The Long Ago Death of Samuel Oddy, Yeoman of Horsforth
What remains of the life of an ordinary man, in an ordinary place, from two and a half centuries ago?
The place where I live was first mentioned in a newspaper on 12th November 1754. It had been raining, the story said, and Samuel Oddy was riding back to Horsforth, Yorkshire, after setting his son off on the long journey to London. He crossed a beck, which was “swell’d with the Rains”. Oddy fell. He “unfortunately drown’d”.
That should be where the story ends.
Oddy was not a noteworthy man and Horsforth is not a noteworthy place, a village which became a town, which became a suburb of the city of Leeds. Finding the newspaper notice was merely a result of idle searching, passing the time during lockdown. Apart from the few of you reading this story, no-one remembers this apparently ordinary man, in an ordinary village, dying a sad but ordinary death, in the rain.
But even ordinary lives can linger, if you look for long enough, a kind of immortality in forgotten documents and easily ignored stones. You can piece a story together, with time, with care, from manuscripts and parish registers and the remains of old buildings in out of the way places.
On sunny days, the views from Samuel Oddy’s childhood home were glorious. The farmhouse where he lived was built from stone carved from local quarries, the kind that went dull when the sky was grey but caught the pink of sunsets and sunrises easily. The land sloped away from the house, down towards the river. There was a barn and land for the animals. He was an only child, so the farm was quieter than most houses nearby, full of children. When the wind was still, you could hear the rumble from Kirkstall forge, down in the valley.
In the house somewhere, the deeds to the place were kept safe. They still survive, written in ornate script on vellum, creases so deep after centuries lying folded that you now need weights to hold them flat. For a while, it seems, the old farmhouse was defined by death: a woman called Katherine, whose family name we can’t be sure of, inherited it. When she died, in 1693, recently married and without a will or children, it passed to the local lords of the manor, as the law said it must. Her husband was Samuel Oddy senior, our Samuel’s father. He stayed in the farmhouse, alone, for two years before he remarried, to Ann Hunter. Buying the house was one of the first things they did when they realised she was pregnant, another year later. Owning the place, the land, in the name of the Oddy family, clearly mattered, with a child on the way.
Another contract, from 1700, helps us find where the house once stood. Samuel senior bought some more land, presumably close to the farm. Two of the closes were called “Bank Closes”. This was the steeply sloping ground, the bank, that still runs away from Horsforth’s main street. The name remains: Bank Avenue and Bank Gardens, up from the ring road that now cuts Horsforth in two. What was then rural is now suburban, covered in twentieth century houses, a place of bungalows and roundabouts, and strangely old stone from long lost structures built into garden walls. My children went to nursery at the top of the bank, on what was once Oddy farmland.
The village’s small chapel was a hundred yards or so behind the house. Samuel junior was baptised there, on 10th November 1697. It was a Sunday, so the chapel would have been full. Samuel senior and Ann would have known everyone in the chapel, everyone in this small village, all the families. There had been Oddys and Hunters in the parish registers for as long as there had been parish registers, for as long as anyone had bothered to record the names of ordinary people in obscure parishes like this.
We can see what the village was like in documents that have survived. Status mattered, and was linked to land: legal papers describe Samuel senior as a “husbandman”, a tenant farmer, and then, after he bought the house, a “yeoman”, a small landowner, one step up the hierarchy, but still below the “Gentlemen” and “Esquires” around the place, and far below the aristocracy. As was typical for men of Samuel senior’s new standing, he took on roles in the parish: in 1709 and again in 1725, he was Overseer of the Poor, distributing funds to the most needy, and binding poor children to new masters, and weighing in on paternity disputes. It could be a litigious little place: Samuel senior went to court three times in challenges to his land, once sueing the rich man he had bought the closes on the Banks from, twice as defendant in claims brought by his neighbours.
