This chronology is the result of over 45 years research by my father. I have made two attempts to collate and edit what he had not finished, and am publishing this first edition as very much a work in progress.

His interest in genealogy sprang from a desire to become a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Drapers of The City of London, by redemption on the right of his descent from Sir Anthony Colclough. During the 1930s he consulted with Ulick Sadleir and with his help and deeds and certificates sent on to him from Canada by his great uncle Fr. John Edgar Colclough, S.J., he was able to prove his claim. In 1943 he was admitted to the Draper's Company. Months later his chambers in the Temple sustained a direct hit during the Blitz and all his papers were destroyed.

He started his researches again in the 1960s, and maintained a correspondence with many Colcloughs around the world. In particular Mary Lou Ruth, of Fremont, California, whose researches on English, Irish and American Colcloughs were characterised by boundless energy and ruthless determination. Whether she was dealing with the sextons of small towns on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec or the Governors of islands in the West Indies, she cajoled her way into locked muniment rooms and extracted information relevant to the Colclough family. In more recent years Don Pennell, Eileen Gardner and, in particular, David Etherington added fuel to my father's enthusiasm. It is true that when my brother was trying to persuade him to finish this book, which it was intended should include the Kilkenny Colcloughs and the Dublin Colcloughs at greater length, as well as dwelling on Indian, African, Australian, New Zealand and South American Colcloughs, he lamented "They're all so boring!"

In 1996 I published what my father had written on the internet, and so heard from various Colclough relations. Most were descendants of Benjamin Colclough of Virginia, of Matthew's line. However I also heard from several Irish Colcloughs living in the Antipodes or North America, many of whom were unable to trace their ancestry. This prompted me to organise a family rally in September 1998 to help tie in some of the loose branches. 3,000 postcards went out to every Colclough in all its variant spellings listed in the phone books of the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia & New Zealand. In the weeks leading up to the rally I have been put in touch with several descendants of John Colclough & Elizabeth Austin, of Guy Carleton Colclough and of Bagenal & Frances Colclough, as well as discovering a line descended from an Agmondisham Vesey Colclough. Had my father had the benefit of the internet and CD ROMs there is no doubt that this work would be twice its present size. However let this first 100,000 words be a beginning from which the complete history of all the various vicissitudes of the family can be constructed. If any Colclough relation or descendant reads these words, their generosity in passing on information is earnestly requested. The internet site, http://members.fortunecity.com/chtii/colclough, will publish updates when there is new information

There will be errors in the pages that follow. Some are errors of transcription from the backs of envelopes that my father routinely used as note pads. Some are my own typing errors. This is work in progress and I hope that you, gentle reader, will chastise me gently!

John Nicholas Colclough

Cuffesborough

Ballacolla, Laois

Ireland

22 VIII 1998

PR E F A C E

Charlemagne, Offa King of Mercia, the Plantagenets, Fair Rosamond, Charles II, George Washington, Isaac Newton, Travis of The Alamo, the Duke of Wellington, President Truman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan - all of them will be in the index of that definitive study of the family which some earnest researcher will one day produce. With them will be footpads, forgers, politicians, pirates, surgeons, slave-traders and so on through a remarkably varied list of occupations not all of which were lawful. The book may well rival the famous Carnegie Monograph on the Dukes Family of Chicago in providing study material for sociologists. To the geneticist a family which whilst enjoying every advantage of wealth and influence has in a thousand years produced barely half-a-dozen individuals of eminence in any sphere of human activity must be of interest. Apart from inclusion in casualty lists on a couple of war memorials the name appears only on four public monuments - the Highwayman's Stone on Salisbury Plain marking the spot where Benjamin Colclough was struck dead by the wrath of God after robbing Mr. Dean of Imber of a watch and chain, two plaques in Wexford recording the execution of John Henry Colclough for his somewhat passive participation in the 1798 rebellion., and one at Tintern commemorating John Colclough's membership of The United Irishmen.

Younger sons were regularly ordained but none ever became an Archdeacon or even a Canon, and the first Colclough Bishop in nearly 1,000 years was appointed in the 1990s. Many held commissions in the army but only one, a sergeant in the Boer War, was ever given a medal for gallantry. One became a Major General, his father having married an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Wellington; the rest were mostly yeomanry colonels or militia captains. Certainly an Admiral Colclough whose parents originated in Stoke-on-Trent attained distinction in the American Navy, but in the British navy the only Rear-Admiral was a paymaster who having started as a boy-clerk in the Admiralty did not "stick to his desk" but went to sea as a paymaster's clerk. Of the large number of lawyers though one at the beginning of the fourteenth century was the King's Serjeant and one in the fifteenth century became a Serjeant-at-Law none subsequently even 'took silk' and the only one ever to attain the judicial bench had a brief and ignominious career as Chief (and only) Justice of Newfoundland where it was reported of him that he was a 'poor lawyer and worse administrator'. As Members of Parliament continuously from the fourteenth century they avoided commitment to either side in times of crisis and the major surviving record of their contribution to Parliamentary debate is a speech on the London Gaslight Bill. Of the twenty books of which they were the authors none ever went into a second edition.

