There are in all six possible points of attachment in the families of FRANCHOY and DAVID PIERON, which we order according to priority of birth, as indicated on : First Migrants

1. JACOB, son of FRANCHOY
2. JACQUE, son of FRANCHOY
3. DAVID II, son of DAVID I
4. JEAN, son of BALTASAR
5. JACQUES, son of DAVID I
6. JOSEPH, son of BALTAZAR

1. Of JACOB PIERON, baptized 9th April1665, we find no further mention; nor does this forename reappear anywhere in our records. His brother

2. JACQUE PIERON, baptized 13 February1670, is by longstanding belief (but, so far as we have been able to ascertain, without any documentary evidence whatever) assumed to have been the parent of

3. JEAN PIERON, baptized 4-Dec-1675, and mistaken hitherto for the ancestor of BENJAMIN PEROWNE, of Great Snoring, we now perceive to be more probably that JOHN PEROW, in relation to whom, we have in the Registers of St Paul's, Norwich., the following:

Of this marriage we have no male issue to record.

4. JACQUES PIERON, baptized 18-Feb-1677, is presumed (without evidence other than of name and age) to have been the father of:

JACQUES PIERON has by some been presumed to have been the ancestor of JOHN PEROWNE of Norwich (1794 - 1882), as also (by association) of BENJAMIN PEROWNE of Great Snoring (1806 - 1881). By dates, by names, and indeed by locality, neither can be said to be impossible, but on a number of considerations, in themselves too slender to warrant argument at length, we prefer the attributions already made at 2 above. It is in the descent of MICHAEL MATTHEW that we find the spelling PEROWN persisting for several generations; his brother JAMES we presume to be:

JAMES PEROWEN; married 18-Jan-1784, at St Mary, Coslany, Norwich, Ann White (var.Wite).

Of the fruit, if any, of this union we have no positive evidence; one son could, possibly, have been:

THOMAS PEROWN, married 29-Aug-1808, at St Saviour's, Norwich, Maria Bacon, "both of this Parish",

From whom is most probably descended that branch of the family leading to "ARTHUR PEROWNE of Norwich"

5. The name of JOSEPH PIERON, baptized 7-Dec-1679 we identify with that of JOSEPH PEROW (var. PEROE), who in 1704 married Effa (or Affa) Lee at St Paul's, Norwich, having issue:

6. DAVID PERONNE, son of DAVID PIERON, baptized 8-Ocr-1672, married twice:

1) 17-May-1752 at St Martin@Oak, Martha Jex.

2) 23-Jan-1769 as a widower and in the same Church, Elizabeth Phillips.

These Parish Register entries identify the relationship between the two Davids and thus establish the transcription from PIERON to PERONNE. The younger is probably that DAVID PEROWN who we find on the Electoral Roll of 1768 for the Parish of St Martin@Oak, there described as a Twister and thus defined for us as a worsted worker. We have no note of any male issue from either of his marriages and the name David does not again appear in our Index for many years.

Here ends the investigation into the families of FRANCHOY and DAVID PIERON, Huguenot weavers of Norwich, sometimes referred to as "the original pair". The tentative conclusions reached as to male descent appear in the Early Generations, precariously suspended from the numbered points of attachment to which each argument relates. For this exercise we dare not pretend an authority which it can not possess, offering it only as a sensible speculation founded on such facts as we have, and ready for the time and effort of others to disprove or to confirm. We now reinforce the solid foundation revealed in "Line D" with the information at hand regarding the next succeeding generation. But the appearance at this stage of a THOMAS PEROWN, whose parentage has not yet been established (see 4 above) is sobering proof that this presentation is most certainly not complete. We must assume that there exist other ramifications which we do not possess the material to reconstruct, as well as connections and attachments of which we have today no knowledge.

In taking leave of the Patriarchs we may remark that examples of the names of Francis (Frank) and Frances (Fanny) recur among their descendants to the present day; one alone belongs in this period and finds no place in the pedigrees:

1702 - FRAN. PEROME, of Bawborough, and, John Tintuy married, 7-Ocr-1702, at St~_George Tombland, Norwich.

We have, however, no evidence upon which to associate this Fran(coise?) specifically with FRANCHOY PIERON, which serves to remind us of much earlier occurrences of our name in various forms in England and, indeed, in East Anglia. The slender volume of data available forbids even a hypothetical extension of the network backwards in time; for the process of projecting it Forward we are fortunately more generously endowed. Henceforth we can build on less treacherous ground.

For two or three generations the families followed their fathers' craft and it was as weavers they first made for themselves a reputation. In the XVIII Century the textile industry of Norwich achieved its greatest prosperity, the master weavers

"opulent men surrounded by their dependants, having something of a lordly bearing"⁴

These were the men who lived in the large houses still to be seen in and around Colegate. Among them can, probably, be counted JOHN (1728 - 1787) and his cousin JAMES (b.1740), described respectively as "worsted manufacturer" and "clothmaker" (as distinct from "weaver") and both domiciled in the Parish of St Michael, Coslany. The latter's grandson, JAMES JOSEPH (1791 - 1873) would achieve the full status of a Colegate Street address and a place in White's "Norwich Directory" as a "manufacturer of bolting clothes and other textiles".⁵ The weavers (until the introduction of steam powered machinery) were principally outside workers, labouring at handlooms in their own homes, and there "in humble dwellings produced the beautiful fancy fabrics which adorn the daintiest ladies in the land".4 By the end of the XVIII Century, however, the thrustful, enterprising textile men of the Midlands had outstripped them in production and were undercutting them in price. By 1845, Norfolk had only 428 power looms compared with Yorkshire's 31, 000.

