HYNE HISTORY
Written
by JAMES ERNEST HOBBS who researched this family in the
1960’s
THE
HYNE FAMILY OF BLACKAWTON DEVON
The surname Hyne is common in south Devon
and particularly so in the area south of Dartmouth called the South Hams, where
Blackawton lies. This coupled with the fact that the probate records of the
Archdeaconry of Totnes were lost some years ago and those of Exeter were
destroyed in the second World War makes difficult the tracing of relationships.
However, the ancestors of Jane Beer Hyne who married Frederick Charles
Francklin in 1890 had been living in Blackawton for at least three hundred
years and it has been possible, from the parish registers and with little other
information, to trace her ancestry back to Richard Hyne (1663-1743) fuller, and
parish clerk, who was baptised at Blackawton 1 September 1663, son of Richard
and Wilmot Hyne. Her descent from Richard Hyne is shown in the family tree
entitled "The Hyne family of Blackawton, Devon".
In the seventeenth century Exeter was the
centre of a flourishing woollen industry producing serges of perpetuanos (so
called from their long wearing qualities). Most of the woolcombing and spinning
took place in surrounding villages, but although much of the manufacturing
(weaving, fulling and dying) was located in and near Exeter, some finishing
took place in the outlaying villages particularly if there was a source of
water power for the fulling mills as there was at Blackawton. With the
Restoration the Devonshire cloth industry expanded vigorously turning
increasingly to the manufacture of serges for the Dutch, German and Spanish
markets, and down to 1715 the Devonshire serge manufacture was the most
important branch of the great English woollen industry, certainly in the field
of exports.
The long war that was ended by the Treaty of
Utrecht in 1713, greatly damaged the woollen industry in Devon. Both the Dutch
and the Spanish trades were much reduced. By the 1720's the competition of
Norwich "stuffs" was pushing the Devonshire serges out of the Spanish
market; by the 1740's and 1750's the Dutch and German trade were going the same
way. The Norwich manufacturers had learnt to produce a finer fabric and to sell
it more cheaply than serges. No real alarm was felt in Devon until the Dutch
trade began to fall off in the 1740's when unemployment appeared on a scale not
experienced before. Even in remote country districts the spinners and weavers
who worked for the merchant manufacturers of Exeter became an increasing burden
on the parochial poor rates. The industry never recovered.
Richard Hyne (1663-1743) was a fuller and
would have seen some of the decline in serge manufacture before he died.
Neither of his two sons Evans Hyne (1704-1788) or Thomas Hyne (1716-1789)
followed their father's trade of fuller but the association with cloth
continued. Both became tailors-and Thomas took over from his father the duties
of Parish Clerk. John Hyne (1746-1825) son of Thomas Hyne (1716-1789) was also
a tailor but had a smallholding to augment his income. In 1779 he was the
occupier of Dallicombe Farm with 17 acres and another 9 acres nearby.
The cloth industry however was not entirely
dead in Blackawton. John Roope, father of Sarah, the wife of John Hyne
(1746-1825) was a woolcomber and John and Sarah's elder son Thomas Hyne entered
that trade, but the younger son John Roope Hyne (1779-1866) became a butcher
and cattle dealer. He had the farm Barnsdale in the hamlet of Woodford which
later his son Frederick occupied. The movement away from cloth was complete and
thereafter the family were artisans and farmers.
Elizabeth, the wife of John Roope Hyne
(1779-1866) died in 1821 leaving him with eight young children, the youngest,
Samuel Evans, only a year old. By 1841 all the children had left home except
the youngest daughter, Elizabeth, aged 25, who lived with her father in a
cottage leased in Blackawton village near the churchyard. He was then described
as farmer and in the Tithe Commutation record of the previous year was leasing
a few fields near the village totalling 11 acres of which 8 acres were arable
and the rest pasture. His son, Frederick, had taken over the lease of Barnsdale
and in 1841 lived there with his first wife Mary Ann and their one year old
baby. The Barnsdale fields in the tithe records consisted of six acres of
arable and two acres of pasture adjoining the farmhouse with another field of
just over an acre of pasture further away.
