|
Part I
Although Jethro Tull has been recognized as an important innovatory figure in agricultural methods in the eighteenth century, little has been written concerning his origins and social background; and much of that is either vague or inexact. From genealogical and other research, new information is provided concerning the family background of Jethro Tull. In particular the three Jethro Tulls who overlapped in time and place (especially with regard to Prosperous Farm) are distinguished. Some revision is suggested in the date of Tull's commencement at Prosperous Farm and of his journey to the continental vineyards. This and other additional background information throws light both on Tull's personality and behaviour and on his need to innovate in order to convert Prosperous from sheepdown to arable.
The earliest information we have is to be found in scattered remarks made by Tull himself in the various editions of his Horse-Hoeing Husbandry. The object of many of his autobiographical remarks was almost wholly defensive, to rebut what he considered unfair attacks upon his farming practice. The next source of information is to be found in an article written by one DY of Hungerford and published in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1764. The identity of D Y is not known, but he claims to have been 'personally acquainted' with Tull. The third source of material for Tull's life is Earl Cathcart's article in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, 1891. This article bases itself on the diary of Cathcart's ancestor, an earlier Earl Cathcart who befriended and encouraged Tull during his lifetime.
In 1973, Dr G E Fussell wrote a volume Jethro Tull: his influence on mechanised Agriculture, in which he devoted a chapter to Tull's biography, and in it he reveals some of the many uncertainties and confusions which have existed and which he himself is unable to explain away. Some of the main confusions and uncertainties concern Tull's parentage, his father's place of origin, his social and financial standing; the date and place at which Tull himself commenced farming; the date at which he removed from Howberry to Prosperous Farm in Shalbourne; the true date of his extensive tour abroad to Montpellier and the French vineyards; and even the exact date and place of his death.
The Dictionary of National Biography states that Jethro Tull was born at Basildon in Berkshire in the year 1674, the son of Jethro and Dorothy Tull. And indeed there is an entry in the Basildon parish register recording a baptism on 30 March 1674 which confirms this. After this date, however, there are no further entries in the Basildon register which might indicate that the family were settled in the parish and thus the probability that young Jethro spent his boyhood there.
It was in Basildon in June 1672 that Jethro Tull married Dorothy Buckeridge. The Buckeridges were a Basildon family and Basildon was the bride's parish.(6) A search of neighbouring parish registers reveals that Jethro and Dorothy had a daughter, named Dorothy, baptized in the parish of Bradfield on 5 February 1676. Bradfield is the parish immediately south of Basildon; and this rather than Basildon, was the home of the Tulls.(7) The next baptism we have for a child of Jethro and Dorothy Tull, however, is in a parish as far removed in Berkshire as it was possible to be. This was the baptism of Elizabeth, daughter of Jethro and Dorothy Tull, at Shalbourne 14 April 1679.
Shalbourne was the site of Prosperous Farm; it lies at the extreme southwest of the parish of Hungerford and is partly in Wiltshire and partly in Berkshire. The question arises as to what was Tull senior's connection with Shalbourne at this date, and whether he was farming Prosperous Farm there. The Visitation shows that Jethro Tull of Shalbourne was the son of Giles Tull of Midgham, Berks; that he had an elder brother James of Bradfield, Berks, and a younger brother Giles; and that he married Mary daughter of Jeffery Farmer of Cholsey, Berks. That these facts are correct is certified by Jethro Tull himself.
The possible awkwardness of a daughter born to Jethro and Dorothy Tull in 1679 and a Jethro Tull with a wife Mary in 1682 seems to have raised no queries from the biographers of the son ofjethro and Dorothy. One would expfect them to have searched for a burial entry between those years which would confirm the death of Dorothy. In such searching they might have discovered, but obviously did not, that there exists a foot of fine in 1678, in which Jethro Tull and his wife Mary sold land in Hungerford, Inkpen and Shalbourne. Only two conclusions seem to present themselves: either Jethro Tull was a bigamist or there were two Jethro Tulls, both associated with Shalbourne...
For the purpose of this article it may now be convenient to label Jethro Tull who married Mary Goddard nee Farmer as Jethro Tull I and Jethro Tull who married Dorothy Buckeridge Jethro Tull II. Jethro Tull the agriculturist will then be Jethro Tull III. Which of the Jethros I and II was the Jethro Tull who was holding Prosperous Farm in the years prior to its occupation by the agriculturist Jethro Tull III? Appearantly, the biographers of jethro Tull the agriculturist (Jethro III) have simply merged the two men into one...
