The Domesday book records that Appleton near Cumnor, 4 miles to the west of Oxford, was a relatively prosperous place in 1086. It had the most valuable fishery in Berkshire (now in Oxfordshire) being priced at £1.4s.2d., and nearby it was Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux and half brother of William of Normandy who owned one of the two landholdings there. A medieval manor house, Cumnor Place, was built in the the village around 1330 initially as a summer retreat for the Abbots of Abingdon Abbey but it was surrendered to the Crown on the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1538. In 1559 Robert Dudley chose the house as the place for his wife Amy Robstart to reside separately from him allegedly as part of his plans to marry Queen Elizabeth I, and it was here that Amy died a year later, either by accident or design, having “fallen down the stairs”. In later years Cumnor Place fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1810.
We have DNA links to the family of Rachel (nee Smith) who married Francis Musto in nearby Wallington in 1814. Rachel was one of six children born in Cumnor to the marriage of John Smith of that parish, and Elizabeth (nee Louch), from nearby Besselsleigh. These families were likely labourers for the Bertie family, then the Lords of Abingdon. Francis Musto meanwhile had been born and raised in Burford.
Fifty years previously in Burford it had been on 27 February 1764 that William Mustoe (noted as a Blacksmith on the Church register) married Rachel Spurrett. Burford is an ancient market town at the Northern edge of The Cotswolds sited on a crossing of the River Windrush almost midway along what is now 30 miles of the A40 between Oxford and Cheltenham. Both William and Rachel were “of this Parish” and there are records of both Mustoe and Spurrett families in the town before then. Burford was an important coaching route before the railways came, and as a Blacksmith in the middle of a rural community before the Industrial Revolution brought increasing mechanisation, William would have been at the heart of the community making nails and locks, furniture, horseshoes, and perhaps weapons and armour, in many cases working closely with the local Wheelwright.
William and Rachel had a son William baptised in Burford in 1766, and it may well have been this William who married Mary and had two sons (Mary’s maiden name is unknown) found in subsequent census returns – Thomas born in 1788 and Francis in 1790, both in Burford but we have not found and baptismal records nor any marriage record for the assumed children. The 1851 Census finds Thomas in Oxford where, as a Widower, he married Mary Luckett and the 1861 census shows him, aged 73, as a Street-Sweeper.
Francis Musto in the 1841 census is living with his family near Cumnor, perhaps having originally arrived in Appleton where his first daughter Mary was baptised in 1814. The 1841 Census shows Francis to be an agricultural labourer. Francis and Rachel produced 4 daughters and two sons to this marriage over the next 17 years.
The youngest, Thomas Musto was baptised in 1831 in Cumnor, started off as an agricultural labourer and a Gardener, but sometime in the mid 1850s he moved to Franchise Street in Birchfield, Birmingham where he became a Malster in one of the many Breweries across the City. It was there that, as a widower, he met and married Mary Medland in Aston Juxta in 1866, a Devon girl recently moved to Birmingham. Between them they had three daughters and a son in the 1870s. Whilst Eliza married a Florist in Harborne and Alice married a Clothing Collector, it was their daughter Mary Jane Musto, born in 1873 who married Frank Hickerton, a Gold-Ring Maker, in 1903 in St Johns, Ladywood. By 1911 they had 3 sons, Fred, Tom and Frank, and a daughter Ruby.
Frank served in the First World War and although he survived he died young in 1928 aged only 48 never having recovered from military service with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Mary Jane Hickerton (nee Musto) soldiered on until 1954, when she died in Birmingham aged 81.
But Came They All to Birmingham 