The decline of Norwich as a centre of cloth manufacture reduced the opportunities open to sons of the spreading branches of the clan, so that many of them were impelled into other fields of endeavour, onto the land and into a. variety of trades, professions and occupations, in which not a few were destined to add distinction (and some a passing prosperity) to the reputation with which their forbears had invested their name. Of the old thrown out of employment by the shrinking volume of their traditional trade, some sought a living in allied industries in commerce as hatters, tailors and shopkeepers of various sorts.Others, unable to adapt themselves in time, were forced to pass their declining years in the humblest of circumstances, as general labourers, gardeners and the like. Many of them congregated at St James', which was the scene of a belated attempt by certain Norwich businessmen to save the rapidly dwindling textile trade. But it degenerated into "a slum Parish dominated by the great 'Pockthorpe Brewery' and the 'Nelson Barracks'"4 and peopled for the most part by very poor families.

Branches of the family now tended to exploit separate characteristics, as farmers, Churchmen and scholars, engineers and tradesmen etc, often moving from Norwich in response to their callings or in search of work. Inevitably, the Armed Forces of the Crown claimed their quota, though we have record of few who made in them a professional career until recent times. By.the end of the XIX Century the diversification of occupations had become general and the attendant ramification widespread; a process accompanied by social and intellectual divergence within the family. When King Edward VII came to the throne, mustered a Bishop in his Palace at one extreme and a Gate Porter in Stratford at the other. Fifty years later florets burgeon in the New World.

To the problems of unravelling the early relationships inside a comparatively concentrated community are thus added those equally complex ones of proving ties with each scattered off shoot. With most of them this task is found simple enough, but with some impossible with the information at hand. A second dark interlude follows before the lights go up, in the third quarter of the year 1837, in the Central Register Office at Somerset House. Here a notice of a later death not infrequently bridges the gap and the earlier marriages sometimes disclose for us a preceding generation of parents. There is however indication in the Registers that some of these events were on occasion tardily reported, while the absence from them of entries supporting information deriving from other sources implies that some of them, may never have been formally notified at all. Despite this aggravating display of indiscipline on the part of certain of our namesakes, it is improbable that any substantial branch or line can entirely have escaped scrutiny.

Those which we have explored have, for convenience, been accorded the designations listed in the Principle Lineage, but these designations must not be taken necessarily to denote (as in the conventional interpretation) either an ownership of property, or the total concentration of each family, in the locality named. The links to the left reference the Family Trees of descedants of the several Pedigrees and those to theright reference the narratives that support them. In presenting these chains of male succession, we have omitted all but those who survived to maturity; the daughters, together with their brothers who perished at an early age, appear in their proper places in the tabulations. Taken together, Early Generations and Principle Lineage reveal a pattern of kinsmanship, but comprise of themselves no more than the warp and weft of a canvas as yet lacking in composition and colour. There are broken threads to be explained and uncertain ties to be rationalized, while a residue of yarn remains to be accounted for. Here presents itself the opportunity to illuminate some of the groups and figures that go to make up the picture as a whole, of which the tabulated pedigrees will give little or no indication.

To begin with, we do not know that FRANCHOY and DAVID were brothers, although this belief is widespread and has long been fostered in separate branches of the family; nor do we have anything for sure to tell of their ancestry. From Elizabeth (nee Perowne) Ives (1797 - 1880) we have it that "two Perownes (sic) landed on the Essex coast from an open boat" (letter dated 22nd January, 1924, from Augusta Louise Perowne, of Great Snoring, Fakenham, Norfolk), but we have not been told when this occurred. Some suppose that this family first appeared in England at the time of the Massacre of St Bartholemew in 1572. And that Pierons, or Pirons, may well have been among the "master workmen, strangers from the Low Countries" brought to Norwich by the Sothertons in 1565 "to assist them in the making of fabrics"⁶. They may have arrived earlier; but it is certain that they had settled in Norwich before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. At the marriage of BALTASAR PIERON on 28th November, 1672, "sans announce", is entered in the Register of the Walloon Church (St Mary the Less). There is little more to record of the life and times of the "original pair". We know that BALTASAR served in his sixties as one of the "hommes politiques", or elders, and that DAVID was made Bailliff in 1691, which suggests that they must have been men of some importance in their own community.

Of the seven distinct branches pursued through the Pedigrees, four are represented among the citizens of Norwich today; three of our name have been honoured as Freemen of .their native City⁷:

1736 ‑ BENJAMIN PERONNE, cordwainer, apprenticed to Samuel Ellis, of Norwich; admitted 3-May-1736.

1809 ‑ JOHN PEROWNE, junior, hatter, apprenticed to Jno.Oxley, hatter, of Norwich; admitted 24-Feb-1809.

1844 ‑ JOHN SMITH PEROWNE, schoolmaster, son of John Perowne the younger; admitted 18-Jun-1844.

<>The first of these, BENJAMIN PERONNE was identified tentatively at paragraph 2(a) above and there abandoned for lack of further information. Our identification of JOHN, the hatter, depends upon his description in the Freedom Roll as "junior", which demands the succession of one John by another, as appears only in the descent of David PIERON indicated by the following entries in Norwich Parish Registers:

1760 ‑ JOHN, son of Michael Matthew Peroone and Thamison, baptized 10-Feb-1760, at St Martin@Palace.

1788 ‑ JOHN, son of John Perown and Anna Smith, baptized 3-Mar-1788, at Lakenham.

