Category Archives: Sussex

H is for Hastings

09 Tuesday Apr 2019

Posted by in A to Z 2019, Royal family, Sussex

≈ 9 Comments

My husband was born on 14 October. On the same day in 1066, there was another great event in English history: a Norman Duke, William, won a decisive battle against the Anglo-Saxon King Harold and took the English throne.

Bayeux_Tapestry_William_Hastings_battlefield

Bayeaux tapestry: Duke William raises his helmet so as to be recognized on the battlefield of Hastings. Eustace II, Count of Boulogne points to him with his finger.

 

The previous King, Edward the Confessor, had died in January 1066. Both Harold and William claimed the crown.

On 28 September, to enforce his claim, William landed an invading force at Pevensey, near Hastings.

Harold was threatened on two fronts. Norwegian invaders under King Harald Hardrada, supported by Harold’s brother Tostig, were attacking in the north. On 20 September, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, near York, Harold and his army defeated and killed Harald Hardrada and Tostig. Then, to confront the invading army of William Duke of Normandy, Harold was forced to march his army the 260 miles from Stamford Bridge south to Hastings.

By 13 October the two armies, William’s, with 10,000 men, and Harold’s, with 7,000, were camped within sight of each other. The invading force was half infantry, a quarter cavalry and the rest archers. Harold’s army was almost entirely infantry, with very few archers. Greg notes that none were wearing proper eye protection.

The battle began with Harold’s army lined up defensively along the ridge now occupied by the buildings of Battle Abbey. The English front, in the form of a shield-wall, stretched for almost half a mile. A shield-wall – soldiers in close formation with overlapping shields – was considered almost impervious to cavalry, but left little room for manoeuvre.

William’s army was south of the Anglo-Saxon force, on a hillside above the marshy valley bottom. His army was arranged in three ranks: archers in front, then infantry, and behind them mounted knights.

In the first exchanges, William’s cavalry made little impact on the Saxon defensive wall of shields. William’s army employed some tricky tactics: at least twice the Normans pretended to flee in mid-battle, to encourage the English to break ranks and pursue them. The turning point in the battle came when Harold was killed, according to legend shot in the eye by an arrow.

Tapisserie de Bayeux - Scène 57 : La mort d'Harold

Bayeux Tapestry – Scene 57: the death of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Titulus: HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST (Here King Harold is slain)

 

Nearly a thousand years later it can be hard to say with certainty what happened and where. However, it seems likely that the Battle of Hastings was fought on the site where Battle Abbey now stands. An obituary of William the Conqueror in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and written before 1100 by an Englishman who describes himself as having lived at the king’s own court tells us:  ‘On the very spot where God granted him the conquest of England, he caused a great abbey to be built’.

On a trip to France in 2003, we saw the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts seventy-five scenes from the events leading up to the Norman conquest, culminating in the Battle of Hastings and Harold’s death: ‘Harold Rex interfectus est’ (Here King Harold is slain).

I can trace my genealogy back to William I of England who was one of my 28th grandfathers. Many millions of people are descended from William. My descent is through my Mainwaring forebears.

Sources

E is for Eliza

05 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in A to Z 2018, Brighton, illness and disease, Morley, Sinden, Sussex

≈ 9 Comments

My husband’s great great grandmother – one of them – was Eliza Morley née Sinden (1823 – 1908).

Eliza was born about 1823 in Cuckfield, West Sussex, to William Sinden (c. 1870-1839), a coach driver, and Mercy Sinden née Rose (1779-1852). She was probably the youngest child of at least six.

At the time of the 1841 census Eliza was living with her widowed mother Mercy Sinden at Albourne, Sussex, just over six miles south of Cuckfield.

On 17 September 1848 Eliza married John Morley (1823-1888) at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, less than a mile east of Albourne.

Morley Sinden marriage 1848

In 1851 the Morley family was living in Keymer, 2 miles east of Hurstpierpoint. They were living at 97 Railway Terrace. John was a railway labourer. Keymer junction was an important railway junction on the line between London and Brighton. John and Eliza had one daughter, aged one, and soon afterwards, another son, William.

