, Eastwood's 1685 and
Prittlewell's in 1645, however, the Church of England registers for Canvey Island do survive from before 1600. Those of the Dutch Church on the Island itself have been lost. The Island
was divided up between several mainland parishes and all these have been
indexed for marriages from the start of the registers up to a period later than
1690.[5] There is no recorded marriage for a Cotgrove
nor for any similar name. There is also a very good index of Essex Wills but
again there is no trace of a Cotgrove will.
Moreover, in the 1660's and 1670's there were several collections of
Hearth Tax, the list of payers still existing.[6] Again there is no trace of a Cotgrove, either
in the Rochford Hundred or in the adjacent Barstable Hundred. Admittedly poor fishermen do not often write
wills and few are wealthy enough to be liable for Hearth Tax, although the list for 1672 does includes
non-payers. It is also possible that they
were stanch supporters of the Dutch Church on Canvey and their marriages and
baptisms were registered in the lost registers of that Church. However it looks more probable that they
arrived in Leigh only a few years before 1686.
Perhaps Benjamin's father was the
first.
Let
us now consider the theory based on the draining of Canvey Island.
This began in the 1620's. The
local land owners led by Sir Henry Appleton signed an agreement with a Dutch
Merchant in London, Joas Croppenburg, to drain the Island in return for a payment of one third
of the lands drained.[7] There is no doubt that many of the men who
worked on the drainage scheme were Dutchmen brought over from Holland by
Croppenberg and some evidence to suggest that they came from Zeeland.[8] In 1628 the Dutch in Canvey numbered in
excess of two hundred and in that year they petitioned King Charles I to allow
them to have a Dutch pastor on the Island. The Church was opened in 1631 and a number of
Dutch pastors held office from then until 1704. Unfortunately the petition of
1628, although still preserved in the Public Record Office, Chancery Lane [9] , has no list of names of the petitioners
attached to the document. Many of the
local surnames after 1700 do however, show signs of Dutch Zeeland origin. [10]
The
name Cotgrove is obviously a typical English surname although it only exists in
that form in the Leigh family. Reaney [11] will confirm that 'Cot' means a small
cottage and 'Grove' means a small wood. One must also consider that in the
1600's the poorer classes of Dutchmen did not use surnames as we use them. Names took the form of a forename plus a
town, e.g. Joas of The Haag (or some other town or area from which the man
came). So did the first Cotgrove have the name 'Cornelis of the Count' or
Cornilis t'Grave ? This could easily be modified to Co 'tgrove by those who
could not master the Dutch accent and later became Cotgrove. This theory is not
supported by the fact that the Registers of the Dutch Church at Colchester do
not have a single t'---- type name, although there are plenty of Den -----'s
and Van der ----'s. There are also no
names that could perhaps be called Cotgrove although when one looks a some
examples of English versions of Dutch or French names it is difficult to see
the connection. Mycoll Du La Peire = Michel de la Pierre, Wam Fromowe =
Guillaume Fremaut, Abram Cosheire =
Abraham Couchet. The Colchester Registers do have several Dutch
surnames with the Christian name 'Benjamin'. There is a reference in a
bible still in the hands of one branch
of the family which records the main descent of the family through a line of
Benjamin's and whose common ancestor is "Crawdeon, a Dutchman". The
bible is only about 100 years old.
The
name as written has changed but slightly during the last 300 years, starting
off as COTTGROVE or COTGRAVE in 1680-1720 before reverting to COTGROVE. During the later part of the 18th century the
name appears occasionally as CODGROVE both in the Poor Law Records and in the
Church Registers. The Lord of the Manor
used COTGROVE. By 1820 it became fixed
as COTGROVE.
So
why Cropenburg ? I suspect that this
is a variation of the Canvey Island story. Our ancestors or others seeking an origin,
assumed that as Cropenburg was the main Dutch character involved in the work it
was from him that they had descended. The Coggery legend is more strongly rooted and but there seems to
be very little truth in it. There is no
doubt, as we have seen, that the name was spelt COTGROVE, or something very
similar to it, since its earliest origins in the area but how was it pronounced
? It is well known that the
pronunciation of some English surnames has become corrupted over the
years. The earliest generations of a
typical English family of the 1200 to 1300's would have been unable to read or
write and although the name was recorded by the scribes of the Lord of the
Manor in what they considered to be correct English, the various accents may have given some rather strange
interpretations of French or Anglo Saxon names. The examples already quoted show this only
too clearly. Although the written
version was preserved by the literate members of the society the future
generations changed the spoken version to suit local accents and make a name
easier to pronounce by the English speaking
descendants . Thus after many
generations the spoken and written versions bare hardly any connection one with another. Saint John
has become "Sinjohn"
and Featherstonehaugh has been shortened in spoken language to
"Fanshaw". As the names of
the nobility were more likely to be written down than those of the poorer
classes, it was these names that tended
to show this difference between spoken and written versions. However all this took place in the earliest
days of the use of surnames, some 400 years before the first Cotgrove landed
from Holland.
The first to arrive would have had, at best, a heavily accented English and their name would be recorded by
the local scribes as the nearest English
sounding name of which they could think.
