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Thanks to the Hundred Parishes Society for its financial support for developing this website

Welcome to our village history website. We aim to build on all the valuable work put in by Hempstead residents in past years, so as to create a picture of the village through the centuries. We want to bring to life the people who have lived here, how they lived, worked and had fun and how their houses have evolved. Here you will find maps of the village at different times; a photograph gallery; descriptions of houses; recorded interviews; films; stories about Hempstead people and events and a wealth of archive material. There is, inevitably, a lot about the Harvey family and the infamous Dick Turpin but we must not lose sight of the other people who spent their lives in, or passed through, the village without necessarily becoming famous.

You will also find little known stories like the connection between our village and Whittlesford Primary School via the will of a grocer born in 1684; the collapse of the church tower in 1882 and the 90 year struggle to rebuild it;  the teenage sugar boilers who commuted to Thaxted six days a week in 1921; and the story of thousands of young men who spent time here during the period 1905-1940, en route to a new life in the Colonies. And there are some funny stories about some of the people who lived briefly in Hempstead before and during the second World War.

It’s impossible to say where ‘history’ stops and ‘the present’ begins. We are all creating historical resources for the future every day. However, this website is not the place for airing matters of day to day importance to current and future Hempstead residents. This is the job of a separate website, hempstead-essex.org.uk. So we have arbitrarily decided to end this website at 1985, which of course means that it excludes events such as the various jubilee celebrations, the birth of the Hempstead Dramatic Society and the continuing saga of the Bluebell. Future archivists can add these when some context is available. For the time being, the social history of the previous 900 years is sufficiently interesting that it should not be lost in a mass of material within recent memory.

For the same reason, we have arbitrarily taken the start date as 1066. This is not to say that there was nothing of interest here before the Conquest – far from it! There are excavations with finds dating back to the late Bronze Age and there was certainly settled farming here in the Iron Age and a stable rural community during the Roman occupation and in Saxon times. This has been extensively documented by the Essex Archaeological Society and others: any attempt to duplicate or summarise their work would inevitably fall short and, in any case, would not belong in what is meant, above all, to be a social history.

This project will never be finished: it is not designed to be. Please tell us what you think of it so far, and help us to improve the website’s accuracy by letting us know of any errors or omissions that you find. Most importantly, we need your help in extending the knowledge of the village with your own stories, photographs and the results of your own researches. Please click here for some ideas on how to get involved.

A potted history of Hempstead

by Alan Weedon

Hempstead is mentioned in the “Little Domesday Book” of 1086, and is referred to as Hamsteda: “Ham” meaning village and “Stead” meaning place in Saxon English (350AD-1000AD).

Hempstead has long been a rural and largely agricultural community, mixing arable farming with animal husbandry. Some land such as Hempstead Wood, was kept as primary woodland, providing essential resources for building materials and fuel.

The village used to have a post-mill, which was built in 1678 on high ground south of the church, but which sadly burned down around 1900. It also sported a gallows on the tellingly named Anser Gallows Comer from Saxon times until at least 1578.

Our church, St Andrews, was consecrated on 8th January 1365 by Simon of Sudbury, Bishop of London and consequently Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England. [Prior to that, our church was a mere ‘chapel of ease’ and all burials had to take place in Great Sampford, with the coffin carried up Church Hill and then along the ‘coffin path’ that starts opposite Pollards Cross: ed].

Hempstead’s claims to fame include William Harvey (1578-1657), physician to Charles I and renowned for his work on the Circulation of the Blood during the 17th Century. He was a frequent visitor to Wincelow Hall, owned by his brother, and his sarcophagus,provided by the Royal College of Physicians in 1883, can be visited in the church.

Another member of the Harvey family buried in Hempstead church, Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey (1758-1830) fought with Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. He commanded the Temeraire, which played such an important part in the victory, and was
immortalised by the painter J.M.W. Turner in his painting, the Fighting Temeraire.

The notorious highwayman Dick Turpin, and member of the feared Gregory Gang, was baptised in the church in 1705. It is said that he was born and brought up in the Bluebell Inn (then known as the Bell Inn), where his father was a butcher and innkeeper. As a young man, he was apprenticed to a butcher in Thaxted after which he set up shop in the same town. After being accused of sheep and cattle stealing, he pursued a career as the notorious highwayman. He was hanged for his crimes in York in 1739, and it should be known that contrary to his dashing reputation, immortalised by author William Harrison Ainsworth in his romantic Victorian novel Rockwood, he was in fact short, stout and bald, with a pock marked face! He was also a murderer and prolific horse stealer.

The Millennium Tapestry in the Village Hall also tells the story of Hempstead in pictorial form and the village website contains a very informative guide which can be accessed by clicking on the image.

