By Dr. Julian Litten

1777 to 1783

1777 was a troublesome time for England, George III was beset with revolution in the colonies – the American War of Independence was in full swing. In the September of that year the mail coach from Wells pulled up at The Globe in Tuesday Market Place and out stepped the small dapper figure of Thomas Weatherhead, a ten-year-old lad from Brancaster who was about to take his first step on the ladder of life: the statutory six years private tuition in Latin, Greek and mathematics necessary for his Cambridge entrance exam. Although it is almost certain that he matriculated, he never became an undergraduate for he died some four weeks before he was to go up.

Biographical details on Thomas can be gleaned from his small ledger stone in the centre alley of the nave at All Saints. It reads:

In Memory
of Thomas Anthony
Weatherhead,
son of the Rev’d
Thomas Weatherhead,
Junior,
and Grace his wife,
of Brancaster in this
County.
Born Decr 23 1767
Died Sept 7 1783.

Even from this short inscription we can glean much about Thomas Anthony Weatherhead. The most obvious is that he was named after his father and grandfather. We further learn that his father was a clerk in holy orders[1], that his mother was named Grace, that he came from Brancaster and that he died in the parish of All Saints’, King’s Lynn, aged sixteen years, eight months and fifteen days and was there buried.

However, his father was not the vicar of Brancaster St Mary. Furthermore, there are no Weatherhead monuments or ledgers in Brancaster church, which leads us to assume that the Weatherhead’s moved away from Brancaster sometime before his death in 1800.

As a Clerk in Holy Orders, the Rev’d Thomas Weatherhead was entitled to the rank of gentleman. As such, he would have been of sufficient status to be afforded intramural burial and so, too, would have been his children were they to have died within his lifetime. Intramural burial was not only a privilege but also expensive. The sole arbiter in the matter of who could be buried within the church being with the incumbent of the parish. Expensive because there was the cost of sinking the coffin-shaped brick grave, the making of the triple coffin of wood, lead and wood and the expense the inscribed black marble ledger stone. By today’s standards we would be looking at an outlay of some £9,000. The only saving would have been that of the burial fee due to the minister, as there was an unwritten rule that clergy did not charge one another for their services. Consequently the Rev’d Thomas Weatherhead would not have expected to be charged a fee by the Rev’d Mark Burn, the Vicar of All Saints’ at the time of young Thomas’s death, though he would have been obliged to pay the churchwardens the statutory 10/6d for ‘breaking the ground’, the monies paid being used to make good the church floor after the burial had taken place.

The Brancaster of Thomas’s childhood was a typical mid-18^th century coastal fishing village, the main catch being the plump and juicy Brancaster Mussels so favoured at London tables. As a village, it had no buildings of note other than the small 14^th century church of St Mary. Those not engaged in fishing worked on the land, as tenants of the Coke’s of Holkham. Did he, one wonders, play on Rack Hill at the east end of the village, the site of Banodunum, the Saxon shore fort?  To the west were the villages of Thornham, Holme-next-Sea and Hunstanton, and to the south the small town of Burnham Market. Indeed, Burnham Market would have been the most familiar conurbation to young Thomas Weatherhead and it would have been here that the majority of his clothing and his school trunk came from.

The journey from Brancaster to Lynn is seventeen miles, a four hour journey by coach. In all probability his father would have travelled with him to Lynn to see him safely ensconced at school. His primary education was probably received at home, and though there was a grammar school at nearby Burnham Market, the town of King’s Lynn provided a greater variety of educational establishments. The comparatively short distance between Lynn and Brancaster begs the question as to why the Rev’d Thomas Weatherhead did not have his deceased son’s remains taken home. After all, the undertaker’s expenses would have been relatively small in comparison to the rest of the outlay.