Perhaps most tellingly of all, there is a list, written in October 1715, charred and often illegible. Samuel junior was nearly eighteen when it was written. There had been an uprising, Jacobites fighting for the reinstatement of the Catholic line of succession, for James, the Old Pretender. All over the country, Catholics were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown, all but renouncing their faith. There was widespread suspicion of those who clung to old traditions. Samuel senior was one of two men from Horsforth on the lists of those required to take the oath. The punishment for refusing could be the seizure of land. Samuel senior’s name was crossed from the list. He kept the land.
Samuel junior looked to his left and to his right when he was at the altar, about to be married. It was St Valentine’s Day, 1728. He was thirty now. This church, All Saint’s, Harewood, was bigger than the chapel back in Horsforth, eight miles away. There was Grace — Gracey, people called her, if the record of her eventual death is to be believed — and, on either side of them, flanking the altar and the aisles beyond, six tombs, each carved with alabaster effigies of the husband and wife inside, each pair in their finery, together, forever. They were painted when they were carved in the 1400s and early 1500s but were beginning to fade now. People had carved initials and dates into the stone.
According to The Notices of the Stables Family, an unpublished family history written in the nineteenth century based on the memories of Grace’s nephew, she was “a sensible woman and remarkable for being cool in the decisions of her will, cautious in the performance of duty, and firm and steady to her purposes.” Samuel, by contrast perhaps, was “affectionate”, a man of “tender affection”. He was a “good friend” of Grace’s brother, John, who was remembered as being “very fond of liquor”.
Samuel and Grace had formally agreed to marry just two weeks before the wedding. A few days after that, John Stables senior, Grace’s father, agreed to pay Samuel four hundred pounds as a “marriage portion”. It was an extraordinary amount of money, more than ten years wages for a skilled worker, and John would pay it off in instalments, with appropriate interest. The note recording that agreement survives, in John Stables’ careful handwriting, alongside the receipts Samuel wrote after each payment, over the years. On the same day that he received the first payment, Samuel transferred the ownership of his land in Horsforth to John senior and one of Grace’s cousins. This was all a delicate business arrangement, as well as a marriage, twinning the families together, the Oddys and the Stables. The Stables were a notch above the Oddys in status, richer, with more land of their own. The marriage madr a difference to Samuel’s own place in the social hierarchy: in the parish record of the wedding, he is referred to as “Mr Oddy”, given the status of a gentleman, unusual for Samuel, almost always given the lesser title of “yeoman”, like his father.
A painting survives of All Saints from the year before the wedding. It is idealised, with the sky pink and blue, with dark clouds gathering. A mountain takes the place of what should just be a rocky outcrop in the distance. The church stands above an aristocratic house, called Gawthorpe Hall. Much of the land between the church and the Hall was farmland owned by Stables. A deliberately placed tree in the painting obscures where the Stables family home would have been. This land is now Harewood House, one of the grandest houses in Yorkshire, built on the Stables farmland. The land was bought by the Lascelles family in the 1730s, sugar plantation owners and slavers from Barbados. They demolished Gawthorpe Hall and the farms in the 1750s. The Lascelles still live there, now cousins to the Queen. You can pay to visit the house and the land, to view the landscaped gardens and the animals and children’s playground and the fine alabaster tombs in the church. My children enjoy it. If you look in the graveyard of All Saints, for a tomb that we can be sure that Samuel and Grace looked towards as they left the church, newly married, the tomb of Grace’s mother and brother, who had died weeks apart, you can find it eventually, worn and unloved, covered by ferns and nettles.
Another painting survives of this area as it was before Harewood House, painted from the other direction, showing the paths winding their way down the hill from the church, past the hall, through the Stables land, towards Horsforth, the way Samuel and Grace travelled after they were married, back home. The hills look gentle but the woods are thick. A man in the painting rides his horse along the path. There is a sunset and the sky is pink again. Clouds gather still and darkness is coming to the air. It is beautiful.
There were few people who knew the roads around Horsforth as well as Samuel Oddy. He had walked most of them in his time. Now, in the summer of 1737, aged nearly 40, Samuel was Surveyor of the Highways in the parish. It was an annual position appointed by the parish vestry, for men of a certain status. This was important work, so records were kept. He had to walk the roads of the village, to inspect them, to see what needed repair. Most were just farm tracks. When it rained, which it did often, they would become clingy with mud. There were no sewers. For one day in the year, he could “cry the day”, calling all the men out of their houses, with what tools they had, to work on the roads. It was everyone’s responsibility; to live in Horsforth was to care for its ways.
