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Abbotsbury Heritage Research Project: a potted history
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Abbotsbury Heritage Research Project: a potted history
Location: Dorset
ABBOTSBURY in DORSET ~ a very brief history
(Peter Laurie, ed. Nigel Melville)
Abbotsbury is a village on the south coast of England ten miles to the north west of Portland Bill. Visible archaeology testifies to its occupation over the last 6000 years: ancient as well as modern man found it a good place to live. It is unusually sunny, yet sheltered from the west and northerly winds.
Vespasian, in command of the II Augusta Legion and later to be Roman Emperor, brought the benefits of bureaucratic civilisation to us at the turn of the first century AD.
The local tribe in Roman times was the Durotriges ~ the"water and heath people" ~ whose name reappears in Dorchester, the county town. The tribe had a pugnacious reputation, probably because they stood at the eastern frontier of the residual British kingdoms.
There may well have been a Roman villa here, the headquarters of a military farm, which would have loaded corn into ships in the Fleet lagoon for delivery to the legionary camps at Exeter and elsewhere.
Tradition puts one of the first British Christian churches here, perhaps earlier than the chapel at Glastonbury. After the Romans left in 410AD, it may have been a base for missionaries, and the tradition that Abbotsbury was a summer capital of Wessex could have brought Alfred the Great to the village.
Abbotsbury, like other coastal communities, was harried by Viking pirates in the latter part of the first millennium. King Cnut of Denmark, once an enthusiastically pagan pirate, found himself later in life the Christian King of England. To repair his youthful ravages, he rebuilt Exeter Cathedral and, in Abbotsbury, made a substantial grant of land to his retainer Orc and his French wife Thola, who used the grant to found an abbey.
The Abbey of St Peter in Abbotsbury flourished until it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. It was sold in 1541 to Giles Strangways whose family still owns it today in the form of the Ilchester Estates. One could argue that Abbotsbury has had only four owners in two thousand years ~ the Roman army, the Wessex crown, the Benedictine Order, and the Strangways family.
Unusually, the lease of the Abbey estate to Giles Strangways required that he pull down the entire precinct. He may well have sold the roof lead and cut stone to get his expenses back. He made a house out of part of the Abbey buildings: in the Civil War, the family held it for the Crown. When it was taken after a bitter skirmish with Parliamentary troops (there is still a buller hole in the church pulpit) the house was accidentally blown up. Until recently it was thought that many documents inherited from the Abbey had been destroyed in the explosion, but now some surprises are emerging from the Estate archives.
After the Civil War, Abbotsbury virtually vanishes from the national record. The farms had good years and bad ones, and the villagers eked out a living by fishing and smuggling. Daniel Defoe came here and saw the fishermen landing mountains of mackerel on the beach ~ just as they were only twenty years ago. In recent years, the ancient pattern of guaranteed agricultural employment for life came to an end, and the village joined the modern world as a fascinating centre for tourism. The Heritage Research Project aims, alongside the Ilchester Estate, to open up the village history to a worldwide audience.
INTERESTING FEATURES that will be explored by the Project ~
The surrounding natural features go back far into prehistory
The evidence of a major faultline between tectonic plates aeons ago
Chesil Beach and the Fleet - a World Heritage Site
The highest peat bog in Dorset
Bronze Age tumuli and other prehistoric structures
An Iron Age fort and Roman signal station
A pre-Christian mound on St Catherine's Hill
The only managed Swannery in the world
The remains of a major Abbey and St Catherine's Chapel
A village almost entirely protected by Grade I, II* and II status
The mining of stone, iron ore, coal and oil shale
The history of farming, fishing, smuggling ~ and the railway to the village
Churches, chapels and schools
Coastguards, wrecks and the rights of salvage
World War II defensive sites
A rich mine of human memories
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