In the chancel is a ledger stone commemorating the burial in August 1813 of the fifty year old Charles Cruso, a prominent King’s Lynn upholder, which is to say a dealer in or maker of high-quality small wares, such as furniture. In addition, upholders also served as funeral furnisher to the middling sort. Cruso would have been twenty-two in 1785 when young Thomas Weatherhead died and it is quite possible that Charles Cruso, or his father, undertook the funeral arrangements for Tom Weatherhead.

The earliest printed description of All Saints’ is to be found in Ben Mackerell’s small tome, The History and Antiquities of King’s Lynn, published in 1738, some thirty years before Tom Weatherhead’s birth. It is just possible that a copy was on his father’s library shelves at Brancaster. Consequently, the young Tom would have been conversant with at least the engravings, showing the size and grandeur of the town he was about to study in.

However, “grandeur” was not Mackerell’s conception of All Saints church in 1738 and its appearance in 1779, the year Master Tom came to town, was markedly different from Mackerell’s description. For example, in 1763 the west tower collapsed as the result of negligence; as it was, the weathervane had already fallen during the Great Storm of 8^th September 1741. Indeed, All Saints’ must have been a rather murky and unkempt building, dwarfed in splendour and majesty by St Nicholas’s Chapel at North End and by the Priory Church of St Margaret of Antioch and All the Virgin Saints (to give it its proper dedication) in Saturday Market.

To some extent, All Saints had fared badly since the dissolution of its patron house, Whitefriars, in 1538. At that particular time All Saints was in a reasonable condition, having been largely rebuilt in the Perpendicular style between the late 14^th or early 15^th century, during the lifetime of Margery Kempe, but hardly anything had been done in the way of fabric maintenance until the Vestry was required to do so in 1763 as a result of the tower collapse.

In general, there is little overall difference in size between the All Saints’ we have today and the All Saints’ in Tom Weatherhead’s day. The original church was Norman, and in the south wall of the chancel part of a Norman corbel table and the crease remains of the pier and arch of a former Norman south chapel can be seen in the churchyard. The floor was then about three feet lower than it is now. Other disturbances in the same wall point to the existence of an anker-hole or anchorite’s cell which projects from the east end of the chancel, connecting with the sanctuary by a 14^th-century piscina with no back to it. Marks of the anchorite’s domestic cell – to which Margery Kemp was a frequent visitor (poor anchoritess!) – can be seen on the same south wall further west. Transepts were added to the church in the 13^th century, and the moulding of the former steep-pitched roof can be seen high up on the external south wall of the crossing. What we see today is middle Perpendicular, which is to say c.1400 to c.1425. Be that as it may, that date would suitable for London, but Norfolk was some fifty years behind the metropolis so we would be looking at a more realistic date of  c.1450 to c.1475.

Regarding the anchor-hold, it must be of great antiquity for mention is made of a succession of anchorites at Lynn in the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th centuries. The anchoresses of All Saints’ seem to have been good friends of the parish. Soon after 1368 Isabella the anchoress gave a new set of vestments to the church. In 1408 Margaret Lock, in her will, wrote of Katherine Samson, “the solitary of the Order of St Bernard, recluse, who lived at the church of All Saints’ in the parish of South Lynn”. Indeed, we know that Katherine joined forces with the vicar, Robert Flood, and John Barber, a freeman of Lynn, in presenting the church with a High Mass set of white cloth-of-gold complete with cope.

All Saints’ is not a large church, having a nave with side aisles four bays long, deep and wide north and south transepts and a lengthened chancel. The nave piers are what one would expect of late 14^th or early-15^th century architecture: piers with polygonal projections to nave and aisles, wavy, filleted projections with capitals to the arches and no emphasis in the arcades of the transept openings. The nave roof is mid-15^th century with hollow-chamfered tie-beams on arched braces with pierced tracery spandrils; the decorated rood beam at the west end of the nave is in situ, it being too structural an element to have been pulled down. The north and south aisles of the nave have flat roofs, panelled and with appliqué flueron bosses carved with foliage; those in the south aisle are a little more exuberant and include an image of Our Lord, seated, and blessing the World. All of the 15^th century stained glass fell to the hammers and halberds of the 17^th century Iconoclasts.