We do not know what was the occupation of MICHAEL MATTHEW, or whether it was his son, or his grandson, who founded the firm of John Perowne & Co. Hatters, of 2, Exchange Street, Norwich, listed in White's Directory of 1845, and said to have been the last makers of the celebrated 'Johnny Walker' ("Born 1820 - Still going strong") beavered hats. JOSEPH PEROWN (1788 - 1856) was a master hatter and may have been a member of this company; if so, his sons did not follow his trade. See Fragment13, "formerly a straw hat manufacturer", who died in Eastbourne at the age of 87, may also have worked in the family business at Norwich, but we have been unable to place him. He has the distinction of being the last in our Index to have spelled his name without the terminal "E". John Perowne & Co., Hatters, do not figure in the Norwich Directory for 1852 which lists only in this context Richard Oxley, Clothiers & Hatters, at 7, London Street, who we may presume to have been the successors of our John's master. JOHN, the younger married twice and his first wife, Joanna, died in 1849 and was buried at Lakenham, in Norwich. The following year he married Isabella Read, a widowed daughter of a ship owner on the London River, which might account for the folding of his firm and the later style of 'Hosier and Draper', under which he departed this life at Prittlewell, Essex, in 1874. Not all of the events in this sequence are conclusively documented.

JOHN SMITH PEROWNE (1808 - 1883) was the schoolmaster, third of our Freemen of Norwich, and among the first of the clan to show evidence of an education in advance of bare literacy. Of his activities in Norwich, which led to him being honoured there, we have nothing to relate. It is possible that he was an assistant master at the Norwich Grammar School, which at that time enjoyed already something of a reputation, but he was certainly never Headmaster there.(letter dated 19th July, 1973 from S.M.Andrews MA, Headmaster)⁸ His name is curiously confused with that of Rev.JOHN PEROWNE (1794-1882) in "White's Directory" of 1845⁹, but our knowledge of both parties permits us to dismiss these misleading entries as the result of some error in compilation. In "Roger's Norwich Directory", 1859, JOHN SMITH PEROWNE is not mentioned, but he turns up again at Islington, where his elder son JOHN SMITH BENJAMIN (1843 - 1889), commercial clerk (in today's parlance, no doubt, a "business executive") was married to Caroline Goodey, a weaver's daughter, in 1863. What he was doing at that time, and how they came to Islington, we have been unable to find out. It is perhaps relevant that the births of his two sons are not to be found in the Index at Somerset House. JOHN SMITH BENJAMIN (1843) and JOSEPH WILLIAM BETTS (1848) (the years have been computed from their ages shown on their respective marriage and death certificates) may have taken place abroad, possibly in France (see p.18 below). One tradition preserved among his descendants has it that "our name is carved on the wall of the church at Canewdon (Essex)". (letter dated 26th February, 1973, from P.A.Perowne, 44, Radix Road, Leyton E10) The Vicar of that parish (telephone conversation lst May, 1973) has, however, no confirmation of this; he associates the name with Westminster School but the "Record of Old Westminsters", which embraces staff as well as boys, does not include JOHN SMITH PEROWNE. (letter dated 23rd July, 1973 from the Headmaster's secretary) Another tradition asserts that this family furnished a "tutor to Winston Churchill", who was born in 1874, and whose teachers are comprehensively chronicled by Randolph Churchill in Volume I of his father's biography. The Duchess of Marlborough, wrote from 46, Grosvenor Square on 15th January, 1888 telling her husband about their grandchildren. "I make Sped a sort of usher or tutor, to look after them at breakfast" ("Winston Spencer Churchill" by Randolph Churchill), but there is no evidence upon which to claim this 'Sped' as a Perowne. On the other hand, Winston Churchill's father, Lord Randolph, left Eton in 1867 "in order to obtain some education from a private tutor"¹⁰. It may be more than a coincidence that JOHN SMITH PEROWNE is for the first time described as 'Private Tutor' 'on the marriage certificate of his second son, 3rd August, 1869¹¹. According to his marriage lines, the latter, JOSEPH WILLIAM BETTS PEROWNE, began his career as a barman, but this we should probably read as carman, since he became a cab proprietor, known to his colleagues as "Gentleman Joe". These were the days before the motor car began to clutter the thoroughfares. We have to picture our Jehu's 'Hansoms' and 'Growlers' picking up and setting down in silent cobbled streets. The older will sense the comfortable odours of horses and straw, of nose bags of oats and chaff filled by the light of flickering gas jets in his stables at Camden Passage in Islington. His eldest son, JOHN JOSEPH (1870 - 1942), known as Jack, "went for a soldier" in the 19th (Princess of Wales' Own) Hussars. He groomed his mount and burnished his sabre on the frontiers of the Empire, and strutted the sidewalks of Canterbury in pillbox cap and a blue jacket to capture the heart of Eliza Gambie, a coachman's daughter, with whom he raised a large family in Hounslow, Middlesex. These "Perownes - of Hounslow" engaged in a variety of trades and occupations and the headline from DAVID PIERON, the Norwich weaver, continues with PAUL FRANCIS PEROWNE (b.1949), elder son of ALEXANDER GEORGE (b.1915), long distance driver, of Northolt.

JOHN JOSEPH's brothers ALBERT THOMAS (1874 - 1954) and PERCY ALEXANDER (1878 - 1949) and their families we recognize collectively as the "Perownes of Walthamstow" hitherto supposed (see."Origins" p.26) to have been descended from the Flemish Huguenots of Threadneedle Street and Spitalfields. PERGY ALEXANDER was a maker of venetian blinds and begat five sons, all without male issue; from ALBERT THOMAS, printer, is descended Rev.PETER JOHN PEROWNE (b.1934), Methodist Minister in Sheffield. The last of our Freemen of Norwich, JOHN SMITH PEROWNE, schoolmaster and sometime private tutor, performed in the latter part of his life the duties of a vaccination officer. He was a house agent and rent collector when he died in Walthamstow, "suddenly in a natural way and not from any violence to the knowledge of the jurors". (Coroner's Inquest, 21st September, 1883)

JOHN PEROWNE, the younger, had a brother WILLIAM (PEROWN) (1802 - 1864)), a master tailor, who removed himself from Norwich into the heart of Charles Dickens' London, where he traded under the style of "Tailor & Habit Maker" at No 1 Maze Pond, Southwark. He assailed on the one hand by the coal smoke of the infant London, Chatham & Dover Railway Company's locomotives at London Bridge Station, and on the other by the antiseptic exhalations of Guy's Hospital. He provides us with the first mention of the name on the Surrey side of the River Thames in London. It is tempting to seek a connection here with that family known to us as the "Perownes of Dulwich" but this WILLIAM PEROWN, though twice married, died in 1864, in the Old Kent Road, apparently without a son to survive him.

