The story of the Disturnal’s goes way back into France, and the wars of religion that lasted throughout the 1600s.
So where do we start with religion? Throughout history in some way religion has affected and dominated every facet of the lives of our ancestors, not always to their favour.
The little that is known about pre-Roman religion involved ancestor worship and Paganism – which in itself is a term first used by Christians in the 4th century for beliefs in multiple gods. The Greeks had multiple gods, as did the early Romans, the Celts, the Vikings and the Anglo Saxons. Early British Paganism is initially associated with the Celtic peoples who were widespread over Western Europe for 1000 years following the Iron Age and yet little is known about them. The Celts, their lives, their peoples, their religion, their very existence were systematically wiped out by the Holy Roman Empire as it expanded from Rome arriving in Britain in 55BCE bringing their own Gods. The Romans resisted the rise of Christianity until around 300BCE when Constantine I was converted to the faith and their previous persecution of the sect ended. In 383BCE Christianity became the official state religion, based in Rome. By then the Romans had started to desert Britain and the Celtic customs returned disturbed only by increasing numbers of Christian missionaries crossing the country converting where they could. Paganism enjoyed a brief revival during the invasions by Angles and Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries but their customs and practices were finally rejected in favour of Roman Christianity at the Synod of Whitby in 664 and Celtic culture was lost to the shadows. The Irish and the Scots took on Roman practices in the 7th and 8th Centuries and eventually the Welsh followed. Since then various forms of Christianity have been the major religion of England and a major part of everyone’s life, through the remainder of the Dark Ages, through the Norman invasion of 1066, through the Middle Ages right through to today.
Christianity involves the belief in one God. This is the same God also for Judaism and for Islam but (put simplistically) Judaism believes that God has had a special relationship with the Israelites since the Creation, and Islam believes Jesus to have been one of the prophets of God, and not his son. So while this was enough of a difference for Islam and Judaism to go their own way, the Catholic Church in Europe grew in power – and power corrupts and schisms appeared and were harshly dealt with. While Catholicism ruled under the Papal States in Italy, the Holy Roman Empire was alive and well in Germany. The Catholic Church in Rome had armies and waged wars. Early successes of the 8 Crusades between 1096 and 1291 greatly added to the prestige of Popes as believing themselves to be the leaders of Christendom culminating in 1302 when Pope Boniface VIII declared that “it is necessary to salvation that every human creature be (a subject of) the Roman Pontiff”.
The French in particular rejected these delusions of princedom and from 1307 to 1376 the Papal Court moved from Rome and set up in Avignon where Papal rulings increasingly favoured the French to the dismay of other European political powers. The schisms continued. In the South of France the Cathars formed their own version of Christianity. By 1417 two popes reigned in France while the English supported the original Pope in Rome. This was resolved over the next 20 years and the rejuvenated Roman papacy reorganised becoming very rich by introducing new taxes and selling offices, favours and pardons. The higher offices spent this money on great buildings and fine and extensive wardrobes, on gold and silver and other luxuries. This splendour and corruption found its way right down to the lowest ranks, down to Pardoners who sold absolutions for all kinds of sins and Friars who increasingly no longer followed their vows of chastity and poverty.
In England the Norman invasion did little to change the growth of Catholicism. The great cathedrals were built around this time with Westminster Abbey (1042), York (1080), Durham (1093), Canterbury (1174), Wells and Lincoln (1191) and the new Salisbury Cathedral (1220). But doubts arose. In the 1300s John Wycliffe viewed the richness of the Church and at the same time witnessed the suffering of the ordinary people in the Black Death in Oxford around 1350. Rather than following the ecclesiastical view that the plague was God’s wrath on a sinful people, he saw it as an indictment of an unworthy Clergy. Increasingly he argued for the scriptures as being the centre of Christianity and that these writings should be available to the ordinary people instead of only in Latin for the learned. He argued that the claims of superiority of the Papacy had no basis, that monks and friars were irredeemably corrupt, and that monasteries should be dissolved. His view was that the moral unworthiness of priests invalidated their office and sacraments. His movement – nicknamed Lollardy by the Pope as an insult – spread across England and was at least part of the reasoning for the Peasants Revolt in 1381 along with poverty, the Black Death and high taxes. In forwarding these beliefs Wycliffe is sometimes seen as the first Protestant 130 years before Martin Luther.
Wycliffe died in 1384 and 30 years later was declared a heretic by the Catholics in Rome with persecution ordered on any of his followers. His body was exhumed and burnt and thrown into the River Swift at Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which flows into the Warwickshire Avon and eventually into the River Severn.
