William Crabb

William Crabb was christened at Littleport on 10 January 1726, the youngest of Robert and Mary Crabb's four recorded children, into a village where his surname was already everywhere — the registers of his childhood carry half a dozen Crabb households at once. On 25 July 1749 he married Esther James at Littleport, and across the next quarter-century they baptised nine children there: Robert, William, a Mary who lived twelve weeks, a second Mary, Christopher, Clement, a son given the family's most distinctive name — Pepper — Thomas, the last-but-one, who carries this line forward, and a final William who died at eight months. Two babies buried, seven raised: the ordinary arithmetic of the age, in one family's rows.

What sets William's generation apart is a printed page. Edmund Carter's History of the County of Cambridgeshire, published in 1753, lists the freeholders of Littleport — the men whose land gave them standing and a county vote — and among them stand four of the clan: Christopher Crabb, Pepper Crabb, Bennet Crabb, and William Crab. The family that would end the next century as landless fen labourers began this one holding ground in their own right; the fall from that page to the 1891 census's one-word 'pauper' is the whole social history of the fens compressed into five generations of one family. William did not live to see it. Esther died in the spring of 1796, sixty-nine years old; William followed on 24 October 1804, buried at Littleport aged seventy-eight, in the same registers as his baptism, his wedding and all nine of his children.