Of the derivation of the Dulwich Perownes we remain uncertain. There were PERONs in Canterbury in the middle of the XVII Century, connected with the London settlement of Flemish weavers.(see Princple Lineage But the first of the "Perownes of Dulwich" to be precisely identified is HARRY ANDREW (1849 - 1931), in early life a car-man and, later, .a master fishmonger, whose descent is now amply documented, see (HARRY ANDREW descent and the Family Tree of HARRY ANDREW PEROWNE)

Despite extensive research, however, no record either of his birth¹², or of his marriage (1870c) to Eliza Bidabeck (var.Beiderbeck) has been uncovered. He is known to have spent some part of his youth in France, and both events may have taken place abroad. In another place (see introductory note Harry Andrw Perowne descent) we advance a hypothesis that HARRY ANDREW could have been a third son of, .JOHN SMITH PEROWNE, the schoolmaster, which might explain the disappearance of the latter from the record between 1845 and 1863 (see p.16 above). Be that as it may, the family of HARRY ANDREW PEROWNE was established about 1870 in South‑East London and consisted in the first generation for the most part of well to do tradespeople. Two of his sons were fishmongers in Peckham Rye and Tooting respectively; of his grandsons one became a Civil Servant in the Inland Revenue Department and the other a Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force. The line contracts to BARRY RICHARD, of Sutton, Surrey, a mechanical engineer, born 13th November, 1942.

One of the more bulky files in the inherited archive is labelled boldly "BEN PED" and subtitled "Ben Perowne of Gt Snoring". The latter suggests a convenient heading under which to treat of this branch, extending (with but two early uncertified attributions) over three hundred years from FRANCHOY PIERON to the present time (see Great Snoring Perownes and Family Tree of WILLIAM SHAW PEROWNE (1789-1842). JOHN PEROAN (1728 - 1787), the worsted manufacturer of Coslany, was at once fortunate in his marriage and prudent in his prosperity. In 1748 he married, in Norwich, Isabella Short, who lived to the age of 102, having given him eight children in whose education he seems to have invested liberally, allowing them to escape from the ailing textile business while the going was good. Three of their four daughters duly married appropriately; the fourth found for herself a small niche in history as the devoted nurse and companion of the poet William Cowper (1731 - 1800), near whose grave her mortal remains lie interred in the churchyard at East Dereham, in Norfolk.

Of John and Isabella's sons, the youngest, JOHN (1761 - 1826), migrated to London, where he traded successfully as an oil and tallow merchant in Aldersgate Street, "close to the Castle & Falcon Inn"; in June, 1796, he was admitted, on presentation of the Innholders' Company, Freeman of the City. This John was a Wesleyan and was later in his life to comment on the large number of his relatives who were "parsons of one sort or another". Notwithstanding, his eldest brother WILLIAM SHAW (1754 - 1842), had become a surgeon in the Royal Navy, but we do not know where he acquired the training to make that possible. While still quite a young man, he left the service and set up in private practice at Downham Market. (subsequently at Fulnetby in Lincolnshire), He earned a reputation as one of the pioneers in the campaign for vaccination against the small pox initiated by the discoveries of Dr Edward Jenner (1748 - 1823).

WILLIAM SHAW PEROWNE married Ann, daughter of Benjamin Cubitt, of Stallam, Norfolk, in which place he settled down in his retirement to farm. Their eldest son, WILLIAM (1792-1872), "ran off" with his first cousin Charlotte, daughter of Isabella (Perowne) and John Monsey; after her death in 1839 he took as his second wife Hannah Gathercole, with whom he carried the name first into Surrey and thence to Hampshire. The birth of their grandson, JOHN BURT PEROWNE in Southsea on the 20th September, 1898, is the latest event of which we have any note in the headline of this branch of the family. WILLIAM SHAW's second son, GEORGE (1795 - 1844) was a veterinary surgeon and owner of a farrier's force at All Saints Green in Norwich. He died uninarried and is remembered principally for having allegedly stolen the body of a deceased employee for anatomical dissection (see Appendix B.2

In the fulness of time WILLIAM SHAW PEROWNE was succeeded at Stalham by his youngest son BENJAMIN (1806 - 1881), in whose descent both the forename and the farming tradition are preserved. He was the first to live at Great Snoring, in which part of Norfolk his descendants of the third and fourth generation flourish to this day. BENJAMIN CUBITT PE'ROWNE (b.1921), however, foresook the land once more for the sea, and his sons followed him into the Royal Navy.

While JOHN PEROAN shepherded his flock into fresh fields of endeavour, the family of his cousin JAMES b. 1740 stuck for a while to their looms. In 1763 he married Sarah Frances Plumsted, of Coltishall, in Norfolkand they, too, had four sons, in whose lifetime a significant divarification first began to manifest itself (see Descebt of James and The decen of James. The first born, JAMES (1764 - 1826), described as a "cloth maker" (as distinct from a weaver), inherited his father's business in Norwich. This he contrived to pass on in a flourishing condition to his eldest son, JAMES JOSEPH (1791 - 1873), the "manufacturer of bolting cloth and other textiles" listed in the Norwich Directories of 1845 and 1859. James Joseph was evidently a man of substance, supplying the principal millers of the County with material or their sieves and living in some style in what was then a fashionable quarter of the city. In 1865 the name disappears from the Directory and we do not know what became of this hitherto successful enterprise. As James Joseph was by then 73 years old and, despite his three marriages, without a son to carry on his business, it is reasonable to suppose that the 'manufactory' continued under different ownership and a new name. To his brother JOHN (1794-1882) we shall presently return.