Fortunately there are a number of references in the town archives to All Saints’, and we have a reasonable idea of what went on between church and parish both before after the reformation. For example, the Guild of the Holy Trinity was established on 26^th August 1392, its rules published in 1394 and letters patent granted at Leicester on 27^th May 1400. The Guild furnished a chapel at All Saints’ in 1498, precisely the same year that Alderman George Pierpoint founded the Guild of All Saints. But precisely where within the building these two chapels were we do not know, maybe they were in the north and south transepts. Suffice to say when the vicar, John Norris, died in 1503 he left his money and lands to endow a Chantry Priest for the Trinity Chapel, and a lamp for the chancel high altar. There is every possibility that the Chantry Priest lived at Thoresby College, founded three year’s earlier in 1500 by Thomas Thoresby for thirteen priests of the Trinity Guild, albeit the Trinity Guild of St Margaret’s Priory rather than of All Saints’.

One wonders if All Saints’ ever had a relic or relics to adorn the altar of the Trinity Chapel. In 1523 the Priory Church of St Margaret could boast the ownership of St Margaret’s skull, ‘to be had in honour’, but it was unceremoniously burnt in Tuesday Market, together with other relics, in 1561.

In 1552 Edward VI’s Commissioners visited Lynn and inventoried the following goods and chattels at All Saints’:

2 chalices, with 1 paten, silver-gilt, weighing 15½oz @ 4/4d per oz.

1 pyx, silver-gilt, weighing 8½oz @ 4/4d per oz.

8 copes of white damask, red, crimson, tawney and blue velvet and silk with gold beads.

5 vestments of red, crimson and tawney velvet.

3 tunicles of white damask and red velvet.

3 altar cloths.

1 altar frontal.

5 bells in the steeple, the ‘Great Bell’ 36cwts, the 3^rd 10cwts, the 2^nd 8cwts, the little bell 6cwts and the sanctus bell ½cwt.

4 bell-clappers, 208lbs.

4 candlesticks, two great candlesticks and 4 little candlesticks. All of latten. 1½cwt.

Doubtless among these vestments would have been the early 15^th-century High Mass set of white cloth-of-gold given by the anchoress Katherine Samson. From the valuation amounting to £53 6s 8d, the sum of £5 was returned as ‘church stock’. The parish was allowed to retain the chalice and paten, the little bell and one clapper, the altar cloth and altar frontal, two small lavabo towels and £6 in cash, with Churchwarden Henry Bleasbury holding £5 and Churchwarden John Baker the remaining £1. The pre-reformation chalice and paten no longer survives; in its place is a mid-16^th century silver-gilt chalice and paten, presumable the result of melting down and refashioning the others. The £6 held by Bleasby and Baker was expended on a new organ, it no longer survives having probably been discarded during the Commonwealth.

Precisely how the parish was administratively organised after the reformation is unknown. Suffice to say that on 27 February 1575 John Pell and Edward Flowerdew, the Recorder of Lynn, were asked to petition Elizabeth I for the advowson of the Vicarage. The town records remain silent as to what happened at the churches during the Commonwealth, apart from the ejection of the rectors and their replacement with ministers. In 1662 the Rev’d John Horne was ejected from his living of All Saints’ and became the minister of the Presbyterians, who met in St Nicholas Street. When he received a licence to preach in 1673 the sect moved to the disused Glass Factory off Broad Street. The next mention in the town records relating to All Saints’ occurs on 6^th May 1669 when the tenor bell was to be tolled twenty times at 4.00am and 9.00pm to keep the parishioners aware of ‘real time’; doubtless there had been some difficulty in men turning up to work on time! Furthermore, the days of the month were also to be tolled after the primary 4.00am strokes.

