Yearsley
The home from the late eighteenth
century of a large section of our family
Introduction
Yearsley is
five kilometres south of Ampleforth, about 10 kilometres south of Helmsley,
approached from the B1363.
The small
village of Yearsley has a long history. There are a number of barrows
and other early
earthworks at Yearsley. A Roman pavement has been found to the west of
Yearsley.
Medieval
Yearsley
Yearsley was
part of the lands of Coxwold and by 1086, it was recorded with Coxwold as Eureslage.
This was a significant
estate comprising 54 villagers and eight households, 15 ploughlands, with 4
lord’s plough teams and 29 men’s plough teams and woodlands measuring 3 leagues
by 4 furlongs. It had the significant value of £12 before the Norman Conquest,
reducing to a value of £6 after the Norman Conquest and the Harrying of the North.
It was held by Kofse before the Conquest and transferred to Hugh, son of Badric
after the Conquest. This estate included Ampleforth, Baxby, Coxwold, Ireton,
Osgoodby, Thirkleby and Yearsley, all part of the Hundred of Yarlestre.
The now
ruined Byland
Abbey, north of Coxwold was founded in January 1135 by Savigniac monks. The
abbey was absorbed by the Cistercian order in 1147. The community had moved
five times before settling at New Byland, near Coxwold in 1177.
To the south
of Coxwold is Newburgh Priory, a former Augustine Priory built in 1145 by Roger
De Mowbray. Henry VIII sold the estate after the dissolution of the monasteries
to Anthony de Bellasis, whose family later took the name of Fauconberg. The
estate passed to the Wombwell family in 1825.
In the Pipe
Rolls of 1176, Yearsley was referred to as Euereslai. The origins of the
name are probably Anglo-Saxon and probably means Boars' Wood. It was Eversley,
in the thirteenth century and Yereslay by the fifteenth century. It was
part of Cukewaldshire and Yearsley was part of the parish of Coxwold
until 1855.
in the
eleventh century Yearsley and the wider estate lands were in the hands of Hugh,
son of Baldric. Later it passed with Coxwold to the Mowbray family. By 1160 Roger de
Mowbray passed the estates to another Norman nobleman, Thomas Colville, a
family which originated in Collville-Sur-Mer on the Normandy coast. Yearsley
was one of the three manors of which Thomas Colvill was enfeoffed by Roger de
Mowbray.
A chapel,
dedicated to St Hilda, was built in the twelfth century, but has since
disappeared. An old tree where fragments of stained glass were found, was
called the Chapel Tree in the nineteenth century.
In 1304 Sir
Thomas Colville the Fifth started a tradition of a weekly market to be held in
the grounds of the manor of Coxwold. He also established a two-day annual fair
to celebrate the Assumption, a tradition that survived uninterrupted in Coxwold
Manor for five hundred years.
Sir Thomas
Colville, the Seventh of Yearsley and Coxwold, made his name during a jousting
incident before the Battle of Crecy in 1346 when he crossed the river to joust
with a French knight who had been hurling abuse at the English king. He later
joined the retinue of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster who was the third
son of Edward III and the richest of the nobility in England. Thomas Colvill
received licence in 1347 to impark his wood of Buksendike in Yearsley.
Thomas
Colville was the feudal lord of Yearsley until 1398 when he died. He was
also connected with Ralph, Lord
Neville of Raby and the family were related to John Percy of Kildale.
Successive generations of Colvilles, generally called Thomas, held the estate
and lands of Coxwold. In 1405 Thomas Colville the Eighth was murdered, probably
on the instruction of the Archbishop of York Richard le Scrope, who was acting
on behalf of Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland. The bulk of the Coxwold
estate was granted to the Uhtred-Neville
family, but doesn’t seem to have remained so.
A later
William Colville was a brother of a later Thomas Colville and William took the
lands of Yearsley along with lands in Upsland, Kilburn and Thirsk. He started
to call the family after the English lands of the family, rather than the
original Norman lands. Therefore, he became William Yearsley.
The manorial
estates of Yearsley passed to Sir William Yearsley, who was Clerk of the
Wardrobe to Henry VI. In 1482 the lands passed to Thomas Yearsley, who died
without male heirs in 1497. Through marriage, the estates of Yearsley then
passed, by Thomas Yearsley's daughter, Thomasina, to William Wildon of Fryton.
In 1500
Joan, the widow of Thomas Yearsley claimed against William Wildon of Fryton her
dower rights in certain lands in Yearsley.
John Wildon
was holding the manor in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1560 Leonard Marton and
his wife Thomasina and William Wildon sold Yearsley to Sir William Bellasis,
which suggests that Thomasina later married Leonard Marton. There was a
watermill in Yearsley in 1560.
In 1603, Sir
John Harte, who was born in nearby Kilburn, North Yorkshire, built a Grammar School
in Coxwold, which closed in 1894. He was also a Lord Mayor of London.
The Old
Grammar School at Coxwold
Eighteenth
century Yearsley
Elias Farndale II (1755 to 1831) settled in the lands around Yearsley in about 1786. He had married
Dorothy Heseltine (1757 to 1840), daughter of Geoff Heseltine on 14 June 1785
at Ampleforth, when Elias was about 30.
