LiveTheirStory

The Rodings are a series of small villages in Essex whose lives were agricultural and not significantly intruded upon by the coming of the railways, which bypassed them to the east and west. Instead, the most significant event to shake established patterns was the arrival of Dissenting preachers, one of whom set up a community at Rookwood Hall near Abbots/Abbess Roding. My 3x paternal great-grandfather Jacob Pavitt and his family seem to have embraced the Dissenting church, and their story plays out in its baptismal records, which were surrendered to the General Register Office when civil registration started in 1837.

Jacob was born in 1811 in nearby Leaden Roding. He, like everyone else in the area, was an agricultural labourer, and at the age of 19 or 20 married Ann Peacock. They married in St Edmunds church in Abbess Roding, her village, but surviving records from the Rookwood Christ Church community, later established in a chapel, show that at least three of their first four children were baptised as dissenters. The records from 1831, which would no doubt have included their first-born, Mary, do not survive – the pastor at the time of the surrender writes peevishly about their poor condition, suggesting that he did not hand them over.

Jacob’s work as a labourer is well-documented in the local press in the 1840s and 1850s:

Chelmsford Chronicle 24/9/1847 The Roothing Labourers’ Friend Society awards Jacob a Class 1 No 1 prize for ploughing for Mr Parris.

Essex Standard 7/10/1853 The Roding [sic] Labourers’ Friend Society awards Jacob a 5 shilling Industry, Labour and Service prize for 23½ years’ service to Mrs Parris

Chelmsford Chronicle 29/9/1854 The Roothings. ‘At the gathering of this society, the oldest in the county and the model upon which all the others have been formed…’ Jacob is awarded 7s 6d prize for Industry, Labour and Service, having worked for Mrs Parris 25 years.

By this time he was 43 years old, and he and Ann had had eight children, five of them girls. The 1841 census records the whole family living in Barwick hamlet, outside the village. Ten years later, only the four youngest children remained at home with their parents. Jacob’s daughter Emma was recorded working as a domestic servant at the Anchor beer house, aged 12 or 13, and this may not have been accidental. The publican, Isaac Reed, was by then 75 years old, and looking for someone to take over. Emma’s father Jacob, a well-known member of the community, fitted the bill perfectly.

Respectability was important, for the pub had actually been founded by Trustees of the chapel to provide a place for chapel-goers to have lunch in between the two services. As a longstanding member of the chapel, and reaching an age where labouring might have been becoming physically challenging, Jacob was able to take on the running of the establishment, listed in Kelly’s Directory in 1855, and remained the publican until his death in 1861. Emma presumably helped out until her own marriage in 1858.

A short history of the Rookwood chapel and the Anchor is included in the history of the village and its neighbour White Roding produced by the local Women’s Institute in 1957, giving a real sense of the world that the Pavitts inhabited.