The Baker Family History

The Bakers of Highfields, Fenton House and Hasfield Court

The history and genealogy of the Baker and Dod families, also touching on the Bellyse and Hall families

Architects, Surgeons and Gentlemen

The Bakers Home Page Return to the Home Page of the Bakers Family part of the website

The Bakers of Highfields Story The Story of the Dods and Bakers and of Highfields, Fenton House and Hasfield Court. A journey through the history of Cheshire and Staffordshire, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman who retained his lands after the Conquest, pottery at Stoke on Trent, an encounter with Elgar, and the history of an Elizabethan manor house at Audlem

The Bakers of Highfields The family tree of the Bakers of Highfields

The Dod Family The Family Tree of the Dods, predecessors to the Bakers of Highfields

The Bakers of Fenton House and Hasfield Court The Family Tree of the pottery Bakers of Stoke on Trent

The Bellyse Family The Family Tree of the Bellyse Family

The Farndale Story The main part of this website tells the story of the Farndale family from Yorkshire Descendants of Arthur Baker, the story of the Farndale ancestry is told through the main part of this website You can also return to the Farndale website home page

The Hall Family The genealogy of the family of James Hall, linked to the Baker family through marriage to Arthur Baker

Welcome to the history of the Baker Family

Highfields in about 1900 Richard Baker (1676 to 1749) William Baker of Highfields (1705 to 1771) Richard Dod Baker (1784 to 1807) William Baker of Highfields (1787 to 1863) Arthur Baker (1860 to 1916)

Introduction to this website The purpose of this web site is to make available genealogical and historical information about the Baker Family of Cheshire. This website is the culmination of work started in the 1980s by Martin Baker Farndale (the son of Margaret Louisa nee Baker, later Farndale) and continued by his son Richard Farndale since 2023. General Sir Martin Farndale KCB died in May 2000. During his lifetime, he carried out extensive research into the Farndale family history, beginning in about 1956. Urged by his mother, in the 1980s he started to work on his mother’s families, the Bakers and the Halls. His work was concurrent with the research of John Bellyse (“Jack”) Baker into the history of the Baker family, and of Highfields, and they both shared a passion for the Baker Story. This part of the Farndale family website has been compiled by his son, Richard Farndale and continues this research which is made available to anyone who may be interested. General Sir Martin Farndale KCB Margaret Louisa (“Peggy”) Baker (1901 to 1996) (BAK00002) was the daughter of Arthur Baker (1860 to 1916)(BAK00155) and the great great great granddaughter of William Baker (1705 to 1771)(BAK00068), the Architect. She was the current website author’s granny. She married Alfred Farndale (1897 to 1987)(FAR00683). She taught physical education at Malvern Girl’s school and was one of the first of her generation to buy a car. She developed a spirit of independence and cheerfulness that was to characterise her life. She and Alfred were pioneers in the prairies of Alberta and later settled in Yorkshire and their large family, the Wensleydale Line, still thrives. After retiring from farming in Wensleydale, Peggy and Alfred settled in Leyburn. Peggy called their new home Highfields after the house at Audlem. Peggy was proud of her Baker ancestry and had many records and stories about the family. She enjoyed helping Martin Farndale with his research into her family.	The best way to view this site Whilst you can view this site on a mobile or tablet, it is primarily intended for use on a PC. This is because the site is intended for the provision of detailed information, more suited to the larger format of a PC. However, it does work quite well on a tablet, such as an ipad. On an iphone it may sometimes tend to be distorted with text not always aligning, though you can generally read text and it should work ok with an iphone too. Your interest in the site This site is relevant to those whose name is Baker, or who know they are descended from Bakers of Highfields. If this describes you, then you should be able to discover a lot of information about your ancestors. If you have information which you can share, please help me by getting in touch. If you have an interest in Baker family history and particularly the information provided here: · First please tell your cousins and other relatives about the site. · Second, please contact me by email to rcfarndale@hotmail.com. This will encourage me to develop the research. It is hoped that anyone able to provide more information about the Baker family history, will e-mail Richard Farndale at rcfarndale@hotmail.com,  so that I can develop the available information and make corrections where you can point those out to me. What you will find when you explore this website This website assists those who are a part of the wider Baker family, or otherwise linked to it, to gain a greater understanding of their history and ancestral origins. It provides vertical context to enable you to trace back your ancestry through time directly. It provides horizontal context by providing information about the wider family of which you are a part. Personal Information I do not wish to record detailed information about living Bakers unless I know that you are happy for me to do so. This site is about historic Bakers who are no longer alive. As a rule I only record the most basic publicly available information about living Bakers, primarily their month of birth. This is so that anyone who wishes, can find themselves in the directory, and then use this site to explore their ancestry. Where I am aware of public information about living Bakers, on their own websites, or public entries on the web which is available already, I have sometimes included that information on personal pages of living Bakers. If you find your own entry on this website and would like me to include more information about you, please let me know. Please don’t provide me with any information you would not wish to be publicly available. I think it is very unlikely that I have recorded any information on the site which people would prefer to keep private, but if there is any information on this site which you would prefer not to appear, please email me at rcfarndale@hotmail.com,  and I will remove it. Peggy Baker (later Farndale) and the Baker family at Highfields in about 1990
A Simple Guide to using the website The best way to explore the Baker family history is to start with the Bakers of Highfields Family Tree, the Dod Family Tree and the Bakers of Fenton and Hasfield Family Tree. You can then click on the links for individuals to find out more about members of the wider family. I am beginning to work on The Baker Story, which will develop the narrative of the family history, though this remains work in progress. There is also a History of Highfields.	Projected programme for this website Having worked on the material which Martin Farndale collected in the 1980s and drawn the history of the Bakers together with modern search methods, I have now reverted to work on the Farndale family. I continue to work on and update the Baker part of the website from time to time and plan to complete the narrative for the Baker Story of the coming year, with many of the supporting pages already drafted.	Related Families Many other families will be able to link to the Baker Family Tree. There are more detailed records of closely related families as follows: The Farndale Family The Hall Line The Dod Family The Bellyse Family

