WEIGHTMAN
The name was also shown as Wightman and Weetman and appeared in local records for over 200 years but the incomplete parish registers make it impossible to know whether all the people listed were descendants of Roger Wightman who was listed as a juror at a Scawton Manor Court in 1588 but it is possible that he was an ancestor of the Thomas Weightman who paid tax for two hearths in 1673 and whose daughter Elizabeth was baptised in Scawton in 1678.
No members of the family were listed as tenants in 1694 but John Thompson was holding Weetman’s two oxgangs amounting to 16 acres and Thomas Weetman was paying annual rent of £34 in 1708 which must have been for a sizeable farm and eleven years later John Weetman was paying rent of £20 for a farm that was held by his widow in 1732. There is no record of John’s baptism in the parish registers but he was born in 1672.
A Thomas Weetman was tenant of Scawton Croft in 1750 and was living there with his wife Helen who was the daughter of John Berry who ran the ale house at a dwelling in Rievaulx now known as Mill House. Thomas and Helen were married in Scawton in 1742 and their children Ellen, George, Ann, Rebecca and Mary were born at Scawton Croft between 1747 and 1758.
A John Weetman married Ann Bradley in 1755, she being a daughter of the tenant of Stocking House Farm but there is no record of his baptism nor that of another John Weetman who married Dorothy Beal by whom he fathered seven children, Dorothy [1775], Thomas [1776], Eleanor [1778], twins George and John [1780], Robert [1783] and Sarah [1785].
The last Weightman tenancy recorded in Scawton was that of Thomas who in 1812 was paying annual rent of £57 4s 6d for 147 acres and as he died at the age of 38 in 1815 he appears to have been the son of John and Dorothy and the last member of the family recorded in Scawton was Mary Weightman who married Marmaduke Taylor in 1820 and there is no record of her baptism.
STURDY
John and William Sturdy were both listed as jurors at a Scawton Manor Court in 1588 but the absence of parish registers make it impossible to positively link these men with the Thomas Sturdy whose dwelling with three hearths in 1673 suggests that he was tenant of one of the larger farms and he may have been the same Thomas who held 64 acres in 1694, part of which was described as William Sturdy’s moor. As that William was probably the one listed as a recusant in 1637 and his wife Alice and John, Ann and Thomas were also listed it seems fair to assume that this group were living in Scawton at the end of the 16th century. In 1667 John, Christopher, Thomas and Dorothy Sturdy were all listed as recusants and nine members of the family were so listed in 1685. The listing in 1735 of Sylvester Sturdy, wife Dorothy, daughter Dorothy, widow Elizabeth Sturdy with sons John and David and daughter Theophila shows that the family clung tenaciously to their Roman Catholic beliefs for at least a hundred years.
