During the research for my MA thesis I dug up - almost literally - the Blackburn family, who lived in York from the late fourteenth century and seem to have been one of the city's leading families. They proved very helpful to me because the family patriarch, Nicholas Blackburn senior, and his wife Margaret left detailed wills, which are available online (translated from the original Latin) here.
The wills are noticeable for the almost obsessive concern they display with churches and chantries. Indeed, the Blackburns' identity, and their relationship to the city of York, is defined not, as might be expected, by the land or property they owned, but through the churches they worshipped at. This became an important part of my thesis, but today I want to look at what else the wills can tell us about the history of the Blackburn family.
Starting with the wills but later scrounging around for other information I managed to produce a Blackburn family tree covering roughly a century. It is still a work in progress - unfortunately most birth and death dates are currently lacking - but the tree still shows the principal family relationships during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Although the Blackburns ended up as a very prominent York family their roots seem to lie not in Yorkshire at all but in Lancashire. They were a family of merchant traders, or mercers, meaning they dealt in cloth and textiles. At this they were obviously successful, since the wills show that they became very wealthy.
As to which part of Lancashire they came from, I would hazard a guess that it was the town of Blackburn or nearby. The evidence for this, such as it is, is two-fold: firstly the Blackburns' name (family names in the Middle Ages were often related to where a person lived); secondly, their occupation. Blackburn, which is old enough to be mentioned in the Domesday Book, was by the mid 1200s a textile manufacturing town. As we know that the Blackburns were mercers, it seems not unreasonable to suggest that they may originally have been linked with the town.
However, at some point they moved over the border into Yorkshire. Nicholas Blackburn senior, who became the head of the York family, was born around 1360 or thereabouts in Richmond, about fifty miles north of York. He married Margaret Ormeshead, the daughter of another prominent local merchant family. They had at least five children: John, Nicholas junior, William, Isabel and Alice. William seems to have been the black sheep of the family as he is scarcely mentioned in his parents' wills - so much so that at first I overlooked him and counted only four children.
By the late 1300s the family had moved to York, to North Street, home to the York Mercers. The parish church of both the Mercers' Guild and the Blackburn family was All Saints North Street. There is no evidence, however, to suggest one way or the other whether Nicholas Blackburn was a member of the Mercers' Guild. But he and his wife were certainly members of the Corpus Christi Guild, one of the most prestigious guilds in York; they joined in 1414, by which time they were clearly well-established members of the York community: in 1406 Nicholas had been made King's Admiral of the North and in 1412 Lord Mayor of York (a position also held by his son, Nicholas junior, in 1429).
Of the Blackburn children, John married twice but died prematurely in 1426 or 1427, leaving Nicholas junior (who like his father also married a Margaret, which is distinctly confusing) their father’s heir. I have found no mention of William marrying, but Isabel and Alice did; between them these four children seem to have supplied their parents with several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, though John's two sons seem to have predeceased him. Several Blackburns, Sandfords and Boltons are mentioned in the wills of Nicholas and Margaret - the descendants of, respectively, Nicholas, Isabel and Alice. The exact relations of the Sandfords to one another, however, are (at least at the moment) not clear, which is why I can only tentatively group them together in the family tree. Certainly they seem to have been a large family.
Nicholas and Margaret senior are buried together in York Minster - as Nicholas puts it in his will, “under my marble stone which has been prepared on that spot for the purpose.” This is yet a further indication of their prominence and prestige within the York community, since at this time most people were buried within their parish church or its graveyard.
The Blackburns have become my pet project - although they were clearly important to York and particularly the All Saints North Street parish for at least the first third of the fifteenth century there is little information about them readily accessible. Most scholarly studies of the Blackburns relate to the stained glass windows they donated to All Saints North Street. Though the windows are important, they are surely not the only aspects of the Blackburns' lives worth investigating.
However, the evidence is there - in the wills, in the churches, and in the civic records - and I am trying to sift and sort this to build up a more detailed picture of the Blackburns' lives. Doing so offers a way into the complex, rich and detailed world of the faith of medieval York.