THOMAS, PEROWN (1771 - 1854) (see Sowells Descent and the Family Tree of Thomas) is also described as a "cloth manufacturer" at his marriage in 1788 to Sarah Nixon, the daughter of a "visitation family" from Great Yarmouth. He was able to sign his name in the Register while she "made her mark", but he seems to have been less successful than his elder brother. At the time of his wife's death in 1840 he was in business as a grocer at Heigham in Norwich, and died at the home of his daughter Harriet in the High Street, Hoxton, where her husband was landlord of a public house called the "Old Whitmoore's Head". His elder son, THOMAS (1794 - 1865) began as a weaver and found employment with Messrs Clabburn, Son & Crisp in their celebrated Norwich Shawl Manufactory. Here is where (due, it is said, in part to the influence of his wife Mary Sowels) he obtained preferment as a 'designer' and, later, as 'warehouseman', which in the terminology of that period enjoyed a somewhat more responsible connotation than it has today. From this Thomas' daughter Elizabeth are descended the "Perowne-Abels of Norwich". The younger of his two sons, ROBERT JOHN SOWELS PEROWNE (1832 - 1886)., was at first a clerk in Norwich, whence he progressed to the position of Insurance Manager in Birmingham. There he is said also to have had interests in a jewellery business, but the male descent in this line would appear to have died out with the death at Edgbaston of his only son FRANK ROBERT, a surveyor, in 1920.

The elder son of Thomas the shawl maker was JONATHAN, SOWELS PEROWNE (1830 - 1891). By trade an upholsterer, he was for some time in work as such under his own name in Sussex Street, Norwich, but in due course 'improved' himself by qualifying as an accountant and forsook his craft for an office stool. For the last twenty five years of his life he was employed by the Norwich Union Insurance Conipany. His son, HERBERT ROBERT was also a clerk, his grandson a butcher, in Norwich; the great great great great grandson of Thomas Perown, was born in 1972 in St Peter Port, Guernsey CI. The only child of an electronics engineer and latest in line of the "Sowels Perownes" was given the names STEWART MARTIN.

We come next to trace the extensive and at times confusing ramification which starts with the marriage of SAMUEL PEROWN (1777 - 1852) and Ann Randall in the church of St Martin at Palace, in Norwich, in 1797 (see Samuel Descent and Family Tree ofSamuel). He, too, was a shawl weaver, residing in Pockthorpe, where their large family persisted ‑for a generation too long ‑ in the multifarious 'mysteries' of their traditional crafts. His three sons were all weavers, two of them specifically differentiated as workers in silk by contrast with the wool for which Norwich was principally famed. Weavers are found among his daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law (and 'Fillover' weavers - whatever they were) as well as 'yarn-winders', 'silk-fillers' and 'clear-starchers' to add to the 'twisters' and 'warpers', the 'end-fillers' and the rest noticed elsewhere and at that date still struggling to make their living in a moribund industry. In this not all of them were successful. Thus, JAMES JOSEPH (1816 - 1852) of Silver Road, who started out as a silk-weaver, was obliged in the latter years of his short life to take work as a gardener and general labourer; the generation which followed had all to look elsewhere for their bread-and-butter. In the process some found betterment in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, reflected in their descriptions as 'press-man' in a shoe factory, as fireman and engineer, and as a steam sawyer.

The line shown as descending through SAMUEL (1846 -1910) turned out in the long run to be the least fortunate of all; but we lack positive proof that this branch is here properly attached. No record has emerged of the marriage of SAMUEL WILLIAM and Mary Ann Charlesworth ¹³ to identify him beyond question with the son of SAMUEL and Ann Randall who was baptized in St Giles at Norwich on 25th December, 1808. Though this identification is highly probable, the controversy is at this point recorded at length, lest at some future date some other searcher should stumble upon a more viable alternative:

Such information as we do have is contained in letters (1923 & 1926) from SAMUEL WILLIAM's daughters Priscilla, Elizabeth and Harriet, in which both agree that they had an uncle named James, and that both he and their father were weavers:

Priscilla further asserts that her father and grandfather both died in the same year, the former being "a young man when he died, just 42 years old". Now SAMUEL WILLIAM died 16-Feb-1851 (aged 43), SAMUEL died 27-Nov-1852 (aged 75), and JAMES JOSEPH, the latter's son, 25-Aug-1852; all were weavers. There are no other relevant deaths recorded. in the Somerset House Index between 1844 and 1854.¹⁴

Thus far the evidence is compatible with our postulation, but some doubt remains, arising out of two further passages in Priscilla's letter:

Regarding the former, no George or James has emerged to fit this attribution; the latter are without doubt GEORGE and his daughter Martha, baptized at St James', Pockthorpe, on the 18th February 1841. Priscilla was more than eighty years old when she wrote this letter and her faculties may have been failing (her handwriting certainly was), but it is scarcely credible that she would not have remembered her work-mate as her cousin and George, of Silver Road, as her uncle. There is moreover another JAMES (1803 - 1967)(Fragment 10), whose parentage we have also been unable to trace. Though this date might fit, it is unlikely that SAMUEL would have named two of his sons James and James Joseph respectively. On the other hand, it is in this line that the name Samuel recurs over several generations, whereas it is not found continuously elsewhere. Numerous coincidences of occupation and of location occur in the two descents, and the name of SAMUEL WILLIAM's wife, Mary Ann (Charlesworth), appears on the Death Certificate of SAMUEL's daughter Rebecca in 1867. On balance, we venture the attachment shown on Family Tree ofSamuel

Whatever his father's provenance, SAMUEL III was a journeyman baker when he married a tailor's daughter in Norwich in 1864; within four years they had quit their native city to seek their fortune in the spreading fringes of the Great Wen. As the "Perownes of Stratford" we trace the survival of this family through two further generations in humble circumstances and lowly occupation in London's East End. We have (1973) no note of any living descendant of SAMUEL WILLIAM PEROWNE, the weaver, and the most recent event recorded in this sequence is the marriage of his great-grandson GEORGE, an armaments inspector, at Birmingham, in 1944.

