The Penman & Brown Families of Newbattle
A child of eight crushed under the wheels of a coal cart. A young father hacking up black phlegm. A half-starved mother pulling a wagon of salt because she was cheaper to employ than a mule. These were the grim realities of eighteenth-century Scottish peasants—such as the Penman and Browns families—who toiled to enrich the owners of the Midlothian coal mines and salt fields.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
—Tennessee Ernie Ford
Coal and Scotland are inextricably linked. Edinburgh, the soot-stained capital of Scotland, was nicknamed “Auld Reekie” due to the tons of coal burned in and around the city, and nearby Newbattle parish had an abundance of coal to mine. Located in Edinburghshire, now Midlothian, and a mile from Dalkeith, Newbattle sprang up near a monastery around 1140. The parish was now almost completely Presbyterian, though there were schisms, arguments between the Churches of Scotland and England, and even sporadic witch hunts. The church people attended on Sundays—the only day the masters didn’t require them to work—was a plain structure that seated four hundred. Most common folk were tenant farmers or coal miners scraping to survive, and it was here that James Penman was born in 1688 to parents James and Helen.
Newbattle parish, in Edinburghshire, was one mile South of Dalkeith and contained a few small villages. This place, which forms a kind of suburb to the town of Dalkeith, originated during the foundation of a monastery by David I in 1140. The church, situated not far from the river, near the principal lodge of Newbattle Abbey, was erected in 1727 with registers that have been kept since 1616. The Church has a regular minister at Stobhill, where it was raised in the 19th century. In 1793 the population of Newbattle was 1295 with 1017 in the Established Church and 278 of the Secession. The land is primarily used for grains, with a few sheep, horses, cattle, potatoes, turnips, cabbage, hay, and pasture grass. Dalkeith is the nearest town.
The Penmans experienced plenty of strife, from struggling to subsist under the lairds and coal masters to weathering the continuous conflicts on Scottish soil. From the fourteenth to sixteenth century, the country endured the Wars of Scottish Independence, the Battle of Arkinholm, the War of the Roses, the Scottish Civil War, struggles with English Kings, and clan wars. The seventeenth century was steeped in turmoil, including the Civil Wars and the Union of the Crowns in 1603, which brought James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I. Speaking of James, one peasant infant James Penman was born just before the first Jacobite Uprising.
For Complete Details, go to “American Pioneer Biographies, European, African, Colonial & Republic Families Of America’s East Coast From 1500-2000, Volume 1, Edition 3” at https://arcifc.com/genealogy/books-and-blog/
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