But when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses onto the door of the church at Wittenberg Germany in 1517 expressing many of the same concerns as Wycliffe he succeeded in establishing forever an alternative to the Catholic ascendancy. Initially intended perhaps a movement of protest and reform inside the Catholic Church the vitriolic response that his actions and words engendered pushed Luther further to question the very validity of Roman belief. Protestantism was born. This Reformation was a triumph of literacy made possible by the recent invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. This enabled wide distribution of religious pamphlets which flooded most of Europe in the early 1500s and which became a cheap and easy method of distribution of beliefs and discontent for the next 400 years.
In turn it was probably this general availability of religious thought that led also to diversity of opinion within the new faith – pamphlets were the Internet of their day. The original Lutheranism put forward a very strict interpretation of biblical requirements, much as the Puritan movement in England. John Calvin was not so strict and established Geneva as the capital of the Protestant Huguenot movement, providing a refuge from Catholic persecution and a centre from which to spread a kinder more tolerant Protestant word. In France in particular Calvin’s approach quickly took on a political element as many of the upper echelons of society changed to the new faith.
Calvinism appealed to educated Frenchmen as well as prominent tradesmen and military officers and believers included many of the elite members of French society in what had previously been an almost totally Catholic country. Despite this Catholicism remained the majority religion in France. Initially the rise of Protestant Calvinism was tolerated but by 1562 there were estimated to be more than 2 million Huguenots and more than 2000 Reformed churches across France. The January 1862 Edict of St Germain recognised officially the rights of Huguenots to practice their religion during the day but not in towns or at night, and they were not allowed to be armed. This made them an easy target in April that year for the massacre by Catholic troops of 60 (of a crowd of 300 or so) Huguenots holding a church service outside the walls of Vassy, 200km to the West of Paris near Caen. The French Wars of Religion had begun.
It is estimated that these French Wars between 1562 and 1598 killed 3 million people across France and it was Huguenots who suffered the majority of the slaughter and many fled the country. In 1562 Lutheran Protestants took control of Sens, Tours and Toulouse and massacred 3000 Huguenots. In 1572 the Catholic Catherine de Medici orchestrated the slaughter of 100,000 Huguenots across France in the 2 months following the original St Bartholomew’s day massacre in Paris which killed up to 3000 in one night. The Wars continued until 1598 when Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes promising official toleration of the Protestant minority. The Huguenots however distrusted the King and used the peacetime to reorganise against the Crown, arming themselves and forging alliances abroad. When Louis XIV ascended the throne in 1643 their persecution began again. Huguenots who did not flee were hunted down and killed or forced to convert to Catholicism. In 1685 Louis enacted the Edict of Fontainbleu, withdrawing all previous Edicts and making Protestantism illegal. Many more left the country, hounded and massacred by French troops as they ran, initially to Italy and to Germany. In particular Brandenberg in Austria publicly offered residence or protected passage whether on to England, the Netherlands, Prussia, Switzerland or the English and Dutch overseas colonies, the Americas, and South Africa and others across the World. And the irony is that France suffered because of it. This loss of a large and educated sector of the workforce was a disaster for many towns cities in France who lost in some cases 50% of their working population. The exodus included many intellectuals, doctors and business leaders. Much expertise in cloth, silk, mining, metalwork, glassmaking and winemaking was lost to other countries and this in many cases resulted in businesses and industries setting up abroad that grew to rival the businesses where previously there had been French dominance.
Because Huguenots fled France by stealth no official lists are available of those who left or where they went to. About 20% of the surviving Huguenots (estimates vary between 20,000 and 150,000 but probably at least some 40-50,000) came to England between 1685 and 1702. While many settled for coastal towns across Kent and in the southern half of the country the largest concentration by far was in London where by 1700 they made up 5% of the population concentrated around Spitalfields, Shoreditch and Wandsworth. By the turn of the century in these areas there were 14 French churches, an Alms house called “La Soupe” and in 1718 a French Hospital was founded.
In Canterbury and Norwich large weaving communities arrived with knowledge of silk that spread also to Derby and Coventry. Many refugee families from Lorraine (notably Tyzacks, Henzeys and Titterys) eventually found their way to Stourbridge where coal, silica, sand, fireclay and power from the River Stour, all necessary for glass-making were readily available, allowing them to use their knowledge as miners, and in glass production and metalwork. In Studley in Warwickshire the arrival of Huguenots is credited with making it an important wool weaving town.
