People
We think that there has been a farmstead here for many hundreds of years, but the earliest documentary reference is the Inventory of the goods and chattels of Edmund Spenser late of High Leas, husbandman, taken in 1635.
Isaac Allsop was farming at High Leas before 1716. He died that year and his inventory tells us much about the kind of farming being undertaken.
By c.1760, High Leas belonged to the local squire, Peter Nightingale, and was known as Burton’s farm, suggesting that that was the tenant’s name. But that is not necessarily so, for Allsops are found again at High Leas, down to the middle of the nineteenth century.
There were once three households here. In addition, the main farmer had several servants and labourers.
John Allsop was occupying the main farmhouse in 1841 (when he was aged 60) and he was still here in 1847. Isaac Rains was the farmer in 1851 and 1861…..In 1881 Peter Kiddy, in 1891 Joshua Burton, and in 1901 Joseph Slater, for whom see below.
The farmhouse in 1957 (unmodernised).
A second house was occupied in 1841 by Laurance Fearn, in 1851 by William Seals, and in 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, and 1901 by Isaac Holmes. This house lay against Hearthstone Lane. Some traces of it remain, that we call Boggart’s Cottage, the site having been amalgamated into the main farm.
A third household was headed by Joseph Breasdale in 1851. It is a mystery as to where this was, perhaps amongst the farm buildings, or at a place in Littlemoor Wood where two stone gate posts still stand. Indeed the main farmhouse seems to have formerly been two units. The 1861 census records an uninhabited house.
The last nineteenth century farmer at High Leas was Joseph Slater. His wife had died and he hadmarried a young widow, Elizabeth Hanson. They each had children, and the oldest Slater child was Godfrey. In 1905 Godfrey left for Canada with his friend Sam Lowe, and a year later the rest of his family followed, sailing on the “Virginian” from Liverpool. The tenancy of High Leas was taken on by William Lowe, father of Sam. Five years later Godfrey came back to England on a visit, and courted Sam’s sister Polly, who was living at High Leas with her parents. Godfrey Slater and Polly Lowe were married in Sasketchewan in 1912 and have many descendants on both sides of the Atlantic. I am grateful to several of these, especially Jean Olajos, for information and photographs shown on this site.
William Lowe left High Leas several years before he died in 1927 (he is buried in the cemetery at Lea & Holloway). His wife Catherine is shown in a photograph at our kitchen door, and several of her recipes found their way into the book kept by her near neighbour Mrs Taylor at Castle Top, whose daughter Alison Uttley was to publish them in 1966.
Alison’s brother William Henry Taylor took over the tenancy of High Leas Farm from Mr Lowe, and a few years later was given the opportunity to buy it (with the upper part of Littlemoor Wood and the land that had been occupied by old Isaac Holmes) as Florence Nightingale’s family decided to dispose of their farms. He did not keep it long, perhaps it bankrupted him, for in 1923 he sold it to Thomas Edge, and Mr Edge (who was a great builder and improver) sold it to Frank Hodson twenty years later.
Mr Hodson was not a farmer, but an investor. He let the farm to Walter Woodward, who seems to have come from Laxton in Nottinghamshire. Several photographs have been supplied by David Land, son of the Woodwards’ foster daughter. Mr & Mrs Woodward were still here in 1957, when Frank Hodson died and R.M. Beaumont bought High Leas. In the 1960s the farm was re-let to Gilbert Winder, whose son John took it over, remaining until 2001.
Thus, in 100 years (1851-1951), the period before subsidies, there were at least nine main farmers at High Leas, and average of about eleven years each. Isaac Holmes lasted longest, but then, he had another job (he was a sawyer). Alison Uttley wrote of “Old Mr Boggarty” (she meant Isaac) carrying his water up from Meadow Wood. It was a hard life.
Mrs Catherine Lowe at the door
W.H. Lowe seated in a chair (not at HLF)
Godfrey and Polly
Mr & Mrs Woodward on the farm road at the back of the house
David Land’s mother and the cow in the farmyard
The two girls harvesting with scythes
Woodwards at the door of the house and the door today.
Detail box. Mrs Lowe’s recipes for parkin, and cakes (from “Recipes from and Old Farmhouse” by Alison Uttley, 1966)
Detail box. In 2002 when clearing brambles on a bank near the farmyard, Edward found remains of a piano – frame, tuning pins, coiled bass strings, and cast-iron bar, showing the maker’s name “…… Birmingham.” This maker worked in ….. so was this the instrument on which the hymns were played, to the accompaniment of the calves blorting below (see “High Meadows” page …)……[this section not properly written yet, EMB]
Alison Uttley……Extract from her diary about the High Leas hay-meadows……. Extracts from “High Meadows.”
