In addition to these, we have three independents (Thomas Fuller, Frances Butler and William Langford), two yeoman (William Parsons and Benjamin Finch), four farmers (Thomas and John Fuller, Benjamin Blackman, and Septimus Slade), and a Dissenting Minister (George Marris).

The Blackman family name has largely disappeared by now.  The family traces back to William Blackman whose wife Mary lived to the great old age of ninety-six (1708-1804).  Their youngest son, Benjamin, had died in 1817, sire of at least nine children.  These had married into various local families.  The marriage partner of Benjamin’s elder sister, Martha (born 1733) holds most interest for us, for she married John Slade, the great grandfather of Henry Slade, the recipient of the Slade letters.  Therefore, the Slade and the Blackman families had blood linkages.  Perhaps Benjamin Blackman the farmer, in 1841 aged twenty-eight, belonged to this same family, even though a later Census reveals that him coming from London (born in Lambeth).  A man named Blackman was suspected as fathering the child that killed the widow Peggy Harris, but refused to come forward.  Charlotte Slade expresses her feelings about this in the full account of the catastrophe that hit the Harris family.  Later on in the letters a second mention of Mr Blackman sees him selling up his household goods, leaving farming and going to reside at The Anchor in Moreton.  In the Census of 1851, however, he has returned complete with a wife born in South Moreton.  Interestingly, a Benjamin Blackman, (born 1775) son of the Benjamin Blackman dying in 1817, married one Sophia Harris in 1800.  He later died and she remarried.  Perhaps some linkage existed between the Blackman and Harris family that caused Benjamin Blackman the farmer to take up with Peggy Harris in 1840.  Charlotte’s disquiet about Blackman may occur because of the relationship between the Slade and Blackman families.  Certainly the Slades worked hard for the six orphans left at her death, Charlotte feeding them, while Henry talked to the Union about the matter.

Details of the other farmers appear elsewhere in this account.

In addition to the farmers, the top end of the social pyramid will have resided around the four people described by the 1841 Census as ‘Independent’: Mary Parsons in Upthorpe (1759-1842); in Tirrold, Thomas Fuller (aged eighty-four), Frances Butler (1771-1842), and William Langford (1780-1861).  Study of the Parish Records suggests that at least three of these families had linkages at this time, while the fourth would join the cluster within a number of years.

Mary PARSONS had been born Mary Youen, marrying Benjamin Parsons about 1780.  Benjamin had probably had at least one wife prior to that, having been born in 1722.  They recorded three sons and two daughters for baptism: William, John, and Benjamin.  Most probably we catch sight of William in the letters.  He keeps greyhounds with which he kills hares.  Somewhat arrogantly, he makes no discrimination as to whether he does this on his own land or that belonging to others.  Even worse, he keeps all the kills for himself, not sharing with anyone.  William suffered a nasty fall from his horse while coursing in the company of Fred Slade, Wellingham Fuller and others.  A Mr Parsons did not look properly after a garden in one of the Slade houses, perhaps even being asked to leave in favour of another Slade. William (or one of his brothers) got into another type of scrape, for he had stood creditor to the failed Mr Webb of Shillingford.  Mr Webb offered nine shillings in the pound.  The creditors mentioned all belong to the Slade family grouping, except Mr Parsons.  Mr Webb went down for three thousand pounds and the creditors took the nine shillings.  Shillingford lies just down the road from Dorchester and the records tell us that at least three of these children lived in Dorchester at their baptism.  Their father, Benjamin, died in Dorchester, having reached an excellent ninety-one years old.  It was in Shillingford where Mrs Sarah Langford lived.  She had attracted the affections of a William Parsons, marrying him rather suddenly in 1840.  Three months later, she produced a son.  This caused Wellingham Fuller to raise his eyebrows.  (Quick time, don’t you think so?)  Unfortunately, the term quick applied also to the child’s life, for he seems to have died almost immediately.  The records give the death of an infant Henry, son of William.  The Census shows William and Sarah in 1841, where we see that she had produced this child rather late in life, there aged 40.  We see evidence of her previous marriage to Mr Langford, for Eleanor Langford, aged nine, lives with her.

Mention of a LANGFORD brings us to the second family, the Langfords of the Astons, to which we must link Frances Butler, or Aunt Fanny, as the Slades knew her.  In the house of William Langford, we find his wife Kate, and a number of children.  The records tell us that Kate Langford was born Kitty Gale, daughter of John Gale and Martha Butler.  Aunt Fanny was Martha’s sister, Frances.  Perhaps even more interestingly we discover that the mother of Martha and Frances came into life with the name Mary Parsons.  So, we have yet another connection with the Parsons dynasty, although we cannot say precisely how it works.  We cannot exactly link the Langfords of Shillingford to the Langfords of Aston, but we may presume a type of relationship.  Nor should we question the possibility of intermarriage, if the Parsons and the Langfords had a blood relationship.  The Butlers practised this behaviour.  Aunt Fanny herself married another Butler, and Kitty Gale’s sister, Mary, married William Butler.  Subsequently, a grandson of the Langfords, William Mead, would marry into the Fuller family, a branch that lived at Hagbourne.  