Those that arrived in England found a Country in the midst of constitutional change. James II, the last Catholic English monarch, had attempted to set in place a firm Catholic succession to the throne and made long-lasting treaties with France. He was deposed and replaced with his nephew the Calvinist William of Orange and his wife Mary (James’ daughter) when in 1688 the Glorious Revolution occurred when William and Mary were invited to “invade” England and take over as king and Queen. His fleet arriving at Hexham was considerably larger than the Spanish Armada 100 years earlier and comprised 250 carrier ships, 60 fishing boats and 35,000 men. He was welcomed ashore and led into London.
This act established in England for the first time a constitutional monarchy in which sovereignty was derived from Parliament and not from royal birth. England had famously split from Rome under Henry VIII who had established the Church of England (Anglican) in 1532 and although for the next 150 years religious policy had varied with the ruler, the country now provided a safe place for religious dissenters whilst at the same time England was keen to be seen helping out those harried out by the French Catholic ruling classes. In England (to all but Catholics) old religious animosities were diminishing and a new spirit of toleration existed in which non-conformists could openly have their own chapels, teachers and preachers. The high level of education and skills brought by Huguenots also helped assimilate the huge numbers arriving. And despite the Catholic role in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and other unrest even persecution of Catholics was diminishing until the laws suppressing this belief were finally repealed in 1829. Meanwhile Protestantism continued to split into many different denominations – Baptist and Anabaptist, Methodist, Adventist, Calvanist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Quaker, and even Mormon missionaries came across the land (although basically a Christian religion, Mormonism tends to sit apart from all of the others). Each new belief gained support and sustenance from inequality, injustice and poverty where they found it as England roused itself it seems from a deep and long-lasting agrarian slumber and entered the Industrial Revolution where conditions in the growing towns and cities could be crowded, disease often spread and life was hard.
Many Huguenots needed financial assistance on their arrival having been unable to bring anything with them. Official funding was started by Charles II in 1685 when he felt “obliged in honour and conscience to comfort and support all such distressed Protestants who by reason of the rigors and severities which were used towards them on the account of their religion should be forced to quit their native country” and public money was made available. £65,000 had been provided in the 3 years following 1685. In 1691 Sir Robert Clayton reported that of over 30,000 refugees at that time, more than 3,000 were in need of assistance. This continued under Queen Anne from 1702 when funds from the Royal Bounty were allocated to poor French families and £12,000 was provided in 1705 and 1707. Under George I between 1721 and 1724 funding of £39,000 continued and it was estimated that upwards of 7,000 people shared in the distribution of funds in those years.
The first Disturnal/D’Estournell so far found to be in England is Nicholas Destournell who married Mary Marley in May 1680 at the original St Mary at the Bourne (later Marylebone), London. Connected or not, on 31 March 1681 Sarah Disturnal is recorded as buried at St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square but no age or parentage is given. In 1683 a Nicholas Disturnal married Jane Bruny again at St Mary, Marylebone. Some researchers have suggested that his full name was Nicholas de Constant D’Estournelle in which case we may have a family tree going back centuries following a Huguenot family of the 16th century who had fled initially to Switzerland but who still seemed also to continue to serve in the French forces. There are no known children to Nicholas but 18 years later at St Martin in the Fields (dedicated to St Martin of Tours) Peter and Elizabeth Disturnell baptised first John Samuel Disturnal in March 1699 and two years later in June 1701 Mary Ann. In December 1701 a Penelope Disternell is buried there, followed by a Mary Ann in 1723.
In 1701 and 1702 first Hester and then Ann are recorded as being baptised by their father Samuel Disturnal in Inkberrow, Worcestershire, then a notoriously poor village to the west of Birmingham. Nothing more is known of this family but perhaps there is a link?
Back in London in November 1708 John Disturnal married Ann Stanley in St Andrew Holborn. It was probably they who had a son Josias baptised there in September 1709.
