The Ancestry of Francis Gallon 31 



stubbornness and physique we find in the Barclays were almost certainly 

 the factors which in earlier generations made their ancestors great in 

 the land. The reader may think that the bond is slender, but it is 

 strange how often we find the great linked to the great in history. 

 And let us remember that, although we have traced the Barclays up to 

 many great names, we have not followed those names downwards again 

 to all their descendants who may have been famous. Our pedigree is 

 directed only to one such man. If the reader believes that time and 

 patience would lead any single individual to find in his ancestry names 

 great in history, then will that reader assuredly find himself in error. In 

 nine ancestral lines out of ten we find a stock which, if we can carry it 

 back beyond 1600, lands us in a yeoman family. There we end in the soil, 

 and there probably the ancestry has remained from Anglo-Saxon times. 

 If we turn back to the fifth generation of Sir Francis' ascendants, 

 we find ourselves very near to that yeomanry stage at least in a moiety 

 of the branches. Actually, in some of the branches, we have to deal 

 with the younger sons of yeomen who had come into the towns as traders. 

 TheGaltons supposed to have sprung originally from Galton in Somerset- 

 shire are described in the church registers as yeomen and husbandmen. 

 They send sons into the law and the church, but we have no record of 

 any member of the family being of note. Look at the other names, as 

 far as it has been possible to trace them. Robert Galton, the brother 

 of the second John (see Pedigree Plate A), started as a " Haberdasher 

 of Smallwares " in Bristol; the Farmers were "Ironmongers" there; 

 the Freames were grocers in Aldgate, but later goldsmiths as well ; the 

 Braines were Tobacconists of Wapping, but carried on a variety of other 

 trades in Whitechapel and Ratcliffe, even to bakers and butchers. 

 But in many cases we can show that they were the sons of yeomen or 

 squires who came into the towns to trade, just as the younger sons 

 of yeomen do to this day. Much more was this the case in the days 

 of the religious persecution of the Quakers. To be a member of the 

 Society of Friends in the latter half of the 17th century demanded 

 splendid courage, and the being, as Galton phrases it, "grandly and 

 simply stubborn " ; but it demanded more ; it needed marked industry 

 and persistency in carrying on a business, and supporting a family 

 under repeated fines and imprisonments. Stringently selected, as the 

 early Quakers were, their rules of intermarriage led to a splendid breed 

 of men and women. If the reader wants to realise how a particular 



