Oak Apple day

This unique event originates from the time of the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660. Parliament declared 29^th May, the King’s birthday, a day of thanksgiving for redemption from tyranny and the King’s return to London.

The public holiday was abolished in 1859 but the date is still celebrated in various parts of the country including Castleton where the church tower is garlanded, Upton-upon-Severn, Aston on Clun and Membury in Devon.

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We are delighted to announce that the Wiltshire and Swindon Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) Project started in early April 2012. This three year project is sponsored by English Heritage and is being run by Wiltshire Council in partnership with Swindon Borough Council.

The project aims to examine Wiltshire and Swindon to investigate the historic and archaeological processes which have influenced the landscapes that we currently use and enjoy today. This will help us to understand the origins and evolution of both the countryside and urban areas of the county, and to identify what makes each place special and distinct. This innovative approach to studying the heritage of an area is called Historic Landscape Characterisation.

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On Tuesday 1^st May the History Centre teams were invited to join our colleagues from the Wiltshire Victoria County History (the editors are also based at the History Centre) in their promotional tent on The Close, Salisbury Cathedral, for the celebration and the visit of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on her diamond jubilee. Each community Area, plus organisations like us, had a jousting tent in which we displayed and presented the best of our county’s heritage.

 
The team tent

We decided to add the occasion by delivering a series of ten-minute talks entitled the ‘Salisbury Tales’, curious tales from Wiltshire’s History, which were repeated throughout the day. It also encouraged us to see how many people we could fit into our tent!

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One of the great things about working in conservation is the sheer variety of objects and materials that we see coming into the labs.

Over the next few months we’ll be conserving a really exciting find from a burial site in Dartmoor National Park. A recent excavation has uncovered a nationally important collection of Early Bronze Age remains from a cist burial which could prove to be one of the most important archaeological finds of the last 100 years.

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From April 2012 museums in Wiltshire will be able to call upon the services provided by the Wiltshire Council Conservation and Museums Advisory Service (CMAS).

Based at the History Centre in Chippenham the team will be providing advice, support and training on all aspects of running a museum. This includes activities such as recruiting volunteers, cataloguing and conserving historic objects, mounting displays and writing funding applications.

Some members of the team...

Many people do not realise that none of the museums in Wiltshire (all 53 of them!) are run by the council. They are all either independent trusts or charities, or operated by town councils.

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We were delighted to learn last week that the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) have successfully secured a grant of £585,400 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to help catalogue, conserve and digitise materials from six archives nationwide. These include the Alfred Williams collection owned by Swindon Borough Council and held at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre. The project, which is also being supported by the National Folk Music Fund, will enable free public access to over 58,000 digital images through a new web portal.

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When the RMS Titanic sank in the icy seas of the Atlantic on the night of April 15 1912 there began a century of fascination – perhaps sometimes macabre – with a tragedy in which an icon of contemporary marine engineering and luxury led to the deaths of 1,503 passengers and crew.  A century later books, journal articles and films continue to be produced, some relying more on fiction than on the verifiable facts of the tragedy, and controversies continue as to the causes of the sinking.

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A little while back Wiltshire Buildings Record carried out a group-effort recording at Bushton, Clyffe Pypard. This was a day where members who are interested in picking up recording skills and recognising Wiltshire features in vernacular houses can go along and learn informally, whilst gathering information for the Record.

Cruck apex

The exterior of the main house is of 2 storeys of whitewashed brick and rubble with a netted thatched roof. Nothing was discerned of the medieval origins of this house from outside. Inside the old hall was a bacon smoking chamber, the lower part still accessible. There may have been access at first floor level to hang the meat for curing. The hearth there was of chalkstone and brick. What is curious is that in the centre are a group of taper burn marks, or hot poker marks alongside the initials ‘TP’. In the world of vernacular architecture debate has long ranged about how these marks came about and why. They are found in many farmhouses and cottages, not only in Wiltshire, but nationally. At last, with determined study by Nick Hill and others at English Heritage it is now thought that these singe marks were done deliberately to ward off accidental fires in the same way that we inoculate our children with a weakened disease agent to guard against a more virulent form taking hold later on. This may be difficult for us to comprehend in our largely secular, scientifically-run society, but in the not so very distant past people were superstitious, and as well as believing in witches they thoroughly believed in magic. It is instances like this that make our interpretation of the past so tricky as we instinctively judge with our own modern values until we learn better.

