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The Holyland families of Desford


"DESFORD, a large village, with many framework knitters, is pleasantly situated on a bold acclivity, about a mile south of the station, to which it gives its name, on the Leicester and Swannington Railway, 5 miles E. by N. of Market Bosworth, and 8 miles W. by S. of Leicester."
[WHITE's "History, Gazetteer and Directory of the Counties of Leicester and Rutland, 3rd Edition," 1877]

      St Martin’s Church, Desford

The parish records from the Anglican church of St Martin in Desford start on 6 June 1559 and are in good condition and surprisingly legible, so I’ve been able to gain information about the growth and decline of the Holyland families in the village over almost 300 years. Religious non-conformism didn’t reach Desford until the 1800s and there are only a handful of Holyland BMDs in the available non-conformist records for the county. The family seem on the whole to have stayed with the Anglican church.
The first mention of the family in the parish records is of the burial of one Thomas Holyland on 28 Jan 1564. Between then and the last recorded Holyland events, the burials of William and his wife Hannah in October 1857, there are around 165 mentions of the name and its variants in the parish registers. This equates to about 2% of all names in total, although the heyday of the surname was the century between 1650-1750, when 4.7% of all parish record entries referred to people with this surname.
At times there were 3 different variants of the name being used simultaneously, but the fixing into the Holyland spelling can be seen clearly, thus:


All family historians will be familiar with the difficulty of trying to tease out the webs of different branches of a family in a village, especially when only a minimal range of first names was in use, when mothers were not named on baptismal records, and when women were not even named on burial other than as “Widow Holyland” (but WHO WAS THE HUSBAND?!  I hear you all cry with me in frustration!) Furthermore, in the early years of the registers, there are few mentions of marriages for the Holyland men; it seems that many either married away from Desford, or maybe didn’t undertake a formal church marriage at all. My attempts to these 16th/17th century Holyland ancestors into the correct family groupings will always be educated guesswork.

Early wills show family members to have had the wherewithal to be lending money and gifting property to other people. Thomas Holyland, who died in 1653, left money to be distributed to the poor of the village on St Thomas’s day (when else!). But they were not gentry. Some of the men were described as “yeoman”, but it seems that most had a trade. Whilst some were farmers, bakers, or joined the army, probably the commonest trade was butcher. Some paid for their sons to leave for London as apprentices in other, more rarified trades; I’ll mention those in another post. I’ll also write separately about how the Holylands spread out from Desford.

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