University Archives
Windham family, of Wawne (incorporating the Ashe and Smijth [sic] families)
The village of Wawne (or Waghen) is just to the north of Hull, on the East bank of the River Hull. A Cistercian abbey established at Meaux was to dominate the economic and social life of the parish of Wawne until its dissolution in 1539 when it came into the hands of the crown. For the next century the Alford and Langdale families owned Wawne until the Corporation of the City of London acquired it in 1629. In 1651 they made a grant of some of the land and rents to Joseph Ashe (1617-1686) who was the third son of a London clothier. He became a successful London merchant and built up estates in Wawne quickly, though he did not reside in the village. Katherine Ashe (1652-1729), married William Windham of Fellbrigg Hall, Norfolk when the Wawne property transferred. The Windham family were wealthy London merchants also who had owned Fellbrigg since at least the early part of the fifteenth century. Joseph Windham Ashe (1683-1746) was a merchant in London specialising in wholesale linen drapery and was cashier to the salt commissioners between about 1718 and 1734, and 1741. Wawne passed down through his descendants until transferring to the Smijth family in 1779. Joseph Smijth (1792-1857), became the first family member to live at Wawne. In 1816 he applied to take the extra name Windham. He was a captain in the 10th Hussars and 17th Lancers. His son, William George Smijth Windham (1828-1887) dropped the name Smijth. He died unmarried and the estates passed down through the family of his brother. The estate, which in the late nineteenth century was about 3500 acres in size, began to be a financial drain on the family and in the 1910s everything was sold except for the Hall, which was ultimately sold in the 1950s. The small collection of family papers includes some sixteenth-century crown leasehold sales, late seventeenth-century sales and leases of the Ashe family including the 1668 purchase of a major moiety of the manor of Wawne for £8235, rectory leases from 1676 from York Minster, some late seventeenth-century rentals, a number of abstracts of title as well as extracts from Meaux Abbey title documents, some eighteenth-century manorial records and some 1830s correspondence about tithes. [DDWI]