Sidney Alfred Parsons and his Ancestors

Edward Boyes (1748 to 1795)

Edward Boyes was a grandfather of Sidney Parsons’ maternal grandfather William Boyes.

Edward was a farmer. He and at least four generations of his ancestors lived in the parish of Owslebury leasing their land and houses from the Manor of Marwell. The earliest of his ancestors that we know of was John Boyes who at the very beginning of the 17th century was leasing his land from Sir Edward Seymour who was the Lord of the Manor at that time. The Seymour family had acquired Owslebury manor during the reign of Henry VIII after the king married Jane Seymour, but in Edward’s time it was in the hands of the Mildmay family who had owned it since 1626 during the lifetime of Edward’s great-great-grandfather.


The village of Owslebury is in central southern England about four miles south east of the ancient city of Winchester. It lies on the old Roman road which led from Winchester (known to the Romans as Venta Belgarum) to the coastal fort at Portchester (Portus Adurni).

The countryside around Owslebury is chalk downland and the land was used mainly for grazing sheep with some arable farming.

Edward was baptised in St. Andrew’s Church Owslebury on the 4th of July 1748 during the reign of King George II. His parents were Edward and Rachel Boyes (née Paige).

Edward was the youngest of his parents’ children. His oldest brother John had been baptised in November 1738, two years after his parents had married, so there might well have been an earlier child who died (perhaps also called Edward after his father). Edward’s sister Susannah died when she was five years old and he was only one.

Edward’s father died in 1755 when he was still only about 44 years old and his wife, Rachel, did not re-marry. She probably ran the farm with the help of her two older sons. John would have been about 17 at the time of his father’s death, and William about 15. Young Edward was only seven. Their mother Rachel lived to be 84 years old and was buried in Owslebury in 1797.

A document dated 1770 which was an account of “custom reap”, for the Manor of Marwell, apparently an account of sums paid by farmers in lieu of agricultural labour services, has an entry which reads “Farmer Boyes for Marwell   £0 0s 4½d”. The farmer named must have been Edward or one of his brothers.


The land which the Boyes families farmed was in the south-west of the parish near Fisher’s Pond and Colden Common. This map, which dates from 1791, shows a farm called Boysland in its bottom left corner. Modern maps show a tree-covered ridge called Boyes Copse in the same area on a ridge above Hensting (or Henstead) Farm. Years later we know that Edward’s son John Boyes would be living in that same area near Hensting Farm.

The three Boyes boys all became farmers in Owslebury and their sister Rachel married a farmer called Caleb Blundell. Edward was a witness at the wedding which was in St. Andrew’s church, Owslebury in 1768. Caleb was relatively well off; he owned Hensting Farm which was the largest farm in that part of the parish.


Edward got married at St. Andrew’s Church in Chilcomb on the 1st of May 1775 to an 18 year old girl from that parish who was called Eleanor Woods. He was about nine years older than her.

Chilcomb is about three miles north of Owslebury and is situated on a hill overlooking Winchester. The church is shown to the right.

Nine months after Edward and Eleanor got married their first child was born in Owslebury. They named her Elizabeth. They had three more children: Edward born in 1777, Susanne in 1780, and John in 1782. Their son John Boyes would eventually become the father of Sidney Parsons’ maternal grandfather William Boyes.

On the 24th of September 1779 Edward Boyes and several other responsible local men (including a maltster, a shoemaker and a gamekeeper) walked the boundaries of the parish and recorded what they found. This was called a perambulation and the procedure was common in some parishes at that time. The notes they made include the following text (note the reference to Boys’s land) :

“Field belonging to Hill’s estate at the Ld end is a ditch up which ye go and as far as Hill’s Mead ye Crops ye Ditch & take in Hills’s and Boys’s land til you come to a cott on Colden Common occupyd.”


About 18 months after John was born Edward’s wife Eleanor died. She was only 26 years old. The date of her death, the 6th of January 1784, was recorded on her memorial stone in Owslebury churchyard.

In December of the following year Edward got married again. His second wife was a girl from Owslebury called Alice Prickett. She was, like his first wife, much younger than him. Alice was only 19 years old and he was 35 when they married on Boxing Day in 1785.

Edward and Alice had three children: William, Alice and Benjamin.

Edward died on the 7th of February 1795 which was less than three weeks after the marriage of his eldest child, Elizabeth. He was 47 years old and he had been married to Alice for just over nine years. Their youngest child, Benjamin, was not yet three years old.

Five months after Edward died his widow Alice got married again to an Owslebury farmer called Charles Page. Charles was a bachelor and, unlike Edward, he was about the same age as Alice. He was a relative of Edward’s mother Rachel. Alice was married to Charles for nearly 40 years. She died in 1834. Charles died ten years later.

Edward Boyes’ Children



Edward had four children with his first wife Eleanor who died aged only 26, and three with his second wife Alice who outlived him.