Already the Dutch name had been altered. The first generation would have lost their accent and although they may have
retained the sound of their Dutch
surname it would have been anglicised within
a couple of generations. All
this is pure theory and there is no proof whatsoever. Moreover it is worth noting that in all
other cases the spoken names is shorter than the written name; Coggery is longer than Cotgrove; three
syllables as against two. Hence Coggery
should be the written name and Cotgrove the spoken. This puts some doubt on the name ever
having been Coggery at all although there was a Coggery family on Canvey Island.[12]
There is a version of the name which is
spelt as COTGRAVE or COTGREAVE and this is found in the north west of England in the county of Cheshire. The spelling of the two names is
rarely interchanged so that one family can be distinguished from the
other. There was a family of Cotgraves
near Hornchurch, Ilford and Barking during the first half of the 17th Century
but there appears to be no connection to the Leigh family and they are almost
certainly descended from the Cheshire branch.[13] This Ilford group seems to die out in 1664
leaving four children, Francis, Timothy and Thomas of which nothing further is
known. Boyd's Marriage index shows no marriage and it is suspected but not
proved that all died in infancy. They were a well off family having two houses
and trading as lime sellers. The 1662 Hearth Tax Return for Hornchurch lists
Thomas as paying for 4 hearths but by 1672 he had left and no other Cotgrave is
recorded.
The
origins of this Cheshire family have been well documented and
can be traced to a Hugh who lived in
Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire. He was an important land owner and may have
been the son of the Lord of the Manor of Cotgreave. This was before the general
use of surnames but they could be using the name Buran. In about 1250 he moved to Cheshire at the request of his overlord, the
Earl of Chester, to whom the Nottinghamshire Manor
belonged. He was offered a job as
woodman and the hand of marriage to a rich and influential widow, who was a
member of the Le Belward family, who the
Earl wished to have married. No doubt
as the result of this marriage and the combined influence of his wife and
overlord Hugh's family prospered and the offspring were granted lordships of
manors. By now he was known as Hugh de
Cotgreave, which surname was adopted by his family. The family split into two or three branches
who each took over manors in Cheshire.[14] There are coats of arms recorded for all
branches.[15] Among
well known members of the family was Hugh Cotgrave, Rouge Croix Pursuivant and
later Richmond Herald who died in 1584.[16] He was noted for producing false
pedigrees. Another was Randle who wrote
a dictionary and died 1634. Many years
later, in the mid 19th Century, the
Cotgrave family was a victim of a genealogical fraud perpetrated by the family
of the widow of Sir John Cotgreave (1770 - 1836). Thus the pedigree recorded in the first
edition of Burke's Commoners is completely false.[17]
The
le Belward's can be traced back with
some uncertainty to Hugh Lupas, nephew of William the Conqueror, whose
illegitimate son Robert FitzHugh was the first Norman Baron of Malpas,
Cheshire, and who was alive in 1090.[18] There is no evidence whatsoever that the
Cotgroves of Leigh have any connection with Cheshire but there is circumstantial evidence
which makes a connection possible.
Imagine
that one of these Cheshire Cotgreaves , having strong protestant convictions felt that
his religious freedom was threatened. This
would have been in about 1600 when King John was on the throne. It is known that at about that time members
of the family appeared before Church Courts.
In common with other at that time they escaped to Holland and joined the Protestant Community there. Many years later the invasion of the French,
who were stanch Catholics forced members of this Community to flee, some came
back to England.
Could out founder, Benjamin be one of these ?
In
the next chapter we can examine this theory in greater detail.
Everything
points to the Dutch origins but the exact story is uncertain and unproven.
The Dutch Connection.
If
as is said the first Cotgrove came over to help drain Canvey, it would be
likely that at least one of his descendants would be recorded between 1621 and
1686. There is however no trace of Cotgrove or any possible name like it,
except the Cotgraves of Barking, before the baptism of Thomas of Leigh in
1686/7. Even if the first one was only 20 years old in 1621 he would almost
certainly be dead by 1686. The first
known Benjamin, who died in 1690, would only have been about 30 at his death so
he is unlikely to be the son of the first; more likely the grandson. With three
generations in the area where are all the children and grandchildren ? On the whole I think it more logical to
assume that it was Benjamin's father who came from Holland, perhaps in the
1640's or '50's, or as we shall see, perhaps even later. The vague mention in the family bible of
Crawdeon Cotgrove as the father of the first Benjamin being a Dutchman adds
weight to this theory. So is it possible
that the second theory is the correct one - that they were fleeing religious
prosecution ?