Samuel knew this road, Featherbank Lane, particularly well, running up from his house to the chapel, close to the farm where he had lived as a child. Samuel walked it every Sunday, and when each of his children were baptised: John in 1729, named for Grace’s father; Ann in 1731, named for Samuel’s mother; Elizabeth in 1732, named for Grace’s mother; little Samuel in 1735, named for Samuel himself and Samuel senior. There would be another baby the next year, William, in 1738, named for Grace’s brother. Family names carried stories for Samuel and Grace.
As he walked around the village, surveying the roads, he could see the paving stones — “causey stones”, they called them around here — that he had sold to the parish, to improve one of the roads back in 1731. One hundred of them, laid flat. A few of the causey stones from around this time still survive, of the type Samurl provided for the village, on a narrow track through undeveloped fields. Locals now call it “the Roman Road”, as the stones look so impossibly old, worn with so many footsteps.
Samuel had land of his own now, where he could raise his family, and animals: he had bought a farm and some woodland, with rocky outcrops. In 1732, when John Stables Junior died, Grace’s brother and Samuel’s “good friend”, he left his property to Samuel in trust for his son. He knew he was dying and had written the will just two days before. “He was very fond of liquor,” according to The Notices, and “he indulged so much in this propensity that he brought himself to a premature grave”. Weeks later, Samuel bought a farm on Featherbank Lane to rent out, close to his own, on that path up to the chapel and butial ground. Death and land were inextricable.
The new stone on the old roads made it easier to get around the village, and to leave it. There were more causey stones put down in 1733, when Samuel verified the accounts of that year’s Surveyor, as was sometimes required of men of his status. 1733 was a sad year. Ann died, Samuel and Grace’s eldest daughter. She was two and a half. They took her body over those old farm tracks, up Featherbank Lane again, to the little chapel where she had been baptised. They buried her in the grounds. Her death shook the family: Grace’s father paid Samuel the last remaining instalment of the marriage portion on the day of the funeral. He brought the original note with him, from Harewood, and Samuel wrote another note on the reverse, to confirm he had received the money, signing it. His handwriting had become more looping over the years.
Just before Samuel junior’s term as Surveyor started, Samuel senior died. He was just a few days short of sixty-eight years old. He had probably been failing a little: a 1735 tax record lists Samuel junior’s land but no Samuel senior, with another man farming “Oddy’s farm”, probably Samuel junior’s childhood home. It was January 1737 when they took the body up to the chapel, to bury him.
Six months later, that summer’s day, 17th July 1737, Samuel probably walked up Featherbank Lane again, from his house to the chapel. It was his mother’s funeral now. They buried her in the same ground as her husband. Their names were recorded on the same page of the parish register: “Senior”, “Yeoman”, “Widow”. Little Ann was buried nearby, named for her grandmother.
Like all the modest monuments in the graveyard outside the chapel, their gravestones were cut from local rock, flat and smoothed like causey stones.
Samuel was coming up to fifty as he looked from the windows of another house, in another village, up another steeply sloping bank to another chapel. It was 1747. They had left Horsforth not long after William was born. He was eight now.
This house was bigger than the one in Horsforth, grand enough to be a “Hall”: Baildon Hall, a sixteenth century manor house, with mullion windows and oak panelling and ceilings with plasterwork vines hiding grotesque faces. There was farmland surrounding it, between the Hall and the church. Samuel didn’t own any of it. He was now a tenant, paying his way through farming, and collecting the rent on his old house in Horsforth. In the Hall, probably upstairs in one of the rooms with oak panelling, Grace gave birth to their sixth child in the late spring of 1743. Grace was 41 and Samuel was 46. In the parish register for the baptism, Samuel was listed as a “farmer”, not the “yeoman” he was called at the earlier baptisms, a step down in status, as much as the Hall was a step up. Samuel and Grace called the baby Jackson. It was an unusual name; all the other Oddy children were given the names of older relatives.
