The Grief Index

[I] In the year 1072, within eighteen months of the Conquest, one Aldric of the Hale — the elder — lost his house, his fields, and his name: the house given to a Norman lord, the fields reassigned, the name replaced in the parish roll by a notation in a different hand. His wife is listed in the same roll as uxor, deceased. Their son William kept the tenancy by swearing an oath he afterwards refused to repeat to anyone who asked him what he had sworn. He never spoke of his father again, or if he did, no record of it survives.

In the winter of 1091, Alice, daughter of William of the Hale, died in childbirth. The child died with her. No name is recorded for either of them in the parish roll; the entry reads only Alice filia Willelmi et puer, hora tertia. Alice, daughter of William, and the child, at the third hour. The third hour is nine in the morning. It was a Tuesday. Vol. I →

[II] In October of 1348, the pestilence came to Halecroft. Richard Hale died. His wife Maud died. His son Edmund, aged eighteen, died. His brother William died. William's wife Alice died. William's daughter Joan died, her name day uncertain. Father Croft, the priest, died. Agnes, the midwife, died. Walter the miller died. The reeve's two sons died. The shepherd died. The shepherd's apprentice, whose name is not in the record, died. The woman who kept the inn at the edge of the village died. The man who ground the malt died. The woman whose name is given in the roll only as the widow by the stream died. Fourteen further names in the parish roll for the autumn of 1348 are followed by a cross and nothing else. The entries stop in November. It is not known whether the priest who was keeping the roll died before he could finish it, or whether there was simply no one left to record.

In the spring of 1349, a boy of eleven returned to the village from Pershore and found it largely empty. He had lost his father, his mother, his brother, his uncle, his aunt, his cousin, the priest who had taught him to read, and — depending on how one counts — most of the village he had grown up in. He did not write about this loss. He wrote about the pig. The editors believe this is the same thing. Vol. II →

[III] John Hale of Halecroft, son of Thomas, died in 1421 of a fever contracted on campaign in France. He was thirty-one years old. He left a wife, Margaret, who is mentioned in the estate records as managing the farm alone for seven years before her son William came of age. Margaret's own account of these years does not survive, if she ever wrote one. The farm survived. Margaret does not appear in the record after 1430.

In 1461, in the disorders that attended the change of dynasty, two tenants of the Hale farm at Halecroft were killed in circumstances that the manorial roll records as per tumultum — in the tumult. Their names were Robert Fen and his son, also Robert. The younger Robert was, the roll notes, seventeen years old. The farm was not damaged, which the editor of the 1884 collection appears to regard as the more important fact; the editors of this supplement do not entirely agree. Vol. III →

[IV] In the autumn of 1642, Thomas Hale, a Royalist captain of horse, was killed at the skirmish of Edgehill. He was twenty-eight years old. His wife Eleanor received a letter from a fellow officer informing her that her husband had died well, which is what such letters always say. The letter survives in the deed-box. Eleanor's reply, if she sent one, does not. Eleanor managed the estate through the Interregnum, paid the sequestration fine, and negotiated the return of the property at the Restoration. She outlived her husband by thirty-seven years. The record shows her, in this period, as a name on documents: a signature, a seal, a mark in the rent-rolls. What the record does not show is considerably more than what it does.

Their son George, born in 1639, grew up without a father. This fact is not recorded anywhere in the family papers as a loss. It is recorded here. Vol. IV →

[V] Judith Hale, wife of Charles Hale of Harton Hall, died in 1726 in the twenty-second year of her marriage. The cause of death is given in the parish register as fever after lying-in. This was her seventh confinement. Of the seven children, four survived infancy: two daughters and two sons. The two daughters married. The two sons, the elder being Charles and the younger being Richard, grew up under the management of a series of housekeepers whose names appear in the account books and nowhere else. Charles, the elder, inherited the estate in 1741 and appears to have had no interest in it whatsoever. Richard, the younger, ran it until his death. What either of them remembered of their mother is not known. Vol. V →

[VI] Augusta Hale, born 1800, was the daughter of Frederick Hale and his wife Catherine. Her brother James died of typhoid in 1821, aged nineteen, on his way home from a failed attempt to establish himself in trade. Augusta received the news by letter. She was twenty-one years old and recently married to a man who would prove to be absent from the estate and from her life for eleven of the twenty years they were married. The letter about James is in the deed-box, folded small. A note in Augusta's hand, on a separate slip of paper folded inside it, reads: He was the only one I could talk to.

