Thames Valley Irvings

Stories and questions about my Irving ancestors and others.

My great-great grandfather Daniel Irving (christened Arrowing, 1853-1940), and his second wife, Mary Jane Drake (1863-1937).

My first known Irving ancestor appears in records for the first time in 1697, when William Irwing (or Irweng) married Mary Stevens, a local girl, at Bledlow, Buckinghamshire.

Before that year, the only records of anybody with his surname in Bledlow or the surrounding area was the marriage of one Alexander Irving at Oxford in 1643, & the christening of an Ann Ervin at Bicester in 1675, but in 1697 three Irving (under various spellings) men married in the Thames valley: William at Bledlow, James Irvin at Fingest, & William Urwing at St. Georges Chapel, Windsor. Three years later, in 1700, David Irwing married at St. Georges Chapel.

What accounts for this sudden rash of Irvings? It has been suggested that they were Scots chapmen, come down to take advantage of the opportunities opening up in England in the cloth trade, & that fits well with the information we have. Irving is a name originating in southern Scotland.  Alexander & David were unusual names inEngland at the time, but common in Scotland, & James was a far more popular name north of the border than down south. Margaret Spufford, in her book “The Great Reclothing of Rural England – Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century” takes so much for granted that many travelling chapmen were Scottish, she pays the fact little attention (thanks to Celia Renshaw for that).

There was also a dissident connection, with Presbyterian Scots typically finding English dissenters more congenial than the Church of England.

Apart from my William in Bledlow, they all settled in Marlow for a while. James, William & David all christened children there, & James & David left wills in which they stated they were of Marlow. Another Irwing man turned up there before too many years, one Christopher, who appears in the records already married, christening a daughter in 1713 (old style).

William in Marlow seems to have had a few trades, including innkeeper & labourer, but mostly he’s recorded as a chapman. As with Scots chapmen elsewhere, he fell foul of legal restrictions on trade, being convicted of buying illegally sold bone-lace in 1701. He was also not averse to a brawl, being named several times in Quarter Sessions records as a “common barrator and disturber of the peace”. David was involved with the bargemen on the river. The sisters of his first wife’s previous husband were both married to men of Deptford, where the river was the main source of income.

The Marlow Irvings may have spread upriver, for in 1720 Irvings show up in Hurst, at Benson at the end of the 1720s, & in the 1730s in Reading. As far as I can tell, those few families account for most Irvings in the Thames Valley for the next century, at least.

Back in Bledlow, a second Irving (James) appeared in the 1730s. At his marriage to Elizabeth Page at West Wycombe in 1736 he was recorded as ‘of Reading’, but I’ve not yet found his christening. At his second marriage in 1751 he was recorded as aged 39, which would put his birth about 1712. Was he related to William? I don’t know. He’s probably not a son, as he’s not mentioned in William’s 1737 will. James was yet another trader in cloth, leasing a shop in West Wycombe from Sir Francis Dashwood. James set a very fine headstone on Elizabeths grave when she died in 1742, & it’s still in Bledlow churchyard.

My William seems be a good candidate for a Scottish chapman made good. Bledlow was a weaving village, & Mary Stevens, who he married, was from a weaving family. In his will (30 January 1737/8, proved 20^th February), he called himself a ‘salesman’ - of haberdashery?