It is not to the geneticist but to the student of human mobility - social, economic, geographical - that the book to be written will be of greatest value with its record of the bewildering movements of this small and readily-identifiable group. So long as there was a family seat occupied by a recognised head of the family commanding an income beyond his own spending capacity such as at Tintern Abbey, Wexford, with its rent-roll from 25,000 acres, or the Delph House at Cheadle with its coal and iron mines, potteries and foundries, the group remained immobile. The social back-ground provided by the family seat facilitated marriages which brought in further wealth and established the economic independence of the cadet branches. The head of the family provided loans for the purchase of commissions and sinecures and gave leases at low rents of subsidiary mansions with sufficient farm-land to support them and allow the tenants to serve as Members of Parliament, J.P.s, town councillors and aldermen. In times of agricultural depression the rents could remain unpaid and the loans be forgotten. The dependent circle extended to sons, grandsons, nephews and cousins.

In the case of the Blurton and Endon Colcloughs withdrawal of support was a process which went on progressively for over two centuries following the departure of Anthony to Ireland in 1540 and his brother Matthew to London and Calais and the gradual running down of the Colclough Staffordshire estates. With the Cheadle Colcloughs it came when the conditions created by the Industrial Revolution and by their own prosperity made the Delph House no longer habitable and they dispersed to London and the colonies. In Wexford it resulted from the marriage of the 50-year old Caesar to a young woman whose chief motivation was hatred of all Colcloughs including her husband and who devoted 40 years of her life to waging a war on them which is now part of English legal history.

The political factors which led to the break-up of other ancient families were not significant in the case of the Colcloughs. In the Wars of the Roses they fought on both sides. During the Civil War they avoided identification with either side. In Ireland when a Papist was dispossessed of his estates his Protestant son would take them over and so they passed from grandfather to grandson but always remained a centre from which priests and Catholic teachers could serve the locality living in the Abbey though often having to disguise themselves as domestic servants in the blue and yellow livery of the Colcloughs.

The immediate consequence of the withdrawal of support was geographical dispersal, firstly to America and the West Indies and later to Australia and New Zealand though there are few parts of the world where at some time or other Colcloughs have not lived for a time at least. Availability of grants of land meant that the first generation of Colclough colonists were generally agriculturists but with the second generation we find them entering the learned professions or the armed forces. The few who remained in the British Isles with support withdrawn descended very rapidly in the social scale.

Dispersal of a family inevitably results in the destruction or loss of its private archives and records, even to the family bible. There being no longer a resident member of the family to protest, tomb-stones in the churchyard are sold by the incumbent to be broken up for ballast for road or railway construction and in spite of the law parish registers are sent to the municipal rubbish dump (as happened at Bournemouth in the 1960s). In Canada the French Canadians amongst whom they settled have not been particularly solicitous in preserving Protestant tomb-stones or other alien records whilst registers kept in timber-built churches, Catholic or Protestant, have shared the fire-risk and the fate of the churches themselves. In Montserrat where the West Indian Colcloughs first settled all records have been destroyed by pirates, French invaders, hurricanes, fires and other disasters. In Australia there were few records until comparatively recently. In Ireland the wanton destruction of the records in the Four Courts in 1922 aggravated in relation to Colclough records the difficulties created by he case of Rossborough v Boyse in which both parties committed perjury recklessly and destroyed any evidence on which they could lay their hands which might be of help to the other side. Parish registers had pages torn out or entries altered or so mutilated as to be indecipherable. Witnesses were bribed to leave the country and one, it seems, was kidnapped and kept out of the way by both parties until his death.

Sir Anthony at some stage had many of the documents relating to his Staffordshire estates with him in Ireland and those surviving were presented to the Salt Library at Stafford by Miss Biddulph-Colclough. She also presented to the Irish National Library the Tintern Archives or such of them as survived the case of Rossborough v Boyse but unhappily in the course of the conversion of the Abbey into a "Monastic Ruin" deed boxes full of documents which had not been handed over were found and thrown on a rubbish dump. Some of these were saved by the artist and historian Peter Pearson.

In spite of the difficulties, histories of the family have been written. In 1853 Beauchamp Henry Colclough of Wexford produced an account of the family running to some 5,000 words which was not printed but of which a number of manuscript copies are in existence. In 1886 Henry Lewis trading as "The Caxton Printing Company" of High Street, Portsmouth, published 'The Pedigree of the Colclough Family of Staffordshire and Co. Wexford' but there is no copy of this in the British Library or in any public or institutional library in the British Isles or even in the Mormon Genealogical Library at Salt Lake City. In 1969 the Burlington Letter Shop of Burlington, North Carolina published 'The Colclough Family in the United States of America, England and Ireland' by the late George Dewey Colclough of Elon College. This contains masses of information about Colcloughs in the United States but for England and Ireland is extremely inaccurate and incomplete. Many others have started but abandoned the enterprise when they realised how much time they had wasted in getting together even the basic information contained in this index. It is to be hoped that with this as a starting point, and with the bonus of saved time which it represents, the definitive work will one day be produced.

