A curious feeling struck me when travelling through the Oxfordshire countryside on the way to Ascott-under-Wychwood for the first (as far as I know) large-scale get-together of the Chaundy family last summer. Not far from the grounds of Blenheim Palace, a small herd of deer leapt across the road in front of our car and sped off across the adjacent fields. I had my camcorder in my hands and managed to capture some footage to go into the subsequent video of the gathering. The feeling was one of continuity, that deer such as these were running about this countryside in the same way when the first Chaundys were settling in the area.
It was a familiar feeling because ever since I had hatched the idea of a family get-together, I could not help but be amazed at how large a nucleus of the Chaundy family had remained around Oxfordshire, so close to their roots. We were heading towards a small out-of-the-way Cotswold village where ancestral records first mention Chaundys living there half a millennium ago, yet there were Chaundys I was about to meet who still lived nearby.
The most comprehensive family tree that had been compiled of the Chaundys runs to some 250 pages. It was written by an Australian, Alison Schenk, whose ancestors were part of the Chaundy family. Though it is a fascinating and admirable piece of work, it is full of mistakes, largely due, I suspect, to its having been compiled in Australia from various source material sent to the author from England and with no real opportunity for comprehensive fact-checking. Some of these mistakes had their lighter side. My father, who lives in Australia, and who is described in the family tree as deceased, took much delight in telephoning the author and describing himself as a voice from the grave. He was also amused when I questioned him about an older sister I never knew I had. Much to my mother’s relief it turned out not to be a skeleton in the closet. I believed my father’s innocent protestations since the names of my children, as listed, bore little relation to reality either.
The introduction to Alison Schenk’s version of the family tree has it that oral history suggests that our family is descended from three Huguenot brothers who came to England from a town north of Paris called Chauny. She adds the “romantic speculation” that we could have descended from a Norman knight called CHAUNDUIT listed in the Sussex town of Battle as having fought with William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The author then, by implication, refutes any Huguenot notion by referring to references of the Chaundys dating back to the fifteenth century, long before the formation of the Huguenot church.
The earliest concrete reference to a Chaundy that I have come across, is not, in fact, in the Schenk family tree but was told to me by Duncan Chaundy from Canada, who discovered it in the Bodleian Library when studying at Oxford. In the Patent Rolls for May 1st 1434, Westminster, it states: “Commission pursuant to Act of the last Parliament to W. bishop of Lincoln and William le Souche of Haryngworth, ‘chivalier’, and Thomas Grenham and William Beaufo, knights of the shire for the county of Rutland in the last Parliament, to issue their warrant to the sheriff for proclamation in the next court of the county that the following whose names have been certified into chancery by the said knights of the shire as those of persons who should take the oath not to maintain peace breakers referred to in the said Act (see Rolls of Parliament Vol. IV, p. 422), should appear before the said commissioners, or three or two of them, and take the said oath”. 37 counties are listed including Oxford - “W. bishop of Lincoln and William de Lovell, ‘chivalier’, also Stephen Hatyfeld and Richard Quartermains, knights of the shire for the county of Oxford, commissioners to receive the oath of the following”. There follows approximately 400 names including John Chaundie.
It seems that there were several periods in the fifteenth century when times were lawless and this was one way to try to bring some order back to the shires. Duncan Chaundy concludes, and it is hard not to agree, that the people chosen to be listed for each county would have to be well known and established in their village or county. This would suggest that there were Chaundys in Oxfordshire in the 14th century or earlier.
Wendy Pearse, Secretary of the Wychwoods Historical Journal, has recently come across John Chaundie’s name again, this time in a document, written in Latin a few years later, in the Brasenose College archives. Concerning a grant of land in Ascott Doyley, it mentions that the said Chaundie owned a building in the west called Halleplace.
Half a millennium later, more than seventy of this John Chaundie’s ancestors gathered in the pouring rain outside Holy Trinity Church that summer’s day. The organisation had been conducted via newpapers, radio, e-mail but mostly by word of mouth. Everyone began, it seemed, by looking for similar physical characteristics in one another. Long faces and long noses seemed to be the consensus. Many had brought along their own family trees and mementos.
Several of us could point to well-known or distinguished forbears along the way, such as the builder, John Chaundy, Sheriff of Oxford in the mid-nineteenth century whose development of St. Ebbes in 1840 was marked by the street-name Chaundy Place that remained until the construction of the Westgate Shopping Centre in the 1970s.
There was F.W. Chaundy who ran a tobacconist in Market Street, another John Chaundy whose print shop in Broad Street appears in a John Betjeman poem, yet another John Chaundy whose typewriter shops were well known in the city, and, perhaps the most distinguished, Dr. Theo Chaundy, son of the print shop owner who became a mathematics don at Christ College and Chairman of the Oxford Freeman’s Committee. There were no relations at the gathering of one William Chaundy born in High Wycombe in 1806. A postman, he was convicted of stealing money from a letter and was transported to Australia from whence he never returned. But he spawned a whole new overseas branch of the family.
The day was a great success. There was so much to say, to hear and to catch up on. As so often with these occasions, it built up its own momentum and many expressed the wish to meet on a regular basis. Sue Chaundy then set about assiduously drawing up a comprehensive family tree for inclusion on this, her website, for which she deserves at least a CBE! Whether the interest in genealogy is increased by an impending sense of one’s own mortality I don’t know. But one lady in her eighties, born and brought up in Ascott-under-Wychwood, wrote to me after the event and thanked me, undeservedly, for “getting the family sorted”.
Following abuse of my email address under the Harassment Act 1997,
my cousin Bob has kindly agreed to accept email on my behalf at Bob Chaundy