William Butchin was born in 1603 and baptised on 20 November that year at St Peter & St Paul’s Church in Nutfield, Surrey. I know little about by first cousin 11 times removed – the oldest son of another William Butching – but his wife and descendants were an interesting bunch…
William’s father inherited the copyhold farm known as Butchings (or Ridge Green Farm as it’s known today and pictured top), in Nutfield in 1560 at the age of 14 and it is more than likely that it passed to William Jnr on his parent’s death in 1606/7. The property had been passed down through the generations since at least 1431, according to the records of Reigate Manor. The will mentioned that William Jnr was bequeathed other property by his father including oxen, horses, a plough, brewing equipment and furniture.
It’s likely that William is the man who married Joan Allingham at St Katherine’s Church in Merstham, Surrey, on 28 July 1636. William would’ve been rather old for a man marrying at this period but he may have been married before and widowed. Joan was a Merstham native and was baptised there on 11 October 1611 but their children were baptised in Nutfield.
William may have died in 1642 (there was a burial in Nutfield on 5 January and no mention of him being ‘son of’ like other entries) but I can find no will for him. His wife Joan became the tenant of Butchings in 1649, which begs the question why the gap if her husband did die seven years earlier. But Joan would doubtless have taken on the tenancy because her children were still minors.
This was around the time of the execution of King Charles II following the English Civil War of the 1640s, a war that was caused in part by religious fractures in English society. On the one side were the puritans, who helped drive Cromwell to power, on the other the Anglicans and proto-catholics. Joan fell into the former camp as the Surrey Quarter Session rolls for 1659-1666 refer to the widow Butchin of Nutfield being fined for failing to attend the parish church – a clear rebellion against the established church headed by the monarch. Joan also made a donation of 6d to support Irish protestants in their long-running battle with the Catholics, another favourite cause of Cromwell and his supporters. The sum was recorded in the village parish registers.
In 1652 the manorial court rolls show Joan was presented for encroaching part of the Lord’s waste containing about 20 rods. She was told to reform and lay out the same before St John Baptist (24 June) or forfeit 40 shillings. This could be a fine or the purchase price of the land.
Joan and her husband had at least three children – William, Thomas and Nicholas (baptised in Nutfield on 28 February 1639 and buried on 16 May 1640).
Joan’s son William Butching was baptised on 14 May 1637 at St Peter & St Paul’s Church in Nutfield. I’m assuming he eventually took over the tenancy of Butchings farm from his mother but I have not found any record of this. However, later in the 1600s William Butchin was presented before the manorial court for encroaching six roads of land of the manor lying Ridge Hawe Greene adjacent to the said William’s barn. He was fined 10 shillings “if he does not remove before St John Baptist next”. I can find no record of William marrying or having children, and he may have moved to Bletchingley. He may have died in 1712.
Thomas Butching – Joan’s son and William’s brother – was baptised on 14 May 1637 at St Peter & St Paul’s Church in Nutfield. Thomas was responsible for the building of Outwood Mill in Surrey – one of the country’s best surviving mills – and followed in his mother’s footsteps, as a religious rebel and noted baptist preacher.
An indenture or deed of sale from a Richard Payne of West Hoathly in Sussex, who was also the Lord of the Manor of Burstow, outlined the grant of land to Thomas Budgen for the building of the windmill. Dated 1665, it mentioned “the yearely rent or sume of five shillings of lawful money of England at the two most usuall Feasts or termes in the yeare that is to say the Feasts of the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary and of St Michaell the Archangell by equall portions”.
But Thomas wasn’t just a miller for as a committed baptist he was recorded presiding over religious meetings at private houses in local villages such as Outwood, Bletchingley, Smallfield, Frogwood Heath, Turners Hill, Hogshill and Nutfield in the 1660s and beyond, at a time when to do so was notoriously dangerous. As his mother had discovered, the state was keen to suppress the sects that had sustained the Commonwealth following its collapse and the return of the monarchy, imposing fines and punishments on offenders through the Conventicle Act. A raid carried out on a meeting in Bletchingley in 1678 breached the terms of the Act and Thomas Budgen was fined as the man alleged to be the preacher at the gathering.
Thomas – now known by the modern version of the surname Budgen – died in January of 1716 and was buried in the nearby parish church of Horne in Surrey on the 14th. The windmill remained in the Budgen family until the turn of the 19th century and they were responsible for building a neighbouring smock mill at about the same time. Budgens continued to mill there until the 1880s but there is now no trace of it, it having collapsed in 1960. As a child we used to visit the surviving windmill to watch wheat being ground and to play on the surrounding green, little knowing that it was once the family business.
Other distant Budgen cousins who followed included a celebrated clockmaker, William Budgen of Croydon, whose work sells for thousands of pounds today, and John Budgen, christened in Nutfield church in 1804 aged 11, who set up a grocery store in Reigate that would go on to be the first in the chain of Budgen stores – a name still on the high street if much changed in form and ownership. Butchins/Budgens continued to occupy Ridge Green Farm until 1853, when it was sold by a John Budgen. As Richard Deacon says in his book Nutfield: Our Village Since Domesday, no other family held a property in the village longer than the Budgens.
Sources: Society of Genealogists’ will records. BMDs at Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk. Bourne Society Local History Records Vol XXVI. Wilfred Hooper: Reigate, Its History Through The Ages (Surrey Archaeological Society). Reigate Manor records (Surrey History Centre, Woking).