A Welsh Connection

Stephen Benham, a fellow member of the Guild of One-Name Studies, sent me a reference he had spotted in the apprenticeship indentures of the Welsh School, Ashford, held in the National Library of Wales.

1756, Sept. 7
Apprentice: Blaencow, William, son of Richard Blaencow of the parish of St. Luke, carpenter
Master: Richard Lucas, citizen and stationer of London

This is a very interesting variant of our family name and it is an entirely logical one! We have always been told the ‘blen’ in Blencowe derives from the Welsh ‘blaen’ for ‘hill’ and obviously here is a Welshman spelling it the proper way!

Searching the database I found a Richard Blencow who married Mary Parke at St Lukes, Old Street in 1757, but no mention of a William there. It was not until I trawled through 18thC William Bs that I found the solution, about 15 minutes walk from where I live in Oxford! To describe what I found, it's probably simplest if I start time-wise at the beginning:

Thomas Blincow was born (not in Oxford) c.1669; in 1695 he married Ann Holship at St Mary Magdalen, the great church in the High Street where Anthony Blencowe was buried. Thomas was an ostler and latterly a victualler, probably an innkeeper (in one record he was described as a ‘pipe maker’, I think this should have been ‘piemaker’!). Thomas and Ann baptised nine children, all in the same church; Ann died in 1728, and Thomas a year later, four of their children survived them.

Richard was born in 1701 and in 1717 he was apprenticed for seven years to Thomas Hinksworth, citizen and joiner of London; for some reason he does not appear to have been ‘made free’ until 1748! I do not have a record of his marriage but his wife was named Ann and they also had nine children; the first three were baptised at St Giles, Cripplegate, London, the younger ones at St Michael Northgate in Oxford. A number of the births and deaths were at ‘ye Black Horse’ in Oxford.

David, baptised in 1740 and William in 1742 were the two youngest. In 1754 David was apprenticed as a joiner to his father (in London) for seven years. In 1756 William was apprenticed for seven years as a stationer to Richard Lucas and three years later was transferred to Richard Rust. The indenture payments of £5 for both David and William were paid as ‘charity money’ by the Welsh Society.

This raised a number of questions:

• We've no such early records of Blencowes in Wales, where was the Welsh connection?
• Why would there be a Welsh school in Ashford in Kent?
• Why would William's parents have wanted him educated there? What became of William and David?

1. The Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Ancient Britons established the British Charity School in London in 1718; it was later called the Welsh Charity School, and only moved to Ashford, Kent, in 1857.
2. The school was established in Clerkenwell; in 1850 it was in Grays Inn Road, which is where the London Welsh Centre is to this day, The school, now a public school for girls, still has a bursary for girls born in Wales.

Stephen thinks that the ‘Ancient Britons’ were hard-nosed citizens keen on turning out apprentices, good conforming Churchmen, able to support themselves and not be a burden on the Poor Rates. Instruction was probably not in Welsh although there is a present-day Ysgol Gymraeg Llundain (London Welsh School) which is a Welsh language school.

As William appears in the records of the Welsh School it may be implied that he, and maybe David, were pupils there. I can only conclude that their mother was Welsh.

One of Oxford's connections with Wales derived from the cattle trade. Cattle were driven from Wales for slaughter at the London markets or, more often, as young steers for fattening on the rich pastures of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire*. The name of the inn ‘the Welsh Pony’ in George Street at the entrance to today's main coach station commemorates the trade. Maybe Ann was a drover's daughter, but it is more likely that if she came to Oxford with her father he would have been a more prosperous dealer.

William seems to have dropped out of sight, but David is a very uncommon Blencowe name, only three 18thC records, it is probable he married Martha Howland in Canterbury in 1770 and baptised a son there in 1771.

Stephen went on to comment on ‘Blen’ and ‘blaen’.

‘In modern Welsh placenames blaen (pl. blaenau) can mean the source or upper reaches of a river (as in Blaenrhondda), the uplands or remotest regions (as in Blaenau Ffestiniog, when seen from Ffestiniog)’.

I had been told that Blencow meant ‘top of the hill’; there's not much of a hill around Blencow but it could well be ‘the upper reaches’ (of the Peterell Stream).

*A minor road from Banbury to Northampton is still known as ‘the Welsh Road’. My grandfather, a grazier in Northants, met my grandmother when he went to Pembroke to buy cattle; he married her there in 1894.

Jack Blencowe
Oxford, June 2006