The Hadwen Family of Lancashire

The dispute (from an article by John Townson)
Leonard and Mary Townson’s eldest son, Thomas, was baptised at Crosthwaite on the 24th April 1758. Presumably he farmed with his father at Low as he is not shown as having any other occupation and describes himself as a yeoman in his will. At the age of 27, he married Elizabeth Dickinson (known as Betty) at Heversham, the parish church, on the 23rd February 1785. They had two children in quick succession, Robert born on the 7th February 1786 and Ellen (sometimes known as Elinor) born on the 23rd December 1786. The family lived at Row, a hamlet just up the road from Low.
It seems that Thomas was a member of the militia as a Barnabas Bolton is mentioned as being paid to substitute for him after his death. Taken more seriously during the Napoleonic wars, there had been militia units for each county since 1757 and, as there were not enough volunteers, able bodied men were balloted for conscription from each parish. Men had to serve for five years during the 1790s and it was an unpopular system, as the unit might be sent for a time to other parts of England. It is not known whether Thomas was conscripted or a volunteer.
Three years after his father died, Thomas also died aged only 35 and was buried at Crosthwaite on the 2nd May 1793. By a strange chance the bill for his funeral survives amongst the Dickinson papers and this gives us some insight into the feasting associated with a burial, events planned it seems more to solace the survivors than to mourn the deceased. There were around 120 people at Thomas’s funeral, representatives invited from all the farms in the valley, and they were given dinner at a cost of £8. Ale during and after dinner came to 26 shillings and the guests were also given ‘arvel’ bread, small wheat buns symbolising a gift from the departed, to take home with them. This cost 14 shillings and there was also a 9 pence bill for a pipe and tobacco for Thomas’s sister, Mally Townson. With the cost of the shroud, coffin and the minister and clerks fees, the total for the funeral came to over £12.
Thomas made a comprehensive will just before he died, the executors and trustees being his father-in-law, Robert Dickinson, and his brother-in-law, Robert Turner. He directs that an agreement he made with his sisters be honoured; that sums of money be paid to them in lieu of what they might have expected from their father’s will. All his farm stock and personal estate is to be sold and any rents collected to provide an income for the maintenance of his children and a small annuity for his wife Elizabeth. He leaves £120 to his daughter Ellen, to be paid when her brother Robert comes into his inheritance at Low. Robert is to have the farm at Low when he is 21 and any capital remaining from his personal estate. Should both children die before they were 21, and with no offspring, Thomas’s brother William was to inherit Low.
As indicated earlier, customary law meant that Thomas’s mother, Mary, still held Low, and any lands that were owned by her husband, for her lifetime. She obviously started plotting with her son-in-law, Robert Turner, to deprive her small grandchildren of their inheritance in order to benefit other members of the Townson family, principally William one imagines. We know all this through a marvellous series of letters written at this time by Betty Townson’s brother, the Revd Robert Dickinson, to his family at Dawson Fold. In one written to his brother Daniel on the 28th December 1794, he refers to Mary Townson thus:-
“Pray how does that old wretch M.Townson at Row go on this very hard winter? Upon her departure I should think your affairs will immediately grow better: and in the common care of nature she cannot be supposed capable of continuing her reign of ill nature and malignity a long time upon earth.”
How terrible to be remembered for posterity by that one paragraph! In the event, the hard winter was to leave Mary Townson unscathed, but carried off Robert Dickinson’s brother Daniel and father Robert in less than two months. This meant that the only trustee left was the doubtful Robert Turner, but the Dickinson family fought hard on Betty’s behalf. The dispute was still not resolved when Mary Townson died in March 1797 and the matter may have had to go to lawyers or the manor court before being resolved in Betty’s favour later that year. Robert Dickinson writes exultantly to his brother John:-
“And I am heartily pleased that my sister Betty is so successful in gaining possession of the two estates at Low and Green for her son Robert. The Townson family and the Turners have outwitted themselves completely and their former behaviour was so unkind and malicious, that they deserve no pity. Everyone that knows them, and is not biased to their side, will consider them as rightly served. I have no doubt that they would have been glad to have made Betty a beggar for life, if it had been in their power. Surely against such people it is right to enforce every claim of justice, and I wish that craft and malice may always punish themselves in the same manner.”
It would appear from this paragraph that the rest of the Townson family had lost more in starting this dispute than if they had supported Betty and her children. In an earlier letter, Robert Dickinson had referred to the possibility that Thomas Townson had agreed to his brother William having the property at Crosthwaite Green, at the same time as he agreed the sums of money to his sisters. This did not happen and William had, in any case, left the Lyth Valley in order to start a new life as an excise officer. In 1796 he is serving in the Settle and Skipton areas of West Yorkshire and in 1799, when he died, he is serving in Liverpool. He married Mary Atkinson, the daughter of a Wharfedale farmer, on the 31st July 1796 at Addingham near Skipton. They had two children, Thomas born in 1797 who probably didn’t survive and William born after his father’s death in 1799. Mary moved back to Wharfedale with the young baby after William’s death and the next few generations of the family farmed in that area. Although they had only the one surviving child, William and Mary Townson have a great number of descendants living today, many still bearing the name Townson.