History

LOST DORSET NO. 28 SHERBORNE

David Burnett, The Dovecote Press

The autumn lifting of potatoes for storage has by chance coincided with Rachel Hassall, the Sherborne School archivist, sending me this photograph of a group of men posed in a potato patch in what is now the site of the Masonic Hall in Digby Road. It was found only recently in the Abbey muniment room amidst a collection of glass plate negatives by Chris Hamon, a verger at Sherborne Abbey. But who the men are, and the reason for the photograph, are a mystery, and I know that Rachel would welcome any help readers of the Sherborne Times are able to give. If you recognise any of them, or know more, please contact me at online@dovecotepress.com and I will forward your email to Rachel. Some have buttonhole flowers. One sitting squeezed between two lines of spuds holds a bundle of what look like chimney sweeps rods. The photograph was probably taken by Adam Gosney (1844-1921), whose Half Moon Street studio was gutted by fire in 1913, but whose fine photographs of Victorian and Edwardian Sherborne happily largely survived.

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The Dovecote Press has been publishing books about Dorset since 1974, many of which are available locally from Winstone’s Books or directly from the publishers.

OBJECT OF THE MONTH THE 1820 PETITION

Elisabeth Bletsoe, Curator, Sherborne Museum

Dipping into the archives once again reveals an item that throws Sherborne into relief against a backdrop of national events. Petitions to the monarch, often styled as addresses, had been an important way in which British subjects expressed their loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty, reflecting a populist notion that monarch and subjects were bound together in a shared social contract. While forms of this ‘subscriptional’ culture had medieval origins, this type of petitioning burgeoned particularly in the 18th-19th centuries revealing shifting perceptions of the crown, parliament, the administrative state and local government.

The notorious divorce between George IV and Caroline of Brunswick in 1820 sparked one of the most turbulent periods in British political history. Their disastrous relationship resulted in Caroline fleeing abroad, where rumours were rife of an affair between her Italian secretary and companion. After six years apart, Caroline unexpectedly returned to England to claim her title as Queen. In an attempt to block her, George pressed his ministers to introduce into the House of Lords a Bill of Pains and Penalties which would annul the marriage and deprive Caroline of her rights. This action inflamed a politically tense public, hungry for reform of the electorate.

The scandal soon became public and acrimonious. The popular press had a field day and the nation became divided, with large swathes of the population turning out to petition in favour of Caroline. She was perceived as a ‘wronged woman’ fighting against a callous political establishment, whereas the King was portrayed as extravagant and dissolute, in sharp contrast to the poverty of the working classes, suffering under the cost of living crisis induced by the Corn Laws.

The Bill was dropped on its third reading in November 1820, as ministers deserted the cause and the government’ s majority quickly slumped to nine. George was outraged. The Whigs and Radicals had used the turmoil to their advantage to expose corruption in the Tory government and to push for political reform. Their opposition campaign seriously weakened Lord Liverpool’ s administration at a time of economic distress and oppressive measures following the Napoleonic wars.

Support for Caroline abruptly disappeared after claims of her supposed ‘immorality’ were exposed. This petition from the people of Sherborne, just over 5 feet long, dated 7th December 1820, and printed by Cruttwell of Sherborne, was part of a loyalist reaction against the general ferment. Signatures from conservative townspeople across the nation attested to an appeal for the return of stability and the preservation of church, state, monarchy and constitution. George IV may well have been adulterous but, to the establishment, adultery in women was more condemnatory since it was perceived that the female influence could corrupt a pure bloodline. At the top of the list of signatories were the principal landowners, Digby and Ilchester, followed by the Master of the King’s School and prominent clergy, yeomen and tradesmen of the town.

In the months that followed, Caroline became an increasingly isolated figure. When she tried to attend George IV’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in July 1821, she was famously shut out. Within a month she was dead but by then her political importance had already greatly diminished.