Hempstead after the Conquest

by Ross Midgley

Richard fitz Gilbert, the son of Gilbert, Count of Brionne, was a Norman lord who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066.  He was rewarded with 176 manors in England, including the lands of which Hempstead forms part, which had been previously held by the Saxon lord Withgar.    At the time of the Conquest, according to the Domesday Book,  there were 22 villagers, 6 smallholders and 8 slaves. Richard, styled as the Earl of Clare, held the land per baroniam (the highest degree of land tenure under the feudal system) in return for the duty, as one of the king’s barons, of providing soldiers on demand and attending the court.  

A typical ‘honour’ (a group of manors including one or more castles) typically contained land scattered over different shires.  This was a devious policy of the Norman kings, designed to avoid concentrating geographical power in the hands of individual barons.   The land could be further devolved to one or more knights who would, in turn, owe a duty of homage and fealty (known as a ‘knight’s fee’) to the new overlord.  

In the case of Hempstead (variously known at the time as  Hemsted, Hempsted and Hamsted), there were originally two manors:  Hempstead Hall and Crouchmans. The development of these, summarised briefly below, reveals a pattern of immigration into the village by wealthy individuals from outside. This is a trend which, one might say, was to be repeated on a larger scale some 700 years later although in the 14th century it was achieved through marriage rather than house purchase!

The records also refer to a separate hamlet, Blackdon (now Blagdens) which devolved from Robert de Wateville in a different way.  Some time around 1700, it was purchased for the use of Guy’s Hospital.

Outside the manors, the church of Sampford Magna (Great Sampford) and its chapel at Hempstead had been among properties added by William II (1087 – 1100) to his father’s endowment of Battle Abbey, near Hastings in Sussex. The two glebes were run together as a single farm producing £30 – £40 per year for the incumbent, a very respectable living for the 14th century. The ‘advowson’ (the right to appoint clergy to a parish) was held by the Abbot of Battle Abbey until 1535, when the abbey was suppressed as part of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. The advowson was transferred to the Mordaunt family of Wincelow Hall (see below) and remained with them until the Harveys acquired both manors in 1647.

Hempstead Hall

The manor of Hempstead  Hall was devolved by Richard fitz Gilbert to the de Veres (Earls of Oxford) and thence to Robert de Wateville.  It passed through various male heirs in an uninterrupted succession until the early 14th century, when Sir John Wateville died without issue and his sister Joane inherited.  In 1341, Joane married Sir William Langham (see below) and the manor was held under the Langham name until once again being inherited by a woman.  Alice Langham, a ‘rich heiress’, married John Coton, a former mayor of Cambridge who had dealings with John Winslow (see below). In 1494, Dame Alice settled the manor on her nephew before moving into Bower Hall in Bumpstead for the last 30 years of her life. The manor continued in the Coton name until the 1630s.

At this point the records become slightly patchy: this is one of the ‘chasms in history’ which Reaney attributes to ‘the confusion which war and plunder introduced’ at the time of the Civil War.   The manor was held by Sir John Soame in 1637 and Sir Richard Stone in 1642 and was eventually purchased in 1647 by Eliab Harvey (brother of William) together with Crouchmans (see below) and various other lands.   The Harveys would go on to hold the combined estate for almost 200 years.

Crouchmans

Crouchmans, later known as Wincelow Hall, was also held through devolved tenure from the Earls of Clare.  In his recent book on the family history of Edward Winslow (one of the original Pilgrim Fathers and a leading figure in the foundation of New England), Liam Donnelly presents a highly detailed analysis of the records from the start of the 14th Century, when the manor was held by a prosperous family named Grigge, probably from Ipswich. The Tax Roll for 1327 shows that the occupants of Crouchmans and Hempstead Hall were on a par in terms of net worth.

John Grigge died in 1332, leaving Crouchmans to his daughter Egidia who, at nine years old, was married to the prosperous widower Sir William Crouchman of Trumpington. Interestingly, there are records showing that, on 22 June 1347, Sir William acted as a witness in a matter related to the marriage of the son of his neighbour Sir William Langham from Hempstead Hall. 

After Sir William’s death, the manor passed through several Crouchman generations and, in 1371, was left to the five year old Mariota (Mary) Crouchman, (although it would be some 20 years before her inheritance was confirmed). In 1375, at the age of nine, Mariota was married in Hempstead to John Winslow, a provisions merchant originally from Hertfordshire, who renamed the hall. When their granddaughter Joan died, without issue, in 1426 the manor passed, via a Crouchman cousin, to Thomas Huntington.    This brought the direct association of the Winslow family with Hempstead to an end after little more than 50 years, although the name of course survives in the names of the road and the farm.

In 1494, Thomas Huntingdon settled the lands on his younger daughter Anne on her marriage to William Mordaunt, an official of the Court of Common Pleas.   After Thomas’s death in 1498, the manor remained in the Mordaunt family until 1647, when the Harveys acquired it together with Hempstead Hall.