Downton: 7000 years of an English village

Copyright 2013: David C R Waymouth All rights reserved. This publication or any part of it may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author or his heirs

Published by David C R Waymouth at Smashwords

Downton: 7,000 years of an English village

Most of it written by David Waymouth

CONTENTS

PREAMBLE Another Millennium Ends

CHAPTER 1 The First Men in Downton

CHAPTER 2 The Normans Shape Downton

CHAPTER 3 A Busy Little Town

CHAPTER 4 Tudors And Others

CHAPTER 5 Challenges And Change

CHAPTER 6 The Great Estates

CHAPTER 7 Governing Downton

CHAPTER 8 Teaching Downton

CHAPTER 9 Downton in Difficulty

CHAPTER 10 Worship Changes

CHAPTER 11 Road And Rail

CHAPTER 12 War, Peace And Downton

CHAPTER 13 Downton’s Latest Millennium Begins

Annex Families in Downton 1599- 1999, Emigrants to Canada

PREAMBLE ANOTHER DOWNTON MILLENNIUM ENDS

CELEBRATING IN STYLE

It is April 1998. Downton is to have a party. A big party. To mark a new Millennium. A year-long party, and the people who will help it happen are meeting, beer and sandwiches at the ready. Upwards of thirty of them, builder and baker, squire and vicar, old and young, in-comers and those who were born in the village, Top-enders and Bottom-enders - all have come with ideas and offers of help.

‘Carnival - Irish ceilidh - bonfire and fireworks - rustic sports - open air concert and pageant - discos and dances - and, perhaps best of all, a New Years Eve party for the whole family together’ come rattling out with much banter and laughter. Nearly two years away but already the party mood is on Downton.

A MILLENNIUM MARKER

As this team are planning to celebrate the start of a new Millennium probably most are only vaguely aware of how many other celebrations there have been in Downton over its many centuries. Coronations and Jubilees, great victories and declarations of peace, elections, even the passing of great reforms have all been excuses for this friendly village to let its hair down.

NOTE TO THIS ebook 2013 EDITION

This book aims to bring alive the happiness and the hardship of a history which goes back a long, long way. It sets out to do it in several ways. There are the historical facts as far as we know them. There are little playlets inspired and loosely based on those written by Dr Miranda Whitehead for the 1994 Downton Pageant. There are lists and tables, there are little nuggets that are meant to be fun or helpful. This is no work of scholarship. The book was written in three months to meet the Millennium deadline. There is some guesswork and plenty of generous interpretation of known facts and almost no original research, relying on earlier work some of which later turned out to be erroneous. Those errors uncovered have been corrected. Errors of emphasis are mine.

We hope it can give both those who already know and love Downton and those coming to it for the first time a sense of continuity. We want you to enjoy a marvellous heritage, the real story of England.

We printed 2,500 copies, sold 2,000, raising £4,500 for village charities, and gave every child in the village a personalised copy. Ever since there has been a steady stream of requests for the book. This is an abbreviated version but most of the meat is here. Sadly many pictures and plans have had to be omitted for this format.

As mentioned above major errors have been corrected; others, no doubt, remain. This edition has been produced to help fund Downton’s History Group for which contributions in kind – family histories, diaries, artefacts - as well as cash are always

welcome.

David Waymouth, July 2013

CHAPTER 1 THE FIRST MEN IN DOWNTON

Downton is a very ancient Wiltshire village, six miles south of Salisbury. People have lived here for over 7,000 years because it was and is a good place to live. It lay between two lines of wooded chalk hills. It had a river, the Avon, which provided fresh water, fish, transport and lush meadows. It had plentiful game and plenty of good timber. Above all else it was a place where men and animals could cross the river and its hard gravel ford was the best for miles.

MAN ARRIVES

400,000 years ago herds of musk ox and elk made seasonal migrations across the dry land that is now the English Channel. Some of the very first men (either homo erectus or neanderthal) to venture in to England followed and lived off those herds. They might also have encountered elephant, rhino and monkeys. Finds of their stone tools show that they camped at Woodgreen, just south of Downton, before moving on up the river to Milford Hill, Salisbury. From there some went further north to Salisbury Plain and to the Vale of Pewsey.

They were skilled makers of Mousterian-type stone and flint axes and scrapers. They fished as well as hunted and they were happy living by water. The valley bottom was, however, twenty to thirty feet higher then than now so it is not too surprising if we have few traces of their time here. Whether Downton was already a place where they camped because it was where the herds forded the river we do not know. Only one of their very primitive Palaeolithic flint axes seems to have been found near the village so far although a number of later Mesolithic flint implements were found.

ICE AGES END

Except for a spell 20,000 years ago when the Ice Ages gripped the whole of Britain and drove man back across the land bridge to France, our ancestors (Homo sapiens) continued to live all over southern England. As the ice retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, 8,000 years ago, so the herds of wild bison, cattle, horses, red deer and elk would have once again been plentiful. They would have grazed on the savannah of Salisbury Plain rather as the cattle and ponies do today in the New Forest. As the herds moved south in the autumn and returned in the summer, small bands of hunters, each perhaps no more than 15 strong, moved with them. There may not have been more than 150 of these ancient people in the whole area.

