The Ancient Roots of the Danforth Family of Suffolk County, England

THE ANCIENT DANFORTH FAMILY of SUFFOLK ENGLAND BEGINNINGS

In the 1630s thousands of Puritan families from Suffolk County settled in the American region known as New England, taking much East Anglian culture with them. Included among these emigrants from Suffolk was the family of Nicholas Danforth of Framlingham. The Danforths have their misty roots planted firmly in Suffolk County, a small region of land barely 40 miles by 35 miles situated on the eastern coast of England. The North Sea coast line of 50 miles made the region depended on sea trade but also vulnerable to invaders. The geography of the county of Suffolk is largely of low lying arable land with very few hills, and rivers and brooks flowing to the North Sea. The Suffolk coast line of Suffolk is said to be an area of outstanding natural beauty.

PRE ROMAN BRITON

The Roman historian Tacitus suggested that the Britons were descended from people who had arrived from the continent and the inhabitants of Southeast Britannia to Gaulish tribes. There was certainly a large migration of people from Central Europe westwards but whether these movements should be described as "invasions", or as mere "migrations" is difficult for historians and archeologists. There are examples of events which could be labeled "invasions", such as the arrival in Southern Britain of the Belgae tribe from the end of the 2nd century BC as described in Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War. According to Julius Caesar, the Britons further inland than the Belgae believed that they were indigenous.

Most of Britains history before the Romans were actually recorded by the Romans. Its “prehistory” is only known by its ancient monuments and archeological findings. Bumps and mounds, irregular slopes of ancient hill forts, strangely carved designs in the chalk, jagged teeth of upstanding megaliths, stone circles of immense breadth and height and legends of ancient mysterious wells and springs tell another history the Romans never recorded.

Humans lived in the British Isles long before it broke away from the continent of Europe, “long before the great seas covered the land bridge that is now known as the English Channel, that body of water that protected this island for so long, and that by its very nature, was to keep it out of the maelstrom that became medieval Europe”. Early man came, settled, farmed and built. His remains tell us much about his lifestyle and his habits.

The island's early inhabitants left behind deposits of not only fine tools made of flint, including hand-axes, but also a fossilized skull of a young woman as well as bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, cave-bears, lions, horses, deer, giant oxen, wolves and hares. From the remains, we can assume that man lived at the same time as these animals which have long disappeared from the English landscape.

The was a thriving culture around 8,000 years ago while the still-cold climate of the glacial period was slowly coming to an end. As the climate improved, there was an increase migration into Britain from the Continent. They were attracted by its forests, its wild game, abundant rivers and fertile southern plains. An added attraction was its relative isolation, providing protection against the fierce nomadic tribesmen forever searching for new hunting grounds and perhaps, people to subjugate and enslave.

A new period of settlement took place around 4,500 BC, in what is termed the Neolithic Age or New Stone Age. In the more fertile south, agriculture played a much larger part in the lives of villagers as animal husbandry began to flourish. Farming began to transform the landscape of Britain from virgin forest to ploughed fields. Early inhabitants kept cattle, sheep, pigs, goats and dogs. They also cultivated various kinds of wheat and barley, grew flax, gathered fruits and made pottery. They buried their dead in long barrows, huge elongated mounds of earth raised over a temporary wooden structure in which several bodies were laid. These long barrows are found all over Southern England, where fertile soil and gently rolling landscape greatly aided settlement.

At Norfolk, in the eastern half of Britain, great quantities of flint were mined by miners working deep hollowed-out shafts and galleries in the chalk to create tools found all over Britain.

The megalith cultures built massive stone structures standing upright as walls, with other huge blocks laid across horizontally to make a roof. They were then covered with earthen mounds which have in many cases, completely eroded. They are some of the oldest manmade stone structures known, older than the great Pyramids of Egypt. Between the late Neolithic and the early Bronze Ages (c 3370 - 2679 BC) huge single standing stones were aligned on the rising or setting sun at midsummer or midwinter the most famous Stonehenge. Henges seem to have been used for multiple purposes, justifying the enormous expenditure of time and energy to construct them.

The Beeker People of the late Stone Age emerged in Briton around 2200 BC. They were named after the shape of their most characteristic pottery vessel and brought the first metal-users to the British Isles. The Beaker People are partially credited with the building with the second stage of Stonehenge. At the time of their arrival in Britain, they seem to have mingled with another group of Europeans we call the "Battle-axe people," who had domesticated the horse, used wheeled carts and smelted and worked copper. They also buried their dead in single graves, often under round barrows. They also may have introduced a language into Britain derived from Indo-European.