In 1853 they emigrated to Australia, arriving in Melbourne on the Ida, on 12 July. They were assisted passengers, that is, their voyage was subsidized by the Victorian Government.

On 10 May 1853 William, then aged one, died at sea of scarlatina  (scarlet fever, a bacterial infection). There were 26 deaths on the voyage. Eleven were attributed to scarlatina.

In Victoria the family lived at Collingwood, an inner city suburb of Melbourne, until at least 1861. There Eliza had five more children.

In 1862 John Morley was renting a  house in Tucker Road, Moorabbin, then a village fifteen kilometres or so miles south-east of the city centre.

In 1864 Eliza’s seventh child was born in Brighton, a suburb about eleven kilometers south-east of the city.

In 1866 Eliza’s brother George emigrated to Australia and came to live with Eliza’s family. George Sinden (1811-1884) never married and all George’s and Eliza’s other siblings had died. George Sinden died in 1884 aged 73.

In 1888 Eliza’s husband John died from a malignant disease of the stomach after an illness of three months. Eliza, then 65, was living at 7 Evelyn Street, East Bentleigh, with her daughter Anne who had married Henry Sullivan in 1887. Three of Eliza’s seven children had survived into adulthood.

In 1886, in addition to the house in East Bentleigh which was then rented by John Morley, Eliza was renting 2 1/2 acres of land nearby, where she seems to have kept a few cows. In 1890 it was reported that she had been fined 7s 6d plus 2s 6 d costs for straying cattle.

On 23 April 1908 Eliza died after an illness of ten weeks at the age of 85 from cancer of the pharynx  and of asthenia, a medical term for abnormal weakness.  She was buried in Brighton cemetery with her husband John. Their graves are unmarked.

References

Related posts

Arrival of the Morley family in 1853

21 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in 1854, Collingwood, immigration, Morley, Sussex, Trove Tuesday, tuberculosis

≈ 3 Comments

My husband’s great grandfather John Morley (1823-1888), John’s wife Eliza née Sinden (1823-1908) and their two children, Elizabeth aged 3 and William aged 1 emigrated to Australia in 1853, arriving in Melbourne on the ‘Ida‘ on 12 July.

Ida arrival 1

Ida arrival 2

SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE. (1853, July 14). The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 – 1957), p. 4. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4794495

Five years before, on 17 September 1848, John Morley, then 25, had married Eliza, also 25 years old, at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex.

John Morley was a railway labourer. In 1851, he and Eliza and their one year old daughter Elizabeth were living at 97 Railway Terrace, Keymer, a couple of miles from Hurstpierpoint. Keymer Junction, which had opened four years before, was an important railway junction on the East Coastway Line to Lewes and the Brighton main line.

In 1854, a year after the Morley’s arrival in Victoria, they were living in Collingwood, a suburb of Melbourne. On 10 March, little Elizabeth Morley died, a few months before her fifth birthday, of tabes messenterica, tuberculosis of the abdominal lymph glands. This disease, rare now with pasteurisation, is an illness of children, caused by infected cows milk.

 

In the first annual report covering deaths to 1854, the Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages of the Colony of Victoria listed tabes mesenterica as one of the diseases of the digestive organs. Deaths from diseases of the digestive organs, including tabes mesenterica, teething and enteritis, chiefly deaths of children, constituted about seven percent of total deaths for that year.

The Report paints a picture of Melbourne and the goldfields struggling with the challenges of the rapid increases in population. Victoria’s population trebled from 1851 to 1854. 78,000 arrived in the year 1853-54, the Morley family among them.

 

REGISTRAR GENERAL’S REPORT. (1855, September 7). The Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 – 1954), p. 6. Retrieved August 22, 2017, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article154891906

Population of Victoria in the 1850s

Population for Victoria estimated at 31 December each year from Geoffrey Searle, The Golden Age: A History of the colony of Victoria 1851 -1861, Melbourne University Press, 1977, (Appendix 1 Page 382) reproduced at http://education.sovereignhill.com.au/media/uploads/VICTORIAN_POPULATION.pdf

 

John and Eliza Morley had eight children, only three survived childhood to become adults.

 

Further reading and sources