A town through time
Roger Guttridge takes a 1050-year romp through the history of Sturminster Newton
Published in December ’18
Sturminster Newton’s creamery in its Milk Marketing Board years. It was later taken over by Dairy Crest, finally closing in 2000. Credit: Sturminster Newton Museum & Mill Society
Exactly 1050 years ago, a youthful King of the English put his royal seal to a property document – and earned himself a special place in the story of Sturminster Newton. Edgar the Peaceful – so-called because his sixteen-year reign was unusually devoid of conflict – gave thirty hides of land ‘at Stour’ to St Mary’s Church, Glastonbury. The gift by this grandson of Alfred the Great is regarded as the first definitive date in Sturminster’s history – AD 968. Details are worse than sketchy but it is assumed that the transaction involved a community on the Stour’s north bank that was big enough to pay tithes and where there was already a church or minster in this ‘marginal, marshy outpost’, as the book Stur: The Story of Sturminster Newton puts it.
Forty-eight years later, in 1016, there was another historic gift. This time the slightly less peaceable King Edmund II – known as ‘Ironside’ because of his valour in resisting the Danes – marked his seven-month reign by donating ‘seventeen hides of Newton Castle’ to Glastonbury. This was on the south bank and is the first reference to the ‘castle’ or fortification that is thought to have preceded the ruined medieval manor house that now graces the elevated site overlooking the river crossing. The combined town continued to be referred to in documents as ‘Sturminster Newton Castle’ until the 19th century.
Sturminster Newton’s Town Bridge, which was built in around 1500. This eight-arch version replaced a six-arch bridge in the time of Henry VIII.
For more than 500 years, Glastonbury Abbey reigned supreme over both parts of the community, collecting tithes and catering for the spiritual welfare of landholders and peasants alike. No-one was in any doubt about who was in charge. In the 13th century, Abbot Michael of Amesbury reminded the 26 Newton tenants of their duties. Among them was Walter Bird, who held forty acres and was required to donate a hundred eggs at Easter, cut his share of brushwood to fuel the Manor fires and use his ploughing skills whenever called upon in the winter months.
Only Sturminster’s Newton half merited a mention in the Domesday Book in 1086, when – unsurprisingly, given its riverside location – its assets included three mills. But there was another important moment in 1219, when Henry III signed a royal charter granting Sturminster Newton the right to hold a fair. Sturminster was presumably establishing itself as a market town by this time, as confirmed by the award of market grants in 1275 and 1278 and by Edward I’s grant for both a fair and a market in 1286. In the following century, Edward III permitted four street fairs a year plus a livestock market on the day before each fair. The enterprise clearly thrived, as Abbot John Selwood stated in the late 15th century that ‘The townlet has a very good market.’ Selwood also had St Mary’s Church built in 1486. A decade later, Henry VII consented to a weekly market in response to a petition. It was destined to continue weekly for almost 600 years – unlike Glastonbury Abbey, which met its traumatic end during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539. Five years later, the same Henry granted the Manor of Newton to his sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr.
Sturminster Castle was given as a gift from Henry VIII to his sixth wife, Katherine Parr, in 1543 . Credit: Sturminster Newton Museum & Mill Society
As Sturminster’s market grew, so did the town, with 64 households recorded in 1525, rising to 81 by 1662. By this time the area – which in those days hosted far more sheep than cattle – had a new and expanding industry involving the manufacture of swanskin, a coarse, wool-based cloth, most of which was carted to Poole for shipment to Newfoundland, where fishermen needed its warmth to protect themselves from the North Atlantic’s harsher climate. A fulling mill, built alongside the corn mill in 1611, powered stocks that hammered the fabric, while near the church, racks of cloth covered a couple of fields.
By the 1790s, an estimated 1200 Blackmore Vale people were employed in making swanskin, including the majority of Sturminster’s working men and women. When the swanskin trade collapsed in the early 1800s, Sturminster merchants turned directly to cod fishing, establishing new communities in Newfoundland and employing their former swanskin workers there. Many never returned and their descendants today still have Dorset surnames and speak with a Dorset accent.
