I cannot claim any credit for the research that this post is based on as it was supplied to me by Michael Ginn many years ago.
My great great grandmother, Eliza Ginn, was born in Great Hormead, Hertfordshire in 1837 and Michael had managed to trace her ancestors back almost 400 years to William Ginn, whose birth had been recorded in 1450 just a few miles away in Aston. Eliza was the daughter of an agricultural labourer and it is unusual to be able to trace such a humble family back so far – in this case it is possible because the Ginns started out as a prosperous landowning family and the manorial court records, deeds and wills for the area they lived in have survived almost complete.
One of William Ginn’s descendants, also named William, was my 10x great grandfather. He was born around 1553 and his father, Henry Ginn, was a prosperous man who inherited further property from the family of his wealthy wife, Margaret Fordham. Henry’s main claim to fame is that in 1579 he accused Alice Cole, spinster of Therfield, of bewitching two of his cows whilst they drank at a water vat. Poor Alice was found guilty and pilloried for the offence.
His son’s contribution to the history of England is rather more inspiring as it involves a defining moment, when the country was threatened by the Spanish Armada.
At the end of May 1588, 132 Spanish ships had sailed for England and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was ordered to gather an army of men at Tilbury to prevent the invaders from entering the Thames estuary and marching on London. At that time there was no professional army, and the monarch expected landowners to raise troops when required – muster rolls record that William Ginn was amongst the local force sent from Hertfordshire and that he was trained to fire a caliver musket, which was the most advanced weapon of its time.
On 9th August 1588, Queen Elizabeth I was invited to inspect and address her troops at Tilbury, which she reputedly did clad in armour and mounted on a white horse. Her inspiring words are still much quoted, particularly the lines:
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain. or any Prince of Europe shall dare to invade the borders of my realm: to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.
Fortunately, for both William and the country, by this time the Armada had already effectively been defeated, and he returned to live in Hertfordshire, where he married Elizabeth Baucock in Anstey in 1591. They had eight children but life did not run entirely smoothly as, although he was the eldest son, he was disinherited and a petition to get his father’s will overturned in 1616 proved unsuccessful. William was left with at most 30 acres of freehold land in Anstey so, although a yeoman by birth, he ended up a small and not particularly prosperous farmer.
William Ginn died in 1636 at the age of 83, and after that the descent of my ancestors from yeoman to agricultural labourer was swift. My great great grandmother married a farm bailiff, George Pursglove, in 1866 and they had two daughters: Ruth (my great grandmother) in 1867 and Eliza in 1870.
After she was widowed in 1904, Eliza Ginn went to live with Ruth and her husband, Walter Howe, in Suffolk and she is frequently mentioned in the letters that her daughter sent to my grandmother, not always in the most flattering of terms as she apparently became “a great trial to us all”. She died in 1917, aged 80.
Sleuthing Notes 