Augusta's three children by Henry March were: a daughter who died at four days old and was not named, a son named James after her brother who died at eleven months, and a daughter named Clara who survived and from whom the Hale-Marsh line descends. Augusta raised Clara mostly alone. Clara does not appear to have known, until she was an adult, that she had had a brother and a sister before her. Augusta did not speak of them. Vol. VI →

[VII] Edmund Hale of Harton Hall died in August 1882, in the forty-first year of his age. He was the last of the Hale line in the main branch. His death notice in the Worcestershire Advertiser describes him as a man of considerable attainment and wide acquaintance in the county. What the notice does not say, and what the sealed document in the deed-box implies, and what two passages formerly withheld from the public record now confirm, is that there was a child — Thomas, aged nine, son of a woman named Clara Marsh, a seamstress of Brixton — and that financial arrangements were made, and that Edmund died knowing the child existed, and that the child, as far as the record shows, was never told. Thomas Marsh, if he lived, would have been born in approximately 1873. What became of him is not known. The estate passes to the trustees. This entry, alone in this inventory, concerns a loss that was inflicted rather than suffered. Vol. VII →

[VIII] Henry Marsh-Hale, grandson of Clara, died at the Somme in July 1916. He was twenty-three years old. His commanding officer wrote to his mother that he had shown great bravery. He had been in France for eleven weeks. His mother kept the letter in the bottom of her work-basket for the rest of her life. Henry's younger brother Arthur survived the war with what the family described as his nerves shattered; Arthur never married and is listed in the 1939 register as living in lodgings in Leamington Spa, occupation clerk. He does not appear after that date in the family record.

Dorothy Marsh, Henry's mother, also lost — in the space of eight months in 1917 and 1918 — her husband George, her brother-in-law William, and two of her nephews whose names the editor of this supplement, having read the relevant documents three times, finds she cannot bring herself to list separately. They are listed here together: Thomas Marsh, twenty, and Edward Marsh, seventeen. Edward had enlisted without telling his mother. She found out when he did not come home. Vol. VIII →

[IX] Violet Marsh, née Hale-Marsh, born 1920, lost her house in the Blitz on a Thursday in October 1940. She was not in it; she was on night shift at the telephone exchange. She came home in the morning to find the street changed. She stood at the end of the road for some time, by her own account, before she understood what she was looking at. She lost all her photographs of her mother, who had died in 1936. She lost her mother's wedding ring, which had been kept in a box on the mantelpiece. She lost a letter that she had been intending to reply to for six weeks and now never could. She lost a cat named George. She moved to the temporary accommodation in Harlow New Town and remained there, eventually purchasing the property under Right to Buy, for the rest of her life. She described the house in Harlow as perfectly adequate. She did not describe what she had lost. Vol. IX →

[X] Eleanor Voss, archivist, opened the deed-box in the Bodleian in January 2024 and found inside it — among the documents — a slip of paper in a hand she did not recognise, folded very small, which read: If you find this, please know that it was not all unhappiness. It is not signed. It is not dated. It has been added to the catalogue as MSS. Hale-Marsh X, item 47. Eleanor Voss sat with it for a long time before she wrote anything in her notes. What she eventually wrote was: I don't know who this is for, but I think it was meant to be found. This may or may not be a loss. The editors have included it here because they do not know where else it belongs. Vol. X →