♀Matilda (surname unknown)

Matilda (dates unknown) was the wife of Miles Whitfield and lived with him in the parish of Alston, on Alston Moor in Cumberland, in the fifteenth century. Her surname is not known. She and her husband are known from a sworn certificate drawn up at Durham in 1522, which named them as the parents of their son Robert, by then long settled in Sussex at the other end of England. She was the thirteenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Robert Whitfield.

Life at Alston Moor

Miles and Matilda lived in the parish of Alston “long both before and after the birth” of their son Robert. Their home is said to have been a small hamlet called Nentsbury, in country about a thousand feet above sea level and rich in lead. Robert was probably born about 1453. He was baptized in the parish church by its vicar, Robert Jackson, who held the post in 1451 and was gone by 1495, and Edmond Lee, Thomas Stevenson and Isabel Bowman brought him to the font as his godparents.

The certificate of 1522

Robert went south and settled at Wadhurst, in the Sussex Weald. In the reign of Henry VIII, Scots living in England were arrested, imprisoned and fined at times of trouble between the two kingdoms, and northern Englishmen were sometimes seized with them as Scots. Some of Robert’s neighbors at Wadhurst began to say that he was a Scot, born in Scotland, and royal officers in the county moved to have him pilloried and imprisoned.

Robert turned to the north for proof. At his request the Prior of Durham^W, Hugh, and Sir William Hilton inquired into his birth. The certificate, which survives in a copy kept by the family, records that they put seven men on oath, among them John Whitfield of Whitfield and three yeomen of Alston parish aged between 60 and 73, and that on 14 August 1522 they certified that Robert had been born to Miles Whitfield and Matilda his wife in the parish of Alston, and was an Englishman born in England.

Notes

How she is known

Matilda is known from the certificate dated at Durham on 14 August 1522, printed in English translation from the Latin by John Brooks Threlfall in The Ancestry of Reverend Henry Whitfield (1590-1657) and his Wife Dorothy Sheafe (1989), p. 61. In the certificate’s words, Robert “was born of Miles Whitfield and Matilda his wife who lived in the parish of Aldneston aforesaid long both before and after the birth of the said Robert”. Aldneston is the tree’s Alston. The certificate describes Robert as “lately abiding in a certain village called Wadehurst in the county of Sussex”, which ties it to Robert Whitfield of Wadhurst. A note of 30 July 1619 with the copy, among the Blackett-Orde (Whitfield) manuscripts, says it was then in the keeping of Robert’s grandson Herbert Whitfield of Tenterden (p. 62). Because the certificate is known only from this printed copy, Miles and Matilda are taken as Robert’s parents with that one step of caution.

Her name

The certificate calls her Matilda and gives no surname. Threlfall writes that “Myles Whitfield had a wife named Maud (or sometimes given as Matilda - the two names seem to have been interchangeable at the time)” (p. 114).

Robert’s birth

The Visitation of London, as Threlfall gives it, says Robert was buried at Wadhurst on 2 June 1541, “being 88 years old”, which places his birth about 1453 (p. 59). Threlfall adds that Robert Jackson’s time at Alston is otherwise unknown, “only that he was vicar in 1451 and was gone before 1495”. The account of how Scots and northern men were treated under Henry VIII is Holinshed’s, quoted by Threlfall (p. 60).