Jackson died in January 1747. He was three and a half. He was buried in the chapel that Samuel could see from the Hall windows, on the slopes above them. John Stables, Grace’s father, was failing then too, “remarkably dead to the world”, according to The Notices. He died in November 1747, not long after Samuel’s fiftieth birthday. He was buried in the churchyard at Harewood, in the chest tomb next to his wife. The estates that he owned, including the share of the Horsorth land that he had bought from Samuel when he married Grace, passed to William, her brother. According to Religion In Earnest, a memoir written by William’s grandson, he was “stern and inflexible in disposition, pharisaic, and a bigoted churchman”.
Baildon Hall is still there, dusky with years of soot and fumes. Semi-detached houses have been built into what was once farmland around it, with hatchbacks parked in paved drives. The Hall is now a private members’ club. There is a quiz night and raffle on Wednesdays. Sunday lunches are available if booked in advance. The Oddy family dining room, with the fine plasterwork, is now “an ideal venue for small functions”. The road is now a cul-de-sac.
The Oddy family left Baildon soon after Jackson’s death. With Samuel and Grace’s parents all dead, and two of their own children dead, they moved further again from Horsforth, to Harden Hall, another large farm on the edge of a village near Bingley. There was oak panelling again, and more mullions looking out across more slopes. There was a round window, looking in the direction of the moor, with the Bronze Age burial mounds on land above the village.
Harden Hall is still there too, a fine house that is still surrounded by farmland. A beck is nearby. If you follow it for long enough, it flows into the River Aire, which eventually passes Oddy’s land in Horsforth, ten miles away.
For a while, it seemed that the Oddy family would never return to Horsforth. They leased the old farmland in the village to a local widow “for a term of one thousand years”, with two thirds of the money going to William Stables. Samuel and Grace’s eldest child, John, moved to London, to become a lawyer. When the worthy men of the parish began collecting subscriptions for the rebuilding of the old chapel, the chapel where Samuel was baptised, where five of his children were baptised, where little Ann was buried, where his parents were buried, Samuel didn’t contribute. Horsforth was his past, more than it was his home.
They did return though, back to that old, smaller house. It was probably for financial reasons. There are land tax records for Horsforth from 1753, shortly after they returned. The lists have Oddy as apparently the eighteenth richest man in the village, “Mr Samuel Oddy” now, a gentleman since returning from long years away in those grand old Halls. However, months later, he borrowed money from the widow he had leased his farmland to, with the house itself as security. He stayed there, control over his property slipping away. His riches, his lands, his status even, were now something of a pretence.
It was just a short ride from the house, across the familiar sloping ground, over the beck, past the forge with its familiar rumble, then on towards Kirkstall Abbey. The Abbey was built in the 1100s from Horsforth stone, but now the road into Leeds ran through the middle of the ruined nave. The rain dulled the colour of the stone until it was almost black. Leeds was three miles further on. Samuel and John waved farewell.
Back at the house, Grace waited. She was fifty-three. Samuel was fifty-seven. It had been his birthday just a few days earlier, probably why John had returned home. John was twenty-five. Elizabeth was twenty-one. Samuel junior was nineteen. William was sixteen. This house was smaller than they had grown used to but it was home. Samuel had bought it even before he married, back in 1720, when he was younger than John was now. It was on the edge of Horsforth, with a wood that locals called The Outwood. On two sides, the land was bordered by rich men, the lords of the manor. On the other two sides, were Horsforth’s well-defined borders: the River Aire to the south; to the east, the beck. Even now, locals say you can’t leave the village without crossing water.
As Samuel approached the beck, he could see it had risen. It was normally narrow and easily fordable here but the rain hit the the slopes of Horsforth and ran off down to the beck, “swell’d from the rains”. He was probably leading John’s horse while riding his own, slightly unsteady. Before the road came, years later, the best place to cross here was at the damstones, which slowed the water of the beck to be carried in a channel to the forge. You can just get to this spot now, if you pick your way close to the riverbank, through tall weeds, through what became a sewage works, through what was Oddy’s land. Samuel knew he was close to home when he got here, a few hundred yards from the house.
