For Capability Brown’s 300th anniversary I was invited to speak at a conference at Hampton Court. My role was to reveal the Greenings who worked in the decades before Brown, often in a similar style, and whose landscapes had often been obliterated, wholly or in part, by later owners who commissioned Brown. I rather enjoyed singing their praises and pooh-poohing him in a roomful of Brown groupies!
From that event has emerged this book, edited by Jon Finch and Jan Woudstra, which was published by White Rose Press on 2 November. It can be downloaded free of charge or purchased as a hardback volume.
I am delighted to say that my talk has grown into Chapter 9 of the book and I hope readers find it interesting – there is far more information there than in the posts on this website. In the 4 years since 2016 I have uncovered much more about the Greening family and that will appear here in the future.
This story has grown out of another historian’s research, and confirms my view that sharing discoveries really matters because it enables others to build upon them and reveal more.
Working under the wing of the London Parks & Gardens Trust, Susan Darling wrote a short and intriguing piece about Mrs Wood the Isleworth wheeler or wheelwright on the website celebrating the 300th anniversary in 1716 of Capability Brown’s birth. She examined payments to Brown in the Duke of Northumberland’s accounts in 1754 for the design and construction of a new lake in the north-east of the grounds at Syon. She found that there was a substantial increase in the size of the tradesmen’s bills submitted to the Duke at the same period.
The bills included those from Mr James Wood, a wheelwright. His main work as a wheeler was making and repairing wheels but he also built and repaired carts and barrows, made handles for tool such as pick-axes, mattocks and mallets, and assembled the occasional box. Susan Darling observed that about 10 years on the bills began to be drawn up by the Duke’s foreman for ‘The Widow Wood’ but as time passed she was addressed as Mrs Sarah Wood. Her bills to the Duke began as relatively small amounts for making several barrows at about 5 shillings each and for mending two garden carts. But towards the end of 1767 and into 1768 several bills were drawn up for ‘New Work By Order of Mr Brown’ totalling around £50. Her business built some 22 barrows over the space of just a few months as well as carrying out the usual wheel repairs and tool-making. This time period mirrors precisely when Brown was receiving payments from the Duke, almost certainly away from the newly dug lake.
Woman with a barrow, sketch by Paul Sandby, British Museum Prints & Drawings, 1872,1012.3419
Wanting to discover more about James and Sarah Wood I did some further research on the Wood family. A wheelwright’s work would have been greatly in demand in the local community regardless of the upsurge of business associated with Brown’s work at Syon. Every business and every farm would need carts and wagons. James Wood was sufficiently well established to take on an apprentice, Ralph Cheney, in November 1756, but only a few months later, in January 1757, he made his will and he died that May. He left £1 for a mourning ring for his friend John Prudden of Brentford End. To his maid servant Susannah Heathwell he bequeathed the wages due to her plus a sum of money to make that up to £50, suggesting a strong degree of affection for her. The only family members he mentioned were his brothers, Robert, a Guildford carpenter, and Stephen, a currier whom he nominated as his executors.
So Sarah Wood was not James’ widow; the will of Stephen Wood, describing himself as a wheelwright of Isleworth, reveals that she was his wife. He made his will in January 1766 when he was ill, leaving freehold property in Ockley in Surrey and in Old Brentford and all his personal property to Sarah who was to be his executor. To his brothers Samuel and Joseph he made bequests of £10 each, while to another brother, Robert, and to his sister Mary Boreman, he left 1 gn for a ring. He made provision for an apprenticeship for Samuel’s son, Stephen, to be overseen by two trustees, Thomas Benham, a prosperous gardener, and Vincent Hobby, both of Isleworth.
Susan Darling observed that the “payment of the bills for work at Syon is usually received by Sarah Wood herself but at one point Jeremiah Lockyer, most likely a wheeler, takes over and picks up and signs for the money. Interestingly, a few months later in 1769, it is Sarah Lockyer to whom the bills are made out!”
Here was another lead worth following. As the extract from the parish register confirms, Sarah Wood married Jeremiah Lockyer at St Gregory by St Paul’s in the City of London in July 1769. Her neat signature in the parish register confirms her literacy and the fact that payments were made to her suggests her continuing independence as a tradeswoman. I have not yet found evidence that Jeremiah lived in Isleworth or that he was a wheel-wright, nor have I yet traced wills for him or for Sarah. However, they clearly prospered from the substantial work undertaken at Syon Park in the middle of the 18th century
My thanks to Susan Darling for sharing her research.
Wills of James Wood TNA PROB 11/830 and of Stephen Wood TNA PROB 11/930
I have been invited to speak to the Hounslow & District History Society about the Greening family on the evening of Tuesday 25 February 2020 at 7.30pm. The talk will take place at the United Reformed Church Hall in Chapel Road, Hounslow, TW3 1UL. I have talked about them before, but this talk will include the fruits of some new research! Non-members are asked to pay £2 for admission.
