The Rev. George Preston

The Reverend George Preston was the vicar of Tasburgh from 1832 until his death in 1836, and was succeeded by the Reverend Henry Preston. The two men were only distantly related but the lesser known Rev. George Preston was arguably in his day the more important of the two and, unexpectedly, provides Tasburgh with a rather more direct link to the Stanfield Hall murders of 1848 than the fact that it had been the unfortunate Isaac Jermy who, as Lord of the Manor, had appointed Henry Preston as vicar.

The Enclosure Act for Tasburgh of 1813 and subsequent Award of 1818 record The Rev. George Preston as the Lord of the Manor of Tasburgh Uphall with Boyland and Hunts, and the owner of Manor Farm on Low Road, although he almost certainly never lived there. He was also the vicar of Beeston St. Lawrence, north-east of Wroxham, where Beeston Hall was, and still is, the family seat of the Prestons, but he didn't live there either. He in fact spent the last 40 years of his life at Stanfield Hall between Hethel and Wymondham, but to fully understand the circumstances of his occupation and his relationship to the murdered Isaac Jermy it is necessary to go back into the history of the Manor of Tasburgh.

In the 1600s the Manor was purchased by Gasgoine Weld who left it to his son Joseph, sergeant at law, from whom it went via his daughter to his grand-daughter Mary Starkey. Through her marriage to John Jermy of Bayfield Hall it then passed to their only son and heir William Jermy, born in 1715. The Jermys were a long established Norfolk and Suffolk family with links by marriage in the 13th century to the royal families of both England and Scotland.

In 1735 William Jermy, who in addition to the Manor of Tasburgh also owned the Manors of Bayfield and Glandford in north Norfolk, further enriched himself by marrying the Honourable Elizabeth Richardson. According to their Marriage Settlement, intended to tie up properties for the benefit of their future children, she brought to the marriage the Manor of Stanfield Hall as well as other land and properties both in Norwich and throughout Norfolk.

However there were no children of the marriage, and on her death in 1751 William Jermy became sole owner of all the settled properties. The same year he married Frances Preston, whose brother Isaac was an accomplished lawyer, and persuaded William to sign a Will designed to ensure that if there were no children, William's substantial estates would be inherited after the death of his wife by other named members of the Preston family, including a nephew Jacob Preston. Nevertheless William insisted that if none of those named persons survived or left male issue, then his estate would go instead to "the male person with the name Jermy nearest related to me who adopted the Jermy arms" ( a names and arms condition) and then successively to their male heirs on the same terms. The Will also stipulated that his library of books was not to be sold but passed down to each successive owner of his estate.

William died shortly after his second marriage, again without children, and Isaac Preston became worried that as a result there was a slightly greater possibility that ultimately the Jermy estates might not be inherited by a member of the Preston family. He therefore persuaded the most likely members of the extended Jermy family, including Jeremiah Jermy, an illiterate labourer in Gt. Yarmouth, to sell their potential interests under William's Will to him for modest sums. Initially this proved to be a shrewd move, because by the time that William's widow, Frances, died in 1791 the Preston relatives named in William's Will had also died without male issue, but it also stored up trouble for the future.

Next in line after Jacob Preston was his half-brother, another Isaac Preston, Recorder of King's Lynn and, armed with the sale agreements from the Jermy family, he was able to successfully claim entitlement to William Jermy's estate. Isaac died unmarried in 1796 when the estate, still including the Manors of Stanfield Hall and Tasburgh, was inherited by his younger brother the Reverend George Preston, who thereby became a very wealthy man. He demolished the old Stanfield Hall, then a moated E-shaped Elizabethan manor house, and rebuilt it as a home for his family, pretty much as it stands today.

However neither he, nor his elder brother, had complied with the names and arms condition under William Jermy's Will; indeed the breach went even further in that the Preston arms rather than those of Jermy had been placed over the front door of the new Stanfield Hall, and when, following George Preston's death, his own eldest son Isaac decided to sell off the library of books contrary to the Will, things started to go wrong for the family.

The auction of books had to be called off when John Larner, a descendent of Jeremiah Jermy, turned up at the Hall with his lawyer to protest that the sale was contrary to William Jermy's Will, that the purchase of the Jermy interests had amounted to a fraud, and that as the Prestons had not complied with the names and arms condition they were not entitled to the estate anyway. Isaac Preston, who was himself a lawyer and Recorder of Norwich, was sufficiently worried by the situation that in 1837 he had changed his name to Isaac Jermy, and his son, Isaac Jermy Preston, became Isaac Jermy Jermy. He also replaced the Preston arms at Stanfield Hall with those of the Jermy family.

That however was not the last of his problems. His father, the Rev. George Preston, had employed James Blomfield Rush as his estate bailiff, and details of the events which followed the disrupted sale of books and ended 10 years later with the murder of George Preston's son and grandson in 1848 by James Rush, can be found on the web. The fullest account appears under the title of The Stanfield Murders – Norfolk Tales, Myths and More.

Following the death of Isaac Jermy and his son, the Manors of Stanfield Hall and Tasburgh passed to his infant daughter Sophia Henrietta, and then by her marriage in 1868, to Col. Reginald Thorsby Gwyn, who appointed Canon Walter Hurd as the vicar in succession to Henry Preston, and was a nephew of Commander William Gwyn, the owner of Tasburgh Hall from c.1832 to 1880. The Manor of Tasburgh was still owned by Col. Gwyn's family or their trustees in 1908, and in 1920 Stanfield Hall was finally sold out of the family by Sophia's son, Major Reginald Preston Jermy Gwyn