Jane Betsy, Rosa May and Chancery
The case however, is disappointingly straightforward, but why it was ever brought to Chancery is another question altogether and one I still struggle to find answers for.
The summons to court was sent to widowed Jane Betsy and her unmarried daughter Rosa May on 12th December 1887. The case would be heard on 12th January 1888. The case was taken out by the Norwich solicitors. It still strikes me as an extreme way to deal with a lump sum which her son Harry had lodged with the Norwich solicitors to top up his mother's annuity.
I have to go back to Bleak House for the image which came to mind. I thought of my 2nd great grandmother, Jane Betsy, as a sort of eccentric Miss Flight, living in the attic at 81 Aden Grove with her caged birds, called, Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach, waiting hopelessly for a judgement.
I puzzled as to why two of Jane Betsy's brothers-in-law should take her to court, until I realised it was the Norwich solicitors who had brought the case. Even so the methods were a bit extreme.
It wasn't until I understood there were two separate wills involved in making up Jane Betsy's annuity, from her father and her late husband, that it began to make sense, but I still think the method of attempting to sort out the muddle was extreme.
The map above shows the location of the various farms which were being run by Skinner family and their relatives in the 1880s. The two farmers, Sherwood William Page and Alfred Neave, who were the plaintiffs, had taken over administration of the trust fund left by James Pollard Skinner for Jane Betsy.
Page and Neave were both successful farmers married to Jane Betsy's sisters, who, like her, would have inherited the income from the land holdings of their father. The bequest from her late husband was something different. The case was convened and brought because Jane Betsy's daughters were querying the short fall in their mother's annuity with the Norwich solicitors. Two of Jane Betsy's sisters had died by 1887. Sherwood William Page had married another sister, thus keeping the land within the family. I am not sure if any of the Tunstall farmland was involved, although my co-researchers have identified land belonging to Sherwood William Page on the Tunstall side of the River Bure. By this time, returns from the land were diminishing and some of the land may have been sold or used to pay taxes or debts; or Sherwood William Page may have been reimbursing himself for expenses, as enabled to do, by the will of Stephen Bately, of which he was a trustee.
Jane Betsy's brother in law, John Pollard Skinner, also married to one of her sisters, is farming at Thrigby at this date. The chancery case effectively brings Sherwood William Page and Alfred Neave into muddle. I guess the case went ahead and was heard by Justice Stirling and that should have been an end to it, but it wasn't.
I cannot resist quoting Charles Dickens:
"A chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which I thought the judge eye had cast in my direction) was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated, and had been entirely owing to the 'parsimony of the public'; which guilty public it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery Judges appointed – I believe by Richard the Second, but any other king will do."
Jane Betsy's annuity may have been sustained successfully when she lived with her daughter at 81, Aden Grove and she may not have taken the attic room and attended the chancery court every day, or even only once to answer the summons. Judging from the letter Emma Jane received from the Norwich solicitors in 1912, Alfred Neave had invested the money and, from the fact she made him sole executor of her will in 1893, I should think, made sure she had the annuity every year she was expecting.
I am still going to put a picture of Miss Flight meeting Esther Summerson and the wards in the endless chancery case in Bleak House below.
I think there was a myth of wealth in the family. If there had been and the case went to chancery, the only people laughing at the end of it would have been the lawyers as in Bleak House.
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