Though he called himself a gentleman, William Juby was in fact an inn keeper and brewer. Of a
yeoman family at New Buckenham, in the early 1640s he inherited the old George Inn which
occupied most of the northern edge of the market place opposite Lovell’s shop. By his will made
late in 1646 he left the inn with its brewhouses, shops, copper, malt vat, beer barrels, etc., to his
brother Richard and his male heirs and if these failed to the town of New Buckenham, half the
profits to support a preaching minister (these were puritan times when sermons were in demand)
and half to a schoolmaster to keep a school and teach the youth of the town. Richard evidently left
no sons and despite a lawsuit brought by other members of the Juby family the inn did pass to the
borough. The old inn was cleared away in 1869 and rebuilt on its present site.
William Barber was the other benefactor. The Barbers were well-to-do butchers and graziers at
New Buckenham and William, like William Juby, claimed gentry status. He inherited a large house
fronting the Market Place and Queen Street from his father (the house was burnt out in 1906 and
never rebuilt) but he sold it in 1671, moving next door to ‘Market Place’. His will is dated 1692 and
shows his wealth. He left £2,235 among various relations and made arrangements for a lavish
funeral with a sermon, six bearers, and the distribution of at least ninety pairs of mourning gloves.
William also left directions for a black marble gravestone (the one with a skull and crossbones set in
wreaths garlanded with roses in the chancel of New Buckenham Church) and he died aged 84 in
1693. He left a small farm in Carleton Rode for the support of the minister of New Buckenham ‘to
induce him to make his residence in the parish, and serve the cure there’ and a newly-built house
on Brand’s Hill in New Buckenham for four poor people to live in rent-free to which he assigned
property in Old Buckenham. Barber’s almshouses as they are still called and the adjoining Town
Houses left by John Verdon were all rebuilt in a matching Jacobean style in 1861.
Little is known of John Hill besides his remarkable headstone a few paces from the church porch.
The headstone hints that he had been a soldier. By 1780 he was living in what is now Kings Stores
in King Street, which is partly an old house behind the Victorian front. He made his will as a
yeoman in 1783 leaving modest legacies to relatives and to his maidservant Ann Parsons ‘the bed
she usually sleep upon’. He died in his 84th year in 1783. The stone was erected by a near relation
and the carvings include a pipe, a punch bowl, a bottle and a glass. The last lines are unfortunately
damaged but the verses read:
Reader
Who e’er thou art from whom or where
Mark well those things thou notice here
Near to this place lies honest John
Was friend but to few, a foe to none
In Peace or War he ne’er show’d fear
For Friends nor Foes he did not care
As Stoic Self in Philosophic pride
He rarely laugh’d more seldom cried
Of this World’s good he had his share
Both Wine and Punch as well as Beer
His whole life thro’ he did not spare
Upwards of (eighty) years he lived the Gout
( ? Did wholly rust ) his Body out
( ) ( ? no rest ) till Death
( ) gave up his Breath
( ) with Mother Earth
© Paul Rutledge 1998
William Juby, William Barber and John Hill
© The New Buckenham Society 2015 (rev 2023)
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