Joshua Ruse (1738-1803) & Mary Wiseman (c1751-1827)
Joshua Ruse was a yeoman farmer and member of a family whose surname appeared in Ashdon in Essex and Castle Camps in Cambridgeshire, and other neighbouring parishes such as Radwinter since the C17th.
Joshua Ruse of Castle Camps in Cambridgeshire married Martha Pratt 19 May 1761 at Ashdon. Parish records for Castle Camps included reference to Joshua Ruse Jun as the parish constable in 1767. The death of Joshua Ruse senior was recorded at Castle Camps in 1770.
Joshua and Martha had two children who survived childhood: Joseph (unclear when he was born, but referenced in Joshua’s will) and Jesse (“son of Joshua and Martha Ruce” was baptised at Ashdon on 29 Nov 1776). Four other children died in childhood.
The parish records recorded the burial of Martha Ruce on 1 December 1777.
Joshua Ruse, widower, married Mary Wiseman on 28 March 1780 at Castle Camps by licence – the bondsman being Robert Rist of Castle Camps, a miller, whose wife was a member of the Ruse family.
Joshua and Mary then settled in Ashdon. His will dated 1801 named two sons, Joseph and Jesse, and “by my present wife” four daughters, Thirza, Mahalar, Mary Ann, and Rebecca. Ashdon’s parish records recorded the baptisms, with Joshua and Mary Ruse (or Ruce, or Rouse) as parents, of Thurza on 18 August 1782, Rose Anne on 9 December 1783 (she was buried on 6 December 1785), Muhala on 1 February 1787, Mary Ann on 11 Jun 1789. There is no baptismal record of Rebecca (or Rebekah) who was born c1792.
“Annals of Ashdon” by Robert Gibson (1988) includes this description: While, over the centuries, Ashdon would seem to have been no more static a rural community than any other, the one conspicuous quality…is its very real sense of seclusion. The community was some distance from the country’s main highways. For all essential goods and services it was self sufficient so there was no pressing need for any of the parishioners to travel. It goes on to quote the description of the Ashdon roads by a surveyor in the 1770s as both bad and exceedingly intricate, there being scarce a direction-post to be seen, or a track to be depended on, the commons over which you pass being more worn by the neighbouring inhabitants in passing from their ground to their respective farmhouses than by travellers in their passage from parish to parish (History of Essex by a Gentleman).
There is little exact information available about the family of Joshua and Mary. The Ruse family farmed at Hill Farm in Ashdon in the C19th – the White family genealogical research noted that the Ruse family were described as “a nice sort of people”. From the 1770s to the early 1790s Hill Farm was occupied by a John Ruse after which it was broken up and part was farmed from the Rose & Crown Inn (‘Ashdon’ by Angela Green 1989). The White family research also includes the following notes made by Richard Wentworth White (one of Rebekah Ruse’s grandchildren): “Copy of writings from first & last pages of a large Bible which belonged to my G.mother née Rebekah Ruse in my possession: In the year 1799 I began harvest Sept 2nd & [ended?] Oct 5th, Joshua Ruse Ashdon Hill. The wheat that grew in the harvest Eight Hundred was sold at 45 pounds for 5 quarters and at a general price 40 pounds.”
In his will dated 1801, Joshua Ruse left all his real estate to his eldest son Joseph and the sum of £50; £200 was to be paid to wife as per conditions of the marriage bond and £200 to his son Jesse. Leases and interest of the messuages, farms and land to wife including messuage or tenement and Inn called the Rose at Ashdon were given to his wife then to his son Joseph. All monies and securities were given to his four daughters when they attained the age of 21.
Joshua directed “that the farming business in which I shall happen to be engaged at the time of my decease shall be carried on jointly by my said wife and son Jesse…and I earnestly enjoin and request them to engage in and use their utmost diligence in the management thereof…”.
One of the witnesses of the will was Richard Green, the blacksmith at Ashdon. A codicil dated 1802 was made after his daughter Thirza married James Ewin, a miller and farmer from Shudy Camps in Cambridgeshire, and had been given £100.
Joshua Ruse was buried on 22 March 1803 at Ashdon, age 65.
Thirza died in 1808, and her husband James Ewin married her sister Mahala in London in 1811. Also in 1811, Mary Ann Ruse married at Ashdon to Matthew Jones, a merchant from Aldgate London. Jesse remained living in Ashdon, where he married Judith Ewin in 1810.
In November 1817, Joshua and Mary’s daughter, Rebekah, married Richard White at Ashdon, the witnesses included Mary Ann Ewin (probably the daughter of James and Thirza Ewin born in 1802) and John Ewin.
Mary (Wiseman) Ruse died aged 76 and was buried at Ashdon on 3 June 1827.
By the mid-C19th, Hill farm was one of the largest in the parish, over 146 acres of mixed arable and grassland and was tenanted by the Ruse family until the 1880s. John Ruse, who was tenanting Hill Farm in the Tithe returns of 1848, was also the parish surveyor and responsible for overseeing the planning of the first bridge in the parish (near Bartlow) in the 1840s, the first bridge at Ashdon having being built about ten years earlier. The Ewin and Ruse families continued to be present in the parish, both as farmers and as millers.