Historic Dents
For fifty years John has had an interest in knowing more about his family and its name and has traced his ancestors back to Matthew Dent, a farmer who lived in Romaldkirk on the Yorkshire bank of the river Tees and who was born in about 1664. While pursuit of the various people who have born the name of Dent is very much a personal interest of John, the results are of potential interest to thousands who still live in Britain and countries that were once part of its empire.
In the absence of DNA evidence John claims no ties of blood except where documentary proof exists, but would point out that there was only one place in medieval Britain called ‘Dent’ and that this is quite distinct from several settlements with the name ‘Denton’, the origin of families wholly unconnected with Dent. The name ‘Dene’ is similarly not derived from the same source, although the name ‘Dennet’ may be, since Dent is written as ‘Denet’ in some medieval documents.
Dent is a township in the parish of Sedbergh, since 1974 administered by Cumbria County Council, but previously located in the north-western corner of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Dent sits on the river Dee, which unlike most Yorkshire rivers flows westward, via the Lune, into the Irish Sea. Historically the surname was most prolific in the counties of the North Riding of Yorkshire and Westmoreland, particularly in the Appleby area and Teesdale.
Lower Teesdale was the ancestral home of the publisher J M (Joseph Mallaby) Dent, the Dent-Brocklehursts of Sudeley Castle, Worcestershire and the American descendants of the 17th century emigrant, Wilkinson Dent, among whom were the Civil War general James Longstreet and his first cousin, Julia Dent, wife of President Ulysses S Grant. The Appleby area was ancestral home to the mercantile Dents of China and Borneo. Newcastle upon Tyne had its own family from the 15th century, whose descendants became the Hedley-Dents of Shortflatt Tower, Bolam.
Although John has made extensive searches through published sources he has so far been unable to source the ancestors of a line of Royal Naval officers, many of whom bore the forename ‘Digby’ and one of whom was Horatio Nelson’s best man at his wedding. Neither has he been able to find out more about the forebears of the watch manufacturers, one of whom made the clock in the Big Ben tower at Westminster.
Dents do occasionally emerge from the pages of history and notes about them and their significance for modern generations, who now number in their thousands, will be attached to this page in due course.
Marriage record of Matthew Dent and Elizabeth Bailise at Romaldkirk, Yorkshire in 1694
John at the grave of his ancestors Matthew (d.1751 aged 88) and Elizabeth Dent (d.1753 aged 94) in Romaldkirk churchyard.
Lazenby Hall, home of John's great-grandfather, William Dent in the 1850s and 1860s.
High Hall, Dent. Is this where the earliest Dents lived?
Dents in History
I make no claim to be related to any of the following people, but include them here as interesting individuals in their own right who throw a little light on the times they lived in.
An example of medieval patronage.
Some idea of the power of patronage in medieval England can be gauged from the career of Thomas Dent alias Salkeld of Westmoreland, Lincolnshire and Somerset during the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. His name implies that he was born out of wedlock, but that his Salkeld father acknowledged him as a family member. At Horbling, Lincolnshire in 1397, with his half-brother Thomas Salkeld, he broke into the house of Thomas Arderne, whose wife Margaret he ravished before making off with various furnishings, for which crimes he received a royal pardon four years later, perhaps in view of his service on King Richard II’s punitive expedition to Ireland in 1399. Who his influential patron was at this stage is unclear, but after the Lancastrian affinity came to power with King Henry IV later that year, the Westmoreland/Lincolnshire family of Bowet seems to have taken a hand in furthering his advancement.
In March 1402 Thomas Dent and Thomas Bowet esquires undertook to manage Minting Priory in Lincolnshire for the crown and the following month Dent received a royal appointment as ‘searcher of ships’ in Somerset, where he already had kinsmen. Henry Bowet had been appointed Bishop to the Somerset see of Bath and Wells the previous August. In the same year Dent was appointed the Bishop’s bailiff of the borough of Wells. Four years later he was granted the office for life of head keeper of the king’s prison of Monkbridge in the town of Bristol, as well as being commissioned separately along with others with the ‘keeping’ of the manor of Gussage Bohun, Dorset, forfeited by the rebel, Edmund Mortimer.
While he was at Bristol, Dent was named in a law suit brought by a kinsman, Jasper, son of John Dent of Lombardy, who operated a bank at Verona to lend money to pilgrims visiting Rome. The banker relied on Thomas Dent of Bristol and Philip Gernoun of Lincolnshire to handle repayments of loans by pilgrims returning to East Anglia and Lincolnshire. Despite their failure to forward these receipts, some settlement was evidently made between the two Dent kinsmen, as only Gernoun is cited in subsequent writs.
In Somerset dialect Dent had become 'Dynt' by 1411, when he was made a freeman of Wells, and again in 1414 when he was twice returned to represent the city in Parliament. Bishop Henry Bowet had been translated to the archdiocese of York in 1407 and paid little attention to his Somerset see before that, but the Bowet family were clearly involved in Dent’s affairs and John Bowet was appointed with Philip Gernoun, mentioned above, as customs inspectors for the port of Boston in 1399. Whether or not Thomas was the son of Emma Dent, who paid the Poll Tax in 1379, is wholly conjecture in the absence of other female family members. Even so, the Yorkshire Dents had enjoyed a degree of patronage since the 1330s and by the 1380s were firmly Lancastrian in their loyalties, through their overlords the FitzHugh and Neville families, even working with John Duke of Lancaster himself in his administration of the northern English counties. From rapist/housebreaker to Member of Parliament; of course, that could never happen today.
