The Baughs of Ludlow and of Lincolns Inn

 Edward Baugh junior, son of Edward Baugh of Onibury, was only eight years old when the family moved to Clungunford and first his mother, then his youngest sister and brother, died within a few days of each other. He didn’t appear in the Clungunford parish registers at all, but he did appear in those of St Michael, Bristol, where he worked as a linen draper. He died on 15^th June 1675, six days before his 40^th birthday. George Morris in Shropshire Genealogy tells us that Edward Baugh, son of Edward and Bridgett Baugh, married the former Mary Stone, now widow of George Houghton  (died 1694), on August 29^th 1695. A document held in the Central Record Office at Shrewsbury, dated August 29^th 1695, states of Edward Baugh of Stoke St Milborough (where his cousin was Rector) that there is no lawful impediment to him marrying Mary Haughton of the Parish of St Mary, Shrewsbury, a widow. Though the Edward in question couldn’t have been the one Morris claimed for obvious reasons, he could have been his son, grandson of Edward and Bridgett Baugh. The wedding was Edward’s only entry in the St Mary, Shrewsbury, parish register.

As Edward Baugh Esq of Ludlow, another Edward, this one the son of Richard Baugh of Clungunford, married Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Knight of Wolverley. Co Worcester. A girl twenty five years his junior. They had eleven children, only five of whom survived through infancy and childhood. Richard, their first son died when he was only fourteen, Robert died when he was only one. Edward, Lancelott, Elizabeth and Mary each lived for only a few days. A plaque in the High Chancel of St Andrews, Ludlow says ‘Here lyeth the body of Edward Baugh gent. obit 26^th July 1742 aged 72. Also the body of Elizabeth Baugh, relict of Edward Baugh gent. Died 25^th June 1778, aged 84.’

Benjamin Baugh, eldest surviving son of Edward and Elizabeth, married Ann, daughter of Francis, the second son of Anthoney Biddulph of Ledbury on 11^th March 1749 in Ludlow. Their first child, a son, Benjamin, died in February 1751, when only eleven months old, their second child, Edward, was baptised on 7^th November 1751. As Edward Baugh of Ludlow, Esq., died 14^th May 1836, he was buried at St Andrews, Ludlow. Francis, born in 1754, and named for Ann’s father, was thirty one when he died in 1785. A second Benjamin was baptised on 25^th February 1756, and Richard on 4^th September 1762. Benjamin senior died on 13^th April 1765, aged 42. His widow, Ann, survived him by thirty six years, dying on 13^th September 1801, aged 75. Like Benjamin’s parents, they are commemorated in Ludlow Church.

The second of Edward and Elizabeth’s sons to survive into adulthood was Thomas, who had been baptised on 27^th March 1727. In general, the Baugh men seemed to choose either the church or the army when seeking a career, and Thomas chose the latter. He rose to the rank of Major in the 55^th Regiment of Foot and fought in the American War of Independence. In his later years he lived at Broad Street in Ludlow. He died on April 20^th 1793, aged 66. He, too, has a plaque to commemorate him in Ludlow Church and his death was reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1793.

Edward, the third son of Edward and Elizabeth, was their second attempt at a child of that name. He became Rector of Neen Sollars, Milson and Ribblesford in Worcestershire. He and his wife, Margaret, had two sons, both of whom entered the church. Richard was at Oxford, Edward followed in his father’s footsteps at Neen Sollars and Milson. He and his wife, Sarah, had two sons they named Richard and Edward, both of whom became church ministers.

Richard, the fourth son of Edward and Elizabeth, was born the year after their first son of that name died. Like his brother, Thomas, he chose the army as a career, was a Captain in the 39^th Regiment in 1765, and a Major when he died on 2^nd October 1787, aged 54. His possessions passed to his nephew Edward (son of Benjamin presumably), the Reverend Edward, Thomas Esq. and Elizabeth, spinster, the natural and lawful brothers and sister, and only next of kin of the deceased, having renounced their rights.