The River Stour is a defining feature of the town, and the mill is one of the defining features of the river
Between the end of monastic rule in 1539 and the collapse of the swanskin trade in the early 1800s, the two most dramatic events in Sturminster were probably the Civil War in the 1640s and two disastrous fires. In October 1644, the ill-fated King Charles I stopped to lunch in a Sturminster field during a journey from Stalbridge to Durweston Bridge, where he joined up with his troops. More dramatically, in 1645 a makeshift army of country folk – officially known as the Clubmen but described by a Parliamentary officer as a ‘rabble of mongrel malignants and nauseous neutrals’ – attacked a Roundhead garrison in the town and drove them out. A month later, the Clubmen were roundly defeated on Hambledon Hill by Oliver Cromwell.
Old Sturminster’s many thatched buildings made it vulnerable to fire. Much of the town centre was destroyed by fire in 1681 and again in 1729, when the losses included 67 houses, ten barns and the original Market House. The White Hart obviously escaped the 1729 blaze, as it carries a construction date of 1708.
As elsewhere, the first half of the 19th century was a busy time for those concerned with education and religion. The Church of England School that is now the Church Room was built in 1817, catering for more than a hundred boys. The Boys’ School in Penny Street followed in about 1835, at which point girls and infants moved into the 1817 premises. St Mary’s Church was rebuilt in 1825, while the Wesleyan Chapel was built in Church Street in 1832. The Union Workhouse in Bath Road opened in 1838.
But the most influential single event in this era was the arrival of the Somerset and Dorset Railway in 1863. This instant transport revolution brought jobs and prosperity to North Dorset. Among other things, it meant that milk and produce could be transported from the Blackmore Vale to the towns and cities while still fresh. As a result, an area that for many generations had been dominated by sheep-farming to satisfy Newfoundland’s appetite for swanskin quickly turned into the ‘Vale of Little Dairies’ made famous by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It was no coincidence that one of the biggest livestock markets in England grew up within the shadow of the railway station, joined in 1913 by the milk factory across the road. These facilities remained the lifeblood of Sturminster until the end of the 20th century.
The Exchange at Sturminster Newton was developed after the town’s creamery and market closed
Hardy, of course, is the most famous of several high-profile writers who collectively have given Sturminster a literary heritage far beyond that which you would normally expect for a town of its size. Hardy and his first wife, Emma, lived at Riverside Villas overlooking the Stour next to the present-day recreation ground from 1876 to 1878. Hardy wrote The Return of the Native there. The couple rented their home from Robert Young, who wrote humorous verse in the Dorset dialect under the pseudonym Rabin Hill as well as his memories of life in early 19th-century Sturminster. Both Hardy and Young knew William Barnes, the greatest of dialect poets, who was born across the river at Bagber in 1801 and christened and schooled at Sturminster before taking his first job with solicitor Thomas Dashwood at Vine House, Penny Street.
Sturminster’s literary heritage continued to recent times through Olive Knott, who lived in Rixon Hill in the mid-20th century and wrote several books and numerous articles on Dorset and Wessex, and Rosemary Ellerbeck, a best-selling novelist, who also writes under the pen-name Nicola Thorne. Rosemary moved to Sturminster from London in 1989 and lived in The Row and later at Stour Bank, the former Vicarage near the church. In The People of This Parish, published in 1991 under Rosemary’s own name, she used Victorian Sturminster as the model for the parish of the title, calling it Wenham. It was, she wrote, ‘not exactly a village, not properly a town; too big for one, too small for the other’.
Rosemary’s time in Sturminster coincided with its commercial decline. The railway had gone in 1966, its passing regretted by almost everyone except the axe-wielder himself, Dr Beeching, whose name is still spoken with disgust in these parts. Closure of the livestock market followed in 1997 and of the milk factory in 2000, their combined demise making way for residential development and the Exchange community centre, medical facility and supermarket. Other peacetime changes in 20th-century Sturminster included the opening of the Council School – now the William Barnes Primary School – in Bridge Street in 1913 and of the Secondary Modern (now High) School in 1960, when it replaced the Penny Street school, which is now a private residence. More recent residential developments have contributed to a steady growth in population, which at the time of the 2011 census stood at 4292 housed in 2016 dwellings. This represented a threefold population increase since 1801, when the first national census recorded 1406 inhabitants.
