Jenkins was born at Bolton-upon-Swale in 1500, and followed the employment of fishing for one hundred and forty years. When about eleven or twelve years old, he was sent to Northallerton, with a horse-load of arrows for the battle of Flodden-field, with which a bigger boy (all the men being employed at harvest) went forward to the army under the earl of Surrey; king Henry VIII. being at Tournay. When he was more than a hundred years old, he used to swim across the river with the greatest ease, and without catching cold. Being summoned to a tithe cause at York, in 1667, between the vicar of Catterick and William and Peter Mawbank, he deposed, that the tithes of wool, lamb, &c. were the vicar’s, and had been paid, to his knowledge, one hundred and twenty years and more. And in another cause, between Mr. Hawes and Mr. Wastel of Ellerton, he gave evidence to one hundred and twenty years. Being born before parish registers were kept, which did not come into use till the thirtieth of Henry VIII., one of the judges asked him what memorable battle or event had happened in his memory; to which he answered, “that when the battle of Flodden-field was fought, where the Scots were beat, with the death of their king, he was turned of twelve years of age.” Being asked how he lived, he said, “by thatching and salmon fishing;” that when he was served with a subpœna, he was thatching a house, and would dub a hook with any man in Yorkshire; that he had been butler to lord Conyers, of Hornby-castle, and that Marmaduke Brodelay, lord abbot of Fountains, did frequently visit his lord, and drink a hearty glass with him; that his lord often sent him to inquire how the abbot did, who always sent for him to his lodgings, and, after ceremonies, as he called it, passed, ordered him, besides wassel, a quarter of a yard of roast-beef for his dinner, (for that monasteries did deliver their guests meat by measure,) and a great black jack of strong drink. Being further asked, if he remembered the dissolution of religious houses, he said, “Very well; and that he was between thirty and forty years of age when the order came to dissolve those in Yorkshire; that great lamentation was made, and the country all in a tumult, when the monks were turned out.”
In the same parish with Jenkins, there were four or five persons reputed a century old, who all said he was an elderly man ever since they knew him. Jenkins had sworn in Chancery and other courts to above a hundred and forty years’ memory. In the king’s remembrancer’s office, in the exchequer, is a record of a deposition taken, 1665, at Kettering, in Yorkshire, in a cause “Clark and Smirkson,” wherein Henry Jenkins, of Ellerton-upon-Swale, labourer, aged 157 years, was produced and sworn as a witness. His diet was coarse and sour; towards the latter end of his days he begged up and down.
Born when the Roman catholic religion was established, Jenkins saw the supremacy of the pope overturned; the dissolution of monasteries, popery re-established, and at last the protestant religion securely fixed on a rock of adamant. In his time the invincible armada was destroyed; the republic of Holland was formed; three queens were beheaded, Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Mary queen of Scots; a king of Spain was seated upon the throne of England; a king of Scotland was crowned king of England at Westminster, and his son and successor was beheaded before his own palace; lastly, the great fire in London happened in 1666, at the latter end of his wonderfully long life.
Jenkins could neither read nor write. He died at Ellerton-upon-Swale, and was buried in Bolton church-yard, near Catterick and Richmond, in Yorkshire, where a small pillar was erected to his memory, and this epitaph, composed by Dr. Thomas Chapman, master of Magdalen-college, Cambridge, from 1746 to 1760, engraven upon a monument in Bolton church.
Inscription.
Blush not, Marble!
To rescue from oblivion
The Memory of
HENRY JENKINS;
A person obscure in birth,
But of a life truly memorable:
For,
He was enriched
With the goods of Nature
If not of Fortune;
And happy
In the duration,
If not variety,
Of his enjoyments:
And, tho’ the partial world
Despised and disregarded
His low and humble state,
The equal eye of Providence
Beheld and blessed it,
With a patriarch’s health, and length of
days:
To teach mistaken man,
These blessings
Were intail’d on temperance,
A life of labour, and a mind at ease.
He liv’d to the amazing age of
169,
Was interr’d here December 6th,
1670;
And had this justice done to his memory
1743.[530]
There is a large half sheet portrait of Henry Jenkins, etched by Worlidge, (after an original painting by Walker,) from whence the present [engraving] is copied, and there is a mezzotinto of him after the same etching.
[527] From the MS. Diary of sir Richard Torkington, quoted in Mr. Fosbroke’s “British Monachism,” 51, from the “Gentleman’s Magazine” 1812.
[528] Strype’s “Memorials.”