John Tayler’s father?

A John Taylor, brickmaker and farmer of Hadleigh, died in 1750 leaving a will dated 1749. I believe he could well be my 4xgreat grandfather’s father:

I John Taylor of Coxand Street within the parish of Hadleigh in the County of Suffolk farmer do make and ordain this to be my last will and testament in the manner following First I give unto my wife twenty pounds Item I give unto John Taylor my son by my present wife seventy pounds as soon as he shall attain the age of twenty one years or marry which[ever] shall first happen and I appoint my son John Taylor of Langham farmer Guardian to my said son John until he attains his age of twenty one years and I order my said son John Taylor of Langham (whom I have hereafter also appointed my executor) to plan out the said seventy pounds at … for the benefit of my said younger son and apply the same towards his education and maintenance till my said younger son shall marry or attain the age of twenty one years as aforesaid but tis my will nevertheless that my said elder son shall have power to apply any part of the said seventy pounds in putting my said younger son out to any trade or business if shall think proper to do Item I give unto my daughter Susan the wife of William Clark of Hadleigh aforesaid of … twenty pounds and I do … and forgive the said William Clarke all moneys that he shall owe me at my death and all other … whatsoever Item I give unto Elizabeth my daughter wife of John Smithson fifteen pounds Item I give unto Martha the wife of John Robinson of Hadleigh aforesaid maltster twenty pounds and do remit and forgive him all moneys he shall owe me at my death and all other demands that I shall then have up on him Item I give to my daughter Mary the wife of William Pain of Hadleigh aforesaid baker five pounds I also give until Richard Everett my grandson thirty pounds as soon as he shall attain the age of twenty one years or marry which shall first happen I also give unto Mary the daughter of the said Mary Pain ten pounds as soon as she shall attain the age of twenty one years or marry which shall first happen […] have set my hand and this sixteenth day of February in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty Nine.

Executor John Taylor

Witnesses Thomas White and John Burrell

Proved 13 July 1750

The younger son mentioned in the will, clearly still a minor, appears to be from a second marriage, as the will refers to a ‘present wife’. She is not named, but a John Taylor and Mary Kingsborough married at Hadleigh on 19 June 1746. There is no indication in the record of their ages or if either was widowed, but could this be them?

Also mentioned in the will are another, older, son (also confusingly named John), four married daughters and a grandson. So the John Taylor who wrote this will must have been at least forty-five at death. He may well have been born around 1700 (potentially the John Tayler independently baptised at Hadleigh on 12 January 1702, the son of yet another John Tayler).

Childhood and Education

The older son mentioned in the will, also called John, is described as a farmer of Langham. He was to be executor and guardian over his young half-brother. 

It is stipulated that £70 was to be used for the younger John’s education and maintenance. We know John Tayler did the writing sheet at Hadleigh Grammar School in 1758, when he would have been about ten or eleven. So, assuming this is the same person, it would suggest the money was indeed used for the purposes of education.

However we also know that by 1760 he was at the Writing School in Dedham. Why did he move there?

It may have been for reasons of funding but, again, an alternative explanation is in the will, which stipulates that the ‘elder son shall have power to apply any part of the said seventy pounds in putting my said younger son out to any trade or business if shall think proper’. 

The Writing School at Dedham had been established alongside the neighbouring Dedham Grammar School, which was presumably a similar establishment to the one at Hadleigh. The Writing School was intended to teach children the skills needed to carry on trade and business.

The Grammar School provided a classical higher education for boys destined for university, which was unsuited to the needs of many poor scholars; so in 1599 another clothier, Edmund Sherman, made provision in his will for an English or Writing School (the present Shermans) to teach the 3 Rs [reading, writing and arithmatic]. (Dedham Parish Magazine, June 2020)

At the time John Tayler was at Dedham Writing School the master was William Colchester (died 1773). Not all boys paid for their education:

The Master instructed without payment eight boys of Dedham or the neighbourhood, admitted by the Governors at about ten years of age, and remaining for three years. He had also about fifty other scholar, some of whom boarded in his house. (C.A. Jones, History of Dedham [1907], p.128)

Another reason for moving schools to Dedham is the possible death of his mother. A Mary Taylor died at Hadleigh in 1758 and is buried in the churchyard there. No age is given in the burial record but if this was his mother it would have orphaned the young John Tayler, not yet in his teens.

As his half-brother had been appointed his guardian on the death of their father, with the death of his mother it is quite conceivable the younger John moved to live with the older John at Langham. Langham is just across the border in Essex, about two miles from Dedham and easily walkable in those days, for a ten-year-old.

(Nothing much is known about the older half-brother, but perhaps he is the John Tayler who inscribed the bible? He could have inherited it on the death of his father and then passed it on to his half-brother, who then handed it down through the Tayler family of Dedham).

Married Life

John and Sarah were tenants of Dedham Hall, and the manorial records make a few mentions of the couple.

John Tayler is included in the names of inhabitants at Dedham in the Churchwardens accounts for 1793. He was landlord of the Marlborough Head public house in Dedham High Street in 1791 and as late as 1801. This is according to various notices in the local press (where his name is printed as both Taylor and Tayler). 

As well as a place for villagers to drink, the inn was also used for auctions and community gatherings, such as the meeting held in March 1801 between John Matthew Grimwood, Henry Jermyn, Alexander Watford and Isaac Strutt, described in the Ipswich Journal as:

four of the Commissioners named and appointed in and by an Act of Parliament, made and passed in the fortieth year of his present Majesty’s reign, intitled, ‘An Act for dividing, allotting and lnclosing, the Heaths and Commons, and for exonerating from common right the Half-year Lands and Lammas Lands, within the Manors of Dedham-hall,  and Overhall and Netherhall in the parish of Dedham, in the county of Essex,’ do hereby give notice, that we do intend to hold our next Meeting, for proceeding further in the execution of the powers and authorities thereby vested in us, on Monday, the 9th day of March next, at Eleven o’clock in the forenoon, at the house of John Tayler, called the Marlborough’s Head, situate in Dedham aforesaid.

By the 1840s George Witheat owned the Marlborough Head, so it is possible George acquired it on the death of John Tayler in July 1815, at the age of sixty-seven (which confirms the year of his birth as 1747/8). Sadly, John Tayler’s will, which may have confirmed this, does not seem to have survived.

The will of his wife Sarah has, however. This was written nine years later, in 1824, and confirms her maiden name as Rook. It appoints her son John Tayler junior (my 3xgreat grandfather, born 1795) as executor. The young John would have inherited the Tayler family bible and his father’s writing sheets, among other possessions. The will was proved on 5 January 1829 following Sarah’s death and burial with her husband at Dedham on 13 December 1828 at the age of sixty-six. 

No other children are mentioned in the will, although there could have been others. A notice in the Ipswich Journal of 26 March 1825, under notices for Colchester, reads: ‘On the 19th inst. was married at Hadleigh in Suffolk by the Rev. Charles B. Tayler, Henry Malden Esq. Fellow of Trinity-college Cambridge, to Elizabeth Frances, eldest daughter of the late John Tayler, Esq.’ She died in Twickenham in July 1835, aged thirty-five. Was she another daughter of John and Sarah Tayler? Sarah was thirty-seven in 1800, when this Elizabeth Frances was born, although John would have been closer to fifty-three.