The
history of relationships between Holland and England during this period could cast some
light on the origins.[19] The persecutions of the Dutch Calvinists
caused many Dutchmen to flee to England around 1565-75. Many settled in Colchester and this led to the founding of the Dutch Church there; by 1635 this had 700 Communicants
and was an obvious centre for further immigrants. But by 1600 the situation had
changed and there were strong Walloon churches in Holland and although many of
the congregations were French, some were formed of East Anglican families who
were leaving England to avoid possible
persecution by James I, who was against anybody who disagreed with himself , a
Catholic; even some of the Dutch
Colchester families returned to their homeland. It was the English families in Leyden that sailed away from Holland to Southampton, Plymouth and finally to Cape
Cod USA in the Mayflower in 1620. It is
interesting to note at this point that the Mayflower called at Leigh in July
1620 to pick up some of her passengers and her part owner, John Vassal was of
Leigh, although he lived at Cockethurst Farm, Eastwood.[20]
Relationships
remained peaceful for the next 30 years, during which time Mary, daughter of
Charles I of England married William, the son of one the Dutch
ruling class. By 1650 the son of that marriage was destined to become William
III of England.
In this period the Dutch fishing fleet sailed down the British eastern
seaboard every year from the Shetlands on 24th June (St John's Day), to the
Thames estuary by the beginning of December. The highly efficient fleet
numbered perhaps 500 boats and their catches were relayed home by a series of
taxi boats, while the fleet, somewhat to the annoyance of the British fishermen
continued southwards. Also during this period the work on Canvey Island was carried out. Thus the climate was right for a Cotgrove
settler although as we have seen other evidence rules out the period.
However in 1652 a series of three wars began
and peace did not return between England and Holland until 1674, followed by
the marriage in 1677 of William to Mary, daughter of James, Duke of York. Thus
it is highly unlikely that a Cotgrove
would have been welcome until after that date, particularly as the Dutch fleet
raided the Medway coast in 1667. They would also would not have chosen the
period of the English Civil War (1642-5). So the most likely time for the first
ancestor to arrive is now shown to be just before 1650 or as late as 1675, but
this is still time enough for him bring his young son Benjamin with him.
From
the Dutch point of view the period 1620-1672
was a time of religious tolerance and although the majority were
Protestant, all denominations were accepted and there was no persecution. The invasion of southern Holland by the French in 1672 would have posed
a threat to the Dutch living in Zeeland which became cut off from the rest of Holland.
The French forces quickly reached Utrecht and the Dutch forces were fleeing in
defeat. Amsterdam was an island among the deliberately
flooded polders and the French turned west and headed for the coast at The Hague.
The winter of 1672-3 was severe and the French looked forward to
advancing over the ice that covered the polders. Fortunately for the Dutch a sudden thaw
melted the ice and the French became
bogged down. They took their revenge
on two villages[21] with such savagery that their allies, who
included England, began to have sympathy for the Dutch
and England signed a peace treaty[22].
However the attack caused a flood of migrants and the churches in Utrecht were persecuted by the French Catholics. Thus during 1672 to 1674 a Protestant
fisherman, trapped on the islands of Zeeland and deprived of the main markets
inland might well have chosen to flee to England. In fact the English had given an invitation
to subjects of the United Provinces to settle[23] in England as early as June 1672 although the
English were still arresting Dutchmen who landed in England in November 1672[24] if they would not swear an oath of allegiance[25].
The French withdrew only to attack again a few years later. This time the English were not involved and
although the French attack was mainly in the south the Zeelanders must have
been worried. Thus 1677 was another
possible date for the arrival of the Cotgroves in Essex.
From
May 1673 onwards many Dutchmen arrived
and in November 1674 great numbers of Dutch merchants and skippers with their
vessels were reported to have a reached Dover from Dunkirk, Ostend and Zealand[26].
Also in November of that year there were two periods of very stormy
weather which were bad enough to be recorded in State Papers and which
prevented the usual packet boats sailing from both Harwich and Dover.
One exile was William Van de
Velde , the famous printer, who is reported to have arrived in London in the winter of 1672/3.
One
must also take notice of the fact that when Benjamin senior died in 1690 his son had not been born. The son in turn
died when his own son was only 5 years old. Thus the first English born
generations had no opportunity to found a family tradition. Any family oral
history would have to have been passed down from the English, female, line and
must be lacking in detail even before if got started.
Thus
one can assume but not prove that the first Cotgrove arrived in 1674, probably
in November from the coast of Zeeland. His name might have been Crawdeon but was that a surname
or a Christian name ? By trade he was
most likely a fisherman. One could also
speculate late the name of his village might have been similar in sound to
“Cotgrove”. By coincidence one of the two villages sacked by the French was
Bodegrave.
There
is, however, another possibility, which could tie the Essex Cotgroves in with the Cheshire family. It is known that the Cotgraves of Cheshire had some children named Benjamin. [27]
They also had children who went overseas around 1630-40. [28] Another Cheshire Benjamin was the son of John Cotgrave
whose aunt Eleanor Cotgrave mentioned him in her will of 1671.[29]
She was a Quaker and had been in trouble with the Church Courts as a
dissenter. Thus it is possible that one
of these Cotgraves left England to seek religious freedom in Holland, only to return two generations later
to avoid the French persecution of 1673.
He would have still had an English name so that this would explain the
lack of a similar Dutch name in the Leigh area. Living within the English community in Holland even for 50 to 75 years would have
meant that the family would have retained their use of English language so that
they would have far fewer problems resettling back in Essex.
Remember the first mention of Benjamin in Essex was as Cotgrave. There is however, not a single item of prove
to confirm this hypothesis.
