Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

8 1785 at the age of 69. His marriage to Esther Catharine yielded 11 offspring, including another Stephen, father of John and therefore Edgar’s grandfather, whom Edgar would never have met as the latter died in 1824. The description of Stephen senior as a yeoman indicates a reasonable social status, as the yeomanry farmed their own land and could merge upwards into the gentry. The collapse of rural prosperity after the end of the Napoleonic wars more or less put paid to this class, and certainly, when John Willsher married Charlotte Winser in 1806, he was simply a ‘farmer’, and therefore not a property owner. Charlotte was also from a farming family in Tenterden, three miles north-east of Rolvenden, and at the time of Edgar’s birth they had taken up residence at Little Halden Farm on the outskirts of the village. The farm was owned by the local squire, Thomas Monypenny, who, on his accession to the ancestral estate at Hole House in Rolvenden in 1836, added Gybbon as a prefix in honour of a female ancestor of that name whose family owned Hole House before she married a Monypenny at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Gybbon-Monypenny’s importance as a landowner was reflected in his election as Member of Parliament for Rye in 1837, although he appears not to have made a speech during his four-year tenure. The tithe awards of the 1830s show John Willsher farming just over 160 acres, a not inconsiderable area, but small enough to be looked after by him and his large family, although by this time it had been reduced by the death of five of the children. By 1841 the census shows that the Willshers had moved down the road to the imposing Chessenden House, sharing with another farmer of advanced years and his 54-year-old daughter. Soon after that, the family moved again, this time travelling the ten miles to Goudhurst, where John died in 1843. At the time of his death at the age of 61, John is described as an innkeeper, although it is unknown which hostelry he ran. Whether he simply felt it was time to retire, or whether other factors induced him to leave farming, it is impossible to say. Certainly, the 1830s saw the emigration of about 200 people from Rolvenden, partly due to the ‘Swing Riots’ that started in Kent in 1830, acts of vandalism targeting in particular the new-fangled threshing machines that were seen as a severe threat to the livelihoods of agricultural labourers. Little did young Edgar know of the rapidly changing times of which he would soon be a part. Origins