Notes on the Warburton Village Clan

I recently updated the Warburton Village Clan since when I have made another couple of updates based on inputs from Trudy Norbury who has sent me transcripts of a couple of wills. I have just added these also. Meanwhile a number of interesting discussion points have arisen.

The overriding question is ‘does the Warburton Village Clan connect to the Warburton of Arley’? A number of trees on FamilySearch and Ancestry claim to show such a link, and Norman Warburton in his book Warburton: The Village and the Family believed there was a link but he failed to find it.

The Warburton Village clan begins with Thomas who bas born around 1557 and died in 1627 leaving a will. The link to the Arley family is usually depicted as via Peter Warburton and Katherine Coupe who are said to be Thomas’s parents.  Other trees make Peter and Katherine the parents of Thomas of Edenfield. Most of these trees give Thomas a wife called Ann Newton. However it is clear from a will dated 1597 that Ann Newton was the wife of a Rector of Warburton, who was also called Thomas. Ann was from Eccles and previously married to an Edward Pendleton. Thomas of Warburton Village is probably the Thomas who was an appraiser on the Rector’s will and it is possible they were uncle and nephew.

Before the regular recording of baptisms, marriages and burials the only records of the common man are in estate records such as rentals or manor courts. Parish records were introduced in the reign of Elizabeth, but it is a rare parish that still has records in existence from before 1600.

References to Warburtons in Warburton are few before 1600, but sufficient to show there were a number of villagers called Warburton. This could be because they were descended from the Lords of the Manor, or because they were common villagers who adopted the name of their village when surnames were first adopted in the Middle Ages. One might expect that a villager would be most likely to adopt his village name if he had actually moved away from it. However Norman Warburton suggests there would be much movement in and out of the parish due to death, expiration of leases, and the need for younger sons to find work.

There is no trace of the old Manor House at Warburton Park today but Norman Warburton quotes Thomas Newton’s The Story of Warburton and its Old Church (1939) saying a branch of the family continued to live there until the latter part of the 17th century. However Norman could find no evidence to support the statement and notes that rentals suggest the Park had been divided into a number of farms before the move to Arley.

The most significant evidence we have is from the Inspeximus of 1520, a Warburton estate Rent Roll of 1572, and the records of the Manor Court, particularly one from 1581 with is transcribed in Warburton by Michael Nevell et al of Salford University.

The Inspeximus of 1520 is a rent roll that resides in John Rylands Library, Manchester. It lists 24 mens who were occupiers in one moiety (half) of Warburton, including three Warburtons, Robert, Thomas, and Hamon. There is also a list of rents on which the first names are Richard Warburton, parson of Warburton, and Piers Warburton. The Lord of the Manor at this time was Sir John Warburton who died in 1524.

The 1572 Rent Roll is 10 yards in length and contained in an iron cylinder. In addition to Norman Warburton’s commentary I have a hand written transcription of the section for Warburton made by Charles Foster, the Arley Hall archevist. It is in Latin but Charles provided some guidance. The Lord of the Manor at this time was Sir John (circa 1523-75), sometimes called John Peter. However a number of the rents are paid to his brother Peter who was granted the proceeds from part of the estate for his lifetime. This Peter had his abode at Hefferston Grange, and was the husband of Katherine Coupe. My Arley Clan tree, which is based on Ormerod’s pedigree, only gives them two sons, Peter and Richard.

The tenants include Peter generosus (Gentleman) , Peter senior, Matthew, and Peter. This last Peter was amongst the tenants whose rents went to Peter of Hefferston Grange. The entry for Peter generosus represents land held directly by Peter of Hefferston Grange. Norman interprets the other tenants as Peter senior and his two sons, Peter and Matthew. It is  worth noting that Peter generosus, and Peter senior are the first names on the list of tenants, though they follow 6 freemen.

The 1581 Manorial Court Proceedings were held when the Lord of the Manor was Peter Warburton who died in 1626 and was held before his steward Peter Warburton (later Judge Warburton) of Northwich.  A list of tenants for years includes Robert and Peter Warburton, Cottagers include Randolf Warburton, and Robert Warburton was also a juror.

If a branch of the Arley family was left as tenants on part of the old manor  in Warburton then it is likely that the Thomas who died in 1627, and is the head of the Warburton Village clan, is a descendant of that family. It should also be noted that in 1727 William Warburton, Thomas’s great grandson, refers in his will to  the lease of a cottage held under Sir George of Arley.