Elizabeth, the second of that name, and the only one of Edward and Elizabeth’s daughters to survive into adulthood, died on 30^th November 1799, aged 75 years.

Elizabeth’s uncle, Lancelot, the first of that name in the Baugh family, seems to have been the only one of the family to choose law as a career. He moved to Lincolns Inn, where he married Ann Buggin, with whom he had four sons. Richard, Lancelot, Edward and Benjamin.

    Lancelot Baugh, son of Lancelot Baugh of Lincolns Inn, Middlesex, was apprenticed to Thomas Cox on the 4^th September 1716, according to the Bindings Books of the Merchant Taylor’s Company. One of the second Lancelot’s sons, yet another Lancelot, born 7^th May 1728, appears on the register of Merchant Taylor’s School 1738 – 1740-1. Merchant Taylor’s School, founded by the Merchant Taylor’s Company of London, an incorporated group of craftsmen tailors, was the most famous of all the guild schools. It was in Suffolk Street and was a day school.

Lancelot the second, and his wife Alice, had two other sons. Richard was baptised at St Andrews, Holborn on 29^th December 1730, John was mentioned in Lancelot senior’s will so must have been born before 1731. He was dead before 24^th October

1771, when his widow, Merien (Boddington), of St James, Westminster, left a £20 annuity and a diamond ring to her son, John Boddington Baugh, and a £20 annuity and other rings to her daughter, Ann. Colonel Lancelot Baugh Esq. of St Marylebone and John Boddington Esq. were her executors.

      Theodosia Baugh, spinster, of Hertford Street, Marylebone, who died on 30^th May 1774, left £300 to her sister, Ann Howarth, and £300 to her sister, Mary Maddison. The residue of her estate went to her brother, Colonel Lancelot Baugh, her executor.

      Mary Baugh had moved to Portsmouth, where she married George Maddison on 11^th October 1757. It was one of their descendants, Reverend A R Maddison, who contributed the Baugh Notes to the 1896-7 edition of Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica from which much of this information has been gleaned.

      Lancelot Baugh junior was a Lieutenant in the 1^st Regiment of Foot Guards by 26^th August 1747, Captain and Lieutenant Colonel by 1^st May 1758 and Colonel in 1771. He was a Major General in 1777 and Lieutenant General in 1779. He was Colonel of the 6^th Foot (1^st Warwickshire Regiment) from 1787 until April 1792 when he died and was buried in the new ground at St James, Westminster. His will mentions a number of Maddison nephews and nieces, his nephew John Baugh, and his niece Ann Motz (ne Baugh) wife of a French army officer. John was a Lieutenant in the 58^th Regiment of Foot in 1778 and a Captain at the time of Lancelot’s will.

Lancelot of Lincolns Inn’s third son, Edward, was always a little apart from the others. He and his wife, Blanche, had their first three children christened at St Martins, Ludgate, rather than in Holborn. Lancelot was christened on 15^th May1729, Ann on 16^th July 1730, and another Ann on 13^th November 1734. After that the family moved back to their South Shropshire roots and their next child, Benjamin, was christened at Stanton Lacey on 30^th November 1737. Another son, Richard, followed on 4^th June 1738 and William on 10^th July 1740. William only survived for eight days, but another William was christened on 10th June 1743. Edward Baugh was church warden at Stanton Lacey in 1740 and 1741. Son Richard became Rector of Ludlow and died on 20^th May 1837. Benjamin became Town Clerk of Ludlow, married Elizabeth, heiress of William Holland Esq. of Burwarton, and had a daughter, Harriet, who married Gustavus VI, Viscount Boyne. All are commemorated on plaques in Ludlow Church, along with Edward Holland, Harriet and Gustavus’ second son.