GEORGE PEROWNE, of Silver Road, was the last of the weavers and he died without a son to carry on his line. His hapless brother "James Joseph of Pockthorpe" (so styled to differentiate between him and the bolting-cloth maker) left three, the youngest of which, another GEORGE (1852 - 1911) (see The descent of GEORGE and The Family Tree of GEORGE), was the shoe press-man already noticed. By his marriage with Mary Green, a Roman Catholic, he broke with the Huguenot and Nonconformist tradition and fathered a large family in Norwich. His eldest daughter, Agnes Mary (1877 1965) Keeper of the Slipper Chapel at Walsingham in Norfolk, was awarded in 1959 the Beni Merenti medal by Pope John XXIII. Two of his sons emigrated to Canada and one to South Africa, where he died unmarried, or without male issue. The fourth, STEPHEN JOHN, grievously wounded as a soldier in the Norfolk Regiment at the Battle of Loos during the First World War, earned widespread respect for his fortitude through thirteen years of crippledom and was buried with full military honours in his home town in 1929. It was left to GERALD JOSEPH (1889 - 1952) to carry on the name; his grandson GREGORY JOSEPH, third child of "Bernard Gerald Perowne, of Norwich" was born in 1951.

In the pursuit of "James Joseph of Pockthorpe's" second son we uncover some curiosities and, at the finish, a questioning coincidence. REUBEN (1848 - 1892'), variously described as a fireman (i.e. a stoker), as an engineer and, lastly, as a labourer in starch-works, found time in his short life for three wives, to the second of which he may, or may not have been formally married (no record at GRO). The first wed again shortly after he left her, but evidently preferred her first married name to her second, for it was as "widow of Reuben Perowne" that she departed this life in 1913. His next partner, Sarah How, died at Lambeth in 1881, conveniently allowing him to designate himself a widower at his marriage "according to the Rites & Ceremonies of the Roman Catholics" to his third wife, Annie (Reilly), who outlived him by more than thirty-four years. By Sarah How he had one son, who died in 1895, just short of his sixteenth birthday, at Islington, attracted thither, perhaps, by that mysterious magnetism which had drawn other Perownes into the same quarter of the metropolis - possibly, by some affinity with them closer than that already discovered.

JAMES JOSEPH II (1840 - 1888), the steam-sawyer, and his wife Elizabeth (Peel) were probably typical of many in, the Victorian artisan-hierocracy. They were proud, principled, church going people, confident in their own skills and achievements whilst content to do their duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call them. Twelve children they are said to have brought into this World at The Loke in Silver Street, but we have record of eleven only, of which one died in infancy and another, ALBERT ended his days a bachelor. The five girls found husbands locally; their four married brothers in turn left Norwich to follow their careers elsewhere. Out of the adversity which overtook the last of the old-style weavers there arose within the ensuing generations a new breed of men - predominently engineers - to meet the challenges of a new age at home and beyond the seas.

The progress of the sons of the sawyer are to be read in the Pedigrees (James Joseph decent, Herbert descent, but the lines of two only of them project expectantly into the future. WILLIAM's son, Samuel Clarence Perowne of Coventry (1907 - 1964), mechanical engineer, was born in India; at the granting of Independence to that Country in 1947, he restored to England both his own professional skills and the promise of his successor's. HERBERT (1878 - 1951) saw service as a young man in the South African War (1899 - l900)¹⁵ and subsequently went to join his brother JAMES JOSEPH III in America. There he made himself expert on grain elevators and was, in due course, appointed to the post of Superintendent, National Harbours Board, at Montreal in Canada. This was the first of the "Perownes of Montrea1", his son was destined - almost by chance - to attain an eminence in the textile industry of which his great-great-grandfather Samuel could scarcely have dreamed and of which Franchoy Pieron would have had good reason to be proud. RONALD HERBERT PEROWNE (b.1918), in his youth a sportsman of renown, joined the Dominion Textile Corporation in 1945 as its athletic director; twenty-four years later he was elected President of "the biggest fabric producer and seller in Canada, employing 10,500 workers, of which 8500 are French". His eldest son, RONALD GRANT PEROWNE, was born in Montreal on 5th February, 1950.

Thus, of SAMUEL's line, one branch alone survives in Norwich today; but there are also to be found in that city descendants of his brother THOMAS (1771) and JOSEPH (1788 -1856) (see descent of Joseph and Joseph's Family Tree. It was evidently foreseen by his parents that there might be in the cloth-making business no future for their youngest son, for he was duly apprenticed to a hatter - possibly in the establishment of his kinsman JOHN, and Johns Family Tree - and died a master of that craft.. It was as a widower that JOSEPH married Mary Melin (an appropriately Huguenot-sounding name) at St Ethelred's in Norwich, in the year 1818; but we have not uncovered the circumstances of his earlier union and have no knowledge of any children of it. By Mary Melin he had two sons. The younger of which, JAMES, (1828 - 1897), a furniture painter & grainer, was married in the Octagon Chapel in Colgate Street and buried in the Rosary Cemetery; from which it can be deduced that his wife, Priscilla Elizabeth (Cooper), must have been a Unitarian nonconformist. From this couple was descended "Walter Henry Perowne.of Norwich" .a master printer, by whose untimely death in 1942, while a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese at Palembang in Sumatra, the male line of JOSEPH PEROWN became extinct.

