The Curious Case of the Livery Button

Livery buttons are a fairly common metal detecting find, so for one to turn up in a field in Overseal near to the Netherseal boundary isn’t something of especial significance, and certainly of no financial value.  It was only a chance discussion over the internet with an interested member of the Overseal History Group that the local importance of the discovery became apparent.  Indeed, the discovery connects our ancient parish directly with the wider world of the 17^th century, even to the far side of the Pacific Ocean.  The button in question is in a fairly poor condition.  It depicts a greyhound courant or a running greyhound, alongside a wading bird, probably a heron or stork.  In a cartouche or banner is what at first, I took to be the word ‘Saardrim’ but what a group member, C.L. Redfern thought was the word ‘Saardam’.  It was during this online discussion that the penny dropped – or in this case, the livery button.

Figure 1. The livery button found in a field in Overseal.

Gilbert Morewood was born in 1585 or 1586, the second son of Rowland Morewood and Ann Stafford of Bradfield, Yorkshire.  At around the age of fourteen, young Gilbert went to London to join the Company of Grocers as an apprentice to Anthony Morewood, probably his cousin, a freeman of the Grocer’s Company. Young Gilbert showed an aptitude for the business and rapidly progressed until by 1616 he had himself risen to become a freeman of the same Company.  Once he became a freeman, he began to invest whatever he could in the import of pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and currants, brought in on trading ships from the east.  Later, he began to trade in exotic groceries and vices such as coffee, chocolate and that old favourite, tobacco.  He began to buy and sell property in the city and the country, lent money, and provided insurance for trading ventures.  He traded through the Levant Company, and he became a member of the Virginia Company, owning shares in ships trading to Brazil and South America, to Guinea and to West Africa.  England in the seventeenth century was changing, and that change was being driven by men like Gilbert Morewood.  Perhaps most importantly for our story, in 1619 Gilbert Morewood became a member of the East India Company, which held, deliberately vague by design of a Royal Charter, a monopoly on trade to the east.  By the year 1628 Morewood was wealthy enough to look around for a country estate and purchased the manors of Netherseal and Overseal in what was then north-west Leicestershire (now South Derbyshire) from Sir George Gresley of Drakelowe.  Morewood grew to love his country estate, and although his business interests often kept him away in the city, his family grew and prospered.  Morewood had a daughter from his first marriage, then a stepdaughter and three more daughters from his second marriage.  These three, Frances, Grace, and Elizabeth, were all christened at St Peter’s in Netherseal, although Elizabeth died shortly after her fifth birthday and is buried in the churchyard.  Morewood’s nephew, Reginald Eyre, also purchased property in the parish and remained there.

 

With a weather eye on the fortunes of trade and unlike many less canny traders, Morewood supplemented his trading activities through the Virginia Company, one of the few who did.  He also traded in lead and another very valuable and dangerous commodity, gunpowder.  In 1641 he rose to became one of the twenty-four ‘committees’, or members of the governing body of the East India Company, ensuring also that his brother and son-in-law were also elected as ‘committees’.  Later still, and very cannily, once it became apparent that the Parliamentarian cause would win the Civil War, Morewood steered the East India Company away from support of Laudian and Royalist causes and supplied the Parliamentary cause, most especially with lead from the family lead mines in Derbyshire.[1]

Figure 2. The Saardam in 1629, illustration from the book François Pelsaert, Ongeluckige voyagie van't schip Batavia nae de Oost-Indien (Amsterdam, 1647). Author unknown.

In July 1628 he petitioned to export lead from his brother’s lead mines in Derbyshire through the port of Hull to Amsterdam, and it may be here that the connection to the livery button was made.  Morewood’s lead cargo arrived in Amsterdam, probably in the August or September of 1628 after the petition had been granted.  The agreement to export the lead had been made with Dutch merchants before restrictions had been put in place by government, therefore the petition was successful.  What is not known is whether Morewood had travelled to Amsterdam himself or whether the agreement was made by an intermediary.

It transpires that the ‘Saardam’ (alternative spellings Sardam, Saerdam or even Zaandam) is the name of a Dutch ship that was constructed in Amsterdam for the Dutch East India Company and made its maiden voyage at the end of October 1628.  At 36 metres from stern to bowsprit (roughly 120 feet), and with a load capacity of 500 tons it was built for inter-island trade in the East Indies.  

