The Time Traveller’s Handbook

Return to the Farndale Story

Invitation to travel through 2,000 years of British History

This is the story of one large extended family and its footsteps through the history of Britain, focused on its Yorkshire origins, over two millennia. What is extra ordinary is that this is not an aristocratic family, but a family of ordinary men and women , representative of those who provided the power banks which drove the national story. It is a story of agriculturalists, soldiers, mariners, and pioneers. It is a story of adventure, hard graft, passion, poverty, sometimes of breaking the law, sometimes enforcing the law, sometimes of inspiring achievement.

The reason this story can be told is:

· The family has surname, derived from a small valley at the edge of the North York Moors, which has a uniqueness which made it possible to extract our detailed story from the vast pool of source material.

· That uniqueness has provided the means to find multiple records of our family back to the thirteenth century.

· Our known rooting to a small valley in Yorkshire, itself part of lands which formed a composite estate back to Roman times, means that whilst we lose sight of individuals before the thirteenth century, we can still explore the deep ancestral past of our ancestors through Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian to Roman times.

· We can then briefly consider the primordial swamp, the bubbling cauldron of unknown folk, who continued their footsteps yet further back through time, told through locations in the very place where our known ancestors trod their paths.

This story is the product of two generations of research, which started three quarters of a century ago in the 1950s. It comprises a thoroughness of genealogical analysis that means that we have a complete record of all members of the modern family back to the start of parish records in the mid sixteenth century, and their stories. It comprises an ambition of historical research and medieval genealogy which has allowed an unusually accurate story to be told back to the thirteenth century. It comprises the story of our known ancestral lands into the deep historical past.

When Martin Farndale began the research in the 1950s, he also collected stories, photographs, and family artefacts, before they were lost to time, which has left us with the benefit of an unparalleled richness of record to the Victorian period.

The Farndale story matrix page is the hub of our family story which will direct you on a journey through time. The wider website also comprises the underlying research and analysis. You can use hyperlinks in the story to explore more detail. The wider website is also a genealogy including a network of family lines which binds together separate family groups which make up the whole family. Every member of the family, modern and historical, has their own webpage where the detailed story of every historical individual is told in chronological detail. So if you choose to explore the detail, you can explore the thousands of pages which make the detailed research available. All the work behind the story is available on the website.

Alternatively, you can focus on the Farndale Story, reading the tales of the family’s main adventures, dipping only into the detailed research, through hyperlinks, as the mood takes you.

Who should use this story to travel through time?

Family

The first purpose of this website is to make available the genealogical research to all who are descended from the Farndale family, whether or not they continue to adopt the surname. For that purpose the Farndale Story may provide the best starting place, but you can also return to the home page of the website and explore your own ancestry in detail, finding the individual pages of each of your direct ancestors, and explore your own unique story.

Those interested in Yorkshire’s past

The family story finds a path through Yorkshire’s unique history, telling of its place in the birth of Christianity, and of a national identity. It tells of Lastingham in 653 CE, at the mouth of Farndale, and it tells the story of the breathtaking minster of Kirkdale. It tells of the origins of the valley of Farndale and of Rievaulx Abbey. The story includes histories of Sheriff Hutton, the home of the Nevilles and Richard III during the Wars of the Roses and of medieval soldiers; and of medieval Doncaster. It explores the history of York in each of its manifestations. It explores the Yorkshire roots of the Robin Hood stories. The story then moves to Cleveland to tell Cleveland’s history from the sixteenth century in detail through to the industrial revolution, of mariners of Whitby, the lost village of Kilton, ironstone mining, and of early industrial Leeds, Bradford, Coatham, Hartlepool and Stockton. The story provides a new perspective on Yorkshire’s history, by following one Yorkshire family’s path through time. The family story provides a unique path, which tells Yorkshire’s story with novelty and adhesion.

Historians

The family story also goes to the heart of the national story. It is a family’s eyewitness account of the origins of the English nation, the Scandinavian influence on the northern lands, and the period of Norman whitewash. The family footsteps continue through the whims of aristocratic games of thrones, medieval confrontation, and the founding of towns. The story, one of ordinary rural folk is the dominant national story before the industrial revolution. The story then follows the course of those folk as they encountered fundamental change. It follows adventures at sea, and pioneers to the new lands which defined the national spirit of a new empire Britain. It emerges into the twentieth century, to face the trenches of the First World War and the total war of the Second. The story provides rich analysis, supported by links to the detailed underlying research. The story provides a distinctive source for a unique perspective on the national story.