The house still survives. It is a beautiful cottage, now much developed and surround by twentieth century houses built on land cleared in The Outwood. It is on a steep slope, down to the beck and river; a 1771 newspaper advertisement for the sale of wood from the land here, when Grace still lived in the house, calls this area Oddy Bank.
It is on the route of my children’s favourite local walk during lockdown, down the slope, to the path along the river, towards the beck and then looping back past the house, a sanctuary from the daily news, the death toll recording the end of apparently ordinary lives. It became, over time, a reminder of the lingering power of apparently anonymous, apparently forgotten people, a strange kind of immortality.
This was the home that Samuel was thinking of, as he approached the beck. This was where Grace, and Elizabeth and Samuel and William waited and, probably, where they realised that Samuel had been gone a little too long. Where, probably, they looked out of the windows built into that familiar stone. Where, perhaps, two riderless horses returned, the short distance up from the beck. Where, probably, Grace or the children decided they would head out to look for Samuel. Where, probably, they brought his body home.
On 19th November, twelve days after he died, the family took Samuel’s body to chapel for the funeral, along Featherbank Lane, the road they had walked so often. The family probably waited so long for the funeral to get a message to John in London, and to allow him to return. Our own house is just off Featherbank Lane, amongst the former council houses and flats, and stone buildings with satellite dishes. My children know the road well. Samuel Oddy was a close neighbour. His coffin and grieving family would have passed the fields where our street would be built.
Up at the chapel, Grace saw the gravestones outside: little Ann, and Samuel’s parents, and so many of the men and women who had worshipped here, who had been at Samuel’s baptism, and the baptisms of the children, men and women whose names were recorded in the parish registers, buried where they were baptised.
Samuel’s name was written in the parish register: “Samuel Oddy Yeoman”. His grave was engraved with text: “here lieth the body of Samuel Oddy of Horsforth who departed this life November 7th in the year of our Lord 1754, aged 57 years”. There was a short poem: “shortened was his time, the longer is his rest. God called him hence because he thought it best”. Space was left on the stone for future generations.
After Samuel died, Grace stayed in the house in the Outwood. Although John sold the house and land the year after, paying off his father’s debts, the surviving vellum contract tell us that the new owners allowed Grace to stay, paying her a small annual fee. The contract promotes Samuel, giving him the title of “Gentleman, deceased”.
It must have been hard for Grace in that house. John died a few years after Samuel, in his thirties. According to The Notices, he was “a very clever man in his profession, and made a considerable appearance in the world,” but was “addicted to the pernicious practise of drinking too much strong liquor”. Samuel junior died young too, having moved away, never to return, married and with a child, named after Elizabeth, his sister. Elizabeth left Horsforth too, and married and had children of her own: John, Ann, Grace. William was the only one to stay for long. He became a mason in the village, carving stone for houses and causey stones and gravestones.
Grace died on 9th November 1779. She was buried alongside Samuel, a quarter of a century after him. She was notably old, and the text exaggerated her age, and obscured the time that had passed: “also”, it read, “here lieth interred the body of Grace, wife of the above laid Samuel Oddy, who departed this life the 9th day of November AD 1779, in the 85th year of her age”. Eventually, even William moved away. He died in 1816, the last of the Oddy family. He was buried elsewhere, never married, with no children. The space for descendants on Samuel and Grace’s gravestone was never filled.
Now the chapel is long gone. It was demolished soon after the funeral, and replaced with another chapel, itself now demolished. The area is now a “Garden of Rest”, the old gravestones laid as a path over the site, and over the footprint of the chapel, as paving stones. Samuel and Grace’s gravestone is placed towards the front. It is a communal space, a nice spot to have a coffee, on a bench, near the park. One Christmas evening, a few years ago now, as the decorative lights were illuminated, my daughter and her classmates performed Christmas hymns there to the people of the village. Unknowingly, she stood over Samuel Oddy’s stone and sung the old, traditional songs.