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Sherborne Museum is open from Tuesday - Saturday 10.30am–4.30pm. Admission is free but donations are very welcome.

PACK MONDAY FAIR

Katherine Barker MA FSA, President, Sherborne Museum

Pack Monday, The Green c.1956

Pack Monday is Sherborne’s only surviving medieval street fair. There were once three annual fairs; St Thomas Becket Fair held on 7th July on The Green, St Swithin’s Fair held on 15th July along Newland, and a third, ‘Pack Monday’ held on the first Monday after the 10th October which, by 1826, had been moved from the Abbey Close (an increasingly ‘insanitary’ graveyard), with stalls from then on set up along the roads around the Abbey and in the market area at the bottom of Cheap Street. ‘Cheap’ is the Old English word for ‘market’ – Cheap Street is ‘Market Street’.

Our earliest eye-witness account of the Fair dates to the 1790s with a colourful description of the wide range of itinerant (and local) traders and entertainers; ‘the ginger-bread men and the bustle, the horses and carriages and mules, the fiddle playing and the frolicking (and the drinking). At 4 o’clock the great Abbey bell is rung... from this time the bustle commences. Then the town comes alive,’ and it still does (but not quite so early). The writer remembers the livestock market in what is now the Hound Street car park and in 2012 met a lady in her 90s who remembered the gypsies and the Horse Fair on The Green. Pack Monday changes with the times. The Fun Fair was formerly held in the ‘Fairfield’ north of

Coldharbour, by the sixties in the open ground off Blackberry Lane above The Quarr and today held on The Terrace, which affords better car parking.

We also find an early description of Teddy Roe’s Band which, ‘ushered in the Fair parading the town with a noisy shout. Whilst some of the sleeping inhabitants deplored this, others respected old customs delighting in the deafening mirth.’ Things are much the same today!

On Pack Monday the town is crowded with people, some travelling from a considerable distance. So how do they know which Monday? The ‘deciding date’ of Pack Monday has clearly been handed on down the generations by word-of-mouth; that is, the first Monday after the 10th October. This places the Fair during Michaelmas-tide when the harvest was in, contracts completed and workers ‘signed off’. It is suggested it was once known as ‘Pact Fair’. The term ‘pack’ was, however, used all over the country to refer to itinerant traders, to ‘pack men’ (pedlars) with their ‘pack horses’ and this seems a more likely origin of the name. Until recently the Fair rights were held by the Lord of the Manor (today’s Sherborne Castle Estates) which is an indication of its considerable age. In 2018 the management of the Fair was taken over by the Events Crew at Henstridge.

It was the writer who noted that 10th October is the Eve of the Feast Day of St Probus whose name is presented in the pre-Saxon name of Sherborne. Before the time of St Aldhelm, Sherborne was known as ‘Lanprobus’, a Welsh/Cornish-style name meaning the ‘enclosed Christian settlement of [Saint] Probus’. Teddy Roe’s Band will find its origins in an early bound-beating and many other fairs were heralded by a similar noisy procession. It is suggested that the name ‘Teddy Roe’ is from the hymn Te Deum laudamus; ‘Thee, O God we praise,’ the Te Deo, chanted during the procession. And this set off at midnight, not from the Abbey, but from The Green, the site of the lost St Probus’ Church. Teddy Roe’s Band now sets off from the bottom of Bristol Road a few hundred yards away. In the days before street lighting and a regular police force, nineteenth-century local newspaper accounts make for sobering reading. Burning torches were carried; drunkenness and violence, pick-pocketing and pilfering were commonplace.

We will, in short, never know whether Pack Monday goes back to the days before St Aldhelm, but the coincidence of 10th October with St Probus is a remarkable one and hard to ignore.

There can be little doubt that Pack Monday is a unique survival. Not Sherborne’s ‘dead’ history conserved in the stonework of our buildings but our ‘living’ history for us all to enjoy, to cherish and to enhance as to ensure its ‘protection’ on into the 21st century and beyond.