The origins of the name are discussed in Chapter 2 but at this stage it should be mentioned that no attempt has been made to deal with the Cork family of Coakley or the Stoke-on-Trent Colecloughs who adopted that spelling a century ago to ensure that the name was pronounced Col-cluff in accordance with the practice of the Stoke Union Workhouse and not confused with Colclough. On the other hand extraordinary spellings such as Cucu and Cocus have been included because the learned editors of the Salt Society's Staffordshire Historical Collections and of the various series of Calendars of State Papers have indexed these under Colclough and have evidently had good reasons for believing such spellings to have been scriveners' errors.

Charlemagne's son Charles did not marry Aelfflaed, daughter of Offa King of Mercia, nor did his daughter Bertha marry Offa's son Ecgferth. The matrimonial negotiations broke down in acrimony and Ecgferth died unmarried six months after his father. The line of descendants of Offa's many daughters all seem to have become extinct within two or three generations, but even so the tradition of descent from Charlemagne and Offa persists in the Colclough family. When in 1562 Anthony Colclough on his marriage to Clare Agard acquired the Agard Hackney mansion as part of the marriage settlement he renamed the marsh lying between the park and the banks of the River Lea "Offa's Marsh"- a name perpetuated by the Hackney Council in one of the roads now covering the site, though 'marsh' has become 'mead' and to the adjacent roads the names of Penda and Edwin have been added.

Descent from Charlemagne by way of Henry II, though improbable, is a possibility if one dismisses the legend of the family's exile in the Midland forests at the time of the Norman Conquest. The Colcloughs certainly did not share the Norman dread of the forests and of their inhabitants, rationalised in the savage Norman code of forest laws, and when in trouble were quite happy to take to the forests and to associate on terms of cordiality with such forest denizens as Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, William of Cloudesley and "Robin Hood's" predecessors. One is reluctant, though, to dismiss the theory that Shakespeare's Duke in "As You Like It" was a Colclough.

"Fair Rosamond" Clifford had two sons by Henry II and to protect these from kidnapping or murder by the minions of Queen Eleanor they were brought up in concealment in the forest. Writers in later centuries have identified them with Sir William Longsword and Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, but the Dictionary of National Biography points out that both these were born before their supposed mother. Fair Rosamond died in 1177 but the Colclough family was firmly established in Suffolk long before she or Henry II was born and there is no record of any unaccounted additions to its numbers at the end of the 12th century. However American genealogical researchers have determinedly traced the Colclough origins to her.

Other fanciful origins include a William Cokely who was purportedly married to a Danish princess and accompanied William of Normandy to Hastings. His grandfather is given as Eliston Kokey, a German chieftain. It has also been suggested that the origin of the name referred to the cold ridge - the 700 foot high half mile long ridge in Great Chell on the Western face of which stands the Westcliffe Hospital which was originally the Stoke Union Workhouse, built in 1843. However as a patronymic it only appears in Staffordshire in the middle of the 13th century and it seems certain that Selwyn and Thomas are descended from an earlier family.

The family name, in all its variations and misspellings, is that of the parish of Cookley in Suffolk, some ten miles inland of Southwold. Cookley is the current spelling of the parish name but in the past it has been variously known as Kokli and for many centuries as Colcleghe which was the spelling used by the family until the sixteenth century when all of them throughout the country adopted the spelling Colclough while retaining the pronunciation Colcleghe. Whether the family took their name from the parish with its three manors of one of which they were the lords for a time or gave their name to the parish is not recorded. They were almost certainly not Normans, though if Saxons they were evidently of some status for Gilbert, son and heir of Robert le Blund, one William's barons, to whom the Manor of Ixworth had been granted, in 1100 married Alice de Colkyoke from the nearby Manor of Colcleghe of which her father was possibly lord. The earliest surviving record of the manor, apart from the not very helpful reference in Doomsday, dates only from l456 when a Colclough was involved in a dispute over the title to one of the manors into which the parish was divided.

By the end of the twelfth century they had spread into Norfolk where in 1224 William claimed that land at Eccles had been owned by his ancestors for many generations. By 1200 they were already in Kent, at 'Ylding', and in Lincolnshire. Between 1205 and 1212 Sir Robert Colclough appears continuously in the public records as a litigant defending his title to the lordship of four Yorkshire manors, to land at 'Cretingham' in Suffolk and to an estate in Hampshire, where his wife Constance also owned land in her own right. He was a Grand Juror for the counties of Suffolk, Hampshire, Oxford and Berkshire, Gloucester and Hereford and at some of these assizes seems to have acted in a capacity similar to that of the Lord Lieutenant. In 1225 Colcloughs were to be found in Middlesex, Surrey, Oxfordshire and Herefordshire, and later in the century they arrived in Shropshire. They were still in York at the end of the century when one William de Coldcle got himself murdered. The families of Cockel and Cockle who are still to be found in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Essex, Kent, Hampshire and Devon are all distinct groups whose ancestry can generally be traced to the 16^th century, but whose roots all probably lie in Suffolk.