    Benjamin, Lancelot of Lincolns Inn’s youngest son, married Mary, with whom he had Benjamin junior in 1734, Mary junior in 1736 and Lancelot in 1737. After that things seemed to go a little awry. In an attempt to carry on family tradition by naming a child after each of Benjamin’s parents a daughter, Ann, was christened in 1740, followed by another Ann in 1742, another in 1743 and another in 1744, as infant mortality took its toll. Benjamin junior apparently hadn’t survived either because another Benjamin was christened in 1745, and another in 1746, followed by a final Ann on 28^th May 1749. Lancelot probably went on to be the Lancelot who was a Lieutenant in the 71^st Foot on half pay in 1766, and maybe the Lieutenant in the Guernsey Companies of Invalids from 1780 to 1794. There is no record of what became of any of the others.

My e-book about these, and other members of the Baugh Family, The Baugh Family of England, Scotland, East Indies and the USA, from their earliest origins until modern times, is an invaluable aid for anyone interested in researching the Baugh Family history.
Starting by outlining the various spellings of the name and where they originated, the book goes on to show how, since there were so few people who went by the name of Baugh and its variations in early times, most of these people were related both to each other, and to the branch of the family who first bore the coat of arms during the fifteenth century.
Several possible alternative origins of that branch of the family, in Normandy and in the Welsh Marches, are examined. Each one being weighed up against the evidence in official documents of the time, as well as information provided by the College of Arms, to see which, in the author’s opinion, have the most credence. 

I first became interested in the Baugh family when I was researching the history of the house where I live, and their name kept cropping up.

They weren't the only family who had lived in the house before me nor even, as it turned out, the ones who had first built it, but they did seem to pop up in my researches more than any other family, and they did seem to have been very important in south Shropshire, so I began to jot down anything I read about them, whether it was related to my house or not.

There had been another branch of the family bearing the same coat of arms living some miles away in Gloucestershire at the same time as those who had lived in my house had been living there, but without any obvious connection between them other than the shared coat of arms, and I began collecting facts about them as well, intent on finding out what the connection between the two families was.

It took me sixteen years of spare moments spent poring over documents in local record offices, reading wills, parish registers, lay subsidies and other official documents, and surfing the internet for other records kept further afield in Britain, as well as in countries such as Argentina, Canada and the USA, to settle in my mind what that connection was, by which time I had accrued so many facts about both branches of the family, about other people of the same name with no connection at all, and still others who hadn't seemed to have any connection with the Baughs who had lived in my house until my researches showed that they did, that I decided to share my knowledge with other people, by turning it into a book.

Not every branch of the family as it is today is represented, that would be impossible, but most of them get a mention, and where there are links to be shown between seemingly unconnected branches of the family they are shown. The Baugh Family of England, Scotland, East Indies and the USA, from their earliest origins until modern times, is available from Amazon Kindle for the give away price of $3.99, or £2.55.

         

The most ill-treated plant of all

   A sunnyish sort of day in Shropshire, and the wind has returned to it being from the north, after just one day of warmer sunshine.

   I've just been finishing off planting the bedding in my garden, which is always a mixture of plants I've grown for that purpose, and a number which have passed the winter in either the greenhouse, or my house itself, awaiting that all too brief summer period when they can be outdoors in the fresh air.

    One of the plants which enjoys that position in my garden is the Spider Plant, Chlorophytum comosum, which must be the one most ill-treated by people who grow it, and I have to include myself amongst their number, I'm afraid, because it will stand almost all degrees of mistreatment. The three specimens in my own garden, which I was looking at when the thought occurred to me, spent the winter in my cellar, where there is very little light at any time, but a lot of damp and cold, yet they emerged from their stay in the depths looking a little anaemic and spindly, but are flourishing now. And that is the way the plant brings ill treatment down on itself, because it will survive anything but frost, the slightest degree of which will kill it.

