Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

9 Boyhood with one serf; and 10 villeins with a priest and 5 bordars have 4 ploughs. There [is] a mill rendering 28 pence…’ That according to the same source Ratby owned land in surrounding villages suggests that it declined after the Norman Conquest from an Anglo-Saxon heyday. Decorated and Perpendicular additions to the original 14 Early English parish church, begun probably in the thirteenth century, attest a growing population during that period. By 1377 there were 85 tax-payers and in 1563 according to the diocesan population return there were 66 households, a number that had dropped to 55 in the Michaelmas hearth tax of 1670. The census of 1801 gives a total population of 480, which had risen to 1,601 by 1901. 15 Ratby had remained a largely rural community in the first half of the nineteenth century. Since it lay just east of the southern end of the great coal deposits stretching north to beyond Coalville and Ashby and just south of the igneous stone quarries used for road-metal 16 and gained only a small share of the cottage framework-knitting industry, albeit the favoured non-agricultural occupation of the community, which was more common in the Soar Valley, 17 Ratby never gained any industrial prominence. Even indeed when in the winter of 1799 the bursting of the Charnwood Forest Canal’s banks cut Leicester off from its coalfields and the world’s third railway, built to remedy this, was built from the county- town to Bagworth in 1832 (and to Swannington the following year) the fact that an early stop was at Ratby did not have to any appreciable extent the usual industrial consequence of such a transportational link. In the second half of that century, however, a little industry did arrive, and seven bag-hosiers are known to have operated in the village, while one shoe and two hosiery factories were established there. So, despite its antiquity, Ratby may be considered an inconspicuous and unpretentious village, never of any note except in its immediate vicinity and without any particular influence on the history or prosperity of its county. Nonetheless, during the late nineteenth century it did make one remarkable contribution, albeit one restricted to cricket. Within the space of a few years there were born six players, namely the subject of this biography, his uncle Tom Jayes, 18 the brothers William and Alan Shipman and two players of lesser distinction. 19 Their forte was bowling, and indeed between them they took 3,654 wickets for their county. Players born in the county town of Leicester did not reach this figure until late in 1961, 22 years after the retirement of the last Ratby- 14 Doug Harwood informs me that there may once have been in the village a Saxon church dedicated to the sainted Pope Gregory the Great. 15 The information on population is taken from W.Page et al, The Victoria History of the County of Leicester , Institute of Historical Research, 1907-1955. 16 In 1481 stone from near Ratby was, however, quarried for the construction of Kirby Muxloe castle. 17 There were only 120 frames in the Ratby area in 1844. 18 Jayes married Sarah Ann Astill, a sister of William Ewart Astill’s father Ezra. After Jayes’ death Ezra was a witness at Sarah’s second marriage, to a quarryman of neighbouring Markfield, in 1917. 19 F.J.Bowley and J.Toon. There would almost certainly have been another, for a third Shipman brother of great promise had been taken onto the County staff at Ashby just before the First World War in which he lost his life.