I first came across weeder women in 2006 – they were working in the gardens of the Chiswick manor of Sutton Court in the 1690s and early 1700s. In the accounts kept by Lord Fauconberg’s steward they were paid six pence a day. The women were rarely named, as payment was usually made within the reimbursement of a lump sum of expenses to the head gardener. Between the beginning of the account book and Lord Fauconberg’s death at the end of 1700 substantial sums were spent on creating spectacular gardens, on construction, sculpture, an orangery, a lake and planting. It appears there was little for a weeder woman to do.
In 1691/2 the sum
of £2.17s.6d was spent against the entry ‘gardeners and weeders’ though
work in the gardens totalled more than £55 that year. After 1700, the widowed
Countess of Fauconberg was overseeing Sutton Court and weeder women often appear
in the accounts, as do purchases of her personal items. So weeders could have
been employed before, for example if she had her own flower garden, but the
cost may not have been recorded by her husband’s steward.
During
1701/2 the three gardeners’ wages came to £16.10s.0d and the weeder woman received
£1.13s.8d. In 1702/3 a single weeder woman is again mentioned, who received
£4.12s.9d; at 6 pence a day that represents 182 and a half days’work . During
1703/4 an unnamed weeder woman was paid £2.11s.6d for 103 days’ work while in
both 1703/4 and 1704/5 Goody Latham did 70 days weeding for £1.15s.0d. Widow
Graunt’s 6 weeks and 3 days of weeding earned her 19 shillings and 9 pence in
1704/5. So far I have been unable to trace personal information about either of
these women.
There was a long tradition of employing women to do this work which straddled the boundary between cheap labour and skilled work. It involved continuous bending and carrying the green arisings away from the beds, but the weeder woman also brought the expertise that ensured she pulled out weeds rather than prized and expensive plants.
Switzer, 1733
William Lawson’s Country Housewife’s Garden (1618) advised that garden beds should not be wider than 5 feet so that the weeder women need not tread on the earth. Other gardening books such as Stephen Switzer’s Practical Husbandman and Planter (1733) emphasised the need to create wide paths between beds for ease of access. Switzer also recommended using the weeder women and boys to pick off and destroy snails every morning. In 1753 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote about her Italian garden: ‘I generally rise at 6 and as soon as I have breakfasted put myselfe at the head of my Weeder Women and work with them until 9’.
Susanna, Lady Lort, a wealthy widow, lived in a mansion with spectacular gardens in Turnham Green. She was ailing when she made her will (TNA PROB 11/515/256) on 16 May 1710 for it was proved on 26 May. Having made sure she sorted out a series of complex family bequests in her will, she left money for the Chiswick Charity School and to the poor in the Parish of St James’s Westminster where she was buried. Then she listed her servants. Amongst them was Widow Woodman ‘who weeds my garden’ to whom she left twenty shillings (the equivalent of 40 days’ work), perhaps a measure of the value she placed upon the widow’s skill.
a weeder woman in gardens Lady Lort had once owned
The biography of this single weeder woman throws a some light on the importance of such modest income for a family. Widow Woodman was born Esther Durham. She received a bequest from her cousin, Robert Durham, a chandler of Acton, (MS 9172/84, will no 105, LMA) in 1693. In his will he described her as ‘Hesther Durham of Turnham Green’ and left her his trunk ‘as a token of his love’. Everything else he owned was to go to his wife Anne, his executor, who lived on until 1697. Esther married Henry Woodman, husbandman of Chiswick, at St Martin’s in the Fields in 1694. When her husband died in July 1701 she had three small sons, William born in 1696, Henry born 1698 and John in 1699, and she was pregnant with their daughter, Mary, who was born in September 1701.
By the time
John was baptised Henry was being described as a gardener, but it has not
proved possible to locate his garden ground. Esther probably needed to keep the
business going despite her widowhood and may well have had employees, or at
least seasonal workers, to assist her. When her children were older they
probably worked in the gardens as did the offspring of so many nursery
gardeners. Perhaps her son Henry was apprenticed to another gardener. Certainly
he was skilled enough to be employed by the important nurseryman, Nicholas
Parker of Strand on the Green, with whom he could previously have served his
apprenticeship. In his will Parker stated that Woodman lived with him and he bequeathed
him land in 1726. This enabled Henry to marry Eleanor Compton, another of
Parker’s heirs, in 1728. She was the daughter of another Chiswick nursery
gardening family and together they became a formidable partnership in the
horticultural business.
Did Esther Woodman sustain a family nursery business? By the time of Lady Lort’s will in 1710, she might have been earning a little extra cash from weeding. Or had the nursery failed, leaving her to eke out a living working as a weeder for several landowners? In the early 1720s she was paying rates to the parish on a small house valued at £3 in Turnham Green (for comparison, Hogarth’s House, then only two rooms wide, was valued at £10). Esther lived until March 1724 but left no will; her son John appears to have taken on her £3 cottage and he lived until 1730. By that date the Strand on the Green property owned by Henry and Eleanor Woodman (bequeathed by Nicholas Parker) was valued at £45.