Of John Roope Hyne's six sons four,
including Frederick, married and settled in Blackawton. The eldest, John Roope
Hyne, was a mason but died before the 1841 census leaving a widow Caroline,
aged around 25, with four young children. Richard Hyne, like his brother
Frederick, became a butcher and owned two and a half acres of pasture and
rented a further five acres, mostly arable, in the seaside hamlet of Street in
Blackawton parish where he lived with his wife Alice and a large family. In the
churchyard at Street there are tombstones in memory of
Richard Hyne died 16 May 1888 aged 82
his
wife Alice died 29 July 1893 aged 88
their
son Richard Henry Hyne died 28 January 1920 aged 75
his
wife Jessie died 9 May 1896 aged 40
and
for other members of that branch of the family.
William the other son of John Roope Hyne who
settled in Blackawton, became a blacksmith but in 1844 he and three of his
young children all died leaving a sad tombstone in Blackawton churchyard:
Sacred
to the memory of
WILLIAM PITTS HYNE
Son of William and Grace Hyne
who died Jan. the 12th 1844
Aged 4 years
Also CHARLES FREDERICK HYNE
who died Jan. the 16th 1844
Aged 10 months
Also JOHN ALBERT PITTS HYNE
who died Feby the 5th 1844 Aged 2 years
Also WILLIAM HYNE
Father of the above children
who died May the 23rd 1844
Aged 30 years
In 1841 Mary Ann the wife of Frederick Hyne
had died of typhoid at Barnsdale. At that time in the Devonshire villages wells
were the principal source of water supply and the lack of sanitation caused
frequent outbreaks of water-borne disease often causing death.
John Roope Hyne made his will in 1857
leaving the fields he was leasing and two cottages near the church in
Blackawton to his son Frederick, on condition that Frederick paid six pound a
year to his sister Sarah Hannaford, and four pound a year to each of his
brothers Thomas Hyne and Samuel Evans Hyne. Another cottage, in which she lived
at the time, was left to his daughter Elizabeth Taylor, whose husband William
James Taylor, had died the previous year.
A memorial in Blackawton churchyard records
the death of two of Elizabeth Taylor's children before their father died in
1856 and by 1861 Elizabeth with her remaining child had moved in to live with
her aged father John Roope Hyne, then 84. Frederick Hyne described as a cattle
dealer in 1861 was living in another cottage in the village with his second
wife Jane and their three children, William Frederick aged 14 and learning to
be a carpenter, Charles Henry aged 12 and John Roope aged 6, both at school.
During the second half of the nineteenth
century the population of Blackawton, as in the case of most Devonshire
villages, began to decline, and work for local skilled trades began to
disappear as the distribution of manufactured goods increased. Population
figures for Blackawton have changed over the last 150 years as follows:
1801
1851 1901 1931
1949
1,019 1,360 946 869 471
When the population was at its peak in 1850,
White's Devon Directory lists the following tradesmen in Blackawton:
Farmers 33
Shoemakers
7
Carpenters 7
Blacksmiths 5
Butchers 5
Tailors 4
Masons 3
Shopkeepers 9
Publicans 6
By 1867, however, when Frederick's son
Charles Henry Hyne (1848-1872) married Catherine Hosking the drift to the towns
had begun and following the example of his elder brother William Frederick, who
was a carpenter, Charles Henry left the village after his second child was born
to set up as a butcher in London. Within three years he died at 3, Beaumont
Square, Mile End, and his wife Catherine returned with the children to Devon
where she married again and lived in Plymouth. Their daughter Jane Beer Hyne
married Frederick Charles Francklin at Boulogne-Sur-Mer in 1890.
SOURCES:
Devon:
W.G. Hoskins. 1954.
Blackawton
deeds and Moger Abstracts,Devon Record Office,Exeter
Census
Records. P.R.O. London.
Probate
Records. Somerset House, London.
Directory
and Gazeteer of Devon. Wm. White 1850. 1879.
Kelly's
Directory, Cornwall and Devon. 1856.
Billing's
Directory and Gazeteer, Devon. 1857.
Tithe
Commutation Records. Tithe Redemption Commision, London.
Parish
Registers.
Fursden
Inventories. Devon and Cornwall Record Society.
Burnett
Morris Index. Exeter City Library.