Part II
Further studies show that although all previous writers have confused (or ignored ) the relationship, usually considering Jethro I and Jethro II as one and the same man, the answer is quite simple. Jethro Tull I was the brother of James Tull of Bradfield, and James was the father of Jethro Tull II.(30) The two Jethros, therefore, were uncle and nephew. As it was the uncle who had married Mary Goddard and the nephew who had married Dorothy Buckeridge it is clear that the father of Jethro Tull the agriculturist was Jethro II.
The family was evidently very close and in a deposition in 1698 young Jethro Tull III, then aged 24 and at Grays Inn, testifies on behalf of his father. Jethro II continued to hold his estate at Howberry throughout these crises. In 1691, about four years after he had acquired Howberry from Edmund Gregory (an associate of Jethro I), he was involved in a law suit concerning the rent charges and taxes on the property.
This is the first sign of his growing financial problems. These brought down Jethro I and were close to bringing down Jethro II too. This was during those years when his son Jethro III was leading, successively, the life of an undergraduate at Oxford, a student of Grays Inn, and a young man about town in London. The fall of his great uncle Jethro I would have been ancient history but the effects of it were continuing and the financial predicament in which this involved his own family cannot have been but embarrassing, perhaps distressing, to a young man in a family so closely knit that the name Jethro (meaning in Hebrew, ironically, 'abundance') was passed down for three successive generations. The sudden reversal of the Tull family fortunes and its continuing reverberations may be the circumstances to which Jethro III referred when he wrote that 'accident, not choice, made me a farmer, or rather many unforeseen accidents'. In 1697 Jethro Tull II explains that he, his father James Tull, and his uncle Jethro I had had 'many dealings together and [had] been bound for one another in several bonds'.
Biographers of Jethro Tull III seem to have been unable to discover the date of his father's death. The actual date is of some moment in establishing when Jethro III may have inherited his father's estate in Howberry (and also the freehold portion of the estate in Shalbourne). It is possible that the estate, or a portion of itt was made over to him and his wife upon his marriage in 1699. The leasehold portion of the Shalbourne estate had been made over to him in 1704. This transfer (a lease having been previously held by his father dated 1686) has led some biographers to assume that it was in this year 1704 that the father died. This was not so: Jethro Tull II died in 1713. Does the lease of 1704 mean that young Jethro began to farm Prosperous at that date while his father continued at Howberry until his death in 1713? The Dictionary of National Biography commences him at Prosperous in 1709, though for no given reason. Jethro probably began his agricultural experiments at Howberry. If the experiments did cause hostility in his father's main estate at Howberry, this could well have been a cause for the father to feel the need to remove the son to another area where he could begin afresh. On the other hand there is a local tradition that Tull's seed drill was first used at Prosperous Farm. Later owner of the farm Lt.-Col Wills showed certain journalist the very pit or well into which, he claimed, the villagers had pushed the hated drill, having first smashed and broken it.
There has been much speculation concerning the date of Jethro Tull Ill's journey to the Continent. Fussell gives April 1711 as his date of departure, basing it on Tull's own statement, 'and he is most likely to be correct. The Dictionary of National Biography dates his departure similarly and gives his return as in 1714. If either of these statements were correct, one would wonder at the baptism on 13 October 1713 at Shalbourne of Tull's daughter Sarah. However, a different set of dates which makes much more sense is thrown up by the information given in yet another Chancery case in which Jethro Ill's brother-in-law states that Jethro, being seized of the Howberry estate in 1713 'and being in a very ill state of health was advised for recovery thereof to travel to Montpellier beyond the sea, which he accordingly did. Both parties agree that Jethro returned in 1715. While he was abroad two events occurred which he may or may not have expected when he set off and, if his health was bad, may not have been informed about. One was the birth of his daughter Sarah. If Tull left the country in April 1713 it is possible that he would not have known of his wife's pregnancy, which at the beginning of that month could have been of only a two-month period. The second event was the death of his father Jethro II. This was either in September 1713 or in March 1714: two different dates were provided by his in-law relatives in contention concerning his estate. The Crowmarsh Gifford parish register, damaged by fire and incomplete, gives no record. Whatever the circumstances, a considerable burden must have fallen on Jethro Ill's wife Susannah.
