The newsletter of Wiltshire and Swindon Archives
Number 19: Autumn 2008

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Alfred Williams Folk Song Collection
Westbury enclosure award celebration
West Dean parish registers
New accessions
Other news
Talks and events
Long service in conservation
And finally...

Alfred Williams Folk Song Collection

Here’s a health to the barley mow, my brave boys!
Here’s a health to the barley mow!
We’ll drink it out of the jolly brown bowl;
Here’s a health to the barley mow!
Barley Mow song – collected by Alfred Williams from David Sawyer of Ogbourne St Andrew

This cheerful verse forms part of a collection of the lyrics of about 1,000 traditional songs collected by Alfred Williams and others in North Wiltshire and over the county border in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. These have been transcribed and researched by Chris Wildridge using the resources of the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre and the English Folk Dance & Song Society at Cecil Sharp House. They are now available online and will prove an invaluable resource for those interested students and performers of our Folk heritage alike. The opportunities for musicians and singers to find or compose tunes for the songs are considerable.
 
Chris has used contemporary census records and Andrew Bathe’s PhD thesis on Alfred Williams and his song collecting to identify the singers that Williams visited and find the villages in which they worked before Williams found them in their old age. Chris has also transcribed songs collected by other notable collectors including the Hammond Brothers, G B Gardiner and Ralph Vaughan Williams from the collections held in the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s library.

The songs collected by Alfred Williams are held by Wiltshire & Swindon Archives (2598).

Photograph of Morris Dancers, at the launch of the folk arts database, 6th September 2008

Westbury enclosure award celebration

At a meeting in the Abingdon Arms, Market Square Westbury on 29 July 1808, six years of patient and painstaking discussion, negotiation, and finally surveying was drawn to a conclusion with the signing of the Westbury Enclosure Award by commissioners authorised by Act of Parliament. This distributed lands amongst those who had enjoyed common rights on arable, meadow and downland comprising almost half of the 17,500 acres that made up the ancient parish (which included Bratton, Dilton and Dilton Marsh and Heywood) and laid out a network of roads and footpaths allowing access by the owners to their newly acquired lands. It represented the completion of a process that had been in progress for over three hundred years through private agreements.

Enterprising local historian Francis Morland felt the bicentenary should not pass unmarked and organised a public meeting in the Laverton Institute at which one of the two original copies of the award was brought back to Westbury probably for the first time since being signed. It rests now with its counterpart in the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham, and was brought by archivist Steven Hobbs, a Westbury resident.

Over 40 people enjoyed the opportunity to look at the document, in particular the maps.
The scope of the award is represented in its size. 92 membranes of parchment (each 75cm x 60 cm) and five maps (each 150cm x 60cm) record the details of this complex rearrangement of the landscape.

 
EA/76 One of the enclosure maps for Westbury, showing Bratton

Open arable fields like The Ham were divided up into separate fields generally bounded by hedge rather than fences, to create the familiar patchwork pattern of fields. The downland was divided into large tracts over which owners could pasture their sheep.

The changes were not just limited to farmland. Although Westbury town was unaffected the impact on Dilton Marsh was considerable. The village had developed as a squatters’ settlement on waste along the road which ran through common land. Houses were built with or without the permission of the lord of the manor. Under the award the road was defined with a width of 40 feet.  This created front gardens to the houses built on the roadside waste, which the owners, who had no common rights were encouraged to purchase. The award is the crucial document in explaining the layout of the village as it is today.
Although completed just three years after the death of Lord Nelson at Trafalgar, the award has more than just an historical importance. Evidence of rights of way, public or private, and the identification of ancient (pre enclosure) hedges are two current issues that illustrate the long term importance of enclosure awards.

West Dean parish registers

It is not usually particularly newsworthy to report the deposit of parish registers, however West Dean is an exceptional case. Its early registers were borrowed for transcription in 1960 and were subsequently assumed to have been lost. Fortunately they have now been found. They are in excellent condition, and include an original paper register from 1538, one of only six in the county. In 1783 the rector collected details about the population of his parish for a national survey and copied them into the current register. They were the only major loss of pre 20th century parish registers in recent times and their discovery is a most exciting event. It is a tribute to the dogged efforts of archive staff over many years to keep pursuing them. The Wiltshire Family History Society will publish transcripts of the baptisms and burials in due course. (3712)

New accessions

The scope of archive keeping has become wider and covers areas of life and society that have previously been less well documented.

The cultural life of Devizes is particularly well covered by records of two organisations. The Devizes Junior Eisteddfodd was set up in 1946 its archives comprises competitors’ lists and event programmes (ref 3668). The winner of the under 10 solo piano competition in 1988 was Jamie Cullum, the singer and pianist, which adds interest to the historical importance of the archive. The Devizes Literary and Scientific Institute was founded in 1833; it organised lectures and maintained a lending library. Members from 1847-1876 are listed in a fee account book, which is a useful, if obscure, source for family historians (ref 3678/2/1).

