Robert Brock was baptised at Haxey, in the Isle of Axholme, on 15 July 1716 — a son of Thomas Brock and his wife Susanna Ward. On 10 October 1738 he married Elizabeth Fillingham at Haxey, and there the couple made their life; Robert kept a licensed house, set down in the records of the day as a victualler and small property-owner.
In the small hours of 29 February 1744, fire broke out in a flax manufactory near the church and swept through the village — in about three hours it took sixty-two houses, and the inhabitants were driven, as the old account has it, “naked into the fields.” Robert was among the sufferers: the relief list drawn up that spring sets him down as “Robert Brock, Victualler and small owner, himself and two small children,” with a heavy loss of £40 in buildings. The two small children beside him in that entry were Elizabeth, four, and Robert, two; the family came through it.
He and Elizabeth raised four children at Haxey — Elizabeth, Robert, Thomas and John — and it is through Thomas, baptised in 1745, that this line descends. Robert lived on in the parish into old age, and was buried at St Nicholas, Haxey, on 6 December 1791. The register calls him eighty-one, though by his baptism he was nearer seventy-five — the loose reckoning parish clerks often gave the very old. Elizabeth, his widow, followed him a year later.
The name outlasted them all in the parish: a windmill on the Haxey–Burnham road was known for generations as Brock's Mill.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-02