The first to go to Ireland was Gregory who had moved to London where he became a Freeman of the City in 1260 and was still living there in l268. The date of his move to Ireland is not recorded but between 1280 and 1285 he received a number of payments for building work at Roscommon Castle and for the pay of the troops under his command there.

From 1300 onwards it is possible to trace the pedigree of the Staffordshire and Irish branches of the family with a fair degree of certainty but the immediate descendants of Sir Walter who lived in Suffolk in the twelfth century, though owning land in Norfolk, and his son Sir William who makes a number of appearances in the Close Rolls from 1203 onwards constitute a jig-saw puzzle from which most of the connecting pieces are missing.

The earliest reference to a Colclough presence in Staffordshire is in 1240 when one Selwyn was involved in litigation with the Abbot of Glastonbury and the Prior of Trentham over the ownership of land in Cocknage which remained Colclough property for many centuries after Trentham ceased to have an Abbot. Nicholas Cokel, whose house in Tutbury was recorded in the inquisition of 1297 as being worth 75s yearly, seems to have been the first of the family to have resided exclusively in Staffordshire.

Burslem, where the family settled, is three miles north west of Newcastle. Just to the North, overlooking the Cheshire Plain, is Goldenhill. The Colcloughs lived in the valley to the East of Goldenhill. It is now approached from the Turnstall-Goldenhill Road by taking the right turn into Colclough Lane, and it lies on the left as one descends the valley. To the South across the Goldendale Valley can be seen the spire of St. Margaret's Church Wolstanton. One of the oldest churches in the potteries, the arms of Sneyd and Colclough can be seen on a shield on the joint of one of the hammer beams.

When Edward I, the English Justinian, decided on his programme of statute law and on the reorganisation of the whole system of courts he appointed as "King's Serjeant" and his technical legal adviser and draftsman Thomas Colclough, one of the Serjeants-at-Law. Until Edward's death in 1307 Thomas was completely submerged in the production of statutes such as the Statute of Mortmain, De Donis Conditionalibus, Quia Emptores, and the Statute of Winchester, and the designing and organisation of the system of courts based on King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer which remained substantially unchanged for nearly six-hundred years. With the accession of Edward II in 1307 Thomas's work was complete, but he remained an unhappy member of the Royal household for the next thirteen years. To the somewhat dour lawyer the personality of the youthful king and the frivolities of the Court were uncongenial whilst his opinions on such matters as the legality of the killing of Piers Gaveston were unacceptable to the King. He was happiest when travelling to France or the Vatican on 'the King's business' even though such journeys hardly fell within the sphere of the King's Serjeant. When in 1322 his appointment ceased - whether as the result of dismissal or resignation is not recorded - he was awarded a derisory pension of '4d daily at the Exchequer for life for his long service to the King's progenitor and to the King'. He did not bother to collect this and on the accession of Edward III in 1327 it was increased to a more reasonable sum and provision made for it to be despatched to him, together with the accumulated arrears of the 4d a day, instead of his being required to collect daily. Incidentally, in the Patent Rolls his name is spelled Cokelico or Coklico.

Thomas's sons, Thomas and John (whose name is spelled Cockyleye rather than Coklico) seem to have been concerned more with the consolidation of the family estates than with public service. At a time when his father was still serving as the King's Serjeant we find Thomas acquiring 'a messuage and 1/3 of a bovate in Wolvedale in Rushton Jamys from Thomas de Fernyhalgh' and in 1347 he was granted the bailiwicks of 'Ryngeldie and Raglotie of Turkelin' in Wales. In that year, too, he was somewhat mysteriously granted letters of attorney from the Black Prince nominating William Hawarden and John Segan. Thomas married one Margery and had two sons William and Richard, of whom William certainly seems to have been one of the more colourful members of the family.

In 1342 William was appointed Escheator of Salop but in 1346 he was fighting in the wars in France. He was a member of the King's suite but at the battle of Crecy was attached as ADC to the Black Prince with whom he remained through the siege of Calais and for some years after and to whom, when in trouble - which was not infrequently - he never appealed for help in vain up to the time of the Prince's death in 1376. Immediately on his return from France in 1348 he became involved in a dispute with William Ollostone, Lord of the Manor of Harewood, and drawing his sword sliced off his head. For this he was condemned to death but the Black Prince intervened to secure a reprieve for him on account of his good services in the French wars, and particularly at the battle of Crecy and the siege of Calais. In 1361 he was again condemned to death, this time for the murder of one William le Page and again was reprieved through the intervention of the Black Prince. After that, though he seems to have perpetrated at least one more murder, the quasi-judicial functions of the escheatorship kept him busy and left him little time for getting into the kind of trouble to which he was prone.

