Updated on 29 July, 2012
They were once contained in separate pages on the Your Archives website, but since that is closed, I thought it best to offer the information here to preserve it from being removed.
The photograph is of the front of the Manor House (The Old Rectory) of Great Snoring circa 1937
Up to and throughout the 19th Century almost the whole village worked on the land or provided basic services to the village.
Exceptions were the Perowne family who started a brickmakers in a neighbouring village before 1850 and Bushell brothers and their sons who made agricultural machines from at least the 1860s until the 1930s. On 12th April 1860 they successfully applied for a patent for their "improved agricultural machine".
The records is listed as: No 917 Jonas Bushell William Bushell Samuel Bushell Joseph Bushell and Daniel Bushell all of Great Snoring near Fakenham in the County of Norfolk for an invention for "An improved agricultural machine". Letters Patent sealed .
In 1877, George Cook, is also recorded as a machine maker in Harrods directory.
Before the 1530s monastries and religious houses, e.g. Walsingham Abbey, took primary responsibility for looking after the poor and destitute.
After the dissolution of the monastries by Thomas Cromwell each parish became responsible for their poor. The 1597 Act For the Relief of the Poor, passed in the reign of Elizabeth I, formalised this responsibility. In 1662 the Poor Relief Act, also known as the Settlement and Removal Act, established the parish to which a destitute person "belonged" and returned them to this parish under a Removal Order or Settlement Certificate.
The Norfolk Record Office contains records of the following removals and settlements for Great Snoring; the records show that the majority of removals were to and from neighbouring villages but Sarah Fidderman, (see below), was returned to Great Snoring from Sussex.
The Poor Law Amendment Act required small parishes to combine into Poor Law Unions and establish workhouses for the Union. The Act intended that support would only be given to the poor within the workhouse.
Walsingham Union Workhouse
The Walsingham Union Workhouse on the Thursford Road opened in 1838 by the Walsingham Poor Law Union in 1834 following the Poor Law Amendment Act of the same year. The land for the workhouse appears to have been purchased from the Chad family of Thursford Hall in the next village. In the mid 19th Century ~20% of the population village lived in the Workhouse. Records of the Walsingham Poor Law Union are available at the Norfolk Record Office.
The Workhouse was enlarged in 1849 to hold 350 inmates. Poor law unions were abolished in 1930 and the Workhouse was closed in 1934. The building was later used as a smallpox hospital but demolished in the 1990s.
The masters of the Union Workhouse were:
By the 1860s families from the village, as from elsewhere in Norfolk following agricultural recession, had started to leave for work in either London or the North. Between 1861 and 1901 over 100,000 people born in Norfolk (over 15% of the population) left the county. Over 50% went to London, 20% to Yorkshire and near 10% to each of Lancashire and Durham.
The majority of those leaving Great Snoring (over 20 families) moved to Yorkshire where they were concentrated in 2 villages. Those moving to London were distributed across the city. The majority of those migrating to Yorkshire moved to Rawmarsh, a mining and steel making village near Rotherham, with the remaining 25% concentrated in the iron stone mining villages of Wilton, Guisbrough and Marske on the north Yorkshire moors just south of Middlesbrough.
Rawmarsh, Rotherham
Wilton / Marske by the Sea North Yorkshire
By 1881, at least 3 families had returned from Rotherham to Great Snoring including Charles Southgate with his Yorkshire born wife Mary-Ann, George Page with his Country Durham born wife Elizabeth and Charles Simmons and his wife Maria. (See 1881/1891 census).
Statute Merchant allowed a creditor to seize the goods and hold the lands of a defaulting debtor until satisfaction of his debt:
1363 Walter Bret of Great Snoring owed 60 shillings to William de Horning
Built in 1808, the windmill finally fell over in 1930. Multiple families appear to have been involved in working the mill as in Kelly's directory of 1892 Mathilda Adams, Clement Docking and George Southgate are all listed separately as millers. (See windmill pages)
Great Snoring appears to have had a shop of some sort from before the 1790s as Thomas Raven, who died in 1799, was recorded in his will as a shop keeper.
Walsingham, which was just 2 miles away, provided by 1839 a range of shops and services including a number of tailors, grocers, drapers, cabinet makers, painters and glaziers and shoe makers plus a watch maker, a glove maker, a plumber, and a hairdresser and perfumer. (Pigots 1839).
In 1854, Henry Savage is recorded as keeping a shop in the village and William Hill and Isiah Stanford as tailors.
By 1888, dressmakers and shops have also been opened by Miss Sarah Brown and Miss Maria Savage and by Mrs Celia Bushell in addition to a shop run by James Howlett. By 1890, Miss Brown and Miss Savage's shop had disappeared, but Frederick Cook had opened an additional shop and Mrs Matilda Adams had a grocers service.
When Matilda Tuck (born 1829 the elder sister of my Great-Grandmother Sarah Ann Tuck) was 11 years old she was sent out to work in a shop in the village where they lived, Little Snoring. In the 1841 census, Matilda is found working as a "servant" in the household of Edward Barrett Adams, (aged 30).
Bearing this in mind, we then see Matilda marrying William Southgate from Great Snoring. William just happens to be the brother of Charles Southgate the Miller, whose grandson was my Grandfather!! (Complicated, eh?)
Matilda and William married in 1848 and produced ten children from 1850 to 1869. One of these children was Elizabeth Southgate - the very same lady we see on the wedding photo of her son Harry Stanley Green. (See the school page for more detail.) Because Elizabeth had married Harry Green the elder, the Schoolmaster.
William inherited the mill from his father Charles, and in the 1863 town directory is said to be miller, grocer, and draper, so they were also running the local shop (in The Street.)
William then died in 1872 (perhaps worn out!).
In the 1875 Directory, the Shopkeeper in Gt Snoring was now Edward Barrett Adams - none other than the gentleman for whom Matilda worked back in 1841. Edward wasn't a local; he came from King's Lynn, but he already had a connection to Great Snoring - how? HE HAD ALREADY MARRIED THE AUNT OF MATILDA TUCK! Yes, he'd married another Matilda earlier, Matilda TUDDENHAM, (sister of Phoebe Tuddenham who had married John TUCK and produced little Matilda Tuck.)
In any case, on 13 May 1876, Edward Adams married again, this time to his neice, former teenage shopworker Matilda Tuck, and between them they ran the shop until Edward died in 1885. They had one child, Mary Ann Adams.
Unfortunately for this story, Mary Ann's age in the 1891 Gt Snoring Census is given as 17, which makes her birth year about 1874 (officially listed as October 1873) before Edward married Matilda. (Oops.) As it happens, this child Mary Ann wasn't baptised until 1883.
My Great Grandmother kept a notebook of the births of family members. She records Matilda's birth on June 20th at half past six at night. My own birthday is that very day!
SEE: Personal stories of Great Snoring and its people, including many mentioned on this website (book)
The Snoring Villages: a website for those researching their family trees, and for anybody curious about the history and whereabouts of these two small villages in Norfolk, UK.
I no longer live in Norfolk. I cannot visit graves, make local enquiries or provide contacts for you. Please be aware that I have no information other than that on this website..
Address: Derbyshire, England
Telephone: Unavailable
E-mail: tricia (at) the-snorings.co.uk