William RUSLING
Thorne is a parish with an unusually varied history. Although possessing an ancient parish church (once a chapel in the parish of Hatfield), the mound of a medieval castle, a market established by royal charter in the seventeenth century, and an elegant eighteenth-century hall and several other large Georgian houses, it is not a conventional country town. It is set amid thousands of acres of moorland, which in the last two hundred years has been exploited for commercial use. It has seen its landscape altered by Dutch drainage engineers in the seventeenth century, canal builders in the eighteenth century and coal-mining engineers in the twentieth century. The original church of St Nicholas in Thorne dates from the 11th century, it has a chancel with traces of Norman windows, nave arcades with pointed arches and round pillars from the 12th century and an arcade in the chancel perhaps from the same time. The south chapel and the top of the tower are 15th century, although the rest of the tower is chiefly 13th century with belfry windows from about 1300. The clerestory and font are medieval. It had a gallery and used a barrel organ for services in the 19th century, when restoration was carried out. To the west of Thorne was a large stretch of water towards Hatfield, and in 1326 a funeral party crossing for the burial in Hatfield churchyard had the corpse and several mourners cast into the water. The bodies of about a dozen people were recovered a few days later. This tragedy led to the Abbot of St Mary’s in York being petitioned and finally granted that Thorne church be rebuilt and made a parish in its own right so that the dead could be buried in Thorne. As well as St Nicholas, Thorne has a Quaker meeting house built in 1750 and in 1837 Whites Directory also records five dissenting chapels in Thorne. These were independents built in 1810, Methodist New Connection 1817, Unitarians 1816, Primitive Methodist 1822 and Wesleyans in 1826. The way of life for people in the area was to change dramatically in the 17th century with the advent of Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch drainage engineer who persuaded King Charles 1 that he could drain the marches and make valuable farm land. After draining many Dutch, Flemish and Huguenots from France came as settlers into the reclaimed area, and some of their descendants are still here. Their names have been altered in both spelling and pronunciation – Tyson became Teeson, Brunge became Brunnyee and Dumoulin became Dimiline, and there well be others. Thorne colliery, sunk by Pease and Partners (a firm of originally Quaker businessmen based in Darlington, whose family came, co-incidentally, from Fishlake, not far from Thorne) between 1912 and 1920, was the most easterly in the Yorkshire coalfield. The opening of the colliery led to the development of Thorne, Moorends as a mining village from a small outlying community of farm workers and peat-cutters. Originally served by a mission church, Thorne, Moorends St Wilfrith was built in 1934-1935 and created a parish in its own right in 1956. The parish records contain material on the history of the parish collected by Rev Dr J F Twistleton in preparation for his book Moorends and Its Church, published in 1985. Unlike many of the settlements in the western part of the Doncaster area, the low-lying moorlands of the east were not dominated by large landowners, but by small peasant owner-occupiers who gradually colonised the land. This led to an independence of attitude, expressed in the past partly in nonconformity in religion, which is still a noticeable feature of the local character today.
William married Mary Ann HOLROYD, daughter of John HOLROYD and Unknown, on 30 May 1855 in Sheffield, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom. (Mary Ann HOLROYD was born on 13 Feb 1832 in Sheffield, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom and died on 8 Mar 1907 in Sheffield, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom.) |
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