    Chlorophytum comosum is a native of tropical and southern Africa, though my Flora of South Africa doesn't include it, and naturalized in places such as Western Australia. It was a forest dweller originally, growing in the congo rain forest in the beginning, but has been a favourite house plant for many years. The German philosopher and writer, Johann Goethe wrote about the spider plants he kept in hanging baskets indoors two hundred years ago. The roots and the rhizomes of the plant are fleshy and thickened, and serve as water storage organs for those dry periods when people forget to water them, and the plant has been shown to reduce air pollution when grown indoors, neutralizing formaldehyde production in the atmosphere.

     In the garden, also during the summer months only, look out for a plant which does appear in my Flora of South Africa. Plumbago auriculata, Cape Leadwort, a fast growing, evergreen, woody-stemmed scrambling climber you often see growing outdoors in Spain, where it can reach twenty feet tall. Its trusses of sky-blue flowers are carried from summer to early winter.

                                                           

Snowdrop - Flower of Hope

     A sunny day in Shropshire, and I’ve been leaning on a farm gate looking across still flooded fields towards May Hill, and dreaming of the summer walks I hope to take there in warmer sunshine.

   One of the nicer things about February is the number of snowdrops you come upon when you are out walking. Every cottage seems to have a selection, and even at some places where there have been cottages in the past, though the remains of the buildings and the people who once lived in them are long gone, drifts of the snowdrops the people planted to beautify their surroundings whilst they were there remain to bear testament to their passing.

   Galanthus nivalis, the common snowdrop, sometimes called the Flower of Hope because its appearance is traditionally supposed to herald the end of winter, isn’t native to Britain, so any you see growing must have been planted by someone, or they wouldn’t be there. Its natural home is Southern Europe, from where it was probably introduced to Britain as recently as the early 1500s, even though some people believe it to have been introduced by the Romans.

   Snowdrops grow best when planted in dappled shade in soil that is well drained, but doesn’t dry out completely in summer. If planted in grass they should be left to die back before the grass around them is cut. Clumps which have grown large enough to separate are best divided whilst still in full growth (“in the green”) to plant elsewhere in your garden. Failing that, move them when plants are just into their dormant period, immediately after their leaves have withered.

     

                                                 

    In the garden, look out for drooping spikes of fragrant bell-shaped pale yellow flowers appearing on the bare branches of Corylopsis pauciflora during mid-spring, before its leaves appear.

Ancient Hedges and Dogs Mercury

    A sunny afternoon in Shropshire. A bit annoying that, as I was battling through torrential rain not an hour ago, when I was out on my daily constitutional.

   The walk had begun in sunshine and I was noting that though the hedges I was passing were finally devoid of leaves, the Dogs Mercury growing at the base of some of them was still very evident.

   Dogs Mercury is the plant which, back in the mid 1970s, was part of a formula for dating hedges devised by Pollard, Hooper and Moore. The number of shrub species for a thirty yard length of hedge, multiplied by one hundred, gave the age of the hedge. If this resulted in a high number and Dogs Mercury was present, it indicated a very old woodland relic hedge.

   This was fine, of course, for dating hedges in Surrey, where the formula was devised and a lot of single species hedges were planted, but during the 1980s students at Wakeman School in Shrewsbury, in association with the University of Birmingham, pointed out that hedges in Shropshire were frequently planted with multiple species and for them the formula could only be applied if a hedge had been colonised by Hazel and Field Maple as well as Dogs Mercury. Especially those parts of it which had clearly been single species planting.

   The hedges along the main road through the village, as far as I have noticed, do not have a great deal of Dogs Mercury growing at the base of them, but there are odd pockets of it growing where what might be original lengths of hedge are surviving. Along the lanes beyond the river though, there is none at all.

     The hedges with the most Dogs Mercury that I’ve found during my ramblings are those along the lanes either side of the Roman Road, and those along the Roman Road itself, which is what you would expect as they have the potential to be the oldest hedges in the village. Along all of them, though, there are lengths of original hedgerow with Dogs Mercury growing under it, and other lengths where the hedge has been replanted at some time and is no longer original.

