Postscript

This interpretation of the events surrounding Sarah Smith’s death in 1763, though informed throughout by archive evidence, is only my interpretation. Others may read the psychology of the events between the known facts differently and come to quite different conclusions.

It is, however, remarkable that we have any hope at all of recovering these few fragments of modest lives lived in the rural middle England of 250 years ago. Necessarily, history is not democratic in this respect - we will always be able to recover more details of the wealthy landowners of our past than the poor peasants of the day.

One person who fascinated me from the start is the Reverend Edward Sneyd. How odd that this third son of a such a wealthy family - a man who was as comfortable in the surroundings of a great baronial hall as in the lowliest crofter’s cottage - should have spent his long years recording so much of we can ever hope to know about the lives of his flock while leaving barely a trace of his own life behind. Edward died on the 16th October 1795 at the age of 63 and lies buried in the Sneyd family vault at Keele Hall. [29]

And what of Samuel and Martha Smith, who had returned to the Parish of Samuel’s birth to raise their young family? These would have been traumatic days for them. Yet they both lived to a ripe old age. Samuel was the first to go - he was buried somewhere in the Wolstanton churchyard on 15th August 1788 aged 79 years old. [30] Two years later, the Reverend Edward Sneyd notes in the Burial Register the 122nd burial of the year, ‘Martha Smith, widow aged 73 of this Parish was buried Dec 23rd 1790. Registered Ditto by me Edwd. Sneyd, Vicar’. [31]

Copyright 2006 Jeremy Crick

[Fig 29]

[Fig 30]

[Fig 31]