Golding Cottage in Pentlow and the Parmenter Family

While reading about the rise of the wool trade in Suffolk, England I came across some very interesting information. The Golding Family made their money in the wool trade, which was such an important part of the history of England that to this day the seat of the Lord High Chancellor in the House of Lords is a large, square bag of wool called the 'woolsack'. The Goldings not only made money, they made a lot of money, so much that a branch of the family connected to Arthur Golding the Translator could buy their way into the Aristocracy through the marriage of one of their daughters to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Unfortunately, when you ally yourself to a benefactor to the exclusion of other sources of income you are in a hard place when your benefactor dies. That's what happened to Arthur Golding and his children. They lost their fortune but in time made good when some when to Bermuda and eventually made their way to New York in America.

The Golding family of Suffolk made money by raising and shearing sheep and selling the wool. Some of them dreamed of Adventure because they were connected by marriage to the Gosnold family of Otley Hall and one their kin was Bartholomew Gosnold who was the captain of one of the first ships to Jamestown. Some of the younger generation must have been raised on stories of voyages to a new world called Virginia.

The Golding family lived in East Anglia, and that area was ground zero for the wool trade at that time. You couldn't get any more central than the area between Bury St. Edmonds, Poslingford and Ipswich and the products of the region were shipped through Ipswich. The harbor there was once one of the busiest in the world.

Other towns in East Anglia that have retained many of their medieval buildings are Clare, Long Melford and Hadleigh.

Poslingford, Cavendish, Pentlow and Glemsford are all within the same area and that is where the Golding Family of Suffolk made their fortune. Pentlow is a small town located to the south of Cavendish and on the outskirts is a building called “Golding Cottage” that still exists and it is right down the road from a 15th century house called “Parmenters” I know there was a Roger Golding who married a daughter of William Parmenter because he filed a chancery suit to dispute the dispersal of some land he said came to him through the will of his wife’s brother who died without leaving heirs. It’s probably a long and convoluted story yet to be discovered, but there’s no reason to assume but that this Roger was part of the Golding family that came from the region around Poslingford and Glemsford, even though his exact identity is not known.

The name Roger, Thomas and William are very common in the family line of the Golding family that allied itself with the Gosnold family and the Adventurers of the Virginia Company, but that of course isn’t enough to confirm family connections. The Parmenter family line doesn’t stop in Little Yeldham in Essex either. There were two branches, one that Roger Golding was connected to through marriage and another one, cousins to Roger’s wife and two of that family immigrated to Massachusetts and specifically to Sudbury where Captain Peter Goulding settled. Captain Peter is said to have had a brother named Captain Roger Goulding and he was there with Captain Thomas Prentice when Metacom was killed at Mt. Hope, thus bringing King Philip’s War to a conclusion. Interestingly enough, Joseph Parmenter, the son of Deacon John Parmenter of Sudbury served in King Philip’s War under Thomas Prentice and was there when Metacom was killed.

All of that may be coincidence, but the similarities in the chain of events is just too close to be ignored. Again, the purpose of this website is to present information while conclusions must be based on evidence. All of these alignments are very alluring though.