 

Having left Amsterdam in October 1628, the Saardam arrived in Batavia (modern day Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, after over eight months at sea, in July 1629.  The story of the Saardam starts to heat up from this point.  The Saardam was involved in the rescue of the Dutch merchant ship, also called the Batavia, which ran aground off the coast of Western Australia in June 1629.  Most of the crew and passengers survived the initial wreck and were marooned on a small group of islands.  The captain, Jan Pelsaert, took most of the senior crew on a longboat to row to Jakarta, and arrived there thirty-three days later, an incredible journey in itself. Pelsaert was ordered to return in the recently arrived Saardam to rescue the remaining passengers and crew of the Batavia.  Arriving back on 2^nd October 1629, more than three months after the initial grounding of the Batavia, Pelsaert discovered the terrible sight of a mutiny in which most of the female passengers had been raped and murdered, the soldiers accompanying the ship had been deliberately marooned on another island some five miles away and any children and men who refused to join the mutiny had been murdered.  In total, an estimated 125 men, women and children were murdered by the mutineers.  Pelsaert dealt out swift justice, cutting off the right hand of many of the mutineers and then hanging them.  The mutineer’s leader had both hands cut off and was then hung.  All bar two of the remaining mutineers were transported to Jakarta, where they were tried before a judge and then hung.  The two were deliberately marooned on the island and left to die.  The remaining survivors of the wreck of the Batavia were then rescued by the Saardam and delivered safely to Jakarta.[2]

Figure 3. The excutions as illustrated in the Lucas de Vries 1649 edition of Ongeluckige Voyagie van’t Schip Batavia nae de Oost-Indien (‘Unlucky voyage of the ship Batavia to the East Indies’). Image: Spy007au via Wiki Commons.

The full horror of the story was published shortly after news of it was received back in Holland and quickly the story became the talk of Europe, especially amongst international traders such as Morewood and the East India Company.  The chance find of a livery button bearing the legend Saardam provides us with a connection to the world of international spice trade and the dangers of seafaring in the seventeenth century. 

Figure 4. The arms of the Morewood family of Bradfield, the 'Morewoods of the Oak'.

In yet another coincidence, it is also the case that one of the symbols of the Morewood coat of arms is a greyhound courant, the running greyhound.[3]  There are many unanswered questions.  Did Morewood himself, or one of his representatives see the livery button depicting a running greyhound and take a fancy to it through the connection with Morewood’s family coat of arms?  Or was it in fact the other way around?  Did the Morewood family adopt the symbol after seeing the Saardam’s livery button?  How did the button come to arrive in the Parish of Seale and country seat of Gilbert Morewood? Was there a closer connection with the Saardam – for example, did Morewood or his Dutch counterpart transport lead from Amsterdam to Jakarta?  Was the apparent coincidence of the lead cargo arriving in Amsterdam in time for the Saardam travelling to Batavia in fact a deliberate objective that had been planned for from the outset?  Was Morewood anticipating an import from the East Indies upon the return of the Batavia?  The list goes on and questions remain unanswered, and after so long are likely to remain so.

 

Here though, we have several curious facts, coincidences and timing that are too great to be ignored.  That Morewood was trading with Dutch merchants and that a delivery of his lead arrived in Amsterdam just as the Saardam was being prepared for a journey to the East Indies; that Morewood himself was already a well-established trader in spices and other goods from the East Indies; and that a livery button was found in a field in the very manor that Morewood owned bearing the symbol of the running greyhound and the name Saardam almost 400 years later are remarkable correspondences that connect a small parish in the centre of England to the wider world of the 1600s, the spice trade that dominated Europe, and to a gruesome 400 year-old tragedy on the other side of the world.  

 

All through the chance find of a button, a curious case indeed.

[1] https://www.sea.museum/2016/06/04/barbarism-and-brutality-surviving-the-batavia-shipwreck Accessed 13th October 2021

[2] Much of this story of Gilbert Morewood is brilliantly researched and told by Linda Levy-Peck, along with much more about the Gresley and Bennett families in 'Women of Fortune. Money, marriage and murder in early modern England'.[3] Glover, S. The History and Gazetteer of the County of Derby. 1833 p.14 Google Books: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_History_and_Gazetteer_of_the_County/PwOcagR5StAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+crest+of+morewoods&pg=PA14&printsec=frontcover Accessed 13^th October 2021

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