In 1670 a most remarkable event took place. The then vicar, the Rev’d Mordaunt Webster, received an anonymous letter and parcel from London. The parcel contained a wooden box in which were two large silver flagons, each weighing in at 60oz., and a heavy silver salver. The letter read: “I shall not doubt of your ready concurrence herein, not of our mutual prayers to Almighty God for so good a work in this age of words. He in mercy sanctify the same to the eternal benefit of the pious giver and increase the number of such who love the place where his honour dwells.”  The letter was signed “Philocrates”. But who was this generous Philocrates?  She was none other than Etheldreda, the daughter of a former churchwarden named Thomas Lilly. In 1661 she married Sir William Hovel of Hillington and in was in the year of his death, 1670, that she made her generous gift. The items survive to this day and can be seen in the Guild Hall Museum.

The lack of maintenance meted out to the building after the dissolution of Greyfriars in 1538 led to the weakening and eventual collapse of the west tower in 1763. For a description of this and the rest of the church in 1738 we need to have recourse to Mackerell's account:-

“The Church did formerly belong to the Carmelites and White Friars, and not improbably, since it appears to be so very near to the Site of that Religious Convent; which, with all the rest, being now utterly demolished, it has ever wince been used for a Parish-Church. This Fabrick, tho’ it cannot be said to be large, yet it is a neat, regular, and solid Structure, built in the Form of a Cross, within a fair Cemetery, or Church-yard, well walled and fenced in.

“The Steeple is square and flat, with proper Battlements round about it; in the middle is a straight Pinnacle, upon which is placed a Weather-cock, and has Five fine Tuneable Bells. Here are two convenient Portico’s, one on the South Side, and the other at the West End. The dimensions of the Whole here follow,

From East to West within is 139ft.

From North to South is 48ft.

The Length of the Cross Isle is 83ft

The Height of the Steeple is 83ft

The Height of the Spire is 31ft

The Height of the Roof to the Area is (here the measurement is wanting)

“The Body consists of three Alleys, and in a Cross Isle beside the Quire are very many Grave-Stones for Monks, and others, as Black Fryars, Dominicans and preachers, Augustine Fryars, or Minorites, who came hither about the Reign of K. Henry III and here settled, building themselves Convents in several Parts of the Town: But there are now no Monuments, Inscriptions or Remains, to be found in the Church to demote the Names of the Persons, who they were, or the Place of their Interments. Those that we now meet with, are all of a latter Date, except some few, which seem to carry the Face of Antiquity; but the Plates on them have been long since sacrilegiously torn away and gone; as were many more beautiful and costly Portraitures of Brass fixed on Marbles in a great Number of Churches in this Kingdom that I have visited, which these Robbers made Merchandise of, and sold to Coppersmiths, Brasiers and Tinkers; a Prophaneness and Barbarity not to be attoned for, nor retrieved.”

When the tower collapsed in 1763 it damaged the west end of the nave in its fall, as can be seen from the repairs subsequently meted out to the 15^th century aisle roofs. The tower was not rebuilt and repairs to the west wall were subsequently carried out in yellow brick, the cost being defrayed by the sale of the bells and the remaining memorial brasses, an action which would have been considered by Mackerell to have been ‘a Prophaneness and Barbarity.’ Thus, then, was the building at the time of Tom Weatherhead’s arrival at Lynn in 1779.

So what would have faced Tom Weatherhead on his first visit to All Saints’?  Certainly not the brick terraces of Hillington Square, nor the open lawn surrounding the church at present. William Raistrick’s 1725 map of Lynn shows the line of present-day Bridge Street and All Saints’ street and indeed these remained much as Weatherhead would have known them until the Great Destruction of the 1960s. Providence Row stretched from Bridge Street to the London Road, and entry to All Saints was either along All Saints’ Lane, as is the case today, or through the gate opposite the Vicarage, roughly 100 yards to the north of the present north door of the church. Furthermore, the graveyard was enclosed by railings, the product of one of the new industries of early 18^th-century Lynn: ironfounding.

