The Boys family of Fredville-revised 15.4.2013
Major John Boys, born in February, 1604 (1605) was the last of the Boys family to own Fredville. When John Boys, the eldest son and heir of Sir Edward Boys the Younger of ffredvile married Margaret, the daughter of John Miller of Wrotham in 1626 his grand-father, Edward Boys the Elder of Fredville, gave him a very generous marriage settlement of land and property in Nonington, Ash, Eythorne, Shepherdwell and Womenswold parishes. On his father’s death in 1546 John Boys inherited Fredville and other extensive family estates and properties in several East Kent parishes which made him a major land-owner and, to begin with, a very wealthy man. He also took over his father’s posts as Warden of the Cinque Ports and Lieutenant of Dover Castle which he held until 1648 (see the page on Nonington and the English Civil War for further details).
During the English Civil War the various branches of the Boys family were involved in both the Parliamentarian and Royalist causes. Authors of 18th and 19th century histories of Kent believed that loyalty to King Charles I had incurred Major John Boys severe financial penalties that eventually resulted in the loss of Fredville. Willliam Hasted wrote in “The History and Topographical Survey of Kent, vol IX”, that “Major Boys, of Fredville, being a firm loyalist, suffered much by sequestration of his estates. He had seven sons and a daughter, who all died s.p. Two of his elder sons, John and Nicholas, finding that there was no further abode at Fredville, to which they had become entitled, departed each from thence, with a favourite hawk in hand, and became pensioners at the Charter-house, in London”.
However, the truth appears to be somewhat different as the Major was in actual fact a Parliamentarian and the author of his own woes as, according to William Boys in his 1802 biography and pedigree of the Boys family, ‘by his own extravagance he much encumbered and wasted the estate of Fredville’.
Major John Boys had severe financial difficulties well before the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. In 1658 he and his son Nicholas had mortgaged “the manor of Elmington (Elvington) and the appurtenances of Nonington, Eythorne and Wymblingswold (Womenswold) and the avowedson of the Church at Eythorne” to Thomas Turner, the Major’s brother-in-law, for £1,550.00. This mortgage was renewed in 1668.
The Major’s financial problems persisted and in July,1673 ‘the mansion house called Fredville, wherein the said John Boys then lived and lands ect. unto the said manor belonging and situated in the several parishes of Nonington, Barfrestone and Knowlton together with a farmhouse called Frogham farm and several closes thereunto belonging containing two hundred acres, which farm was already mortgaged to one William Gilbourne’ were conveyed to Denzil, Lord Holles, a prominent supporter of the Royalist cause in the English Civil War and well rewarded after the Restoration of Charles II, as security for an advance of £ 3,000. It would appear the money was not repaid as the Kings Bench at Southwark imprisoned the Major and son Nicholas for many years. Nicholas Boys died in 1687 and the octogenarian Major John Boys in March 1688 and was buried at St. Mary’s Church, Nonington. James Boys, one of the Major’s younger sons, tried without success in 1689 to retrieve the estates.