The two groups seem to have blended together in Southern England and were responsible for the enormous earthwork called Silbury Hill, the largest manmade mound in prehistoric Europe. These people made well crafted stone battle axes, but also metal daggers with richly decorated hilts, precious ornaments of gold or amber, as well as gold cups, amulets, even a sceptre with a polished mace-head at one end.

About 600 BC the Celtic peoples arrived in the British Isles where the Romans found them the main population. Until Julius Caesar crosses the English Channel from northern Gaul and began his failed conquest of Britain, the Britons did not appear in history. In the process of migrating to the island, the Celts pushed the native populations north. These refugee tribal groups would become the cultural ancestors of the Picts, a mysterious culture that dominated Scotland until the Irish invasions of the 5th Century AD. When the Romans returned in 43 AD, they began a systematic conquest of Britain until they reached the Pictish tribes in the Scottish highlands. Rome could not defeat the Picts and would abandon northern England in 117 AD however not until building a massive wall to keep them contained.

The Romans found a disunified group of tribal kingdoms organized around the same logic of warfare as the Gauls. Most of the tribes the Romans encountered were new arrivals with the bulk of southern Britain had been conquered by the Belgae from northern Gaul in around 100 BC.

However Celtic ritual life centered on a special class of people, called the "druids" by the Romans. What is known about the Druids is that they performed many of the functions consider "priestly" functions, including ritual and sacrifice, but they also included functions that we would place under "education" and "law." According to Julius Caesar, who gives the longest account of the druids, the center of Celtic belief was the passing of souls from one body to another. .

Population estimates of pre-Roman Britain at the time the Romans could have been 500,000 to 1 million by the end of the first century BC, with no significant number of people older than fifty years. Most people were concentrated densely in the agricultural lands of the Southeast. The average life expectancy at birth would have been around 25, but at the age of five it would have been around 30. These figures would be slightly lower for women, and slightly higher for men on account of the high mortality rate of young women during childbirth.

THE ROMAN ERA 1 AD -500 AD

The Danforth’s ancient ancestors were a mingling of Roman Britons, Germanic Angles and Saxons, Scandinavian Vikings, and French Normans. The ancient Britons, the first residents of the area were susceptible to a series of invaders from the sea, starting with the Romans, followed by the Angles, the Saxons, and the Danes, and finally the Normans over a thousand year period from 40 AD to 1066 AD. The invading settlers who made the greatest impact on the region were a Northern Germanic tribe called the “Angles”. The Angles came to Britain shortly after the Romans left in the 5th Century and they called their new home “Land of the Angles”, which over time became “England”; a name that was eventually applied to the rest of Britain.

 

The Romans invaded Briton in 43 AD under the orders of Emperor Claudius. The Romans brought war elephants and heavy armaments to the island which would have overawed native resistance. Eleven tribes of Southeast Britain surrendered to Claudius. It is likely that the tribes of Southeastern were already as good as beaten when the emperor appeared and made a triumphant march into Colchester which the Romans established as their new capital. Claudius returned to Rome to celebrate his victory and the legions left behind went on to subdue the rest of the island. Roman garrisons built forts and walls to protect the cities and villages built throughout their newly conquered province. Roman Governors, with their legions and knights ruled the island for nearly 400 years until the collapse of the empire.

The Roman town of Colchester just south of Suffolk County is said to be the oldest recorded town in Britain on the grounds that it was mentioned by Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who died in AD 79. The Celtic name of the town was Camulodunon and it was already a center of power of the Trinovantes tribe ruled by King Cunobelin, known to Shakespeare as Cymbeline. The name of the town meant 'the fortress of [the war god] Camulos'. At the time of the Roman Conquest Colchester controlled a large swathe of Southern and Eastern Britain including southern Suffolk under Cunobelin "King of the Britons" by Roman writers. Just north of Cunobelin’s kingdom was the kingdom of the Eceni, a Brittonic tribe.

Their Eceni [Iceni] kingdom included present-day Norfolk, parts of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and and in Roman period, their capital was Venta Icenorum at modern-day Caistor St Edmund. Roman historian Tacitus recorded that the Iceni Tribe was not conquered in the initial invasion of AD 43, but its king had come to a voluntary alliance with the Romans. However, the Eceni rose against the Romans in AD 47 after the Roman governor, Publius Ostorius Scapula, threatened to disarm them. The Eceni rose in revolt but were defeated by Roman troops in a fierce battle but were allowed to retain their independence. A wealthy, pro-Roman war lord named Prasutagus was able to gain full control over the Eceni people and became king.

