Gloucestershire 300 Years Ago E-Book

Alan Pilbeam

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Sir Robert Atkyns's Ancient and Present State of Glostershire, which appeared in 1712, was the first published survey of the county. Alan Pilbeam's Gloucestershire 300 Years Ago is written to celebrate Atkyns's achievement and to present his information in a more accessible form. Atkyns's work is critically assessed with reference to other sources and used as a basis for comparison with today's landscape. Fully illustrated in both colour and black and white, it includes a gazetteer of places to visit and analysis of the spatial pattern of Atkyns' data. Published to mark with the tercentenary of this important work, Gloucestershire 300 Years Ago is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the county and in local history more generally.

Leseprobe

GLOUCESTERSHIRE

300

YEARS AGO

ALAN PILBEAM

Cover illustrations. Front, above: Cirencester from above Roman fort. (Courtesy of Richard Bird Photography). Front, below: Jan Kip’s engraving of Cirencester. Back: Scowles in the Forest of Dean. (Photograph courtesy of Martin Latham)

First published 2011

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved© Alan Pilbeam, 2011, 2013

The right of Alan Pilbeam to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUBISBN 978 0 7524 9673 3

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Preface

  1   Sir Robert Atkyns

  2   The Saxon Imprint

  3   Interpreting Domesday Book

  4   The Landscape Impact of the Normans

  5   Monastic Gloucestershire

  6   Landscapes of Desertion, Dereliction & Disorder

  7   The Buildings of Benefactors

  8   Markets & Fairs

  9   Good Houses & Handsome Seats

10   Rural Land Use

11   Industry & Population Distribution

12   Historic Towns

13   Curiosities

14   Complementary Views

Preface

The year 2012 marks the tercentenary of the publication of Sir Robert Atkyns’ The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire. The book was published posthumously as Atkyns had died in 1711. Since the time of its publication it has been a major source of information for historians tracing the ownership of manors, the lineage of the county’s gentry and the details of early monastic holdings. Samuel Rudder often quoted it word for word when treating these matters in his A New History of Gloucestershire, published in 1779. The book is also of great value to historical geographers because it contains information on such topics as land use, population totals and housing numbers for each parish of the county, as well as providing details of the principal houses, markets, industry and commerce of the time.

Because Atkyns followed a parish by parish survey and was concerned with the particulars of each parish rather than with a county-wide sweep, it has often been necessary to scan all 859 pages to gain an impression of the state of Gloucestershire at the time. So in celebration of his work an attempt has been made to collate and synthesise his information and to present it thematically, considering in turn the background of the main features that contribute to our image of the landscape in the early eighteenth century. The landscape is continually changing and the scene in Atkyns’ day was just one stage in its long development. Some attention has therefore been given to the ‘ancient state’ of the county, where possible using Atkyns’ book as a primary source. Thus one chapter has been devoted to the Domesday survey and another to the monastic holdings in the county, chapters which are largely supported by his assembled records. He writes little about Saxon and Norman Gloucestershire, and for chapters on these periods other sources have been required, including visible features in the present-day landscape.

Atkyns wrote before the impact of turnpike roads, canals and then railways had been felt; Parliamentary Enclosure of the common open fields had scarcely begun; Cheltenham consisted of a single street, and industry depended essentially on hand labour and water power. It was a very different world from today’s, yet the legacy of Atkyns’ Gloucestershire is still with us and wherever possible attention has been drawn to what remains from those far-off days. A thematic approach to the present-day landscape, as distinct from that of the early eighteenth century, is provided in my Landscape of Gloucestershire, published by Tempus in 2006.

Atkyns’ book, once scarce and very expensive, is now widely accessible because the Gloucestershire County Library has made copies of the 1974 reprint available to all its branch libraries.

There have been many adjustments to the county boundary since 1712: some parishes, particularly in the north and east of the county, have been transferred to other counties and others have been added to Gloucestershire. To simplify comparisons with statistics for the present day, the county considered here is the one established in the 1974 reorganisation. Those parishes which were then lost to Avon have not been included, and it has not been possible to include much information on the parishes added to the county since The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire was published because there is no equivalent source to Atkyns’. In all, 243 parishes have been included in this study.

Gloucester was by far the most important settlement in the county in the early eighteenth century and Atkyns devotes the first quarter of his book to that city. The remainder of the county he treats in an alphabetical arrangement of parishes. In his own preface he explains some of his reasons for writing and to this we turn in the first chapter.

1

Sir Robert Atkyns

The south transept of St Kenelm’s Church, Sapperton, is dominated by the huge floor-to-ceiling memorial to Sir Robert Atkyns. His stone effigy is life-size and represents him reclining in an elegant pose. Beneath his left hand is a book, much smaller than the folio size of his own, and he is surrounded by flamboyant decoration, which includes figures symbolising Justice and Prudence (fig. 1). The inscription behind the effigy pays tribute to his character and influence, and ends with a prophetic reference to that ‘more durable memorial The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire’. An engraving of Sir Robert by Michael van der Gucht, who produced engravings of many notable people of the day, is included in the book and shows him as plump, full faced, bewigged and clean shaven (fig. 2). The effigy in the church bears a good likeness to it.

The ownership succession of the county’s manors is a prominent theme in the book and Atkyns records the lineage of many landowning families. His own ancestry included several distinguished lawyers, some of whom held high legal positions in the country. The family came from Monmouthshire and the earliest reference is to a Thomas Atkyns, who died in 1401. A fourth generation descendant of his, David, a merchant from Chepstow, moved to Tuffley on the south side of Gloucester and died there in 1552. His son, also named Thomas, a judge, acquired the manor of Brickhampton in Churchdown parish, and the latter’s son, Richard, bought two more manors, one on either side of the River Severn at Hempstead and at Morecot in Minsterworth parish, as well as other lands in the county. He died in 1610 and was buried in Hempstead church. His colourfully painted stone effigy, portraying him in judge’s robes, rests on a table tomb bearing the Atkyns’ coat of arms. A grandson, another Richard, was the last to live in Tuffley. He was educated at the Crypt School in Gloucester and became a colonel in the army of Charles I, raising his own troop of cavalry. Financial problems forced him to sell the estates, which were then purchased by an uncle, Sir Edward Atkyns. Edward’s eldest son, Robert, became Chief Baron of the Exchequer and was knighted in 1660. He died in 1709, aged 88, and his son was the Sir Robert Atkyns whose writings we are considering. The latter was born in 1647 at Monken Hadley in Hertfordshire, at a time when the visible, social and political effects of the Civil War were still fresh. He matriculated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1663 and in that same year was knighted by Charles II. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1668 and became the MP for Cirencester from 1679 to 1685, and then for Gloucestershire between 1685 and 1687. After the change in government in 1688, his retirement from public office gave him the leisure time to prepare for writing his book. He often stayed in London and was able to put his legal expertise and privileged position to good use in extracting much information on landownership and family succession from records held in various archives in the city. His epitaph records that his death at Westminster on 29 November 1711 was caused by dysentery. He had married Louise Carteret of Hawns (or Haynes) in Bedfordshire in 1669. She outlived him by five years and had the splendid monument to his memory erected in Sapperton church. They had no children.