The exterior of the church – apart from the loss of the tower – would have been little different, except that the window tracery was somewhat more decayed and was without the stained glass that we see today, a legacy of the late 19^th-century gifts and bequests. Entry would have been via the south porch, itself somewhat decrepit an in need of serious attention. Indeed, this porch was to suffer more over the next one hundred years and was eventually dismantled during the restoration programme of 1887 when its stones were used to assist in the construction of the present boiler house at the east end of the south transept.

The first thing that the nine-year old Tom would have seen on entering the church was the floor. A higgledy-piggledy ramshackle affair of supreme unevenness, powdered here and there with the large Purbeck and black marble ledger stones. In the chancel. were four indents – their brasses missing – of a layman and three priests, a stone to Frances Prettyman, the daughter of Dr Samuel Baron MD, who had died in 1666, one Dr Samuel Baron himself, who had died in April 1673, one to his son, Dr Andrew Baron MD, of 1719. Presumably the Baron family had adopted the chancel as their mausoleum. This would not have been a difficult thing for them to have done as it was almost private, having been shut off from the rest of the church in the 1670s by the infilling of the chancel arch with crude wainscoting so that it could be used as a schoolroom. To add insult to injury the cresting of the 14^th-century piscina and 15^th-century sedilia were hacked off in the 1670s to allow the walls to be wainscoted.

It is interesting to recall that the majority of the 15^th century Rood Screen was still in situ when the chancel arch was blocked. When this in-fill was removed during the 1841 restoration programme the majority of the medieval screen was found to be so rotten from damp and neglect that it was considered beyond repair and so was discarded, with the exception of the lower left-hand section – now in the nave south aisle – beautifully painted with representations of St Peter, St James the Greater, St Thomas, St Philip and St Matthew. One assumes, therefore, that the other six panels depicted St John the Evangelist, St Mark, St Luke, St Matthias, St Andrew and St James the Less.

It has to be remembered that the incumbent’s income – ‘stipend’ we call it now – came from a number of sources as there was no fixed or guaranteed salary for clergy at that time. The major sources of income were the tithes, where every freeholder in the parish was due to render a tenth of their disposable income to the clergy, and the fees received from the letting of pews. This in itself was a heirachial affair, with the pews at the front of the church being the more expensive, those at the back being the cheapest. This hiearchy has become some embedded within the bones of the English that even today there is a reluctance in Anglican churches for congregations to occupy the front pews, as if they were being governed by the shades of the aristocratic dead, defying people to sit in their pews. The other sources of income were ‘surplice fees’, which is to say the fees obtained through the solemnisation of matrimony and the burial of the dead, and finally there were the rents to be had from any property or glebe land associated with the benefice. Of course, in some areas an incumbent’s income could match that of the leading gentry of the parish, but in the poorer areas – and it has to be remembered that this part of Lynn was, in comparison with the Old and New Towns, somewhat down-at-heel – the income was not so plentiful.

The arrangement of the seating would also have been unusual to us today. To begin with, the pulpit would have been more to the centre of the nave for in the 1770s most churches were ‘preaching boxes’ where the congregation came to hear the Scriptures expounded. With nothing else to do on a Sunday, these sermons, or ‘expositions’ as they were known, could last well over the hour. To alleviate boredom, we know that there were ‘two large Frames of Joyner’s Work fixed on the North Wall, wherein are divers Scriptural Phrases, obvious to be perused by such as are pleased to take the Pains to read the same for better Instruction’. A good pass-time for a schoolboy tired by the sermon.

In the late 18^th century the service of Holy Communion was a rarity, celebrated not much more than three times a year. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, both with a sermon, took Sunday precedence over the Lord’s Supper. You may ask where the altar was. In short, usually at the crossing where nave altars tend to be today, adjacent to the pulpit and fenced in by communion rails. Unfortunately these rails have not survived at All Saints’, but the Communion Table can now be seen against the south wall of the nave aisle. It would have been at this Board that the Eucharist was celebrated in Tom Weatherhead’s time. Of course, we have no guarantee that he would have received the Sacrament himself for it was unusual in the late 18^th century for confirmations to be administered to children under the age of fourteen years.