It was common practice for a Roman client king such as Prasutagus to leave his kingdom to Rome upon his death, but the Ercenian king sought to preserve his line by bequeathing his kingdom jointly to the Emperor and to his own daughters when he died in 50 AD. The Romans ignored this, and the procurator Catus Decianus in London seized his entire estate for the Emperor. When Prasutagus's widow, Queen Boudicca, protested she was flogged, and her daughters were raped.

Queen Boudicca bided her time until AD 61 when after forming an alliance with the neighbouring Trinovantes tribe she led a full scale revote against the Romans. The Roman Historian Cassius Dio, wrote: “...a terrible disaster occurred in Britain. Two cities were sacked, [London and Colchester] eighty thousand of the Romans and of their allies perished, and the island was lost to Rome. Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.... But the person who was chiefly instrumental in rousing the natives and persuading them to fight the Romans, the person who was thought worthy to be their leader and who directed the conduct of the entire war, was Buduica, [Boudicca] a Briton woman of the royal family and possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women.... In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of divers colors over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire.”

The revolt caused the destruction and looting of Colchester, London, and St Albans and the slaughter of tens of thousands Romans and Britons. The Emperor Nero considered abandoning Briton altogether before finally Queen Boudicca was defeated by Governor Suetonius Paulinus and his legions. Although the Britons outnumbered the Romans greatly, they lacked the superior discipline and tactics that won the Romans a decisive victory. Today, a large statue of Boudica wielding a sword and charging upon a chariot can be seen in London on the north bank of the Thames by Westminster Bridge.

Colchester was the home of the first permanent Roman fortress to be built in Britain in AD 43. It was renamed by the Romans as Colonia Claudia Victricensis (City of Claudius’ Victory), and was the main port for Roman troops landing and departing from Britain. The city was also the capital of the Roman province of Britannia, and its temple, the only classical-style temple in Britain, was the center of the Imperial Cult in the province. The city was also initially home to the provincial Procurator of Britain. The city was one of the few Roman settlements in Britain designated as a Colonia rather than a Municipia, meaning that in legal terms it was an extension of the city of Rome, not a provincial town. Its inhabitants therefore had Roman citizenship.

When the revolt of AD 61 entered the city, as the symbol of Roman rule in Britain, Claudius Temple of victory was attacked and destroyed. Tacitus "In the attack everything was broken down and burnt. The temple where the soldiers had congregated was besieged for two days and then sacked." The revolting armies then destroyed the city and slaughtered its population. “The sea appeared blood-red, and specters of human corpses were left behind as the tide went out".

Following the destruction of the Colonia the town was rebuilt on a larger scale and flourished, growing larger in size than its pre-Boudiccan levels despite its loss of status to Londinium. Of the two provincial administrators, the senatorial military governor was always located in areas of conflict, whilst the civilian Procurator’s office had moved from Colchester to the newly established port commercial settlement of Londinium (London).

However the Colonia did retain the Imperial cult center and priesthood at the Temple of Claudius. The colonia was at the center of a large territory containing many Roman villa sites. Colchester reached its peak in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and would have been the center for any commerce and produce coming from natives of Suffolk.

Suffolk is the site of several Roman villa complexes in Suffolk including one called Castle Hill outside of Ipswich. This Ipswich site is described as the largest and most sophisticated villa complex known in Suffolk comprising several buildings, including a bath house. The buildings, both timber and stone, show several phases of rebuilding, spanning the 1st to the 4th centuries AD. Once the Romans left it fell into ruins.

The presence of the Romans in Suffolk is also noted by a Roman bath house with running hot water built in the 3rd and 4th centuries at Stoneham Aspel, and Burgh Castle, also known as the Saxon Shore Fort. This Roman fort, built in the 3rd Century third century, was constructed to defend the south coast of Britain known as the Saxon Shore, against invaders from Denmark and Germany. Today the walls still stand up to an impressive 15 feet high.

In 407 Constantine III was chosen Emperor of the collapsing empire by Roman troops in Britain. As emperor he took the remaining troops in Britain back across the English Channel into Gaul [France]. In 409 Constantine's control of his empire fell apart. Britain, now without any troops for protection and having suffered particularly severe Saxon raids in 408 and 409, viewed the situation in Gaul with renewed alarm. Perhaps feeling they had no hope of relief under Constantine, the Britons expelled Constantine's magistrates in 409 or 410 “rejected Roman law, reverted to their native customs, and armed themselves to ensure their own safety.”

After the Roman armies withdrew in about 406 A.D. the British Isles were defenseless and subjected to a series of sea invasions from Northern German tribes from an area now known as Schleswig-Holstein, the most northern state of Germany. The times of peace and prosperity was over with the arrival of the Saxon and the Angle Goths.