Before quitting contemporary Norwich it is convenient to dispose of that other THOMAS, whose parentage has not yet been discovered and whose descent is unproven (see Thomas' descent and Thomas Family Tree. In an era of large families a succession of solitary sons is inevitably suspect, and to cast about for an affiliation to some more prolific strain is not irrational. By correlation of places and dates it can be surmised that GEORGE HENRY PEROWNE (1814 - 1872), a maltster and sometime stoker at the Gas Works, belongs some where in the extensive Pockthorpe hierarchy (see Samuels Descent. Again, if Thomas and Maria (Bacon) were indeed his parents (see introductory note to Thomas' descent, then the association with the Parish of St Saviour's could connect this branch with JAMES PEROWN in the descent of DAVID PIERON. There is, alas, no evidence at hand to support either hypothesis, so that this family is for the present left unattached.

What we do know is that the maltster married Elizabeth Growe and had by her a son JAMES JONATHAN (1839 - 1907) who was a shoemaker in Pockthorpe and, in the latter part of his life, a fruiterer in St Stephen's Street, Norwich. From him diverge in curiously discrepant trades (i.e. a jeweller / watchmaker and a butcher)¹⁶ two lines, the senior of which continues through "Bertie Frederick Perowne. of South Oxhey" his elder son MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER first saw the light of day in London in 1949. The junior line, from a succession of three styled "Arthur Perowne, of Norwich", emerges with ARTHUR HERBERT (b.1930), farmer of Bawburgh and for more than a decade (1948 - 1959) "one of the most popular figures in British golf" ("Sunday Express", 22nd June 1958).

Of the four now distinct families of Perownes represented in Norwich (1973), three (Sowels Perowne, Bernard Gerald Perowne and Walter Henry Perowne) are shown without doubt to derive from JAMES PAROON (PEROWNE) (1700) and Frances Burnsted. And a generation further removed from a supposed connection with the "Benjamin Perownes of Great Snoring" ; the relationship of the fourth (Arthur Perowne) remains frustratingly obscure. We come at last to rehearse briefly the well-documented Family Tree of JAMES (1764) and Mary Ann (Hills) (Plate I.E.2) with which this project began; and to recapitulate those "residues of yarn" not woven into the Pedigrees.

The legend of Mary Ann Hill's instant romance with JAMES PEROWN, the cloth-maker (see James' Family Tree), which started one Sabbath at the Gate of the City, leaves unexplained her presence in Norwich. She was born in Maidstone, the daughter of a merchant adventurer working his own ship out of Rochester in the China trade. She was said to be "a very clever lady", the first of two remarkable women destined in successive generations to change - almost miraculously the orientation and evolution of the senior surviving branch of her large family. As already recounted (see Reference of his inheritance)), the textile business passed in due time properly to JAMES JOSEPH, the eldest of their four sons, in whose hands it swelled to importance during his lifetime, but at his death was lost for the lack of an heir. With prudent forethought the second had been set to a different trade; JOHN PEROWNE (1794-1882), the future Rector of St John, Maddermarket, started his working life as an apprentice compositor on the "Norwich Mercury".

How he was led to abandon this calling for that of the Church is but one of several mysteries in his life to which we find no answers. The transition can have been accomplished only with the aid of a superior education and some influence, to the first of which we may suppose his mother contributed. There are no clues as to the patronage his parents may have been able to invoke. At the age of 23, still a journeyman printer, he found time to 'read' for Holy Orders with Rev. Sharpe at Yaxham, some miles outside Norwich; two years later he was ordained - surprisingly and unaccountably at Gloucester, and at a private ceremony in the Palace Chapel. This was the first of the "John (otherwise Ecclesiastic) Perownes" a heard term adopted in default of a better to define this ramification - by no means all clergymen - in the Principle Lineage. In the same year (1819) JOHN PEROWNE married, in Norwich, Eliza Scott, a gifted orphan whose antecedence, shrouded (whether deliberately, or not) in implausible romantic legend, was to become for her grandchildren an absorbing subject of endless speculation, of fruitless research, and of unconvincing occult dabblings. With her he set out for India, to serve inconspicuously for seven years as a CMS Missionary before returning to Norwich, where they conducted together a school, offering a "sound Classial & General Education" to a limited number of 'select' pupils, which included their own four sons. In this latter enterprise they proved notoriously productive, yielding in a single generation an eminent divine, an honoured honoured Archdeacon of Norwich, a distinguished Master of a Cambridge college and a respected Secretary to the Governors of the London Stock Exchange. This "celebrated" (DNB) fraternity rode the crest of a wave; their achievements are to be read in the pages of the Pedigree, together with those of their sometimes scarcely less notable clerical and secular successors. In two eventful generations of chance and change the momentum is spent, the wave subsides, and the waters recede. No descendant of JAMES PEROWN and Mary Ann Hills is known in Norwich today; a solitary great-great-great-grandson, fifth in direct succession to be christened JOHN, was born in London on 20th August, 1942.

* * * *

In the preceding pages we have reviewed those branches we have traced for more than three hundred years -a procession for the most part of very ordinary people united in the beginning in a common hereditary craft and today scattered widely in a multitude of diverse trades, professions and occupations. Surprisingly, no evidence emerges in the process of any blood relationship with the seventeenth and eghteenth Century Peron and Pieron weavers of Threadneedle Street and Spitalfields discovered in our earlier investigations¹⁷; the roads by which our current contacts came all lead unerringly back to Norwich. The stragglers by the way (see FRAGMENTS are fewer in number than we might have expected, and of them the majority prove to be of no great significance to our present purpose. With time and effort many could certainly be restored to their proper places in the ranks; a few belong, perhaps, elsewhere, conceivably in other Norwich networks not yet identified.

