Transcribed from the 1898 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Portrait of John Keble]
John Keble’s Parishes
A HISTORY OF HURSLEY AND
OTTERBOURNE
* * * * *
BY
CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
AN OLD INHABITANT
* * * * *
London
MACMILLAN AND CO. LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1898
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
To explain the present undertaking, it should be mentioned that a history
of Hursley and North Baddesley was compiled by the Reverend John Marsh,
Curate of Hursley, in the year 1808. It was well and carefully done,
with a considerable amount of antiquarian knowledge. It reached a second
edition, and a good deal of it was used in _Sketches of Hampshire_, by
John Duthy, Esq. An interleaved copy received many annotations from
members of the Heathcote family. There was a proposal that it should be
re-edited, but ninety years could not but make a great difference in
these days of progress, so that not only had the narrative to be brought
up to date, but further investigations into the past brought facts to
light which had been unknown to Mr. Marsh.
It was therefore judged expedient to rewrite the whole, though, whenever
possible, the former Curate’s work has been respected and repeated; but
he paid little attention to the history of Otterbourne, and a good deal
has been since disclosed, rendering that village interesting. Moreover,
the entire careers of John Keble and Sir William Heathcote needed to be
recorded in their relations to the parish and county. This has,
therefore, here been attempted, together with a record of the building of
the three churches erected since 1837, and a history of the changes that
have taken place; though the writer is aware that there is no incident to
tempt the reader—no siege of the one castle, no battle more important
than the combat in the hayfield between Mr. Coram and the penurious
steward, and, till the last generation, no striking character. But the
record of a thousand peaceful years is truly a cause of thankfulness,
shared as it is by many thousand villages, and we believe that a little
investigation would bring to light, in countless other places, much that
is well worth remembrance.
For the benefit of those who take an interest in provincial dialect, some
specimens are appended, which come from personal knowledge.
The lists of birds and of flowers are both from the actual observation of
long residents who have known the country before, in many instances,
peculiarities have faded away before the march of progress.
The writer returns many warm thanks to those who have given much
individual assistance in the undertaking, which could not have been
attempted without such aid.
C. M. YONGE.
ELDERFIELD, OTTERBOURNE,
18_th_ _June_ 1898.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
MERDON AND OTTERBOURNE 1
CHAPTER II
MEDIÆVAL GIFTS 13
CHAPTER III
REFORMATION TIMES 27
CHAPTER IV
PURITAN TIMES 39
CHAPTER V
CUSTOMS OF THE MANOR OF MERDON 53
CHAPTER VI
CRANBURY AND BRAMBRIDGE 69
CHAPTER VII
THE BUILDING AT HURSLEY 78
CHAPTER VIII
OLD OTTERBOURNE 83
CHAPTER IX
CHURCH BUILDING 92
CHAPTER X
HURSLEY CHURCH 107
CHAPTER XI
THE GOLDEN DAYS OF HURSLEY 125
CHAPTER XII
HURSLEY VICARAGE 135
CHAPTER XIII
LATER CHANGES 145
CHAPTER XIV
A SURVEY 153
CHAPTER XV
WORDS AND PHRASES 171
CHAPTER XVI
NATURAL HISTORY 190
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JOHN KEBLE, from the Pencil Drawing by John _Frontispiece_
Bacon, jun., (1851), by permission of the Rev.
J. B. Medley of Tyntesfield
MERDON CASTLE AND WELL, HURSLEY PARK _To face page_ 10
RICHARD CROMWELL, LORD PROTECTOR 49
THE OLD CHURCH AT HURSLEY 79
HURSLEY PARK HOUSE. N.-E. FRONT, 1867 81
EXTERIOR, OTTERBOURNE CHURCH 98
AMPFIELD CHURCH 102
FOUNTAIN AT AMPFIELD 103
HURSLEY VICARAGE AND CHURCH 122
SIR WILLIAM HEATHCOTE, Bart. After the picture 128
by George Richard, R.A., 1870; by permission of
P. and D. Colnaglie and Co.
HURSLEY CHURCH 141
INTERIOR, OTTERBOURNE CHURCH 144
[Picture: Map of Hursley, Otterbourne etc.]