THE DARK AGES 500 AD- 1000 AD

Only DNA testing of the male lineage of the Danforth family can determine whether the Danforths descended from indigenous Briton or whether the male ancestor arrived in Britain with the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 5th Century. The east coast of Britain, left defenseless by the departure of the Romans, was invaded and settled by the Angles as early as around 450, earlier than many of the other regions of Britain. These Angles formed the Kingdom of East Anglia about 500 AD which was one of the seven kingdoms in Britain during the period known as the “Dark Ages”. The term Dark Ages refers to the fact that literacy had all but disappeared when the Romans left. The Roman and Greeks classical knowledge was discarded by the German barbarians who hated the Romans.

The new kingdom of East Anglia was founded in the lands of the Eceni and was bounded on the east by the North Sea and the south west by the kingdoms of the West Saxons, Wessex), the East Saxons (Essex) and the South Saxons, (Sussex). The Northeastern lands were settled by Angles who founded the kingdom of Mercia. East Anglia divided between its north folk ( Norfolk ) and the its south folk ( Suffolk ). The "North Folk" and "South Folk" division may have existed before the first of Anglian kings of who we know very little. Legend named first king of East Anglia, Wuffen, “Son of the Wolf”.

The Angles and Saxons were pagan until the 7th Century when Pope Gregory I sent missionaries to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. By mid-600’s the kingdom of East Anglia was mostly converted to Christianity. It would be at this point that the ancestors of Nicholas Danforth began to adopt Christianity and abandoned the old ways of their ancestors.

At one point East Anglia was dominated by the Anglican Kingdom of Mercia until the 9th Century when the “Great Heathen Army” coalition of Danes and Norsemen invaded Britain in 865. Because of East Anglia's proximity to the sea, the kingdom was constantly being invaded by sea pirates known as the Vikings. The Vikings were also commonly known as the Northmen, the Norse, the Normans, and the Danes.

The patron saint of England for nearly 300 years was an East Anglican king named St. Edmund until he was replaced by St George in the 13th century. He was also the last king of East Anglia and was killed in battle against the invading Danes in the year 869. Certainly any ancestor living in East Anglia at that time bore arms against the invaders..

On Christmas Day, 855 AD, Edmund was consecrated king of Anglia. Ten years later the 'Great Heathen Army' of the Danes arrived by ship on the coast and set up its winter camp in East Anglia. King Edmund managed to buy them off with a gift of horses from rampaging in his kingdom and the Danes turned their attention to the kingdoms of Northumberland, Mercia, and Wessex. Four years later the Danes rode back into East Anglia, where they wintered at Thetford. King Edmund attempted to drive them out was but killed in battle at 'Hægelisdun' on November 20th, and is buried there or nearby. The town of Bury St Edmunds was named for the slain king. The Anglo Saxon king Alfred the Great did manage to keep the Great Heathen Army from turning all of Britain into a Scandinavian nation, but the eastern half of the Island including East Anglia was ruled by the Danes. For almost two hundred years the Danes controlled Suffolk and mingled their Viking blood lines with the Angle people.

The Danes’ control of Suffolk ended in the Eleventh Century, when William the Duke of Normandy, he himself a descendant of Vikings, invaded Britain in 1066 and defeated the armies of Angle and Saxon kings. William, now known as the Conqueror, became the first Norman King of England.

It is at this time that the men of our family became identified with the surname that eventually became Danforth. The family surname name Danforth is a derivative of the words “Dern ford” which became Derneford. This name was derived from the Anglo-Saxon word "dierne" meaning "hidden” and the Danish word “ford". A ford was a Viking word for any body of water shallow enough to cross on foot or horseback. The linguistic root of the word ford is similar to the word fjord meaning a narrow inlet from the sea between steep cliffs. Thus the family name is a reminder of this period of British history when Danish kings ruled the people of Suffolk.

The word Derneford was originally a name of a location and was used to mean a hidden crossing. In a 14th Century tale concerning King Edmund during the Viking invasion used a crossing called 'Dernford' to escape capture. The word 'Dern' implied that this site was a 'hidden ford', either known to few people, or hidden topographically.

There were at least four 'Dernford's in East Anglia, all in Suffolk. One was in the parish of Foxhall, where the Domesday Book says was once a manor called 'Derneford' (later Darnford), presumably at a crossing of the Mill River. Another is 10 miles to the north-east where Dernford Hall sits beside the river Alde, in the little village of Sweffling. There was a bridge at Sweffling known as the Derneford bridge. The third is about 5½ miles south-east of Stowmarket where 'Derneford' is also recorded in Domesday Book, possibly referring to a 'hidden' crossing of the river Gipping. The fourth is located in the parish of Cookley, south-west of Halesworth in Suffolk.