Why did the Inskips move to Bedfordshire

For the last nine months I have been deep in old parchments trying to find out why the Inskips first moved to Old Warden, Bedfordshire in the late sixteenth century.  The result has been a village reconstruction of all the families in Old Warden between 1537 when Warden’s Cistercian Abbey was Dissolved, and the 1660 Restoration of the Monarchy.

So what of the Inskips? Well, John Inskip, born around 1556,  is still the earliest Inskip in the village, with his 1584 marriage to Margaret Pope – the Popes were in Old Warden at the Reformation.  John Inskip set out, probably from the Lancashire Fylde, around the 1570’s to seek opportunity.  He was part of the migration of young men from the North to the South-East of England at a time of great economic and cultural change in the country.  I found evidence of other young men in Old Warden from Lancashire and Yorkshire.

It is likely that he was the son of a husbandman – a rank in Elizabethan society- and may well have taken out a contract as a farm servant in Old Warden.  Very many young people in those times became farm servants, often on annual contacts, from age 11 – that is how they learnt how to earn a living and maintain a family.

Margaret Pope inherited her fathers copyhold tenement.  She and John lived next to what was the vicarage (possibly now the Old Post Office) on a small plot of land with a three bay cottage, a garden, an orchard and a two bay barn.  They had common rights to graze two oxen and a cow. Unlike other Warden cottagers, they didn’t keep sheep.  They paid 5 shillings a year for a copyhold worth 10 shillings in 1605 and 30 shillings in 1622.  However, they could not possibly have lived off such a small holding and so John must have had a trade and/or wage employment.  The documents were reluctant to provide that information so I have speculated on the following:

Ø Drovers or carters – based on their travel and keeping oxen with only a smallholding.

Ø Weavers or tailors – Alice Inskip’s kin (John’s second wife) were tailors, as was John Inskip’s grandson. They may have had expertise in flax weaving from Kirkham in the Fylde.

Ø Horticultural labourers – based on the family predominance in market gardening from the late seventeenth century and land fertility expertise in the Fylde, plus John’s orchard and barn.

Many ancient copyhold tenancies in Old Warden were brought out and merged into larger farms during the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century – as was the case in many areas of the country, as land was made more productive in order to feed a growing population.   However,  John held on to his copyhold and in 1615 was one of a group of men who took a local landlord to court for enclosing common land.  The documents of the case are still in the National Archives in Kew.  John must have won the case (that part is not in the archive) as when he died in 1626 he passed his copyhold to eldest son Robert.  When Robert died unmarried, around 1651,  the copyhold – one of the last remaining in the village – went to sister Elizabeth Mathie and husband Thomas.

At a time when Old Warden was going through a huge amount of economic change with land investment and shrinking smallholdings, when poor harvests, due to the little ice age of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, brought death and disease,   the Inskips were one of the families who survived and even to some extent thrived.  That was very much through good management.