William Ginn of Aston (d.1520)

William Ginn of Aston (circa 1450-1520) was a Yeoman farmer who owned a farm/tenement called "Garretts" or "Jarretts" in Aston of about 200 acres.  He was a peasant, but a prosperous one and is known by me to have had two sons - Thomas (the elder) who died in 1526/7 and Henry who died in 1539.  Court cases, manorial records and wills establish Thomas as the elder son of William and the fact that Henry's granddaughter Katherine married Thomas' grandson John established the sibling connection, the grandchildren married by way of tying in to the two branches the blood ownership of "Garretts".


It is believed (but cannot be proved) that William's wife was called Margery, largely because both Thomas and Henry had daughters of that name.  I have no idea when  Margery died, this being before the creation of parish registers of course.

                                        Aston Church

There is only one set of documents that survive (from 1507 - when Henry the 7th - father of Henry the 8th was King) that reference William.  This is a Rental (ie a list of the Manorial Copyholders) which show William as having the same land and paying the same rent as his son and grandson were later to do.  The Rental (DE AS 85  Herts Archives) is below.

What is clear is that in about 1450 William Ginn was born in Aston, and what is equally clear is that he was born in Aston End, which is a hamlet on the borders of Stevenage, in fact parts of the lands that William held have now been absorbed into the parish of Stevenage.

This is obviously nearly a century before the earliest parish registers.  And I never thought that I would know any more, but then in 2023 something of a miracle occurred.

When I did the earliest research in the early 1990s, there was a manorial document that the Herts Archives could not date.  Following the intervention of the National Archives in the last few years (circa 2013), it has been dated to circa 1450 (DE AS 93).

This document shows a Thomas Ginn with a house called Hallond and the same manorial fields (Banleys and Hamleys) that the later Ginns of this family had in the 1500s.  The relevant page of the document is below.  At the same time, I was contacted by a correspondent (Barry Ginn of Canada) who had found that in 1440 and 1441 a Thomas Ginn (clearly the same man as in the Rental of c1450) was prosperous enough to be employing permanent (the average peasant would never had employed help save perhaps at harvest) labour to assist him on his lands.

Conclusion - Thomas Ginn was perhaps father - more likely grandfather to William Ginn - he lived at Aston End.

It is my opinion and that of Professor Mark Bailey (a specialist in Medieval Manors) that Thomas Ginn took part of the Aston Manor Demesne in the early 1400s, this is discussed more fully in the Introduction.  He may well have  taken advantage of the availability of land after the huge decrease in population in the wake of the Black Death - but we will discuss that elsewhere as I say.

So William here was far from the first Ginn in Aston, and his family likely originated in Stevenage.  

He died in circa 1520, there is no manorial record surviving for the year that he died and as for Margery she is obviously absent from the records.

William and Margery had two sons that I know of

Thomas Ginn (d. 1526/7) inherited the family farm, stayed in Aston and a Ginn family descended from him established itself in (amongst other places) Welwyn and Datchworth, Walthamstow, Hatfield and Essendon, Weston and Clothall and Broxbourne  as well as both leaving and returning to Aston at a later date.  Individuals will be discussed in more detail later.


Henry Ginn (d. 1539) married Katherine and moved to Anstey in Hertfordshire where, by means of the survival of three sons - Robert, Thomas and William he established a vast Ginn family, members of whom will be discussed at length in later posts.