History of this website

Martin Farndale’s historical research into the Farndales began: 1956

Martin Farndale’s historical research into the Bakers began: 1980s

The Farndale Family Website first published by Richard Farndale: 6 November 2001

The Baker Family part of the Farndale website first published by Richard Farndale: 1 October 2023

The Baker Family part of the Farndale Family Website was last worked on: 28 September 2026

Website Philosophy

Our forebears tend to be fondly remembered for a generation or two and then disappear from memory, except for slabs of stone that mark the place of their burial. However each of our ancestors, and their close relatives were individuals with their own rich stories. It is through their stories, and the history of their lives, that their memories can be preserved within families and communities of which they were once a part. Their stories provide us today with a direct route into our own past. Each individual in the Baker, Dod and Hall lines has their own separate webpage. Stories are not told about living members of the families, who simply have a page as a marker to find their way into their historic story. The stories of historic ancestors are fully narrated, to preserve the rich lives each of them led. The website is carefully researched from primary and secondary sources with full referencing, to vouch the narrative and provide a means for further research.

About the Author

Richard Farndale BA (Hons), LLB (Dist), LLM (Dist), FRGS is a former artillery officer and lawyer. He was Chairman of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators in Scotland and practiced dispute resolution in the Scottish courts and arbitral tribunals. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society, the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society, the Cleveland & Teeside Local History Society and the Helmsley Archaeological and Historical Society. In retirement he is a passionate amateur historian and genealogist who applies his professional understanding of the legal rules of evidence to the exploration of his own family story, and Yorkshire’s history, with an interest in the Baker family of Cheshire as well. Richard’s father, the late General Sir Martin Farndale KCB, started to research the history of the Farndale family in the 1950s, and the Bakers from the 1980s, and Richard has continued that research since Martin died in 2000. The work is a two-generation endeavour.

Published articles by the Author

Farndale, Richard, (2024), Farndale and its Medieval Beginnings in Medieval Yorkshire, the journal of the Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society, Issue 11, 2024. See pages 25 to 47 and pages 48 to 69.

Farndale, Richard, (2026), England’s 1100th: Deira and the Idea of Anglo-Saxon Unification in Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/00844276.2026.2692264.

Richard is currently working on a two-part series on the history of Kilton, North Yorkshire, home to the Farndales for 250 years, for Cleveland History.

Peering back into our deep history

Kirkdale cave, North Yorkshire

The village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanised by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.

It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know – the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age.

That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several.

The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley – tree-clumps, corners in woods – that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian. When I sat at home among my talking sisters, or with an old woman sucking her jaws, and heard the long details, I would look through the windows and see the wet walls streaming, the black trees bend in the wind, and I saw these things happening as natural convulsions of our landscape, and though dry-mouthed, I was never astonished.

(Lee, Laurie (1959), Cider with Rosie, Chapter 6, pages 104 to 105).

The past is a foreign country, they do things different there (Hartley, L P (1954), The Go-Between, Prologue, page 1).