CHAPTER I
MERDON AND OTTERBOURNE
THE South Downs of England descend at about eight miles from the sea into
beds of clay, diversified by gravel and sand, and with an upper deposit
of peaty, boggy soil, all having been brought down by the rivers of which
the Itchen and the Test remain.
On the western side of the Itchen, exactly at the border where the chalk
gives way to the other deposits, lies the ground of which this memoir
attempts to speak. It is uneven ground, varied by undulations, with
gravelly hills, rising above valleys filled with clay, and both alike
favourable to the growth of woods. Fossils of belemnite, cockles
(_cardium_), and lamp-shells (_terebratula_) have been found in the
chalk, and numerous echini, with the pentagon star on their base, are
picked up in the gravels and called by the country people Shepherds’
Crowns—or even fossil toads. Large boulder stones are also scattered
about the country, exercising the minds of some observers, who saw in
certain of them Druidical altars, with channels for the flow of the
blood, while others discerned in these same grooves the scraping of the
ice that brought them down in the Glacial age.
But we must pass the time when the zoophytes were at work on our chalk,
when the lamp-shells rode at anchor on shallow waves, when the cockles
sat “at their doors in a rainbow frill,” and the belemnites spread their
cuttlefish arms to the sea, and darkened the water for their enemies with
their store of ink.
Nor can we dwell on the deer which left their bones and horns in the
black, boggy soil near the river, for unfortunately these were
disinterred before the time when diggers had learnt to preserve them for
museums, and only reported that they had seen remains.
Of _human_ times, a broken quern was brought to light when digging the
foundation of Otterbourne Grange; and bits of pottery have come to light
in various fields at Hursley, especially from the barrows on Cranbury
Common. In 1882 and 1883 the Dowager Lady Heathcote, assisted by Captain
John Thorp, began to search the barrows on the left hand side of the high
road from Hursley to Southampton, and found all had been opened in the
centre, but scarcely searched at all on the sides. In July they found
four or five urns of unbaked clay in one barrow—of early British make,
very coarse, all either full of black earth or calcined bones, and all
inverted and very rough in material, with the exception of one which was
of a finer material, red, and like a modern flower-pot in shape. Several
of these urns were deposited in the Hartley Museum, Southampton.
Of the Roman times we know nothing but that part of the great Roman road
between Caer Gwent (or Venta Belgarum, as the Romans called Winchester)
and Sorbiodunum (Old Sarum). It can still be traced at Hursley, and
fragments of another leading to Clausentum (Southampton) on the slope of
Otterbourne hill.
In Dr. Milner’s _History of Winchester_, written at the end of the last
century, he describes a medallion of mixed metal bearing the head of
Julius Cæsar, which was dug up by a labourer at Otterbourne, in the
course of making a new road. He thought it one of the plates carried on
the Roman standards of the maniples; but alas! on being sent, in 1891, to
be inspected at the British Museum, it was pronounced to be one of a
cinquecento series of the twelve Cæsars.
The masters of the world have left us few traces of their possession, and
in fact the whole district was probably scarcely inhabited; but the trees
and brushwood or heather of the southern country would have joined the
chalk downs, making part of what the West Saxons called the Jotunwald, or
Giant’s Wood, and the river Ytene, and so Itchen seems to have been named
in like manner.
These were the times when churches were built and the boundaries of
estates became those of parishes. The manor of Merdon, which occupied
the whole parish of Hursley, belonged to the Bishops of Winchester by a
grant of Oynegils, first Christian King. Milner, in his _History of
Winchester_, wishes to bestow on Merdon the questionable honour of having
been the place where, in the year 754, the West Saxon King Cenwulf was
murdered by his brother in the house of his lady-love; but Mr. Marsh, the
historian of Hursley, proves at some length that Merton in Surrey was
more likely to have been the scene of the tragedy.