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Reading Smoke in the Lanes by Dominic Reeve (1958, new edition Lamorna Publications 2010), my memory was jolted by the following when Dominic and other Romanies were at Devizes Fair. Whilst in a pub, drinking and listening to a woman singing a fine old Romani ballad,

“A minor disturbance broke out when a young traveller of slick appearance endeavoured to plant a kiss on the forehead of a young girl seated with her mother by the wall. The girl’s mother however, who possessed the fascinating name of Cinderella Bull, strongly disapproved and brought an empty beer bottle sharply down on the back of the youth’s head and floored him. He lay cursing roundly and vowing that he was fatally injured. Fortunately further trouble was prevented by the people near him, all of whom declared him thoroughly ‘brazen’”

My memory got into gear and I recalled that back in 1984 I had published a picture of a Mrs Bull, whose forename I later discovered to be Cinderella, in A Wiltshire Landscape: scenes from the countryside 1920 – 1940.

Cinderella Bull in a meadow at Etchilhampton

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One of the volunteers working on the Lacock Abbey archives asked me to help with reading two unusual documents (2664bx61/60). They were two orders issued in June 1631 by Star Chamber, a much feared court which vigorously protected royal rights and privileges and became synonymous with misuse and abuse of power by the King and his circle.  The documents offer indemnity from arrest for any violence used in assisting the sheriff and trained band to apprehend several persons who were believed ‘in the night season’ to have destroyed the fences and enclosures in Braydon Forest, near Cricklade, and to have threatened similar action in Blackmore or Melksham forest. These royal forests had been recently disafforested, Braydon the previous year and Blackmore 19 years ago. This was a process which removed them from the jurisdiction of forest law and gave it the status of ordinary land. In effect it allowed the land to be divided into enclosed fields and coppices held by individual farmers, who paid rents to the royal agents who in turn paid the crown for the franchise. This was a controversial move, motivated to raise revenue for the crown, which ended common rights in the forest. The disaffected in Blackmore Forest were believed to have met the ‘Ryotters and Mutiners’ of Braydon Forest and thus posed a threat which prompted this pre-emptive action. The royal farmer had built ‘several faire houses’ for the tenants, and also a church for the inhabitants ‘to repaire to to heare devyne service’. Allowances had been given to the ‘pretended commoners’ and the tenants who by their great labours, charges industry have brought the ground into good tillage and pasture land. It was claimed that the would-be rioters were believed to come from Lacock. Of the seven named, four were among the fifty-five listed in the Braydon forest document, and were presumably the 17^th century equivalent of ‘flying pickets’.

Where was this church? I could find no reference to the licensing or serving of this church in the diocesan archives, or any indication of how long it lasted. This appears to be the only evidence of it that has come to light. Evidence of its probable location is provided by a deed of division of what remained of the forest, which appears to be the eastern part, in 1818 between Thomas Bruges and Edward Philips in another collection in Wiltshire and Swindon Archives (1985/1/1).


The map associated with the deed of dvision, 1818
Ref:1985/1/1

 The associated map describes Chapel Ground and Chapel Mead on the site of what became the grounds of Sandridge Park. By 1838, and the tithe apportionment, Chapel Ground has become The Park, although Chapel Mead retained its original name.


Section of the map showing Chapel Ground and Chapel Mead

 This little piece of research illustrates extremely well the importance of having different archives brought together in the History Centre. We do not know whether the church was built of wood or stone, and what evidence of its foundations may be discernable to archaeological investigation, although house platforms have been identified on the site. The documentary evidence suggests that this might be the hamlet established in the 1620’s for the forest land tenants, and this will be added to the Historic Environment Record maintained by the Archaeology Service also based in the History Centre. If you have enjoyed this article, the following entries may also be of interest:

The King of Limbs

A Hunting Lodge for King John?

New technology helps us appreciate Wiltshire's past

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