•  Elizabeth was baptised in Owslebury on the 24th of March 1776. She about seven years old when her mother died and almost ten when her father re-married. She married a man called William Pugsley in Owslebury on the 21st of January 1795 just three weeks before her father died. William was a gardener at the time of his marriage and he was living in Upham, a neighbouring village, but he had very likely been born in East Quantoxhead in Somerset. Information from another researcher indicates that he and Elizabeth probably went to live in Kilve, which is close to East Quantoxhead, had at least one child, a son whom they named Edmund after William’s father. The same source indicates that William and Elizabeth may have died while Edmund was still a young teenager. Edmund was living in Kilve when he married Hannah Evered in 1817 and in 1833 they and their children emigrated to Canada.

•  Edward was Edward and Eleanor’s first son and he was baptised in Owslebury on the 14th of August 1777. He was about six years old when his mother died and seventeen when his father died in 1895. Five years later he was living in Kilve in Somerset when he married Elizabeth Bartholomew. Edward purchased the freehold of an inn, the Hood Arms in Kilve which is still a popular country pub, and lived there until he died in 1848. He and Elizabeth had two children — Ann and Edward. One of his grandchildren, Walter Escott Boyes, emigrated with his wife Clara to the United States where they settled in Syracuse in New York State.

•  Edward and Eleanor’s daughter Susanne was baptised in May 1780. She was less than four years old when her mother died. Susanne got married when she was about 19 years old to a man called Joel Bartholomew in Chilcomb, in the same church where her parents had married. It seems likely that Joel was a relative (probably a brother) of Susanne’s brother Edward’s wife Elizabeth. Joel and Susanne went to live in Kilve. They had a son, who was also called Joel, in 1811.

•  John was baptised on the 18th of June 1782 so he was about twelve years old when his father died. He became a farmer in Hensting in the parish of Owslebury and married Faith Newlyn. Their son William Boyes was a grandfather of Sidney Parsons. John achieved national fame in 1830 when he became involved in one of the so-called Swing riots in an effort to calm the men who were rioting. Despite that, and despite being himself an employer rather than a worker, he was convicted and transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now called Tasmania) before eventually returning home after being pardoned by Lord Palmerston.

•  William, Edward’s first child with his second wife, was baptised on the 30th of December 1787. He became a shepherd in Colden Common and never married.

•  Alice, who was born in 1789, was six years old when her father died and her mother re-married. When she was 19 or 20 years old Alice married Thomas Guy. The wedding was in Owslebury on the 21st of January 1811. Thomas was a labourer. They had one son called Thomas who was baptised in Owslebury in September 1817 and another called William who was baptised in Morestead eight years later. Alice’s husband Thomas died in 1827 after which Alice lived in the parish of Owslebury at Hensting Bottom. She died in April 1851 and was buried in Owslebury. Alice and Thomas’ son Thomas married and lived in Colden Common where he worked as a farm labourer. William, their other son, also married and worked as a porter for a Winchester wine merchant.

•  Benjamin Boyes, John’s half brother, was baptised in September 1792. He was not yet three years old when his father died. In 1817 he married Mary Guy who was probably a cousin of his sister Alice’s husband. Benjamin farmed in Owslebury and he and Mary lived at Boyes Farm which was (and still is) in the centre of the the village near the Ship Inn where the road to Hensting and Fishers Pond begins. By 1851 his neighbour at Hensting Farm was John Newlyn Blundell who was a son of his Aunt Rachel and Uncle Caleb. Benjamin and Mary had twelve children four of whom died in childhood. Benjamin’s wife died in 1850. He died fifteen years later.

Edward Boyes’ Ancestors


Parents
Father — Edward Boyes, a farmer who lived in Owslebury
Mother — Rachel Paige, who married Edward in Twyford, a village adjoining Owslebury to the west

Grandparents
Grandfather — Robert Boyes, a farmer in Owslebury
Grandmother — Hannah (surname unknown)

Grandfather — William Page, a farmer in Owslebury who for many years was a churchwarden in St. Andrew’s
Grandmother — Anne (surname unknown), who died when her daughter Rachel was only about five years old

Great-grandparents
Great-grandfather — Edward Boyes, a farmer in Owslebury who lived through the stern austerity of Oliver Cromwell’s puritan England



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You are free to make use of the information in these web pages in any way that you wish but please be aware that the author, Mike Parsons, is unable to accept respsonsibility for any errors or omissions.

Mike can be contacted at parsonspublic@gmail.com

The information in these web pages comes from a number of sources including: Hampshire County Records Office, Somerset Heritage Centre; Dorset County Records Office; Southampton City Archives; the General Register Office; several on-line newspaper archives; several on-line transcriptions of Parish Register Entries; and several on-line indexes of births, marriages and deaths. The research has also been guided at times by the published work of others, both on-line and in the form of printed books, and by information from personal correspondence with other researchers, for all of which thanks are given. However, all of the information in these web pages has been independently verified by the author from original sources, facimile copies, or, in the case of a few parish register entries, transcriptions published by on-line genealogy sites. The author is aware that some other researchers have in some cases drawn different conclusions and have published information which is at variance from that shown in these web pages.