The name of Burden is first seen in the beginning of the seventeenth century, when a Henry Burden appears in the court rolls of Beccles, in Suffolk, in connection with sundry sales of wool to Ghent.
It is not certain whether this Henry was an ancestor or no; but within ten years the name twice reoccurs, once in the form of Burdyn, and once in that of Bird.
A receipt presented at Bungay, dated in the year 1616, when our Shakespeare died, and acknowledging payment for wood used in burning a witch, bears the signature Barton: and a deed of 1638 conveys and devises 47 hogsheads of mild ale to Zachary Pyorden, who is later known for a zealous defender of the public liberties.
It is interesting to note that a Master Barreden sailed for Holland from Yarmouth, in company with some fifteen or twenty of “God’s servants,” shortly afterwards, with a large and very valuable cargo of wool. He was presumably a nephew of the foregoing. There is a family of Bourdons in Bradford, Mass., who, though claiming a Canadian origin, are very possibly descended from this early champion of religious liberty.
No mention of the Burdens during the Civil Wars remains. We may imagine them, if we will, following the Parliamentary cause; whether passively—as did so many of the sturdy East-Anglian stock—or actively; accepting the wage, and loyally fighting the battles of the great Protector. However that may be, the name reappears with another John Burden in 1672, a religious enthusiast who preached the Word to the people of Saxmundham during the hot summer of that year.
He seems to have been an honest God-fearing man, devoted to the cause of true religion in the first period of his ministry.
A government which could permit the entry of the Dutch into the Medway, and produce the infamous shorthand notes of a Pepys, did not tolerate the mystical zeal of Bunyan’s contemporary. He was thrown into Ipswich gaol, on his release from which place he proceeded to Aldeburgh, and declared himself the Messiah—at some time between April and June 1684.
Few believed him, but he suffered nothing further from the authorities, and died peacefully in the occupation of cobbling, at Orford, on the 5th or 6th of January 1701/1700.
The race of Burden is then lost sight of for nearly a century. There is almost certainly some connection between Mr Burden’s ancestry and that of Sir Algernon Burden, of Pelham Thorpe, near Norwich, for Mr Cosmo Burden (Mr Burden’s surviving son) has recently borne the same crest as the baronet.
The College of Heralds, who, under the able direction of Lion d’Or, have accumulated these details at a considerable expense, trace continuous filiation from John Burden, whose mother may have boasted gentle birth, and who established himself as a corn chandler at Colchester in the year 1785. John Burden, confining himself strictly to the wheat market, drove a prosperous business in Colchester during the Napoleonic wars. His subscriptions to the charities which were so necessary in those times of high prices and public famine appear no less than six times between 1801 and 1815. He was an Alderman of his town, and died in 1833, leaving a son, George Burden, whom he had established as a large ironmonger at 106 Thames Street, in the City of London, and who was the father of the remarkable Englishman this memoir commemorates.