Church property being exempted from William the Conqueror’s great survey,
neither Merdon nor Hursley appears in Domesday Book, though Otterbourne,
and even the hundred of Boyate or Boviate, as it is in the book, appear
there. It had once belonged, as did Baddesley first, at first to one
named Chepney, then to Roger de Mortimer, that fierce Norman warrior who
was at first a friend and afterwards an enemy to William I.
The entire district, except the neighbourhood of Merdon Manor on the one
hand, and of the Itchen on the other, was probably either forest ground
or downs, but it escaped the being put under forest laws at the time when
the district of Ytene became the New Forest. Probably the king was able
to ride over down, heather, and wood, scarcely meeting an enclosure the
whole way from Winchester; and we can understand his impatience of the
squatters in the wilder parts, though the Cistercian Abbey of Beaulieu
was yet to be founded. Indeed Professor E. A. Freeman does not accept
the statement that there could possibly have been thirty-nine village
churches to be destroyed in the whole district of “Ytene.”
The tradition lingered to the present time at Otterbourne that the corpse
of William Rufus was brought back in Purkiss’s wood-cart from Minestead
to Winchester for burial in the Cathedral, along a track leading from
Hursley to Otterbourne, called at each end King’s Lane, though it is not
easy to see how the route could have lain through both points.
The parish of Hursley lies in the hundred of Buddlesgate, and division of
Fawley; and the village is situated on the turnpike-road leading from
Winchester to Romsey, and nearly at an equal distance from each of those
places.
The parishes by which Hursley is surrounded were, when Mr. Marsh wrote,
Sparsholt on the north; Farley on the north-west; Michelmersh and Romsey
on the west; Baddesley, North Stoneham, and Otterbourne on the south; and
Compton and St. Cross on the east.
The whole parish was then upwards of twenty-eight miles in circumference,
and contained 10,590 acres of land, of which 2600 were in common, 372 in
roads and lanes, about 1000 under growth of coppice-wood, and the rest
either arable or pasture.
The soil in the parish of Hursley, as may be supposed in so extensive a
tract of land, is of several different sorts; in some parts it is light
and shallow, and of a chalky nature; in others, particularly on the east
and west sides of the parish, it is what is called _strong_ land, having
clay for its basis; and in others, especially that of the commons and
fields adjoining, it consists principally of sand or gravel. Towards the
west, it is entirely covered with wood, not in general bearing trees of
large size, but some beautiful beech-trees; and breaking into peaty,
boggy ground on the southern side. The northern side is of good rich
loam, favourable to the growth of fine trees, and likewise forms
excellent arable land. This continues along the valley of Otterbourne,
along a little brook which falls into the Itchen. It is for the most
part of thick clay, fit for brick-making, with occasional veins of sand,
and where Otterbourne hill rises, beds of gravel begin and extend to the
borders of the Itchen, through a wooded slope known as Otterbourne Park.
The boundaries of estates fixed those of parishes, and Otterbourne was
curiously long and narrow, touching on Compton and Twyford to the north
and north-west, on Stoneham to the south, and Hursley to the west, lying
along the bank of the Itchen.
The churches of both parishes were probably built in the twelfth century,
for though Hursley Church has been twice, if not three times, rebuilt,
remains of early Norman mouldings have been found built into the
stone-work of the tower. And on the wall of the old Otterbourne Church a
very rude fresco came partially to light. Traced in red was a quatrefoil
within a square, the corners filled up with what had evidently been the
four Cherubic figures, though only the Winged Ox was clearly traceable.
Within the quatrefoil was a seated Figure, with something like scales in
one hand, apparently representing our Lord in His glory. The central
compartment was much broken away, but there was the outline of a man whom
one in a hairy garment was apparently baptizing. The rest had
disappeared.