The pews seating the church in Tom’s day were of late 17^th-century Jacobean construction and would have been arranged to face both east and north. They would, of course, have been box pews, their sides about four feet in height, so that when seated no one could see each other. But the incumbent could seem them from his pulpit. This secrecy was not so much an attempt not to be seen, rather it was so one’s absence would not be noted by the other worshippers, for the renting of a pew did not necessarily carry with it the responsibility to attend services. The ‘ownership’ of a pew was more a matter of status and a willingness to contribute towards the incumbent’s income. Damp, poor maintenance, woodworm, wet-rot and dry-rot all had their effect on the pews and they were eventually removed during a re-seating programme in 1842.

Contemporary with the Jacobean pews was the pulpit, a sumptuous mid-17^th century piece – almost certainly designed by Henry Bell – with the usual sturdy blank arches, a tester, and a back-panel flanked by dolphin volutes. Mackerell gives us a good description of this item:  ‘The Pulpit, which is pretty handsome, (is) situate within the Church, on the South Side thereof, next to the Cross Isle, upon the pillar from the West; for the more decent Adorning whereof, the Parishioners did, in the Year 1725, bestow upon it a Green Cloth with Fringe round the Verge, together with a fine Velvet-Cushion, and a deep Boarder of the same about it of the like Colour; both of which, without doubt, were presented with a due Veneration and Regard  to the Holy Ordinance performed in this Place; where with we of this Town and Corporation of King’s Lynn, both in the Church of St Margaret, and in the Chapel of St Nicholas, as also here in this Church of All-Saints, are very eminently Happy. God grant a Continuation of these Blessings to us, and to our Posterity, so long as the Sun and Moon endure, and the due Improvement of the same in our Lives and Conversations, to the Honour of his Holy Name.’ This pulpit survived until 1887 when, being considered unsuitable, it was given away to the church of St James, Runcton Holme, where it can still be seen. 

Even the nave side aisle roofs would have unfamiliar to Tom Weatherhead, which is strange considering that they are fifteenth century. The reason for this oddity is that part of the 1670s re-ordering saw the construction of plaster ceilings in the side aisles. As ceilings there were utilitarian and undecorated. At the time of his visitation in 1844, the King’s Lynn antiquary, William Taylor, observed: “Fortunately the nave retains its original open timbered roof, which is supported on stone corbels of finely executed heads, which the carved spandrels of the beams are elegant and various in design.’  Doubtless these elegant and various carvings would have been a source of distraction for young Thomas during the long and tedious sermons.

It seems unlikely that the church had a west gallery in Weatherhead’s time and the earliest record of one being erected is 1842, the year of the general re-seating programme ; the present gallery is certainly late 17^th century, but it was brought here in the 1960s from St Peter’s, West Lynn.

Unfortunately, the present 15^th-century font was not known to Thomas Weatherhead. It was damaged during the fall of the tower in 1763 – at which time its Jacobean cover was smashed – so it was put into the Vicarage garden and remained there until 1844 when it was replaced and roughly repaired as the result of the exertions of the local antiquary, William Taylor.

I am sure that a trawl of the rate books and town directories could give us a comprehensive list of the citizens of quality, freemen and tradesmen living in Lynn during Weatherhead’s brief sojourn between 1777 and 1783. Precisely how many of these individuals a young schoolboy would have come across is difficult to say. Nevertheless, a trawl of the names on the extant ledger stones in the church can give us an idea of those parishioners whom he must have known or, rather, who knew of him.

Let us start with those who are buried in the centre alley of the nave.

Sarah Horsenail who died on 1^st October 1783 aged 49. Thomas would have been 16 when she died. In the same grave is her brother, Samuel, a Lieutenant in the Navy, who died on 16^th April 1794 aged 45. He would have been 36 when Thomas died.