William, or his father Richard are siad to have been the recipient of the arms still used by the family.  The crest of an eaglet is supposed to represent the father and the 5 eagles on the shield his sons. The motto His Calcabo Gentes - With these I shall crush races underfoot, refers to the military prowess of the boys!

His brother Richard had been returned to Parliament in 1360 and he joined him there some years later though - there is some uncertainty as to the date of his return and for how long he sat. His nephew and his grandson, both named William, were both M.P.s and during the latter part of the fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth centuries there were at any one time two William Colcloughs sitting in Parliament for Newcastle or Stoke, and it is quite impossible to work out when William senior was replaced by his nephew or grandson, or which of the three Williams was which. When the monumental History of Parliament reaches back to the fourteenth century it will certainly sort out the confusion and resolve the difficulty. One can only say for certain that William's son John was acting as his executor in 1403 but that in 1390 William was still an M.P. and in that year during John's 'absence from the Realm on the King's business' held a power of attorney for him. The first William's grandson, also a William, died in 1416, his widow Elizabeth and his son John being his executors. There was a fifth William who died in 1389 and who had been much involved in the affairs of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and who on his death left a six-year-old son named George after his Godfather the Earl. One of the M.P.s was appointed Escheator of Salop in 1413 and the other Escheator of Stafford, but one assumes that the William who was charged with housebreaking in 1440 was yet a sixth and not one of the M.P.s.

Richard who was brother of the first William was also M.P. representing Newcastle from 1360 to 1375. He acquired the Lordship of the Manor of Hanley from Sir Richard de Peshale who had bought it from Nicholas de Kynnardsley, but subsequently had a considerable amount of litigation about it as did his grandson John who inherited it. John, who was born in 1355, was M.P. at a very early age, subsequently being Mayor of Newcastle for over 30 years. John's brother Hugh took over the Newcastle seat in 1390 and remained M.P. for seventeen years but his chief concern for much of his life seems to have been with the affairs of the Earls of Stafford. Gilbert, a relative of his whom it is difficult to place beyond the fact that he held land in Stoke in 1407, was in the Earl's Retinue Roll in 1372, as was Hugh later. Hugh certainly seems to have been a stout fighting man and when the Earl was killed at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 Hugh was at his side. In his will the Earl left Hugh an annuity of 100s, 10 marks a year from the rents of the Manor of Madeley and other gifts. Henry IV wanting to make generous provision for his second wife Joan of Navarre did so out of other peoples property which happened to include the Manor of Madeley. Hugh protested and the Escheator of Stafford (Hugh himself), was accordingly ordered by the King to ensure the continuation of Hugh's income from the manor. The Staffordshire Records Society in its review of the Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1413-1416, observed that "the King's friends evidently hung together for we find Hugh Colclough, M.P. for Newcastle, as trustee of licences to dispose of rents in the Manor of Ridwell &c..."

On ceasing to be M.P., Mayor, Escheator and the rest, Hugh made a gift of his Blurton and Cocknage estates to his son Richard and moved to Witley Court in Worcestershire which had come to him as part of the marriage settlement of his wife Alice. He was knighted, was a grand juror for Worcester and named on the commission of Oyer and Terminer for Worcestershire in 1427 and the last we hear of him was in his old age when he was evidently suffering from insomnia, a petition to the Pope for an indult to have a daily Mass said before daybreak in his private chapel. The Visitation of Staffordshire in 1641 traces the Colclough ancestry back only to Hugh's father, Richard, who died in 1395 but even so its information about the first five generations which it records is unreliable. Richard was M.P. for Newcastle-under-Lyme from 1360 to 1371, acquired the Lordship of the Manor of Hanley which remained a Colclough possession for over 300 years, was High Bailiff and Mayor for many years and was dead by 1385 when his son John was his executor. The 'Visitation' names his sons as Hugh, William and Richard and makes no mention of John. When Hugh moved to Worcestershire he granted the lands of Blurton and Cocknage and the Manor of Hanley to his son Richard who had married Elizabeth, daughter of John Delves. Richard was dead by 1425 for in that year John Delves as his executor was sued by the Prior of Trentham "to give up to him the land and heir of Richard Colclough which belonged to him as Richard held land of Thomas the late Prior by military service ...amounting to seven messuages, 300 acres of land and 40 acres of meadow in Bloreton as of right of his church at Trentham by military service and by homage of fealty and a scutage of 40p...." This is all very puzzling for historians assure us that as the result of the Black Death in 1349 and the Peasants Revolt of 1381 all the more onerous incidents of feudal tenure had disappeared by the end of that century, and that in any case Abbots did not hold land by military tenure. What is even more puzzling is that only seven years later we find Thomas, Prior of Trentham, suing Katrine, widow of John Colclough, for abducting Thomas, son and heir of John Colclough, "whose marriage belonged to him". Katrine did not appear, and as the sheriff returned that she held nothing and that the heir could not be found within the bailiwick, her arrest was ordered.