The BUTLERS had a connection with Wycombe.  We hear of a dreadful story retold by Mrs Butler of Wycombe (i.e. Mary Gale).  A gentleman and his family, on their way to Australia, suffered a shipwreck just after St Jago.  They saved nothing and came home filthy and destitute wearing clothes they had begged at St Jago.  It seems they had lived the high style but had failed.  Fortunately their friends stood by them, for they had provided a few acres and the odd cow or two to keep the wolf from the door.  We also hear of the sad demise of Aunt Fanny.  She had gone out to sweep the snow away from the back door. Her daughter, Jane, heard something and investigated.  There she found her mother, sitting on the ground, her head against the wall, quite dead.  Jane found her only ten minutes after she had gone out to sweep the snow.  She and Mr Marris, the Dissenting Minister, carried Aunt Fanny upstairs.

Connections and relationships between the Langfords and Butlers criss-cross the records.  After Aunt Fanny died, we learn that Jane went to live with her brother in Gloucestershire.  The text continues He is a chemist there and William Langford is getting on famously at Froom.  This is William Flow Langford, eldest son of Mr and Mrs Langford.  A close inspection of the Langford children’s names reveals a daughter: Anne Cox Langford.  By now she has moved to London, working as a shop woman.  Her middle name draws attention to the Cox family.  It seems that Anne’s mother was yet another Butler, probably a sister to the Butler that married Aunt Fanny.  In the Census of 1851 and 1861 we see Anne living back in the Astons, having retired from working in the grocery trade.

Mr and Mrs Langford must have been popular in the villages.  In their fifties at the time of the letters, we nonetheless hear that Mrs Langford accepts Kezia Slade’s invitation to join a gypsy party.  Mr Langford lends his cart for a young person’s expedition in the snow.  He gets pelted by snowballs (they came pretty thick about his head), so presumably the assailants knew he would not mind that much.  Perhaps the Langfords just missed their children.  We encounter Mrs Langford early on depressed because all her daughters have now left home, save Elizabeth, the youngest.  We learn, incidentally, that Mr Tindal, a Dissenting Minister, is courting Emma Louisa Langford, her next to youngest daughter.  Mrs Langford had close connections with the Fullers and frequently is found visiting Mrs Fuller, comforting her madness.  Perhaps part of her popularity lay in her being a bit of a chatterbox.  She tends to let slip facts that catch out Charlotte Slade and embarrass her with the Fullers.

In the letters, the Langfords clearly pass through a transitional phase in their life, for, as we have seen, they let out their brewery to Thomas Hale, moving into Miss Harris’s house.  Later they move into the house of a widow, Mrs Mead.  We can use the records to show us that Mrs Mead is none other than Mary Langford, her second daughter.  Mrs Mead, it seems, had become widowed early, though apparently not without comfort.  Charlotte Workman, wife of Dr Workman, whose lifestyle required a continuous supply of money, noted pointedly: she is left very comfortably as regards money matters.  Although the letters contain hardly any mentions of the outside world, we catch one brief glimpse of worldly matters in the account of the Langfords.  As the Langfords move from Aston Tirrold to Aston Upthorpe, Mr Langford finds that he has disenfranchised himself for the election, because he forgets to register.  On balance, Charlotte Slade felt this a good thing, because Mr Langford was a known Radical.

The Langfords lived on and on. Mrs Elizabeth Fuller mentions them in her letters to her American cousing.  We leave them in her final letter written in early 1856, perhaps very near the end, for Mrs Langford has been seized with a fit on Saturday and lies in a very precarious state.  Mr Langford is living but very feeble.

The Langfords perhaps lodged at slightly higher social levels than the farming families, despite their temporary involvement in a trade sector – the Sudden Death brewery.  Both Charlotte Slade and Elizabeth Fuller give the impression that they looked to Mrs Langford for their inspiration on society.  The letters contain endless references to families from this section of the community.  They constituted the peer group for the Slades.  Charlotte would never question that Henry would want to hear all about people from this level.  If he heard anything about people from the lowest level, then what he heard would do nothing but confirm his prejudices.

So, at the very top of the social pyramid we find behaviour no different to that found at the bottom: substantial inbreeding between a few families.  Indeed, of all the families involved, the Slades seemed to have kept themselves relatively free of this behaviour.  Certainly they exhibited much less intermarriage than the Fullers did, for example.  At the top levels of society, this practice will have occurred because of restrictions on movement and because the families wanted to consolidate their positions.  Henry Caudwell causes a collective shudder to issue through his family, at least the women, because he has decided to marry a servant girl.  It will have him left quite behind.  At the lower levels, it will have occurred also because of restrictions on movement but perhaps families also followed a pattern set by their respectable superiors.  The inbreeding in the Fuller family in Tirrold seems to fit with a closed village pattern.  Remember how, of the two villages, Aston Tirrold had a higher proportion of its population born there.

We have seen that inbreeding certainly had an impact on the physical condition of unfortunate individuals.  Also we can see it at work in the way that families controlled specific sectors of the local economy.  It leads us to consider the extent to which society at any level exerted control over the genetic combinations that might occur.  Instead of having matchmakers, did the society have an informal system whereby people might actively prevent unions that might lead to trouble?  An oral system to recall what people had relations in different families may have existed, but we may doubt it.  Many of the wider relationships only come to light through computer analysis, so perhaps beyond a certain level, nobody bothered.  Inbreeding within isolated villages even today gives rise to standard jokes.  During the first half of the nineteenth century, such conditions would have constituted the rule rather than the exception for any village, not just the Astons.