Lettice, wife of Giles Haycock, Oatmeal Maker, died 26 July 1786 aged 60. She would have been 59 when Thomas died. Her husband, George, who died on 7^th June 1799 aged 68 would have been 54 when Thomas died.

Elizabeth Curtis, died 28^th October 1781 aged 45. Thomas would have been 13 when she died.

Thomas Moore, died 10^th June 1796 aged 56, would have been 45 when Thomas died.

Thomas Smith, died 27^th January 1811. He would have been 55 when Thomas died.

Prudence Winniffe, died 10^th January 1790 aged 46, would have been 41 when Thomas died. Her husband, Bland Winniffe, died 4^th June 1794 aged 62, would have been 53 when Thomas died.

Then there is William Kempton, who died on 23^rd February 1798. He would have been alive at the time of Thomas’s death.

In the chancel is the ledger stone of Catherine (Kitty) Cruso. She died on 30^th July 1794 aged 24 so would have been 18 when Thomas died. Her husband, Charles, died on 24^th January 1813 aged 50, which makes him 22 years of age when Thomas died.

Harvey Goodwin, Attorney at Law, who died on 16^th April 1819 aged 63 would have been 29 when Thomas died.

In the south aisle are buried others known to Thomas:

The Rev’d Charles Phelps, vicar of All Saints’, who died on 16^th January 1783 aged 70 was a funeral whom Thomas almost certainly attended; he would have been 15 at the time. Mary, the sister of the Rev’d Charles Phelps, died on 4^th June 1791 aged 70. She would have been 54 when Thomas died.

John Morris, Brandy Merchant, who died on 22^nd February 1792 aged 69 was 62 when Thomas died.

Miss Mary Richmond, who died on 28^th April 1796 aged 75 would have been 64 when Thomas died.

Then there is the Rev’d Mark Burn, vicar of All Saints’, who died on 8^th March 1811 aged 72 and would have been 46 when Thomas died and whose funeral he took. His wife, Mary, died on 13^th June 1798 aged 48. She was 35 when Thomas died.

From this information we learn that Thomas might have attended the funerals of Elizabeth Curtis in November 1781, of the Rev’d Charles Phelps in January 1783 and that of Sarah Horsenail in October 1783. Of the others, we have a good age-range of attendees at Thomas’s own obsequies in September 1783:

Mary Burn, Charles and Kitty Cruso, Elizabeth Curtis, Harvey Goodwin, Giles and Lettice Haycock, Lt Samuel Horsenail RN, William Kempton, Thomas Moore, John Morris, Mary Phelps, Mary Richmond, Thomas Smith and Bland Winniffe.

But they all had one thing in common which we do not. They knew what Thomas Anthony Weatherhead looked like, how he spoke, how he dressed, where he sat in church, whom his companions were, and of what he died of. To us he is an enigma. He is the only teenager commemorated on a monument in All Saints’ and he must have been a much-loved son for his parents to have expended so much on his burial and commemoration. By today’s standards it might seem cruel to have buried him away from his family home which, after all, was only some twenty-five miles away. But we need to look at it differently, and with 18^th-century eyes. Why take him away from his friends and those whom he had got to know and, indeed, those who had got to know him?  No, it is right that he is here. The sadness felt by those attending his funeral is understandable. Here was a young man who had just completed his education and was due to go up to Oxford or Cambridge – more likely the latter - at the end of his summer holidays when Death chose to deal him a mortal blow. According to the Burial Register, he was buried on 9^th September, two days after his death. By any standard, this is exceptionally quick; was it that he died of a contagious disease – such as smallpox - and that it was thought prudent to bury him immediately rather than delay the disposal by his return to Brancaster?

For my own part, I am pleased that he is here. From my pew I can look upon his stone and wonder what he might make of me. The 7^th September 2010 marks the 227^th anniversary of his death. Here he lies encoffined, beneath his stone, surrounded by the graves of those whom he knew; and I trust that he will still be here in 227 year’s time.