___________________________________________ Monday 17th October Pack Monday Fair Cheap St, South St, Half Moon St, Digby Road and Station Road

THE CONDUIT

A SYMBOL OF CIVIC PRIDE Rachel Hassall, Sherborne School Archivist

At the bottom of Cheap Street on the Parade stands the Conduit, or more properly the Conduit House. Visitors to the town may suppose this hexagonal stone building is a market house, however, on reading the old metal plaque they will discover that not only is the parking of cycles prohibited but that the Conduit was built as a monks’ washing place in the Abbey Cloister early in the 16th century, or, as my grandfather liked to tell us, it was where the monks washed their dirty habits.

Over the course of its 500-year history, the Conduit has survived bombing in the Second World War, being hit by drunk drivers and having rugs beaten against it. It has served as a reading room and a library, a police lock-up and a bank, a collection point for items for the wounded of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war and as a temporary war memorial for the First World War. Also, every Christmas since 1978 it has housed the Rotary

An early photograph of the Conduit. c.1880.

Club of Sherborne Castles’ nativity crib scene.

After the Abbey, the Conduit is probably the most-photographed building in Sherborne. It has come to symbolise the town – appearing on postcards and memorabilia and, until 1986 when the College of Heralds granted Sherborne a coat of arms, it featured on the town council’s insignia. Today, the Conduit is used as Sherborne Town Football Club’s logo.

Surprisingly, despite the Conduit’s importance as a focal point and a symbol of civic pride, it was not until 1815 that the first artistic representation of the building was produced when Edward Percy, a Sherborne surveyor and architect who lived opposite the Conduit on the corner of Long Street and Cheap Street, sketched it for Hutchins’ History of Dorset. The earliest known photographic record of the building is a glass plate negative taken in about 1850 and held in Sherborne School’s archives. Viewed from Long Street the photograph shows the Conduit with glazed windows and surrounded by high railings with water pouring from the fountain on the roadside.

Although the Conduit is now considered an integral part of the landscape of Cheap Street it does not really belong there. It was actually built in about 1520 in the monastery’s cloister garth on the north side of Sherborne Abbey (now part of Sherborne School) where it served the monks as a lavatorium or washing place. Its name is derived from the open stone channel, or conduit, through which the Newell spring water was piped to it from Kennel Barton north of the Yeatman Hospital.

The Conduit’s connection with the monastery was short-lived because on 18th March 1539 Henry VIII’s representatives expelled the monks from Sherborne, and the Abbey, the Conduit and its supply of fresh water were sold to Sir John Horsey of Clifton Maybank. Sir John recognised the importance of the Conduit’s water supply to the town and in about 1560 moved the Conduit from the former cloister garth to a more accessible site on the Parade in Cheap Street, where it is said to have yielded a hogshead of water every minute (the equivalent of 66 gallons or 300 litres).

For 304 years from 1629 until 1933, the Conduit was owned by the Governors of Sherborne School. In 1873 they oversaw its restoration, removing the railings and bricks from the doorways and covering it with a new lead roof, and in 1889 they undertook further restoration when the building was taken down and moved back to allow for the widening of the road. In 1933 the Governors of Sherborne School presented the Conduit as a gift to the town.

In 1950 the Conduit was granted Grade 1 listed building status on account of its special architectural and historic interest, and today it is one of ten Grade 1 listed buildings in Sherborne. This summer the Conduit was cleaned and restored by Daedalus Conservation ensuring that it will remain in pride of place at the heart of Sherborne for at least another 500 years.

One aspect of the Conduit’s history remains a mystery – the curious tradition that no Sherborne School boy ever walks beneath its roof!

THE MONMOUTH REBELLION

Cindy Chant

Duncan1890/iStock

The Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, was an uprising lasting only 20 days with its beginning, and ending, in Dorset. But what was the Monmouth Rebellion? It was all part of the Civil War – a fascinating story of ordinary people being motivated to take up arms for what they really believed, with a very unhappy ending.