   In the garden, or perhaps looking over your hedge at it, because its presence isn’t really encouraged in modern gardens, growing along the base of a hedge near to the site of an old abandoned dwelling maybe, where some cottager used it for flavouring beer in the days before the introduction of hops, look out for the mildly aromatic, indented, mid-green leaves with silver undersides, of Artemisia vulgaris, Mugwort, also known as St John’s Plant, because a crown of its sprays was worn as a protection against evil forces on St John’s Eve.

                                                    

A bumper year for berries

     A wet day in Shropshire, and I’ve taken the hint from the weather and come indoors to write about the garden, rather than be out in it carrying out the seasonal tasks I’d intended doing.

     It certainly has been a bumper year for all sorts of fruits and berries. Surprising really if you think back to how late plants were in getting underway after that long, cold spring, which seemed to be going on forever. The yew berries have now continued that trend by not being quite ready for the birds, which prefer them as food above all other berries when they are available. Luckily for the birds, though not for the appearance of my garden, they’ve had pyracantha and rowan berries aplenty to tide them over whilst they’ve been waiting.

   Berries have always been an important part of decorations at Christmas time, though for a long time the Church, itself, didn’t encourage the use of evergreens such as holly, ivy, laurel and mistletoe for such a purpose, because of their association with pagan practices in this country which pre-dated Christianity by centuries.

     Nor might they have taken so readily to another pagan custom, this one brought to us from Sweden by the Vikings, which involved people cutting down two pine or fir trees, setting them up outside the entrances to their houses and decorating them with candles, fruit and ornaments to mark the passing of the shortest day, if Prince Albert, the German-born consort of Queen Victoria, who probably had Viking blood of his own coursing through his veins, hadn’t given the practice respectability by adopting it himself.

     In the garden, look out for the scarlet berries of  Ilex aquifolium ‘Pyramidalis’, a dense female holly tree which is one of the few hollies which doesn’t require both a male and female plant to be present to provide cross fertilization before it can bear berries. Most hollies are unisexual, so they do.

                                                                

Getting life back to normal

   A cloudy day in Shropshire, and I’ve been getting back to doing some work in the garden, something which the total hip replacement operation I had in February has prevented  me from doing to the full this summer.

   It isn’t until life obliges you to do everything with a crutch in either hand, that you realise just how impossible that makes even the most simple job in the garden. Improving enough eventually to be able to work with just one crutch in one hand brings some tasks back within the bounds of possibility, but it still doesn’t make carrying them out very easy.

   At least I’ve been able to make full use of the recycled whisky barrels I bought last year to put on the patio and grow my vegetables in. They were high enough to be quite easy to use once I’d got to the one crutch stage. And the raised bed I bought a couple of years ago, though lower than the barrels, was still relatively easy to make use of at a time when I was still unable to bend down low enough to be tending things at ground level.

   There is a web site called Thive, Carry on Gardening, which gives gardening advice to people with varying degrees of disablement, recommending tools and equipment to suit the particular physical problem you’ve ticked on the drop-down menu, be it temporary or permanent. It told me that for my particular problem a self-propelled mower, or a light electric one, both of which I have been using as it happens, are the best ones for me at the moment.

   The site is worth looking at if you’re finding gardening physically challenging for whatever reason, be it permanent because of age or infirmity, or temporary because of an injury of some sort, or because of having an operation as it was in my case.

   In the garden, even if you’re only there as an observer not a worker, look out for the large clusters of sky blue, star-faced  flowers borne by Plumbago capensis, flowering in a sheltered position of some sort.  Though it will grow outdoors all year round against the wall of  a villa in Spain, Cape Leadwort, which I first came upon when it was used as a summer bedding plant in the parks in London where I was an apprentice gardener, won’t survive the winter outdoors in Britain, except perhaps in the extreme southwest of England. If you bring it indoors once summer is over, however, and give it a position somewhere with warmth and plenty of light, it will reward you by continuing to flower for a while, and if you’re lucky, by starting to flower again next spring.

