The story of the Finches has just irrevocably changed from the country to the city although they don't really know it yet. William Finch, born in January 1713, has moved to Bethnal Green. I'm not sure but I think he took up lodgings with William and Mary Ansell in...
When the Finches lived in lovely rural Hertfordshire, what did they eat? William Finch took the story of my ancestors back to the rural edge of London. The Finches were agricultural labourers or small traders in the town. Although they weren’t really peasants...
Hertfordshire’s history has been governed by its proximity to London. It doesn’t have good soil but, from the twelfth century, markets were established in the county to supply London with butter, cheese, meat, hides and leather. This led to the establishment of inns...
Theft in Hertfordshire. A wonderful seventeenth-century poem helped the English peasantry express their outrage at the English Enclosure movement, an act which allowed the fencing off of commons land to be sold or given as private property. Who steals the goose off...
Thomas Finch was my direct ancestor, my eighth great-grandfather. He was a city boy, born in London, on 11 October 1655. His baptism was registered a year later in the old Anglican chapel of St Mary in Whitechapel. His siblings Sarah, Anthony and Dorothy were all...
Thomas Finch and Ann Summers On 26 July 1681 Thomas Finch, a 26-year-old barber living in the village of Great Hadham in rural Hertfordshire took a night walk with his friend and associate William Cristy. It was a balmy summer night but there was a full moon. Loping...