The Jolly family counted among its number: Major James Jolly (1600-1666) Provost-Marshal General of Lancashire and Quartermaster General in the Parliamentary Army of Sir Thomas Fairfax; the dissident Reverend Thomas Jolly (1629-1703), founder of Congregationalism (now United Reform Church); and Edward Jolly of Mythop (1664-1738), hero of the 1715 Preston Rebellion (Thornber 1837). 

Jollys have been present at the meetings of the Preston Guild for more than four centuries beginning with William Joly and his son John in 1562 - a fact commemorated in 2001 with the grant of an Honorary Burgessship of the Guild to a member of the family by the Right Worshipful Mayor of Preston. Inset: Tomb of Thomas Jolly of Mythop (1733-1814)

By the early eighteenth century, the Jollys of Mythop had emerged as one of the most notable Fylde families, minor gentry whose name and title - The Masters of Mythop - were synonymous with the rich mosslands of Amounderness and their historic development as "the granary of Lancashire" (Guppy 1890; Clarke 1916,1917). The family was closely linked with the Earls of Derby, the so-called "Kings of Lancashire", during this period. From 1707, the family lived at Preese Hall and later at Mythop.

The Hundred of Amounderness itself is centred on the lowland district of western Lancashire known as the Fylde, bordered to the south by the Ribble and to the north by the Wyre. Amounderness derives its name from Agmundr, a Norse warlord who died in battle in the Ribble Valley in 911. The great Victorian antiquarian Henry Fishwick (1894) traces the Jolly family back to one Seth Joly in the south of the county in the reign of Edward VI (1547-53). He suggests that Seth was in turn descended from the more ancient Jolyes of Leke in Staffordshire - a contention supported by Clay (1895) but in fact based on a discredited heraldic claim made by Major James Jolly in the seventeenth century.  Inset: The Weeton Courtbook, 1736

Maltby Verrill (1933), however, cites a Lancastrian grant of 1429 featuring one Nicholas Joly. Certainly, Jolly Milne, on the River Douglas, near Standish, has an association with the family reaching back to the 1340s.

Even earlier, the family has been linked with the East Riding of Yorkshire where Geoffrey Jolif had been Preceptor of the Knight Templar Consistory at Faxfleet, the largest in Northern England, in the 1290s. There is Domesday evidence to suggest the family may even have been prominent pre-Conquest landholders in the east of the county -- descended from Jólgeirr, an invading Viking chief.  Inset: Mythop Hall

Recent DNA testing by the University of Arizona, however, casts doubt on this supposition. The Jolly haplotype appears to be Iberian Celt (2B) suggesting a more probable link with the ancient British tribesmen of the north western seaboard, the Setantii.

The Jolly family now lives in southern England - having disposed of the last of its Lancashire properties in the late 1970s. However, family burial grounds at Kirkham and Weeton remain. There are still several eighteenth-century box pews in family ownership at St Chad's, Poulton-le-Fylde. Two family charities established for the relief of the poor in 1750 and 1784 are now defunct. The current Master of Mythop - the tenth in succession - lives in London. Inset: Marton Bank, a family property in the 1850s

To learn more about the Jollys of Mythop, contact: inquiries@amounderness.com

For further information, see:
 

Clarke, A		Windmill Land (Dent: London 1916) More Windmill Land (Dent: London 1917)
Clay, JW, ed.		Familiae Minorum Gentium, Vol III, pp. 1048 ff., Publications of the Harleian Society, Vol XXXIX (London 1895)
Fishwick, H, ed.		The Note-Book of the Rev Thomas Jolly, 1671-93, and an Account of the Jolly Family of Standish, Gorton and Altham (Chetham Society, Vol 33: 1894)
Guppy, HB		Homes of Family Names of Great Britain (Harrison & Sons: London 1890)
Maltby Verrill, D		“The Huguenot Family of Joly”, Notes and Queries, Vol 164: p.13 (Jan-July 1933)
Thornber, W		The History of Blackpool and its Neighbourhood (1837; Blackpool and Fylde Historical Society reprint 1985)