Country life -- England; England -- Social life and customs; Gentry -- England
The third of the four--of whom John Arscott was the eldest--was
Richard, who left four sons. Of these the second, Humphry, was the
father of seven, and Tristram, the eldest, of two. Tristram's family
died out in the male line in 1620. Of the seven sons of Humphry all
traces have disappeared. The fourth was John Arscott of Tetcott,
he, like his elder brothers, a man of good estate. His family became
extinct in the male line in 1788.
The Crymes family, of Buckland Monachorum, was vastly prolific. William
Crymes, who died in 1621, had _nine_ sons; of these, as far as is
known, only three married--William, Lewis, and Ferdinando. William left
but one son; Lewis had a son who died in infancy, and that son only;
Ferdinando had a son of the same name, whose only son died within a
year of his birth. Ellis Crymes, the son of William, and inheritor of
the estate, married twice, and had by his first wife, a daughter of Sir
Francis Drake, as many as _ten_ sons; by his second wife he had _six_
more. Of the ten first only eight had children; and of the offspring
of the second batch of six not a single grandchild male lived. In two
generations after this prolific Ellis with his sixteen sons, the whole
family disappears. I do not say that it is absolutely blotted out of
the land of the living, but it is no longer represented in the county,
nor can it be traced further.
I can give an excellent example in my own family, as I have taken great
pains to trace all the ramifications. In the Visitation of 1620, John
Gould of Coombe in Staverton is represented as father of seven sons;
and Prince, who wrote his _Worthies of Devon_, published in 1701, in
mentioning the family, comments on its great expansion; yet of all
these sons, who, one would have supposed, would have half peopled the
county, but a single male lineal representative remains, and he is over
fifty, and unmarried.
The Heles were one of the most widely-spread and deeply-rooted families
in the West of England. At an assize in Exeter in 1660, when Matthew
Hele was high-sheriff, the entire grand-jury, numbering about twenty,
was all composed of men of substance and quality, and all bearing the
name of Hele. Where are they now? Vanished, root and branch.
Where are the Dynhams, once holding many lordships in Devon? Gone,
leaving an empty shell--their old manor-house of Wortham--to show where
they had been.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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