Katrine with her infant son took refuge in the forest where they found the company of outlaws and robbers far more congenial than that of the Abbot. From them Thomas received an education which enabled him to lead a band of robbers who not only persecuted the Abbot and all his retainers but spread their depredations all over North Staffordshire. In course of time Thomas settled down, married the daughter of Sir William Mainwaring of Over Peover in Cheshire and sat as M.P. for Newcastle. In 1464 Thomas was outlawed for debt at the suit of Sir William Birmingham, a fellow M.P. on the other side of the House, and appeared in the custody of the sheriff. He claimed that he had been illegally outlawed because his name was Thomas Colcloght and not Colcloth and that he lived not at Newcastle but at Newcastle-under-Lyme. He was released on sureties including his son, Thomas the younger, of Newcastle and Thomas Stokely of London, gent. The following Michaelmas he appeared in court and claimed his release on the ground that there was no place called Newcastle, simply, in county Stafford but made no claim on the ground that his name had been misspelled. The King's Attorney appeared and defended the legality of the outlawry and appealed to a jury which was summoned for the Quindene of Easter Day 5 Ed.4 on which day the sheriff made no return to the writ. Up to Michaelmas of the following year no jury had been empanelled and Thomas resumed his seat in Parliament.

"The Wedgwood Family History" by Josiah C. Wedgwood M.P. records that "at Trinity Term 1456 Geoffrey Middleton was suing John Richard Colclow of Chelle, gentleman, Thomas Keelyng, John Robynson and John Weggyvode, all yeomen of Wulstynton, for breaking into his close at Chatterle and taking 21 steers, 10 heifers, 6 horses and 5 mares worth �40." The defendants did not appear and the sheriff was ordered to arrest them. This Richard Colclough appears to have been a typical swashbuckler of the time, leading bands of 'malefactors' or 'patriots' on one side or the other during the Wars of the Roses; lying in wait to murder 'malefactors' or 'patriots' on the other side and evading arrest with uniform success. The Wars of the Roses began with Warwick's victory at St. Albans on 22 May 1455 and Yorkists were still dominant in 1456. Both Richard and Thomas Colclough, who was M.P. for Newcastle in the Yorkist Parliament of 1450 and in the Lancastrian of 1453, were probably bailiffs of Sir Richard Bagot, Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1452/3, for in 1455 and 1456 Bagot as ex-sheriff is suing each of them for five marks. The evidence leads us to suppose that Richard Colclough, at any rate, considered the Red Rose to be the right colour. He died, or was killed, in 1473.......With John Wedgwood of Blackwood in 1474 we begin the consecutive (Wedgwood) pedigree. It may be that he is the same as that boisterous follower of Richard Colclough who broke in and lifted cattle at Chatterley in 1456."

Though Wedgwood puts the year of Richard's death as 1473 it was probably later for complaints about him and his gang were continuous until 1475. In 1470, for instance, John Clyffe of Hynealgrange alleged that Richard with his brother Roger and twenty-nine others had broken his close and houses, ill-treating beating and wounding him and taking 12 heifers, 80 sheep and 40 lambs. In the following year Richard and 16 others were sued by Margery Ronnal for illegally taking cattle and sheep also at Hynealgrange and later that year Richard with John Swinerton 'and other malefactors' was sued by Thomas Joyce for 'lying in wait to kill him and for beating and ill-treating him so that his life was despaired of and keeping him in prison against the law'. The last we hear of Richard is in 1475 when, rather surprisingly, with his former victim Thomas Joyce, together with 'John Swynerton yeoman late of Bloerton, and John Orpe late of Newcastle, smyth,' he is charged 'as before' and as before he does not appear and his arrest is ordered though as before the sheriff fails to effect it. Incidentally the inclusion of Richard's brother Roger in John Clyffe's complaint is surprising for Roger seems to have been a highly respectable and peace-loving yeoman farmer who left behind him a record only of land dealings and agricultural activities. The similarity of all these complaints, the ability of a victim of 'beating and wounding' to recite the surnames and Christian names of, in one case, over thirty attackers who after midnight on a moonless night had driven off his cattle whilst he was lying wounded on the ground and the failure or refusal of the sheriff to arrest the accused over a period of twenty years suggests that the complainants were supporters of the House of York.

