The Cambridgeshire Broket clan from the Mordens

For the last 3½ centuries Brokets have lived in the adjacent parishes of Guilden Morden and Steeple Morden—mainly the former. The following separate pages cover the 3½ centuries:

+++++++++17-18th Centuries
+++++++++Early 19th C: 1800-25
+++++++++Mid 19th C: 1826-50
+++++++++1851-1950

This is the font in Guilden Morden parish church where many of them were baptised:

Lying on Cambridgeshire’s SW boundary with Bedfordshire, just below the less fertile, neighbouring parish of Dunton, the land was mainly devoted to arable farming and sheep. The men were Yeomen, Agricultural Labourers, Village Publicans, Butchers, Shepherds and, from the 18th C many were Carpenters. In the 1850s half the 8 or so Carpenters in Guilden Morden were Brocketts.¹ From childhood through to old age many of the women were Straw Plaiters:    Read more

Like the St Neots clan, the Mordens clan was a surviving branch of the Bedfordshire Dunton clan, which disappeared from Dunton in the 2nd half of the 17th C.

For the first 148 years—1685-1833—this Mordens ‘clan’ was actually a single line, with only 2 or 3 households at a time, or 4 if you include the older generation. Towards the end of this period, the Brocket households in the Mordens—indeed in Cambridgeshire as a whole—were those of William and Ann HALL of Guilden Morden, and of their 3 children: John, William and Elizabeth. But thereafter the sons of these 3 evolved into 12 households, with 44 known sons of their own, and as a result most sons emigrated to nearby parishes, London and beyond. Towards the end of the 19th C the number of Morden households fell back to 3 and through the 20th there were only one or two at any one time.

In 2000 descendants of the clan in the UK numbered about 50 families—only one of which has members still in the Mordens—with others in Australia, North America, South Africa and elsewhere.

Page Last Updated: April 6, 2020