By Robin Greaves

[Ed There are two articles which I have copied as written in the Mourholme magazines]

The main part of the house dates from 1604. It was built as a three- storeyed farm house by a Jenkinson and lived in by that family for three hundred years. Across the road are large barns and outbuildings, and there is a pump and well recently renovated. Behind the house at the top of the garden is the grave, complete with stone and urn, of James Jenkinson who died in 1808 aged 70, and was buried there ’according to his wishes’.

He was first buried in Warton but ’he did not settle’. Several times after his death he was seen walking up the road from Warton to Yealand, and eventually, after the vicar had tried in vain to exorcise his spirit, he was exhumed and reinterred where he now lies.

The ground floor of Green Garth has been much altered but there is still an old stone fireplace in the main room very similar to others in the village. It has been painted and has the motto ’Palma non sine pulvere’ written beneath the mantlepiece. Beside it is a fine old oak bureau built into a recess, with cupboards above and below it. Through a door is the original staircase which leads to the upper floors. There is some old woodwork upstairs and on the walls of one of the top rooms and on several doors are initials carved presumably by the farmhands who slept there.

In 1950 I lifted a loose floor-board on the staircase and found under it, covered with dust, a Catholic Book of Hours, bound in leather and enclosed in a brocade case lined with velvet. It is written in French and Latin and the date of publication is 1753. On the back page is written the name Peater Desbourd. Who was this secret Catholic who hid the book? Who stitched the beautiful case so carefully, even covering the button in blue velvet?

Green Garth and The Jenkinsons: a House and its History

by Carol Shaw

In 1945 my parents bought the house in Yealand Conyers which is known as Green Garth from the Miss Hardings, who had been left it a few years earlier by an ex-pupil. She was Elfrida Roper, who also owned Beechfield. She had bought Green Garth in about 1932, and had made considerable alterations to it. From the Miss Hardings, my parents learned that the house had been built in 1604, and from that time until it was sold to Miss Roper it had belonged to a family called Jenkinson who were Quaker farmers.

One of them, James Jenkinson, was buried in the copse above the orchard in 1808 “at his own request” according to the inscription on the tomb. Initials on the doors and walls of the rooms on the top storey were said to have been carved by the farmhands who were housed up there. My sisters and I were brought up on this story, and there seemed no reason to doubt it, apart from one rather peculiar circumstance: my elder sister, going up the back staircase one day, felt a sudden desire to lift a loose board and look underneath. In the dust at the back of the hole she found a small book, carefully preserved in a case made of brocade and fastened with a button. The book proved to be a Catholic breviary, Heures a Trois Offices, l’usage de Rome dated 1753, with the name Pieter Desbourdes in the back.

What was a Quaker farmer doing harbouring a Catholic, and, by the sound of his name, a Frenchman? Was he being persecuted, and did the Quaker family take pity on him? Why did he hide his breviary under the stairs and leave it there? There were no further clues. Years later, several things began to make me question the established story.

My husband, looking at the initials in the top rooms, remarked that they must have been very small, and very literate farmhands. “If you are carving your name on a door, you normally do it at shoulder height, and some of these initials are only three feet or so from the floor.” Certainly the letters, with their elaborate serifs, are not what one might expect from rough eighteenth century farmhands. Might they, he wondered, have been not farmhands but schoolboys from the Quaker school down the road, boarded out with a friendly farmer?

I made a list of the initials and went down to the Meeting House to compare them with those carved on the door there. Many of them tallied. My sister, researching into early seventeenth century wills, found no record in them of any Jenkinsons in Yealand, which was odd. If they had lived in such a large house from 1604 onwards, surely there should have been some wills. There certainly was a Jenkinson family connected with the house. Apart from James in the orchard, my mother had been visited in the 1950’s by Jenkinson descendants wishing to see the tomb.

My brother-in-law suggested I should try to trace them in the old Quaker minute books still kept at Yealand Meeting, so I borrowed them and read my way through the 1670’s, 1680’s, 1690’s. No Jenkinsons. I found the first mention of the name in March 1729, when Michael Jenkinson was appointed schoolmaster at Yealand for one year. He was still there in 1733: “Michael Jenkinson our present master…is to teach all poor children belonging to this meeting and all others who are of ability.” In 1734 he married a local girl, Ruth Robinson, and settled down to produce a large family and presumably continued to teach at the school. There is no mention of where they lived.

Two of Michael and Ruth Jenkinson’s sons, John and James, later played an important part in the Meeting’s affairs, being appointed to several committees, travelling to Manchester and to London, _ and entrusted with various business matters. John is described as a schoolmaster and a yeoman. Both he and James rented land from the Meeting and in 1764 it is recorded that John bought a “dwelling house and also the close called Overcroft.” He also paid £30 for the alteration of a house which Friends bought in 1763 and converted into a school. There seems no way of telling whether either of these houses has anything to do with Green Garth.

In 1778 John married Margaret Hall of Height, and they had three children. He died in 1796, and his wife Margaret in 1813. The children seem all to have left the Society of Friends, since there is no further record of them in Quaker sources. Ruth, the eldest, certainly left: she married Mr Clarkson of Brackenthwaite in Warton church, and was eventually buried at Cartmel Priory.

James, Michael and Ruth’s other son, is a more shadowy figure, He never married (or, at least, no such marriage is recorded in Friend’s records). He was active in the Society, and in 1768 transferred his membership for a time to a meeting in London (another place to look for evidence of his activities). In 1775 he published A Generic and Specific Description of British Plants, so he must have been something of a scholar and a naturalist. He and John appear to have been involved in a printing and publishing business at one time – there is a pamphlet printed by “J. and J. Jenkinson, Printer of Yealand” *in the Lancaster Reference Library.

There is a curious note in the Meeting accounts: In 1802 James Jenkinson bought the school house and garden”. It is unlikely that this was the present Old School, since it still belongs to the Society of Friends. Was it Green Garth? James certainly owned the house when he died in 1808. He is described in Friend’s records as being buried “in the croft above his house at Yealand Conyers”. In quite another context I came across a letter on “Antiquities in Lancashire” written in 1788 by a William Hutchinson to George Allan Esq¹. which refers to “British remains in the parish of Warton” and continues “Mr Jepkinson, who conducts a great seminary at Yelling, where he teaches the languages, conducted us through the scenes of antiquity…..At his house he showed us two urns which his workpeople recovered from cairns levelled down within his new enclosures on the skirts of Warton Crag.” It is fairly safe to assume that for “Jepkinson” we can read “Jenkinson” and for “Yelling”, “Yealand”. Mr Jenkinson was presumably John, the schoolmaster, who was by this time, it seems, a prosperous farmer, reclaiming land on the slopes of Warton Crag. This could have been the land above Green Garth, which could have been the house Mr Hutchinson visited. But still no proof. There is a lot more work to be done. The next step is probably to go to Preston and see whether the Lancashire Record Office has any record of John or James Jenkinson purchasing a house in Yealand Conyers that could be Green Garth. Meanwhile, James still sleeps above the orchard, and I am still intrigued.

1. William Hutchinson 1732-1814, and George Allan 1736-1800. Both distinguished antiquarians in their day, both Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries. It was Allan who encouraged his friend to publish his “Account of the Antiquities of Lancashire”, Archaeologia ix 211-18. 1788. ↩︎

Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 7 Spring 1984 and Issue 19 No 2 1992