Genealogists

The Farndale Family Website, from which the Farndale Story derives, provides a novel approach to genealogy which has built on the important but more mechanical processes of sifting records of births, deaths and marriages, and census records, to build stories onto the genealogical framework. It has used two generations of family research experience to explore new approaches to provide depth and story telling, to push the possibilities of genealogy to its maximum. It recognises the constraints of genealogical research before the time of parish records, but has not shied from a methodology to provide detailed medieval genealogical analysis, using models of relationship to present the most probable story. It uses the author’s professional legal experience in the application of rules of evidence to present a genealogy which meets the higher standard of proof where that is possible, but presents the probable, ‘more likely than not’, analysis when certainty is impossible. It finds ways to push beyond perceptions of constraints on genealogy to provide breadth (the story of a whole family) and depth (probing into medieval records) and it also explores how, when the genealogical research can go no further, historical research can continue to tell the family story into deeper time.

Using the Time Traveller’s Handbook

The Farndale Story comprises a matrix of stories, each taking you on a journey into the past.

Please start by reading the Prologue, top centre of the matrix.

You can travel through time by exploring these stories in any order you like, or you could take a more structured approach. The main story is told through numbered Stories in thirty three Acts with links to them in bold red text. You can explore these in any order, but it would make more sense to start with Act 1 – the Cradle about eight rows down the matrix. I suggest that you then follow the story in the numbered order, which will first take you back in time through the history of the ancestral lands of the family, and then take you forward in time. It’s up to you though. Just go where the mood takes you.

You will find the Explainers in purple text. These provide more depth which you might like to explore as you read the main story. They tell of places and historical events, and of historical factors which influenced our family. You will find the Explainers adjacent to the Stories to which they apply.

You can also meet a few select individuals from the family, who best illustrate our story at different periods of time. Whilst you can find every member of our extended family from the Farndale genealogies, the individuals here comprise a few folk who help to tell the main story. Again you will find the individuals adjacent to the Stories to which they apply.

You can also find some detail about objects and places which tell our family story. The Story of our family in thirty places and objects. If you find yourself in Yorkshire, you could visit these places. Whilst one object is in the British Museum, the places are otherwise clustered around the North York Moors, the Dales, the Vales of York and Pickering, and Cleveland. These pages will tell you how to get there and what you will see. If you can’t get there, they will describe the places and objects, to help you visit them virtually. Again you will find the objects and places adjacent to the Stories to which they apply.

On each page you will find hyperlinks. These will generally take you to the more detailed research in pages on the wider website.

At the top and bottom of each page you will find a link back to the main matrix. At the bottom of the Story pages, you will also find a link to the next chapter. So if you want to read the story in order, you don’t have to return to the Matrix each time.

Our Ability to Time Travel

We know that the modern Farndale family are descended from the thirteenth century agriculturalists, who cleared the land in the place known as Farndale from about 1200, and were established tenant farmers by the end of that century.

Since Farndale was a part of the estate of Kirkbymoorside, which was centred in the town of Kirkbymoorside and the agricultural lands around Kirkdale, in the time before lands started to be cleared in the Dales, our family can explore its path through Norman, Scandinavian, Anglo Saxon and Roman times, throughout which time the estate was a settled agricultural centre, at a place of political influence and significance to the regional and national story.

When our ancestors were clearing the valley of Farndale in the thirteenth century, this was the same time when surnames started to be used and then became hereditary. These thirteenth century individuals chose to define themselves, and their descendants to follow, by the name Farndale. In some cases, the medieval records tell us who were father and son and daughter. It is not possible to be certain about the precise relationships of all these individuals to each other. However we have been able to compile the most probable family tree of these early ancestors.

It seems to me to be likely that all modern Farndale descendants share the same ancestors from one family, because in the early sixteenth century (when we know how they were related to each other) almost all members of the family lived in Cleveland, north of the moors for the next couple of centuries, and probably descend from two individuals, Nicholas and Agnes Farndale. There is some evidence that suggests that their son William Farndale who died in Skelton in Cleveland was the same William Farndale who married Margaret Atkinson in Campsall, just north of Doncaster in 1564. So it seems likely to me that all modern Farndales descend from the thirteenth century folk who lived in Farndale via the medieval Doncastrians. There are other possibilities, but we can build a model for the most probable early ancestry, using the extensive medieval evidence available to us.

Some advice for Time Travellers

The Time Traveller’s Matrix is a historical observation tool. When you travel back in time, avoid the predestination paradox, but enjoy reading and observing our story. Absorb the stories, and let your imagination stretch out the family tales, to provide perspective to the regional and national story. Use these building blocks to understand your own story alongside the wider local and national story. Notice the historical repetition, that reverberates into the contemporary age.