Just before Christmas WBR looked at a farmhouse in the hamlet of Southcott, within the parish of Pewsey. It was the usual story – an old farm which was worked by generations of farmers is no longer viable. The lands are sold off and the farmhouse is turned into a country hideaway for busy people. The transition from rural dwelling to sophisticated mansion necessitates a good lot of tweaking of the original fabric to bring it up to date, as well as extending the accommodation to provide services such as our rustic forbears would never have dreamed of (Southcott has a swimming pool and sauna!).

The hamlet of Southcott, c.1960
Ref: P48999

Part of our remit is to look into the history of those that lived there before, and take a peek at what they were doing, partly to inform us as to how the building might have been used at a particular time, and although not strictly necessary, what sort of people they were.

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In one of my earlier blogs I had the pleasure of writing about our research into Black History in Wiltshire. I mentioned at the time that we were working with local communities and other partners to create the SEEME Wiltshire Black History Project. I am pleased to say that this hard work has paid off and we have been awarded a grant of £39,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of a total of £56,000 we and our partners have raised to run an Oral History Project relating to Wiltshire BME communities.

 
This exciting project will help us to record, transcribe and archive the personal testimonies of elders within the community before they are lost to us. In addition, we will be providing family activities, including performance through drama and music, and animation video in response to those testimonies; creating educational resources and engaging young people with elders; publishing a calendar and a mobile exhibition. The aim is to create a project that is managed by the local community, with opportunities to volunteer and participate in all activies, in partnership with Wiltshire Council, the Salisbury Playhouse and the Wiltshire Music Centre. We are also grateful to Westlea Housing who provided an initial £3,000 to run a pilot project and get the partnership off the ground.

 Baptism entry for ‘Gilbert, son of John Keen, Niger, Yeoman and of Frances his wife.’

We also hope to continue to research the early Black presence in Wiltshire and I am grateful to colleagues and researchers at the History Centre who continue to provide some wonderful examples. Readers may recall that last time I wrote about Maria Mandula ‘Stranger and Aethiops’ buried in Calne, 1586, as perhaps our earliest written reference to a Black person in Wiltshire. My new favourite entry in our records relates to the parish registers of Minety, brought to my attention by our colleague Steve Hobbs. It is for 1708 and relates to a baptism of ‘Gilbert, son of John Keen, Niger, Yeoman and of Frances his wife.’ This is exciting because the majority of the Black people we find in parish registers in Wiltshire at this time were servants / slaves or former slaves for the aristocracy and gentry. Either way, most were not considered to be free. During this period it is estimated that there was a Black population of around 20,000 in London alone, and evidence from provincial counties such as Wiltshire help us to widen the picture. This was a period where Britain had truly established itself as a major player in the slave trade. But here, in Minety, not only do we have a Black person who is a relatively wealthy farmer, who was free, but clearly had been established in the community long enough to be married and have a child. Any further information on John Keen and the Keen family would be most welcome. We continue to collate references to Black people in Wiltshire, notably between 1600’s - 1800’s, so do keep the references coming as we build a picture of our county that has seen constant movement of people and historically more diverse than you might think. To find out more, please 'read more'...

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The story of how archives have survived can be almost as interesting as the documents themselves; but not quite. Last year a furniture restorer in Sussex sent some papers of the Hazland family of Woodborough which he found in a drawer in an antique chest that he was working on. We recently received a document written in 1804 that had been found in a wall in a cottage in Tetbury, Glos, in 1949. This find was of particular interest because it illustrates the social structure the parish of Charlton near Malmesbury around the time that Nelson was killed at Trafalgar.
The Schedule

It is a schedule of Assessed Taxes which included duties on houses, windows, carriages and servants. 93 people, of whom 52 are described as poor, are listed with their occupation or status. The completeness of the picture is confirmed by the 1801 census (for which no personal details were kept), which counted 88 families. The document suffered somewhat by its immuration, and subsequent treatment with adhesive tape, but the paper of the time, made from rags as opposed to wood pulp, is very durable and only one name is lost. 

By a strange coincidence a few weeks after this document was deposited we received a similar for Tisbury, dated 1825, which was found in a wall space in a house in the village, lived in by one of the assessors. It seems that filing away tax returns was taken to rather extreme lengths...

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