These paintings surmounted three acutely-pointed arches, with small
piers, and square on the side next the nave, but on the other side
slender shafts with bell-shaped capitals, carved with bold round
mouldings and deep hollows. Two corbels supporting the horizontal
drip-stone over the west window were also clear and sharply cut; and the
doorway on the south side had slender shafts and deep mouldings, in one
of which is the dog-tooth moulding going even down to the ground on each
side. This is still preserved in the entrance to the Boys’ School.
These remnants date the original building for about the thirteenth
century. It may have been due to King Stephen’s brother, Bishop Henry de
Blois of Winchester, who is known to have raised the castle whose remains
still exist on his manor of Merdon, where once there had been a Roman
encampment. So far as his work can be traced, the first thing he would
do would be to have a similar embankment thrown up, and a parapet made
along the top, behind which men-at-arms would be stationed, the ditch
below having a stockade of sharp stakes. In the middle of the enclosure
a well was begun, which had to go deeper and deeper through the chalk,
till at last water was found at 300 feet deep—a work that must have
lasted a year or more. Around the well, leaving only a small courtyard,
were all the buildings of the castle meant for the Bishop’s household and
soldiers. The entrance to it all was probably over a drawbridge across
the great ditch (which, on this side, was not less than 60 feet deep),
and through a great gateway between two high square towers, which must
have stood where now there is a slope leading down from the level of the
inner court to that surrounded by a bank. This slope is probably formed
by the ruins of the gateway and tower having been pitched into the ditch,
as the readiest way of getting rid of them when the castle was dismantled
afterwards. We are indebted to the late Sir John Cowell for the
conjectural plan and description of the castle.
As soon as the Bishop had completed this much he would feel tolerably
safe, but he would not be satisfied. He could hardly have room in his
castle for all his retainers, and he could not command the country from
it, except towards the south; therefore his next work was to make an
embankment and the ditch on the outer side of it. It was then an
unbroken semicircle, jutting out as it were from the castle, and
protecting a sufficient space of ground for troops to encamp.
[Picture: Merdon Castle and Well, Hursley Park]
In case of an enemy forcing their way into this, the defenders could
retreat into the castle by the drawbridge. The entrance was on the east
side, and in order to protect this and the back of the castle, by which
is meant the northern side, another embankment was made and finished with
a parapet. Also as, in case of this being carried by the enemy, it would
be impossible for the defenders in the northern part of the castle to run
round the castle and into shelter by the main gateway, he built a square
tower (exactly opposite to the ruin which yet remains), and divided from
it only by the great ditch. On either side of the tower—cutting the
embankment across, therefore, at right angles—was a little ditch, spanned
by a drawbridge, which, if the defenders thought it necessary to retire
to the tower, could at any time be raised (the foundations of the tower
and the position of the ditches can still be distinctly traced).
Supposing, further, that it became impossible to hold the tower, the
besieged could retreat into the main body of the castle by means of
another drawbridge across the great ditch, which would lead them through
the arch (which can still be seen in the ruins, though it is partially
blocked up). The room on the east side of this passage was probably a
guard-room. In some castles of this date there were also two or three
tunnels bored through the earth-work from the inner courtyard to the
bottom of the great ditch, so as to provide additional ways of retreat
for such men as might otherwise be cut off in those parts most distant
from either of the great gates, in order to secure the outlying defence.
Henry de Blois must have been thinking of the many feudal castles of his
native France. He was a magnificent prelate, though involved in the wars
of his brother and the Empress Matilda. The hospital of St. Cross, and
much of the beauty of Romsey Abbey, are ascribed to him, and he even
endeavoured to obtain that Winchester should be raised to the dignity of
a Metropolitan See. It does not appear that all his elaborate defences
at Merdon were ever called into practical use; and when his brother, King
Stephen, died in 1154, he fled from England, and the young Henry II. in
anger dismantled Merdon, together with his other castles of Wolvesey and
Waltham; nor were these fortifications ever restored. The king and
bishop were reconciled; and the latter spent a pious and penitent old
age, only taking one meal a day, and spending the surplus in charity. He
died in 1174.