The Court of Star Chamber was established in 1487 with jurisdiction covering, amongst other things, riots and unlawful assemblies, but in the century-and-a-half of its existence only twice were Colcloughs before it. In 1512 Richard Colclough of Wolstanton, gent, and John Henshaw of Milnerstown, Chester, gent, and sixteen others were the subject of a complaint to the Court of Star Chamber by William Clarke that 'they had assembled with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers etc. and carried away 20 loads of hay in the 27th year of the reign of the sd. King.' Colclough and Henshaw denied the charges which appear to have been dismissed. Seventy years later William Colclough and his wife Isabel late of Ramsclyffe and thirty others appeared 'to answer touching certain riots trespasses and other matters' and John Colclough of Grobershill, yeoman, and sixteen others were indicted for riotous assembly at Knutton on 21 September 1592 and taking 2 calves, 5 sheep and 3 pigs and assault and battery on Jane wife of Thomas Malpas and Katerine Gibbon of Barlaston and for all that the whole thirty-two of them were fined an aggregate of only 12d. In 1589 William had been indicted for assault and battery and together with his wife Isabel and John Hall again in 1591, the victim that time being the highly respectable and inoffensive William Colclough of Brerehurst. In that same year Thomas Hall, labourer, was indicted for breaking the close of Bartholomew Colclough at Dowes Leasor at Stallington and trampling his grass and turning his soil with a plough. This last case is difficult to understand for Bartholomew was one of the major Staffordshire landowners and a large-scale industrialist and one would have thought his time was far too valuable to be wasted in going to court over what on the face of it appears to have been no more than a drunken spree.

Three centuries of determined property dealings and even more determined marriage alliances with all the great land-owning families of the area, particularly marriages to 'sole heiresses' resulted in the Colcloughs becoming possessed of a large part of the land of North Staffordshire by the end of the Tudor period and becoming, too, people of very great power and influence, on which point the Staffordshire Record Society mentions that four of them in succession were knighted. However, a tendency to produce sole heiresses is evidently a Mendelian Dominant characteristic for though Sir Caesar Colclough had more than twenty cousins living in North Staffordshire at the time of his death in 1687, most of whom called their sons Caesar after him, by the end of the next century they were practically all extinct. The only surviving Staffordshire Colcloughs were the Cheadle branch, descendants of Bartholomew, whose line had never married sole heiresses but younger daughters of large families and had maintained and increased their fortunes by the exploitation of coal and iron mines, foundries, potteries and other industrial activities as well as large scale agriculture and membership of the learned professions, but since their departure from Cheadle in 1804 they have spread themselves not only all over England but all over the world and to trace them would be a major genealogical operation. The terrible cholera epidemic of 1833 which threatened to become endemic in the Potteries finally drove out all those Colcloughs who were in a position to move. William White's History and Gazetter of Staffordshire published in 1835 shows the Colclough seat of Delph House, Cheadle, occupied by a collier and only the following seventeen Colcloughs in the whole of the County of Staffordshire:-

Farmers Ts. Colclough, Hadley End, Yoxall

Ths. Colclough, Bucknall, Stoke.

John and Joseph Colclough, Windy Arbour, Talk-o'-the-Hill

John Colclough, Biddulph

John Colclough, Lightwood Field, Cheadle

Beer-house Francis Colclough, 'Red Lion', Broad St. Stoke

Keepers James Colclough, Wood St. Stoke

John Colclough 'Steele's Nook', Stoke

Samuel Colclough, Watergate St. Tunstall

Grocers James Colclough, Bridge St. Stoke

James Colclough, Moorlane Rd. Burslem

Fishmonger Samuel Colclough, Forsbrook, nr. Cheadle

Confectioner Mary Colclough, Flint St. Stoke

Engraver William Colclough, High St. Stoke

Manufacturer James Colclough, Steele's Nook, Stoke

Hairdresser Thomas Colclough, Flint St. Stoke

Earthernware James Colclough, Chapel Lane, Burslem

The Colcloughs were the first to exploit the Staffordshire coal mines which involved them in constant litigation from the middle of the fourteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the 17th century the North Staffordshire coalfield was already being worked commercially and the Potteries were showing the first signs of the conditions which even in the Industrial Revolution were to make them a reproach to civilization. We find the first impact of all this on the Colcloughs in the Quarter Session records of disturbances as in 1608 when John Colclough and William Colclough were accused by one Podmore of "breaking off before the eyes of the said mineowner the windglass". It transpired that the mineowner with his "windglass" were trespassing on the Colcloughs land. Even William, the barrister of Grays Inn, had to devote more time to the troubles arising from the mines owned by him and his son John than to those of his clients. The chief causes of litigation seem to have been overlapping titles due to faulty surveying. The case of Bayley v Wedgewood which was before the court continuously for twenty years started in 1679; it arose from a 99 year lease to William which on his death had passed to his son John and thence to the Wedgewoods. The plaintiffs claimed that "....They deny that John Colclough was ever seised of the mines in fee.....John Colclough did get coals but the defendants believe and doubt not that though he, John Colclough, was a great & rich man & very wise & had many friends & great friends & converted a great part of the coal so gained to his own use yet he compounded for the same with the owners of the land where the coals were." In another case it was said of John that he was "a great commercial arbitrator and accounted a very able and honest gentleman". There were many other cases some of which went on for fifteen years or more. John's father, William, was also highly regarded; in the case of Hargraves v. Wedgwood, re Churchyard House, in 1679, seventeen years after his death, it was said "William Colclough, gent, who was coroner of the County and a person of great parts and integrity and was feoffee to uses in both the earlier indentures if he had taken the premises to be church land would not have been a feoffee to the prejudice of the Church". William was born in 1590, admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1609, where he graduated in 1613 and joined Grays Inn. In 1641, at the age of 50, he married Katherine Burslem and died on Oct.28, 1662. By an earlier marriage he had two sons, Thomas born in 1619 and dying in 1644 and John born in 1624 and dying in April 1666.