Susannah had married Jethro on 26 October 1699, according to Earl Cathcart. The place of marriage is not given by Cathcart, but Fussell states that 'it may be assumed that it took place in London'. The assumption is made, presumably, to suit Fussell's account of the life of a young bachelor of means and status living there. It is a mistaken assumption: search of the parish registers of Burton Dassett in Warwickshire, where Susannah's family resided, reveals that the marriage took place in that parish. The Smiths were a substantial yeoman family and it may be that young Tull, rather than leading a life of leisure and fashion in London, was sufficiently affected by his family's financial misfortunes to seek out a suitable provincial bride.
According to Tull's will he was survived by a son John and four daughters. The date of John's birth is not known, but it must have been before 10 April 1704 since Jethro's son John is one of three lives on which the 1704 leasehold of a portion of Prosperous Farm is based. Shalbourne parish register records the baptism of Mary daughter ofjethro andjoanah Tull 2 March 1711 and Sarah daughter ofjethro and Joanah on 13 October 1713. Since all other records refer to Susannah, is this yet another example of the confusion into which the personal details of the Tulls' lives have been allowed to remain...
Part III
The discovery of so many records containing miscellaneous information previously unknown concerning the Tulls I, II, and III has resulted also in unearthing a few items which, by alluding to farming practices by the two earlier Tulls, may throw a little light on the sort of family agricultural background from which the younger Tull developed. When Jethro I was negotiating a marriage settlement in 1674 between Griffith Jones and his step-daughter Elizabeth Goddard, one of the items he insisted on having inserted into the treaty was that Griffith Jones senior should make a watercourse in his lands in Radnorshire which were to be settled on Griffith junior. What the exact function of the watercourse was is not stated, but clearly it was designed for the improvement of the estate; and Griffith Jones complained bitterly that it had cost him some L400 to make.
Of greater interest are the details of Jethro II's conditions in leasing Prosperous Farm to John Smith in 1686 and his complaints concerning the tenant farmer's failure to comply with them. One of the conditions was that, on expiry of the five-year lease, the tenant should leave the ground well planted with clover grass 'as he had found the same' and to leave all the straw and chaff from the last year's crop. When Smith entered upon the tenancy there were eighty acres or more planted with clover, but when he left there were only a few acres so planted, 'neither did he leave any straw and chaff or firewood'. Moreover, Smith was over L300 in arrears of rent. Smith of course denied most of this. Smith's continually complained 'of the hardness of his bargain, the badness la of times, and the cheapness of corn'. In addition Smith had found taxation heavy and had had soldiers quartered upon him.
Whatever happened to the farm between re the time when Smith finally quit in 1693 to and Jethro Tull III was assigned a lease in 'e 1704 we do not know. Nevertheless the tv case just related gives us some idea of sc the circumstances of the farm which he th inherited and a foretaste of some of the problems he would be likely to encounter - in times that were bad for farmers and on land which was far from ideal.
There is another case which illustrates the practice of Jethro III in the very year of his momentous departure abroad, that is, before he comes back with his observations of the French and Italian vineyard tillage which led to his most important conclusions.
In 1713 an agreement was made by Jethro's wife Susannah on his behalf, leasing an estate in Oxfordshire to a tenant farmer. This agreement contained a clause whereby the existing tenant in his last year 'was not to feed the field after he had cut his grass and he was to spend all his straw now in the barns, in the backsides and yards, and the straw thus growing or to grow, and the dung thereof made, and also the dung now laying in the backside [of the premises] and there leave the same' for the use of the incoming tenant. And the incoming tenant 'likewise, in his last year was to spend all the straw on the premises and the dung thereof made, to lay on the same, except for the last year's dung, which he is to leave for the use of Jethro Tull'. It seems clear that Tull considered the use of dung necessary, at least up until the visit abroad he made in 1713-14.
The object of this article has been to provide a much firmer basis than previously existed for the family descent of Jethro Tull the agriculturist and to resolve some of the chronological problems in his biography. What strikes an outside observer is the degree to which Tull's invention was mothered by necessity. His pioneer work seems to have developed pragmatically in response to a series of financial setbacks which had begun by undermining the basis of the social standing for which he had been educated. A victim of the economic forces of his day, the pressure of those forces gave a naturally ingenious mind the driving urge to experiment and to innovate. This response enabled him to maintain a precarious link with genteel society, whose intelligentsia (eg, Cathcart) accepted him, despite his impoverishment, as a practical and beneficial innovator.
Jetrich Tyl and Norman Hidden, great grandnephews
|
