• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1309 0

(later Sarah) Kidd, were outsiders. The first Kidds in the registers, they arrived in the nearby village of Shotton, part of Hawarden parish, at some point before 1743. The family came from another part of England—perhaps the area around Manchester, where the surname Kidd is common—and Thomas began work in one of the area's many mines. They already had at least one child, William, and a girl who died in 1745. Twenty-eight-year-old Sarah gave birth to a succession of children in Shotton, and then Ewloe, where they moved in about 1746. Mary was born in late 1742 or early 1743 and christened in 1743.∗ She soon became a stand-in mother to Anne, Sarah, Amy, Thomas, and John, two, six, eight, eleven, and fourteen years her juniors, respectively Some of them learned the basics of reading and writing, perhaps at a church school in Shotton. William Kidd could sign his name, although Anne and Mary signed with X. Men (and sometimes women) who could sign their names were called upon to witness weddings, and Thomas junior did so in 1780.

∗ Mary was christened on May 19, 1743, Anne followed in 1745, and a girl, Amy, was christened in 1748, but she died soon after and was buried in the same year. Sarah was christened in 1749; Thomas was baptized in 1750 and died soon after. Amy was christened in 1751, Thomas in 1754, and John in 1757.

All those who met the adult Emma remarked on her strong Lancashire accent. Although she had lived near Chester since she was a baby, she did not have a Chester accent. It was an age when the poor traveled so little that rural accents and dialects were so pronounced as to be almost incomprehensible to outsiders, but Emma's speech was seemingly untouched by the place in which she grew up. Her anomalous speech suggests that her family was not native to the area but originally from northern England and that she had little contact with the villagers around her.

By 1771, Hawarden had become more salubrious. A traveling journalist, Nathaniel Spencer, declared it:

A very considerable village, situated on the road leading to Chester, near the river Dee, and has still the ruins of a strong castle, although it does not appear by whom it was built. The village has some good inns, with three annual fairs, viz on the eighth of May, the first of October, and the twenty-fourth of December, all for cattle. The air of this county is very cold, but it is also healthy. There are lots of sheep on the mountains and the black cattle are fed in the valleys. There are great crops of rye, oats and barley, and although they have not much wheat, yet it is esteemed exceedingly good…. They prepare a sort of liquor from honey, called Metheglin, which was used by the ancient Britons.1

The Kidd family moved to Hawarden from Ewloe sometime in the 1750s, presumably because Thomas had work in John Glynne's mine. No doubt they soon became very fond of metheglin. Their cottage, now demolished, stood on the main road, near the church and the Fox and Grapes pub. When her husband died in 1761, marked in the register as "collier," forty-six-year-old Sarah had to find a way to support her family. William was sent to work in Ness, Mary followed to assist with his baby in 1764, and the rest had to find the money to live. By the time Mary returned, Thomas junior may have been working as a shepherd, guarding his neighbors' sheep on Saltney Marshes. But even his peppercorn salary was under threat. Glynne, like every landowner, was keen to fence off common land for his own use. Thanks to his efforts, fewer villagers bought sheep every year.

The family depended on the little money Sarah Kidd earned from toiling as the village carter. Three or four times a week, she drove a cart to Chester carrying coal, agricultural produce, and sometimes people. She probably stabled her horses at the Fox and Grapes. Chester had two markets a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and fairs in February, July, and October; Chester was a wealthy city, with a population of about twenty thousand, complete with a handsome Theater Royal and elegant assembly rooms for balls