OUR GENE POOL

Recent analysis of the DNA of one of one of these ancestral men found in a cave in Cheddar gorge only sixty miles west of Downton showed him to be quite closely related genetically to modern men living in that area today Other DNA tests show that most of us in Britain can trace our ancestry back to the earliest settlers - waves of Celts and Romans, Saxons and Normans seem to have done little to dilute the original gene pool already here.

DOWNTON’S DAWN

SCENE: It is a clear bright early summer’s day. A girl, clearly pregnant, is sitting on the top of a small hillock looking over the river and the reeds and willow beyond. She is wearing simple leather clothes stitched with sinew. She is weaving willow to make a carrier for her baby, her first, due in a month or two. At the foot of the hill, close to the river bank on a gravel ledge perhaps ten feet above the river, smoke is rising from one of the three crudely thatched huts and an old man is sitting on his haunches napping flints. Skins are stretched to dry and a woman is scraping one clean.

We hear the girl’s thoughts: ‘I do hope the hunters find something soon. Last year’s nuts and dried crab apples are not enough. We don’t seem to catch enough fish although the old man’s clever traps are good and my Man is good with a harpoon. I do hope he’s safe and looking after my brother on his first hunt. I’m glad they took the boat - it shows they think there are big animals about. I wonder whether Grandpa is right and we can stay here until after you are born, Baby. This is a safe place - we’ve been coming here every Spring since I was little - but the young men say the game is better now further north where all the rivers meet. I don’t like it there.’

Her mind wanders as she works and then something makes her look up and across the valley. She has known this feeling more strongly since she became fully a woman - an awareness of her kin however far away they are. This time however she can see the flailing arms and then hear the faint cries of her small brother as he comes across the marsh, alone.

‘I must warn Granny and Grandpa - perhaps something has gone wrong with the hunters.’ So she makes her way awkwardly down to the camp. "Boy is coming on his own. I do hope they are all right. They’ll be fine" says Granny without even turning and the Girl gasps because now she can see that Granny is getting ready all the makings of a feast and Grandpa has got out his skins and head-dress and is preparing a thanks offering to the Earth-mother. ‘That can only mean that the men have killed a great beast and are on their way back with the meat carried between them hanging from staves. That is always the time for a party. Dare I ask Granny how she knows? And yet didn’t I sort of know too?’ "It’ll come to you, my love." said Granny before the Girl can speak.

[This story is based on an incident reported by Laurence van der Post while watching the nomadic Kalahari tribesmen who live today much as these early men of Downton may have lived. He drove thirty miles from a kudu kill to find the camp already preparing a kudu feast.]

SETTLEMENT 7,000 YEARS AGO

By then Downton would have been one of the places where the herds crossed the river Avon. When the sea rose to cut the land bridge to France 8,500 years ago with a final catastrophic flood as the melt water in the North Sea broke the link between Dover and Calais, so the annual migrations would have ceased and a more static life was possible. Gradually our forbears tamed and herded the wild cattle, horses, reindeer and even pigs. Their diet was higher in protein than ours today which shows how much milk they drank and meat they ate..

In Downton the remains of a Mesolithic circular shelter dating from 5,250 BC were found in Castle Meadow. Those early Downtonians had chosen a ledge of well-drained gravel with a good view right across the valley. It was a safe, dry place to camp near the ford. We know this from excavations in 1953-7 which showed a few post holes round a shallow circular depression. The posts were to carry a lean-to or flimsy roof of skins or thatch and the pit was dug out to provide a surrounding bank built up to the roof as a shelter from wind and intruders. Such flimsy huts would protect the occupants from wolves, jackals and even bears by night at least long enough for warriors to rouse. It would be a good dry place to leave babies and stores by day, guarded by the elderly. Associated flint tools, evidence of fire pits and animal remains suggest it was seasonal shelter for hunter-gatherers or herdsmen. The archaeological dig yielded 38,000 flint workings of which 1,000 were finished tools or weapons. Much the same shelters can still be seen in use by Kalahari and Masai tribesmen in Africa today (and are like Hippies’ ‘benders’!.)

FARMING BEGINS

Around 5,000 years ago permanent settlement, farming and a marked increase in population had occurred in the Avon valley. Rivers were highways for primitive men but, as in the case of the River Avon at Downton, sometimes they became frontiers between tribes as well. The valley and the forested chalk upland behind the river were rich in game, wildfowl and fish.

The names given to prehistoric periods are very arbitrary but here they are taken to be:

PALAEOLITHIC 400,000 to 10,000 BC

MESOLITHIC ‘Stone Age’ 8,000 to 3,500 BC

NEOLITHIC ‘New Stone Age’3, 500 to 2,000 BC

BRONZE AGE 2,000 to 800 BC

IRON AGE 800 BC to AD 43

ROMAN 43 AD to 400 AD

POST-ROMAN 400 AD to 500 AD

SAXON 500 AD to 1066

To the west, just above Downton on Newcourt Down, are the Giant’s Grave, a Neolithic long barrow or burial mound, and the Bronze Age round barrow or tumulus called Giant’s Chair. The lynchets of Standlynch are terraced fields cut out of the side of the hill to improved fertility. Similarly, a graveyard of an early British tribe found off Wick Lane indicates a considerable degree of social organisation and a settled population over thousands of years. Doubtless the villagers were recruited to help build Stonehenge, another massive communal project, only 15 miles to the north.

By 3,000 BC Downton men were of the ‘Beaker’ people, migrants from the Continent. They were ploughing, tending flocks of sheep and had pottery. They probably brought their domesticated stock with them from the