Though the designation "Master Potter" was first adopted by William Adams in his will in 1617 it is one which could have been claimed by many of the Colcloughs from the time of their arrival in Staffordshire in the 14th century, potting having been one of the major industries pioneered by the younger sons of the family, and it was their Colclough connections which resulted in the Wedgwoods becoming potters. In his will in 1656 John Colclough (otherwise Rowley) who was William's half-brother, left to the Wedgwoods all his potting equipment and it was at the Overhouse, for a time a Colclough residence, that the Wedgwoods established the Overhouse Pottery.

In spite of the large number of Members of Parliament which they have produced the Colclough family, except in Ireland, have been singularly free of political convictions of any kind or at least extremely discreet in revealing them. During the Civil War Phillip Colclough managed to get himself arrested by the Parliamentary forces, but the Order Book of the Committee at Stafford records on 20 Feb. 1645 that "Whereas Phillip Colclough of New Castle, prisoner in Stafford, hath procured his enlargement by the payment of Three pounds in money and his oath that he would not beare arms agayne against the Parliament, it is ordered that he shall live at home and his goods and cattle be protected so long as he shall not misdemean himself against the Parliament and all Commanders, Officers and souldiers are to take are to take notice hereof. Signed by Mr Crompton, Capt. Stone and Mr Rudyert."

Half-a-century later we find the Cheadle Colcloughs showing no reluctance to publish their support for the House of Stuart. In 1686 Newcastle had been deprived of its borough status and to make a mockery of the arrangements imposed proceeded to elect a mock mayor and corporation. Thirteen years later Cheadle imitated the idea but with a somewhat different purpose, to express their disapproval of the Revolution Settlement and their loyalty to the Stuart cause. The Mock Corporation had wide support including that of many of the local landowners and the Colcloughs were prominent in its deliberations during the thirty years of its existence. An article in vol. LXIV of the North Staffordshire Field Club Transactions, records that "Blest Colclough was present on New Year Day 1704 and 1709 while Caesar, his elder brother, attended in 1710 and the two following years. Their father was Adam Colclough of Delph House who married Anne Blest of Eccleshall. The latter may be identical with the Anne Colclough who supported the Stadholder in 1711. Anne Colclough of Delph House, widow, was buried in 1711. It is amusing to note that when Adam Colclough's sister was baptised in 1636 she is styled Elizabeth Cowlocks in the parish register. In 1719 Caesar Colclough of Delph House, Cheadle, married Anne, daughter of Arden Adderley of Hams Hall and widow of Samuel Adderley of Blakenhall... The Mayor, Samuel Adderley seems to have been identical with the son of Samuel Adderley who married Catherine daughter of Adam Colclough of Delph House." The attendance book shows that on January 1st 1703/4 Ann, Bridget and Blest Colclough were all present; 1708/9, Blest; 1709/10,Caesar; 1710/11,Anne and Caesar; 1711/12, Caesar; 1729,Caesar.

Delph House is to the South of Burslem. A large house, of relatively recent construction, overlooks the town of Cheadle. The road from Boundry, by the Red Lion Pub, to Cheadle is called the Delphouse Road.  James Dundas Colclough suggests that the original house was in an amphitheatre at Dilhorne Common. The remains of four substantial gateposts, each some three feet square, opposite which are the traces of the old road to Cheadle. At the Western end of the site, modified for modern habitation is a gateway. Built in a military style in fired red brick, it is ornamented with blue brick diapers. Above a four centred arch in sandstone are several mullion windows, and it is flanked by octagonal towers surmounted by miniature sandstone turrets. Over the centre of the gateway is a sandstone cartouche in the form of a shield displaying four demi eagles in a cross, as in the Colclough arms, but with the central one missing. Over the shield is a face, full front. These are in fact the arms of the Buller family who built Dilhorne Hall in the 1837, which have a curiously coincidental resemblance to the Colclough arms.

It is said that the arms were originally granted to William de Cokerly who was pardoned of murder in 1361 on account of his good service with the Price of Wales in the war in France. The five demi eagles referred to his five sons with whom he was going to, in the words of the motto, "Crush Races Underfoot". A freer translation of the motto might be more appropriate - I always put my foot in it.

Chapter II

Home

Country House Tours