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Anne Barker of
Hambleton - Close
to the shore of Rutland Water stands the isolated Hambleton Old Hall. While
Civil War raged it was home to the Parliamentarian High Sheriff of Rutland,
Abel Barker, and his new wife Anne. Separated from her Royalist family, Anne
wrote intimate letters telling of billeted soldiers, Twelfth-Night cakes, new
fashions from London, and her ambition to present her husband with a son.
Tragically, Anne's married life lasted only eighteen months; the child she
expected with such hopeful joy brought her unexpected death. Her letters
survive to paint a vivid picture of the daily concerns and human emotions of a
vanished age. |
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The First Lady of Lyndon The
Letters of Mary Barker (1655-79) Rutland Record 19 (1999)
contained an article entitled ‘A Country Wife: Anne Barker of Hambleton
(1646-47)’. The domestic life of Anne and Abel Barker, vividly recounted
in her letters, was cut tragically short by her death eighteen months after
marriage. Abel Barker, High Sheriff of Rutland, and a rising man under both
Commonwealth and Restoration governments, found himself with a motherless
infant heir to provide for. In this sequel to that article, the less literate
letters of his second wife are supplemented by Abel Barker’s detailed
record-keeping (all contained in the Barker MSS at the Record Office for
Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, DE 730). Together these tell a story of
social advancement, marital chidings, local gossip, sick children, estate
management and the building and furnishing of the grand new house at Lyndon.
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Thomas
Barker of Lyndon Hall was a leading Meteorologist in the latter part of
the eighteenth century. For a number of years a research project has been in
progress at the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia,
Norwich concerned with the preparation of a series of daily historical weather
maps for a period in the eighteenth century. Among the many meteorological
records being used, there is one of outstanding value both for its continuity
and content. This is the weather journal kept by Thomas Barker at Lyndon Hall,
Rutland from 1733 to 1798. |
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William
Whiston was the son-in-law of Samuel Barker of Lyndon Hall. In 1714,
Whiston was instrumental in the establishment of the Board of Longitude and for
the next forty years made persevering efforts to solve the longitude problem.
He was born at Norton.-juxta-Twycross, Leicestershire in 1667 and studied first
at home and later at Tamworth Grammar School and in 1686 was admitted to Clare
Hall, Cambridge where he qualified as B.A. (1690), and MA. (1695), and was
elected Fellow in 1691. William Lloyd ordained Whiston at Lichfield in 1695 and
he married Ruth Antrobus in 1699. |
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To the Conants of America On May 14th 1894 Thos.
Conant of Oshawa, Canada visited Lyndon and wrote an account of his Visit. By
way of preface he wrote "I have been travelling, not only over modern and well
known Europe, but have as well ascended the Nile, quite 800 miles, and
afterwards ridden at least 550 miles on horseback, over the Holy Land, tenting
out at nights, and making a special effort to visit all the places made
celebrated by the mission of our Saviour; and now being on my way homeward,
although with a much depleted wardrobe, and in a battered condition generally,
I avail myself of the opportunity to call on our English
kinsman". |
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