Introduction
The Cross Keys Tavern had expanded during the 1740s. It seems that business was booming. Elinor, husband Thomas and her son from her first marriage, Nicholas Ley, combined the running of the tavern with the Shipway family building activities. All was going well. However, one by one those close to Elinor were to leave her. By 1752 she was once again all alone.
Widowed Again
In March 1748/9 Thomas Shipway dies. We cannot tell how old he was when he passed away. He and Elinor did have nearly 20 years of time together as man and wife. He was probably in his sixties at the time of his death. Like his father, brother and son before him he is buried at St Andrew’s. Elinor seems to have expedited his will with some haste. Just threes days after the funeral probate is granted.
Thomas left almost all of his estate to her with the exception of minor bequests to his siblings. His will states:
I give and bequeath unto my Sister Sarah Shipway A Mourning Ring which came to me on the Decease of my late father
I give and bequeath unto my Sister Elizabeth wife of James Linton Glover One Guinea in Gold.
No mention is made in his will of his other two sisters Hannah and Mary. He leaves brother William “All my woolen Apparell which I shall have at the time of my Decease”. As we have already seen, William died four years earlier so was hardly in a position to need them.
The omission of his other sisters, Hannah and Sarah, is strange. It could be explained by the fact that both were earlier apprenticed to their father William. Hanna was apprenticed in 1732 and Sarah in 1742. Thomas may have considered that the prospects of future prosperity of having a trade, sufficient a legacy for these two sisters.
Elinor
We seem to have neglected Elinor somewhat in describing all that is known of her second husband. The truth is she does not appear in much documentation for the period of her marriage to him. There is the wedding itself, of course. The birth and untimely death of their son is another instance. The only other mention is that of Thomas’s own death in 1748. There is no evidence beyond her being Thomas’s wife – and mother of her son Nicholas from her first marriage.
We cannot even know for sure that she and Thomas lived at number 40. Although the deeds do suggest this. One deed about number 40 states that it is “now in the possession of said Thomas Shipway”. Unfortunately, the term possession does not necessarily mean he and his family actually lived there. They may have sub-let any or all of their Friar Street properties and lived elsewhere.
Let us assume that Elinor is living at number 40 at the time of her husband’s death in 1748. Her first born son, Nicholas Ley, would at that time been about 24 years old. Most likely he would have been still been living with her. Although we have little to go on, Elinor (in the author’s opinion) is a survivor. She would have been well capable of continuing the business at the Cross Keys should she have had to. After all her father was an innkeeper, as was her first husband. It may even have been the case that it was Elinor herself running the pub. Thomas continued with the family building trade, enlisting as needed the strong arms of her son. So despite the sorrow of losing a husband for a second time she could have continued in much the same way as she had done.
A Hammer Blow
It must have been a hammer blow then, when in 1752 she loses, for a fourth time, a male relative very close to her. The parish records for St Helen’s show that Nicholas Ley the younger, son of Nicholas Ley, was buried in the same grave as his father within that church. Nicholas was 28 (the same age that Elinor was hen she married his father). We know the two Nicholas’s were buried together as Elinor has Nicholas Ley’s memorial stone in St Helen’s church updated with the following epitaph:
Also here lieth the Body of Nicholas
Ley (son of the above named) who
departed this life 29th March
1752 Aged 28 years
The memorial stone is now lost but studies done at the beginning of the 20th century categorically state that this inscription is done by a different hand. So, it is clear that the inscriptions are made 27 years or so apart.
Read Part Six: The Cross Keys ExpandsRead Part Eight: Final Years