George Brock

George Brock was baptised at Belton, in the Isle of Axholme, on 17 October 1619 — a son of Francis Brocke and his wife Elizabeth Taylor, of a family long settled in the parish. Then, in 1634, a boy of fourteen or so, he was bound apprentice in York — to William Scrafton, barber surgeon: the working surgeon of the age, who let blood, drew teeth and set bones as well as kept the razor. The card index to the city's register of apprentices carries him — “son of Fran. Brocke of Belton, Lincs, yeoman” — a yeoman's younger son, sent out of the Isle to learn a city trade.

The published register of York's freemen — where an apprentice who served out his term would ordinarily be enrolled — has no Brock in it from first to last: the term never carried George into the freedom, and the city's freemen's rolls never hear of him again. Why he came home no record states; but the registers allow a reading, offered as a reading only. Alexander, the first of Francis's sons, was nearly five years George's elder; and on 13 May 1636 the Belton register buried an “Alex: Brock, singleman” — an unmarried man, the entry now read at the page. Which Alexander it holds the register cannot alone say, for the parish had another of the name, also young enough to be single; but “singleman” rules out any married or widowed man. If it was the brother, then two years before their father died George had become Francis's eldest surviving son — and the land, not the razor, would have been his portion. What is certain is the frame: bound to York in 1634; his father buried in December 1638, “Ffrancis Brock, yeoman”; George at the altar at Belton in 1643, and every later record of him a Belton record.

He came of age as the kingdom slid into civil war; and in December 1643, weeks after the fighting had reached Lincolnshire, he married Hellinor Sealand — the wedding entered in the registers of both Belton and Amcotts, on a page that also records the burial of an unbaptised infant. Two children followed: Alexander in 1643, and Elizabeth in 1645.

Then the record thins. From the middle of the 1640s the Belton register, like registers across England, falls nearly silent, and Hellinor is heard of no more — no burial for her survives. When the entries pick up again George has a second wife, Alice. Their marriage is nowhere recorded — it was made in the years when such records were simply not kept — but the register itself supplies the proof of the union: in January 1651, on a near-empty page still written in Latin, their daughter was baptised “Susanna Brocke, filia Georgii et Aliciæ” — Susanna, daughter of George and Alice.

Four more children followed — George and William, baptised together in March 1653, Francis in 1655, and Peter in 1656 — and it is through Francis, who settled at Haxey, that this line descends. After Peter's baptism George himself passes out of the record: no burial survives for him around Belton, and the year of his death, somewhere near the Restoration, is unknown. Alice long outlived him; a Belton burial of December 1692 is very possibly hers.