                                      

Paradise as a garden

         Belief in a better world from which mankind had originated and to which we would one day return, was paramount amongst the Middle Eastern societies which began to develop from around 4,000 BC. It was in the earliest known writing of mankind, that which originated in Mesopotamia during the proto-literate period, that first mention of a paradise was made: a divine garden which the gods had planted out with fruit trees, green fields and meadows.

       The English word paradise comes initially from the old Persian word 'paizidaeza' which Cyrus the Younger, ruler of the Persian empire around 500 B.C., used to describe his garden to the Spartan commander Lysander and which literally means 'walled around'. From this, the Greek `paradeisoi' became the Latin 'paradisus' and, in 1175, the middle English 'paradis', used in a Biblical passage: "God ha hive brohte into paradis". The idea of a garden in which men and women may transcend their frailty has become a concept shared by many societies which had little else in common, and has persisted despite the disappearance of many of the civilizations which adhered to it.
      The Sumerian - Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, was an idyllic earthly garden of peace and plenty reserved solely for those who had achieved immortality. It corresponds exactly to the Homeric Elysian Fields where those favoured by the gods rested until eternity in a state of perfect bliss. The Egyptians believed that the first object to meet their eyes on entry to the world of the dead would be a beautiful and shady tree, from which a goddess would welcome them with food and water. They loved their gardens so much that a usual prayer was that after death they might return there to sit in the shade and eat the fruit of the trees they had planted.

       The Christian Garden of Eden was slightly different. It became identified with Heaven, remote and no longer obtainable since the summary ejection of Adam and Eve from it, and the doom pronounced on them that henceforth they must toil amongst thorns and thistles and eat the herbs of the field.

      The preference of mankind to rest in a beautiful garden for eternity rather than to work in it has led to repeated attempts to re-establish that paradisal situation lost at the dawn of time. The need seems universal, though not always for a single place of total bliss. Saint Paul wrote of a man caught up in the "third heaven" of paradise, whilst the paradise promised in the Koran consists of several terraces of gardens - each more splendid than the last. In the Islamic gardens of Persia and Mughal India, the terraces were often meant to correspond to the enclosures which made up the Garden of Paradise in the Koran.

        There is a Saxon version of the Latin poem 'De Phoenice' which describes paradise as an island in the east where there was no suffering and no night, where the trees bore their fruit throughout the year and where the air was filled with the sweetest of odours. In the seventh century it was reputed to be a region to the east of China, watered by the four great rivers mentioned in the scriptures. The Portuguese in Sri Lanka long considered that country to have been the original site of The Garden of Eden because of a tree which flourished there, called Tabernaemontana alternifolia, the divi-ladner, which bears poisonous fruit resembling an apple with a single bite removed, which they claimed was the Tree of Knowledge.

         Wherever paradise had been, if it ever really existed, there would have been water, there would have been shade and there would have been scented blossoms. An old Persian motto says of a garden pool: "If there is a heaven upon earth - it is here - it is here!" The Egyptians believed that gods were present in a garden because divine fragrance was manifest in the scent of flowers. They believed also, that in the cool of the day, spirits came out of their tombs to enjoy the shade and water of a beautiful garden. 

      One of the most beautiful tomb interiors of the Theban  necropolis is of a royal gardener, Senufer. The entire ceiling is painted to resemble a grape arbor, with stems, foliage and flowers climbing up the walls . Should he have been virtuous enough to have found his way to paradise, who knows but that he might have discovered it to look like that.

                                                           

If you want to know more, why not buy Gardens of the Gods, a hardback book by  Brian Taylor available on Amazon, or its e-book version Sacred Plants of the World from Neolithic Times Until the Present Day, available from Amazon Kindle.