A photograph album of staff and patients in the Red Cross Hospital at Westwood House, 1917, was deposited by a relative of one of the nurses. The album is particularly informative as most of the people in the almost 100 images are named. Many country houses were converted to military use in WW1 but relatively few are recorded so fully as this example. (3701)

3701/1 Photograph album from Westwood House – showing a social event involving both patients and nurses in fancy dress, 1917

Cathy Day, who spent time in the archives researching the parishes of Stourton, Kilmington and Mere for a PhD in biological anthropology at the Australian National University, has kindly given the History Centre copies of her transcripts of baptisms, marriages and burials from the 1850s to c1910 for those parishes. She has covered baptisms and marriages from Mere Independent and Bonham (Stourton) and Wardour catholic chapels.

We have also acquired transcripts of baptismal registers for the North Dorset Methodist Circuit which includes Mere, Shaftesbury and Gillingham, from the mid 19th to the late 20th centuries. The original records are held by Dorset Archives Service and the transcripts are a most useful source for those with ancestors in that corner of SW Wiltshire.

There is now a set on microfiche of National Probate indexes covering the years 1858-1943 in the History Centre.

Other news

Ben Daubney is compiling a handlist of material in our collections relating to black and minority ethnicity, and is keen to receive any references found in our archives, particularly in Parish registers, that could be added to it. Anyone wishing to contribute should contact Ben This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or by letter addressed to Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, History Centre, Cocklebury Road, Chippenham, SN15 3QN.

One very poignant record is found in the corner’s accounts of travelling expenses on the Quarter Session Great Roll for Easter 1803 of a suicide in Trowbridge “of a negro man called by the name Antigua and Moorish, a private in the 59th Regiment of Foot, who on being put in the guardhouse he, near to there, with a black silk handkerchief, did hang himself.” One can only imagine the degree of desperation that caused to take him to such a drastic action.

405/4 – image of a black child, used in a grocer’s advertisement, nd, one of the many items listed in the new black and minority ethnic handlist.

Canals figured in several inquests in the early 19th century; clearly they presented a new hazard and were the cause of an increase in the number of deaths by drowning. In his accounts presented at the Hilary sessions, 1798, the coroner recorded the inquest into the death of a labourer employed on the construction of the Wilts and Berks canal, who known only by the remarkable sobriquet Double Gloucester. He had died at Melksham, as a result of a rupture caused by a blow he received in two fights that he fought on the day that he died in the first week of July 1797. His recovery was hampered by the effects of the quantity of strong beer he had consumed. The corner noted that ‘seldom has a business been so complicated’; two adjournments were required to summon witnesses and the man’s second, who he believed had acted improperly and unfairly to the deceased. The document offers a brief glimpse at the shady underworld of bare-knuckle fighting, so well described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his novel Rodney Stone. The navvy seems to have been a rather extreme example of the tough, hard living character that many attributed to the labourers who built the infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution.

Work on retyping the catalogue of the Pembroke of Wilton archives lead to closer examination of the collection. Among a bound gathering of papers from the 16th and 17th centuries is an account for work at St James Park, London from 1616 for keeping ‘his majesties Forrayne Beastes and Fowle’. Payments covered work on weeding and making walkways, but also for oats for ducks, peas, tare and a ‘sault stone’ for pigeons, bread for a crane and for keeping a beaver. An allowance was also made for powder and shot for killing vermin. This provides a brief glimpse of a fashion that quickly spread among the aristocracy and gentry, including the earl of Pembroke who kept exotic wildlife in Wilton Park. (2057/E1/1)

Readers with clerical ancestors who watched the  programme on Patsy Kensit’s ancestors in the recent BBC series of  ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, might be interested to know a little more about the Clergy of the Church of England database that provided her with an important lead. Its objective is to create a relational database documenting the careers of all Church of England clergymen between 1540 and 1835. We have been fortunate to have had a good team of researchers, notably Robert Pearson, archives assistant at the History Centre, who have created a comprehensive resource for Wiltshire. See: www.theclergydatabase.org.uk 

Talks and events

On 27 September the annual Open Day for Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre took place, which was a very successful event, attended by over 600 people. Some of the staff dressed up as “Wiltshire Heroes”:

Left to right: Celia Fiennes; Eilmer of Malmesbury; Maud Heath; Edith Olivier; Sir Christopher Wren and Siegfried Sassoon

During the Autumn and Winter a series of Thursday afternoon talks on aspects of Local History and Archaeology will take place. A list of talks is available here. Tickets are £3.00, with concessions.  

Long service in conservation

In September Paul Smith and Mervyn Grist completed, between them, 70 years service to Wiltshire County Council, making them probably the most experienced conservation team in any local archive service in the country.

And finally...

This is, I believe, the earliest reference to football in Wiltshire (risky as it is to make such a claim!) In 1619 several men and women from Great Bedwyn, were presented for being ‘behoulders and players att footeball on a Saboth day’. Both players and supporters were each fined 2s. As the holy day was the only holiday in the week, such clashes between spiritual observance and physical exuberance were inevitable, particularly in the highly charged religious atmosphere of the 17th century. (D5/28/20/17, 21, 22)

Contributors: Steve Hobbs, Claire Skinner