In the former category the comparatively recent "Bristol connection" (See Fragments 13 and 15) must surely fall, but we know of no JOSEPH PEROWNE who was a musician, while his daughter Anelina appears in the records for the first and last time at her wedding, - in 1905. Of REGINALD PEROWNE, the Doctor of Medicine, there is no trace. It is of little help to learn that his elusive son REGINALD LEON (her uncle by marriage) was "given to excessive drinking". (letter dated 29th August, 1973, from Mrs Dorothy Bradshaw, of The Hermitage, Little Durnford, Salisbury, Wilts); His second marriage and his death are, indeed registered at Somerset House, but, not his first entanglement or his birth. It seems probable that this Bristol detachment will be found also to have started out from Norwich, and to have strayed 'en route' beyond the boundaries of England and Wales.

On the other hand, JOSEPH JAMES PERONE the whitesmith of Lambeth and Shoreditch, could (despite the familiar combination of forenames) prove to be the odd man out, improperly mustered among this "residue of yarn". For, From 1837 the surnames Peron (var. Peron, Perou), Perona, Perone, Peroni, Perronne punctuate the pages of the "GRO Indices". They are prefixed here and there by alien sounding christian names, such as Cesar, Toussaint, Angelo, Clotilde and Luigi¹⁸. DIGNEY (var, Disney) PERRY PERON, the first of a succession with those names to figure .in the Registers, is described as a weaver, domiciled in Bethnal Green; the last in our list was landlord of the "Old Parr's Head" public-house in West Kensington in 1900. It was at this date the name of PHILLIPE PERONNE was attracting custom over a hairdresser's shop at 60, Piccadilly W1. We can not tell who EUGENE was, who lived (1914/18c) in Victoria Square SW, because we have not explored these ramifications, perceiving in them no relevance to the Perowne Pedigrees we are now ready to recite. In the immortal words of the Athenian General Nicias, declaimed on the eve of his expedition to Sicily (415BC):

"Let anyone who thinks otherwise take my place"

The authentic translation reads: "If anyone thinks differently, I invite him to take the command instead of me". Thucydides - "Historv of the Peloponnesian War".

---

footnotes:

3	GEORGE PEROWNE, born 14-Apr-1838 in Norwich ( St Saviour's) was the son of an unidentified BENJAMIN and Priscilla (formerly Freeman); he died in infancy, Q31838 (General Register Office) (See Fragment 7).
4	"The Old Churches of Norwich" ‑ Noel Spence & Arnold Kent Jarold Publications - 1970."
5	To bolt = to sift; to separate bran from flour. Bolter = a machine for separating bran from flour Bolting-cloth = a cloth for sieves; linen, or hair, cloth for bolters. - (Nuttalls Standard Dictionary)
6	"The Old Churches of Norwich ‑ Noel Spence & Arnold Kent. Jarold Publications - 1970."
7	That this is the full tale of them has been verified by Mr Gordon G.Tilsley, Town Clerk of Norwich.(letter d/12th February, 1973)
8	The school records were lost (or deliberately burned!) in the 1850s. The school magazine dates only from 1873, by which date John Smith Perowne had left Norwich.
9	Miscellany of Gentry, Clergy, Partners in Firms etc. Perowne. Rev. John Smith, rector of St John Maddermarket, Shrubbery, (p.166) Trades and Professions Academics: Perowne. Rev., Jno Smith Shrubbery, St Stephens Rd (p.171)
10	"Lord Randolph Churchill" by Winston S.Churchill - Odham's Press Ltd., London, 1905
11	Anotlier, but irrelevant, coincidence is that Lord Randolph was for a time (1857‑1863) a pupil at Mr Tabor's school at Cheam, in Surrey, where JOHN JAMES STEWART PEROWNE had been for a term a master in 1845
12	In our records the forename Harry is rare. Among the fragments (7 and 8) are two extracts from the Indices at Somerset House: ·   1847 - HENRY SCHWABE PERROWNE, son of Anne Perrowne, died 14-Jul-1847 at Bridge Road, Battersea, aged 3 days. ·   1849 ‑ HARRY SCHWABE PEROWNE, son of Annie Perowne, born 8-Dec-1848, at 4, Marlborougli Terrace, Haggerstone (Shoreditch); father "none". To the pathos of the first, the second adds a degree of mysticism. Who was the luckless star of this sordid little two act drama we can not know; nor does poor Annie or her son appear again. It is more easy to imagine a lusty Schwabe, with a skinful of gin (at one penny a glass) and a wife in every port, than to snare the confidence of John Ditchman, Registrar, in a latter day immaculate conception.
13	A Mary Ann Charlesworth, aged 24, spinster, daughter of William Charlesworth, file-smithof Scotland Street, Sheffield, married, 26-Dec-1844, in the Parish Church, Sheffield, Joseph Pass, grinder, widower, of Solly Street, Sheffield, son of Charles Pass, cutler.
14	Priscilla is rare among Perowne fornames. George, son of Benjamin and Priscilla (Freeman) Perowne, was born, 14-Apr-1838, in the parish of St Saviour, Norwich, but died in infancy. This Benjamin is as yet unidentified (Fragment 6). Priscilla Elizabeth herself was born 16-Jul-1844 and her daughter Priscilla Mary Jane MacFadyen (out of wedlock) on 20-Jan-1886. Priscilla Elizabeth Cooper married James Perowne in 1859. The name does not appear elsewhere in our records.
15	By an odd coincidence, Herbert Perowne was placed in the same ward in hospital at Bloemfontein with Connop Perowne. Neither had any idea who the other was, or how (if at all) they were connected. There were at least five Perownes in the Army in South Africa at that time and probably more.
16	It is an oft-repeated aphorism that every English pedigree must include at least one butcher.
17	According to the Census of 1851, JAMES JOSEPH PEROWNE (1791 - 1873)(Plate III.B.1), the bolting-clothmaker, was born in Shoreditch, but there is nothing to show how his parents came to be there at that time.
18	The inquisitive can find at Appendix C a table by no means comprehensive of extracts taken in the course of our present researches from the Somerset House Registers. See also the Principle Lineage of "Origins of the Name &; Family of Perowne"(1973)