In Lydia Wickham’s Northern Peril: Darcy & Wickham’s Rapprochement? Lydia has been residing at Castlegate in York with Fanny Roberts, a rich society widow, as her companion, an arrangement organised by Fanny’s friend Caroline Bingley. Within hours of Fanny’s death as a result of a hunting accident, Lydia is arrested, accused of forging Fanny’s will. On learning of the arrest, Darcy, Elizabeth, Bingley and Mr Davers (Caroline’s new husband) drop everything and make haste to York. Forgery is a capital offence and Lydia faces the gallows if found guilty. The four of them set about making enquiries and chasing down the witnesses to the will.
Soon, George Wickham and other family members have also arrived in the social capital of the North.
By Chapter 12, Darcy and Mr Davers have rented a large house in Skeldergate, York where everyone is residing. As a line of enquiry, Darcy invites to dinner William Noddins, the curate of St Mary’s Church, Castlegate where Fanny had worshiped, together with his large, hungry family. He and Lizzy hope that some information may be gleaned regarding the whereabouts of the servants who witnessed Fanny’s will.
Mr Noddins was a real historical figure in 1799 in which the book is set. I’ve painted him to be poor, he and his family in straitened financial circumstances. I would have liked to have depicted a family with a large number of children, say eight or nine, including teenagers, coming to dinner, having in mind the Reverend Odgers in the Poldark novels. But Noddins was only born in 1766 and did not obtain his degree until 1791 when he would have been about 25 which is much older than usual. This may be explained by the fact that the record describes him as a ‘sizar’, that is a student who receives an allowance towards college expenses and who originally acted as a servant to other students in return for his allowance. At any rate, he would have struggled to have become a father of eight children including teenagers by 1799, therefore in my book he and his fictional wife have five children, the youngest still yet a babe-in-arms. Mr Noddins’s fictional 14-year-old sister also comes to dinner.
William Noddins was certainly poor. The record shows that the stipend he received was only £25 a year which in today’s money terms is only about £3,700, after he was appointed curate at St Mary’s in Castlegate in 1792.
I am afraid that I had to take a liberty with Noddins since the site theclergydatabase.org.uk suggests that subsequently in 1804 he was a fellow, that is a university fellow, presumably at Cambridge where he obtained his degree, and the thing about fellows is that at that time they could not be married! Therefore the real William Noddins would have had neither a wife nor presumably children in 1799.
However, in Lydia Wickham’s Northern Peril some useful information does come out of the dinner, imparted in fact by Mrs Noddins, causing Darcy and Lizzy to make a search of Fanny’s Castlegate house where they find a key piece of evidence.
The highwaymen John Nevison, who was hanged on the Knavesmire, in March 1684 is said on Wikipedia to have been buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Mary’s.
The attached image is a 2019 photo of St Mary’s Church in Castlegate from Wikimedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. The author is Chris06. Today the building houses contemporary art exhibitions operated by York Museums Trust.
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