The family had moved to Windgate Farm, where William Farndale
(1788 to 1871) was born. This might be a reference to Windyridge Farm at Yearsley, close to a Bronze
Age barrow. There is also a property called
Windygates near the High Lions Lodge, so it is possible that this was the
location of the farm.
Elias was a
farmer there.
in 1835, an
Edward Ewbank was seeking to prove his entitlement to land and he gave evidence
that the Ewbank land extended to a boundary with the ground of Elisha Farndale
in Yearsley by a small stream. Mr
Edward Ewbank, of Gilling, proved that his grandfather formerly rented the
Gilling Warren, and that his jurisdiction extended over the lands now occupied
by the appellants. He remembered a stone, having G on one side and Y on the
other, which was put down 26 years ago, in the place of an older one, and
which, along with some others cover formed the boundary between the parishes.
William Heseltine, 66 years of age, was born at Gilling, and had lived there
for all his life, his father had a warren under Lord Fairfax, on whose estate
there were three; he had received information from his father respecting the
boundaries; they were also separated from Elisha Farndale by a small stream
of water; his ground was in Yearsley, and the witness’s in Gilling. John
Trousdale, aged 68, had known Gilling 52 years last Martinmas, and knew the
enclosures of the appellants; he had cut turf there for the rector of Gilling;
had never heard of the perambulation 38 years since, by the Yearsley people.
John Rymer, who had known Gilling 39 years; and John Clark, who had lived with
the rector of Gilling, 53 years ago, corroborated the account of the former
witnesses.
The Ampleforth Line of
Farndales originated at Windygate Farm in Yearsley and from there spread across
the Vale of York.
The Topographical
Dictionary of Yorkshire by Thomas Langdale in 1822 described Yearsley as
being in the Wapentake of Birdforth. Coxwold then had a population of 348. The
Free Grammar School founded by Sir John Harte was in operation near the church in
Coxwold and there was a neat hospital, founded by Thomas, Earl of Fauconberg
in 1696 for ten poor men who are provided with blue coats every two years,
with another hospital for eight poor women who received eight bushels
of coals annually and five yards of cloth every two years. It seems that
the poor women were expected to make their own clothes! Thomas Langdale
continued that in 1760, the facetious Laurence Sterne was presented to this
curacy by Lord Fauconberg.
The Irish
novelist, the Reverend Laurence Sterne (1713 to 1768), of whom Thomas Langdale
clearly disapproved, was a friend of John
Hall of Skelton Castle, lord of the manor of the Farndales of Kilton.
Shandy Hall had been built in Coxwold in about 1450, possibly as a priest’s
house. After the Reformation it became
part of the Bellasis Estate of Newburgh Priory, and was extended in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By
then it was known as Parsonage House and for eight years it was the home of
Laurence Sterne who wrote in a tiny study various works including The Life
and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey. According
to an anonymous letter in 1760, Sterne hardly knew that he could write at
all, much less with humour so as to make his reader laugh. However having
failed to provide for himself as a farmer, and ill with tuberculosis, he began
work on his novels. He had just finished his novels about a decade before Elias
Farndale arrived in Yearsley.
Shandy
Hall
By 1861 Yearsley
had 37 houses, with a population of 180, 94 men and 86 women. In 1871 there
were 33 houses at Yearsley with a population of 95 men and 68 women. By 1881
there were 30 houses, with 94 male inhabitants and 67 women.
A chapel of
ease was built in Yearsley in 1839, dedicated to the Holy Trinity.
In 1890, the
Bulmers Topography, History and Directory described the Yearsley township as
comprising 2,764 acres with 171 inhabitants. The lord of the manor was Sir G O
Wombwell. The village was described as situated on a lofty eminence, exposed
to the chilling north and eastern blasts as they sweep over the Blakemoor
mountains.
Sir G O
Wombwell provided £10 a year to support the Yearsley school.
Yearsley was
also the site of the
pottery of William
Wedgewood, a relation of the famous Staffordshire Wedgwood family of
potters.
The village
was part of the Newburgh Priory
estate of the Wombwell family until 1944. Sir George Orby Wombwell, the
fourth Baronet, was the last surviving officer of the Charge of the Light
Brigade and is buried in the Coxwold churchyard in 1889. When he had reached
the guns at Balaklava, his horse was killed under him and he was shortly after
pulled off and taken prisoner, his sword and pistols being taken from him by
some Russian Lancers. He managed to escape, catch another loose horse and ride
back to the British lines, hotly pursued by Russians. He retired from the Army
as a lieutenant in 1855, when he inherited his title in Coxwold and Newburgh
Priory. At Over Silton Manor, Wombwell's initials, GOW, can still be
seen on one of the manor cottages. He was appointed High Sheriff of Yorkshire
in 1861
or
Go Straight to Chapter 14 – Return
to Yearsley
Other source
material includes
A History of
the County of York North Riding: Volume 2. Originally published by Victoria
County History, London, 1923, Coxwold.
Yearsley,
a Genealogical Story,
2017, Part
1 and Part 2
The webpage
on Ampleforth includes research notes
and a chronology.