Probably the two Peters in the 1572 rental are father and grandfather to Thomas, but the evidence can’t be said to be conclusive. We can also surmise that the Peters are probably descended from the tenants in the Inspeximus of 1520, but the 52 year gap makes in impossible to determine the link.  However their line clearly distinct from Peter of Hefferston Grange and the suggestion that Thomas was his son is not supported by the evidence.

In general I would say that some of the pedigrees on the Internet suffer from lack of knowledge of the geography, and a failure to appreciate the numbers of Warburtons living in the area in the 16th century and the small pool of christian names that they used.

Another element to consider is the DNA evidence. There is now strong, but not conclusive evidence that the DNA profile shared by the quarter of Warburton defined as the Cheshire Group was inherited from the Norman Knight Odard de Dutton and is therefore shared with the Arley family. If this same profile were found in the Warburton Village clan it would show it was part of the Cheshire Group, and because of the circumstantial historical evidence that the Warburton Village clan is linked to the Arley family, the arguement for it being the profile of Odard de Dutton would be strengthened.

However to date there are three profiles from the clan, of which only two match, and none match any other Warburton profile. The presence of two profiles means there must be one occasion where a Warburton boy bid not take his name from his biolagical father, for whatever reason. Such events are called non-paternal events (NPEs). In fact either of the profiles could be from the NPE, and it is possible they both are, masking the DNA of the clan’s earliest ancestors.

In my recent clan update I restructured the clans charts. Warburton Village is one of the largest clans, only exceeded by the combined Hale Barns and Mobberley clans. It is therefore split across a number of charts. In reorganising the splits I was guided by the locations of the DNA results.

Although the clan goes back to the 16th century, all explored recent lines are descended from one man, a William  who lived from circa 1661 to 1728. William had two wives, Priscilla Ashton and Joan Cartwright. Chart 1 shows the early generations down to William, and it is possible there are other lines that have not yet been developed.

Chart 2 shows the descendants of William and Priscilla, though in fact the three lines that extend to, or near to the present day are all descended from their grandson William (1733-1822) and Elizabeth Arden. Two of these lines are broken out into charts 3 and 9, and each produced one of the two matching DNA results. Because William (1733-1822) is the common ancestor of these two results we can assume that all his male descendants will share them, though this ignores the possibility of non-paternal events in those parts of the tree that are not in a direct line from William to the owner of one of the results.

These results are from haplogroup I-M253 which is most common in north Germany and Scandinavia and could be indicative of Viking or Anglo-Saxon origin. The later would be most likely given the Mercian origins of Warburton village but more detailed testing would be needed to confirm this.

Chart 4 shows the descendants of William and Joan Cartwright, with the exception of four named families shown in charts 5-8. In fact this multitude of descendants are descended from William’s grandson Thomas (circa 1731-1801). There are several lines from Thomas’s first wife, Ellen Small, and two lines from David (1789-1859), Thomas’s only son by his second wife Sarah Cadman, both shown in chart 4. It is from one of these lines that the third, non-matching DNA result comes. It is from haplogroup R-M269 which is very common in England, but hasn’t been refined further.

If a link to the Warburtons of Arley is to be proved, an additional DNA result is needed from a descendant of Thomas and Ellen Small. There are four possibilities for such a result:

  1. It matches a existing Warburton result from outside the Warburton Village clan. This is the most advantageous result as it proves the clan is linked to the clan(s) with the existing result. If it matches the Cheshire Group results then the link with the Arley family becomes very likely. Also the current Warburton Village clan results would be shown to be the result of non-paternal events.
  2. If the result matched the I-M253 results then this would be the profile of all the descendants of William (1680-1732), and the R-M269 result would be a non-paternal event. However we wouldn’t know if I-M253 was the result of a non-paternal event in the Arley family or was the profile of a villager who adopted the Warburton name. We would need to find a new line that bypassed William to make further testing possible.
  3. If the result matched the R-M269 result we would have a situation where 2 grandsons of William (1680-1732), that is William (1733-1822) and Thomas (circa 1731-1801) had different DNA profiles. We would have no clue as to William’s own profile or that of his ancestors. We would need to uncover a new line that bypassed the two grandsons, and preferably William himself to make further testing possible.
  4. If the result didn’t match anything the situation becomes even more confused and we would need to pursue another test.

The task at hand is to find a suitable test subject. If you are, or know a direct line male Warburton descendant of Thomas Warburton and Ellen Small I would love to hear from you to discuss a DNA test which could be funded from the project’s General Fund.

 

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2 thoughts on “Notes on the Warburton Village Clan”

  1. My name is Lawrence Charles Warburton I was born in 1953 in South Shields in the northeast my dads name was William Henry Warburton he was born in Gateshead any information on the Warburton family would be welcome

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