To start at the beginning, the Duke of Monmouth was the result of a brief affair between Charles II and an Anglo-Irish girl named Lucy Walter. She claimed that she had an affair with Prince Charles whilst in Holland, and gave birth to his son and that Charles had very much recognised him as such. But Lucy sadly died at the age of 28, and her young child was brought up by a Royalist Officer living in exile, and so took the name of James Croft.

By the time that Charles was restored to the throne in 1660, young James Croft was thirteen, and it was his grandmother, the widow of Charles I, who brought him to England where he became a great favourite at court. The King gave him the title, Duke of Monmouth, and made him a Knight of the Garter. He was considered very brave and led a full life with a distinguished military career. He was popular with the ordinary people and had countless mistresses. However, there was an intense hatred between Monmouth and the Duke of York, when Monmouth suggested himself as heir to the throne, rather than the King’s brother James, the Catholic Duke of York. A year later in 1685, Charles II died suddenly, and the Catholic James II came to the throne.

The new king, fearing Monmouth’s popularity, ordered a watch on all ports in case Monmouth gathered reinforcements to make a bid for the throne. In June 1685, three foreign ships were seen anchored off Lyme Regis – Monmouth had arrived to claim the throne of England! A dominating tall figure dressed in purple strode through the crowds and led a group towards the town. The townsfolk were soon aware that this was Monmouth and cheered him all the way to the marketplace. In a nearby field, Monmouth welcomed new recruits as they queued beneath a large green flag,

saying ‘Fear Nothing but God’. Over 90 signed up immediately and were soon followed by another 60.

Monmouth led his troops north, recruiting as he journeyed through Axminster, Taunton, Bridgewater and Shepton Mallet. He had amassed an army of mostly untrained men now over 1,000 strong, with about 150 horses bought or borrowed. The next day training began, with taller men drilled in the use of the heavy 16-foot pike, while the others were taught how to fire and load a musket. But they had no town as a base, his ships in Lyme Bay were captured, and they were literally going around in circles.

Monmouth’s spirits were beginning to dampen and he was giving up all hope of becoming King. There was no news of any men rallying to his cause in other parts of the country, and having come full circle, he passed through Shepton Mallet again and headed towards Sedgemoor, where his campaign was to end. On this lonely peat moor in Somerset, on 6th July 1685, his poorly trained and inexperienced army, were involved in a very bloody battle – the last battle to be fought on English soil where English men took arms against fellow English men.

This was the climax of the rebellion to overthrow the Catholic King, James II. 300 rebels and 200 royalists were killed on the battlefield, 1000 rebels were killed as they fled, 320 were executed, and 750 were transported as bonded slaves. Monmouth, with his men lying slaughtered all around him, fled the battle accompanied by Lord Grey and a small party. There was a reward of £5,000 on his head, and he was soon captured, in a field of peas.

He pleaded for his life, but James had no mercy and he was thrown into the Tower. His execution was a horrible, botched affair, with five blows of the axe. At one point, Monmouth twisted his half-severed head and grinned up hideously at his executioner. Eventually, the executioner knelt down and sawed through Monmouth’s neck with a knife, so ending his life, and his bid for the throne of England.

Little is left to remind us of this campaign, only the battlefield memorial at Westonzoyland, and the church that became a prison to 500 unfortunate rebel prisoners. Many were badly injured and kept in appalling, insanitary conditions for several weeks until they were sent for trial at the Bloody Assizes. Monmouth was not a great leader – he was soft and too good-natured. He had been spoilt as a child and led to believe in an unsuitable role for himself which was bound to end in disaster.

Specialist Matthew Denney will be in the Sherborne area on Thursday 27th October to value your objects & antiques

Edward Seago, RWS (1910-1974) THE STRAND, JUNE 1953 Signed, watercolour. This subject was drawn for the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Estimate: £4000-6000 to be sold on 12th October.

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