The arrival of more Disturnals into England are evidenced by the Royal Bounty funding under Queen Anne. In 1705 a recipient of support is recorded as Josias Destournelles (Commoner, age 31) from Paris with Susanne his wife (age 55?), and 4 children of whom the eldest was 6, living in Westminster/Soho. They received £2/2s that year. If the eldest was 6 then this child was born in 1699 possibly while still in France. It may be that their second born child was Jean (John) baptised in Jersey in May 1702 as they fled across the Channel. Third maybe came Suzanne who on her death in July 1779 in the French Hospital in Church Street (St Anne’s) London is recorded as being aged 76 and is described as being “the daughter of Josias Destournel, native of Paris, a refugee because of his religion (‘pour cause de religion’)”. Fourth maybe then came Josias born in August 1703 and baptised in St Anne Soho. A fifth child Pierre was born to Josias and Suzanne in December 1705, baptised in St Anne Soho on 13 January 1706, but it is then a coincidence in the Private Register of the Huguenot Church of La Patente de Soho the baptism of a son Josias on the same day 13 January 1706 to Josias Desternel and Susan Morel confirms his Paris origin where he was a Surgeon. They again received funding in 1707 from the Royal Bounty of £1/19/6d when they are still recorded as having 4 children.
- In 1733 a John Disturnal married Hannah Dausey in St Anne’s and three children are recorded – William in 1730, John in 1734 and Elizabeth in 1735 all in St Ann & St Agnes with St John Zachary. In 1742 and 1745 John Disturnall, Gunsmith of Bermondsey, took on apprentices in the trade. In 1759 Philip Disternel, son of John of Bermondsey, was apprenticed to William Disternel, Clockmaker. In 1764 John Disturnall, son of John Disturnall of Newington, Gunsmith, was apprenticed to Henry Gubbin, Goldsmith. John Disturnel was buried in St Mary Newington in 1767.
- There is no record of Suzanne ever marrying and at her death in 1779 she is still a Destournel, still living in St Anne’s.
Of the first born, and of Josias (1703) and Pierre/Josias (1706) there are a number of possibilities but little evidence of certainty to identify them. In 1774 the reverend Josiah Disturnall was a Governor at the Brideswell Royal Hospital.
The 1705 Royal Bounty payments list two other Josias Destournel/Destournelles in need of support on arrival in England, one in Westminster Soho, and one in the parish of St John. On 21 November 1708 a Josias Disturnal married Ann Stanley in St Andrew Holborn and on 18 Sep 1709 had a son Josias christened at the same church.
The St Martin in the Fields Settlement Examinations show a Peter Distornall in 1714, a silversmith with wife Mary from a Fleet marriage in Feb 1713. In 1718 a Peter appears as a Periwig maker but by 1728 a Peter Distornal is in Marshalsea Prison for debt – the widower of Ann (married at St Clements in 1718), and the father of Thomas (b1719) and James (b. 1724) both baptised at St Andrew by the Wardrobe. There are two more children, Peter and another James baptised by Peter and Ann Distornal in the area, but they are not mentioned in 1728 and nothing more is recorded of James. Thomas however probably went on to marry Hannah and have 5 surviving children – Thomas (at St Andrew), Amelia and Elizabeth (at St Giles), and Humphrey and MaryAnn (at St Sepulchre) between 1753 and 1768.
A Susannah Distornal is recorded in 1728 as having a son James by John Ramsey, born in the Workhouse. Twenty-one years later Esther Destornell age 18 is recorded as the deserted wife of James Destournell from a Fleet marriage in 1748. In 1729 a Josias Distournel married Ann Hatton at St Paul’s Wharf, and in 1730 John and Katherine Desternel baptised John and Mary in St Mary Whitechapel (although a John is buried there the same year).
In 1733 the Church Wardens and Overseers of the Poor of the Parish of St Sepulchres successfully petitioned from the removal of Josias Disturnell the Elder back to the Parish of St Andrew’s in Holborn. Having not obtained any legal settlement and by reason of his great poverty, and on the basis of an oath by Josias Disturnell the Younger that his father did 5 years ago live and keep a house in St Andrew’s Holborn at a yearly rent of £13, it was ruled that he should be returned there. This was appealed by St Andrew’s Overseers but the result appears to have stood with Joseph Distornol being buried at St Andrew in November 1738. Meanwhile Josias the Younger paid his land tax while living in Upper Shadwell St in St Paul. He married Catherine Morton at St George in the East in 1732 and proceeded to have 5 surviving children Ann (1733), Richard (1736), Peter (1737)and Josias (1738) all born in Holborn. But after the death of his father the family moved to Darlaston on the outskirts of Birmingham where the 5th child William was born in 1740. Thus began a long line of Black Country Disturnals based mainly around St Lawrence in Darlaston and St Bartholemews in Wednesbury. They became shopkeepers of earthenware, of groceries and provisions, they ran public houses and beer shops, they were gun-lock forgers in Wednesbury, Axle manufacturers,and corn dealers. Some branches went to Australia (New South Wales) and to Canada (Sedgwick, Alberta).
But Came They All to Birmingham 