Stockton In The Wylye Valley

Edith Olivier in her book Wiltshire, posthumously published in 1951, penned the following portrait of Stockton:

Long before the Romans came to Britain, the Stockton people already possessed the social gifts which have distinguished them ever since. This place has always been self-sufficient. It has organised itself for work and for play. It still does so.

The first settlement which can be traced in Stockton was on the down a little to the north of Stockton Wood, so, like most early Wiltshire villages, it was well above the river level. This British village has been partly excavated, and enough was then discovered to prove that the aboriginal inhabitants were by no means savages. Their life demanded plenty of ornament. They wore brooches of bronze and enamel, bronze necklets and wristlets, and many beads. Their spoons were made of bronze and of bone, and with these they ate off pottery coming from Italy, Gaul and the New Forest. When their feasts were over, they “rose up to play” at draughts, for some of their draughtsmen have been dug up; and they were not averse to a little gambling with counters, which they made by roughly trimming the edges of broken fragments of pottery. Many of these relics were found in the neighbourhood of a cremated burial which has been dated at about 100 B.C.

A Saxon charter of 901 is preserved at Winchester, and this shows that in King Alfred’s day the Lord of Stockton was a noble named Wulfhere, who seemed to have got into trouble with the Crown, and so forfeited his estate. Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, then granted it to one Ethelwulf, who passed it on to his wife Deorswith, “as her own possession, to dispose of as to her was most desirable”. It was “desirable” to Deors with to present the estate to the monastery of St. Swithun at Winchester; and Domesday Book records it as still belonging to that monastery. The priors of St. Swithun took good care of it, for it is a remarkable thing that in this charter of 901, in Domesday, and today, the boundaries of Stockton have remained un changed. Evidently a contented place. The names of the lords of the manor are all entered in the records, from R. Vernon, Prior of St. Swithun, 1285-1346, to Henry Brooke (1530). He was the last ecclesiastical owner of Stockton, and then in 1559 Henry VIII ap pointed the first lay lord of the manor since Saxon days. This was William Herbert, the first Lord Pembroke.

The population of Stockton has not varied much, and lists of the families living there exist from 1200 down to the present day. Early lists of names are short. There were four families in 1200, sixteen in 1300, and by 1400 the number had gone up to thirty. It was down to twenty-two in I800, and was highest in 1600 and 1700 – forty-six and forty-four. At the present day there are fifty-six inhabited houses containing a hundred and eighty-six people; and since 1801 the population has moved up and down between two hundred and twenty -four and one hundred and eighty.

More interesting than these statistics are the various occupations of the Stockton people in the last two hundred years, and it is sad to see how far more varied these used to be than they are today. In 1847 there were three carpenters, one tailor – “John Dyer sat cross-legged in the window at No. 22” and who also “played the cello in Church” – three shoemakers, two grocers, one pig-dealer, two blacksmiths, one wheelwright, one butcher, one maltster, one curate, one parson, one beershop and forty-six cottagers. But there was no baker, for every woman was proud to bake her own bread.

Nicholas Fleming had been the carpenter in 1694, and the trade was still in his family in the nineteenth century; and the Giles were the blacksmiths for a hundred years from I809. When Tom Farley died during the war he brought an end to a family which had lived in Stockton for five hundred years.

Coming to 1930, the village occupations included one keeper, one clerk-of-works, six gardeners, three railwaymen, two grooms, six farmers (one of whom was also a coal merchant), one houseman, one motor-driver, one rector, one innkeeper and one butler.

At that time several people in the village employed domestic servants. At Stockton House there were three menservants, including a chauffeur, five maids, and seven gardeners; while at Long Hall the staff was five maids, a groom and three gardeners. Five or six people employed a maid apiece, and most of these also kept a groom or gardener.

Agricultural wages then were thirty shillings to thirty-six shillings weekly, and rents were three shil lings to six shillings.

Particulars relating to 1847 come from a book com piled in that year by Mr. T. Miles, the parson; and now, nearly a hundred years later, Mr. Yeatman Biggs, of Long Hall, has made a similar book, and has also collected personal recollections of the past sixty or seventy years from old inhabitants. They give a lively picture of village life. Stockton was the only Wiltshire village to appear in the “Coronation Royal Record” of 1937, in recognition of its beauty and of the pains taken by its inhabitants to maintain this beauty.

Mrs. Giles, who remembered the village in 1877, says it was then “much the same as it is today”. The inhabitants were “genuine Wiltshire people, friendly, contented, and happy, always ready to lend a helping hand. Every one joined in dancing, sliding, skating in the meadows, or picnics on the downs, . . . no merri ment was complete without dancing, to the tune of accordion, concertina, fiddle, whistle pipe, and even mouth organ. If none of these instruments was forth coming, the dancers made their own music, singing and whistling as they danced.”

Stockton people must have been great dancers in those days. Not content with only two or three kinds of dance, like the lazy and limited performers of today, their programmes included: Up-the-Side-and-Down- the-Middle, Bricks and Mortar, Sir Roger de Coverley, Four-handed Reel, Ribbon Dance, Heel and Toe Polka, ordinary Polka, Polka-Mazourka, Waltz, Schot tische, Highland Schottische, Varsoviana, Gallop, Swedish Dance, Lancers and Quadrille.

In the winter the boys “made play of work” in the smithy, with ledge and anvil, and there was singing and boxing. The room was lit by stable lantern, and the seats were planks laid across barrels. The occupants were completely contented.

In the memory of the oldest inhabitant of any date, Stockton Feast on the Sunday after July 6th was the great day of the year. It always “began a week of jollity”. For the day itself, “new potatoes were dug for the first time”, and everyone was sure of “an extra good dinner”. Five or six of the villagers got temporary licences for the week and sold beer in their own houses, for “tea was too expensive”. The whole village had a festal air, because there were “stalls by the road side from No.11 to Almshouse Lane”, and at these were sold sweets, cakes, ginger beer and other fairings; while Charlie Topp from Codford did a roaring trade in cockles and winkles.

Outwardly the present generation expects a more refined setting for its recreations, but the spirit is the same. The old barn has now become a theatre which has discovered a good deal of local talent, and in addition to regular plays once or twice each month, there are miscellaneous programmes consisting of playlets called “sketches”, songs and violin solos; and when Christ mas comes, everyone dances at the Christmas party. Meantime, all through the winter, the reading-room in the village is filled with members enjoying papers, books and magazines; playing billiards, bagatelle or darts; or continuing the ancient village tradition of draughts. All of this is managed by a committee of the members, who also elect an entertainments committee which gives a weekly village party. Stockton entertains itself, of course.

But to return to the oldest inhabitant, there were always certain regular feasts. On Shrove Tuesday the children paraded the village, singing their Shrovetide songs, one of which was:

I’ve come a’shroving After a piece of pancake

Or a little truckle cheese Of your own making.

Is the knives and forks put? Is the bread and cheese cut?

Is the best barrel tapped? For I’ve come a’shroving.

On May Day there were more children’s parades, this time carrying “lovely garlands”; and on Whit Monday the Stockton club marched up to Stockton House with a band, and there they spent the evening, dancing on the lawn till well after the moon was up. At the Harvest Home there were suppers given by the farmers, and at Christmas time mummers and carol singers filled the air with all sorts of music.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Stockton was much excited over the building of the railway, and no doubt the more conservative and old-fashioned people felt that this hideous innovation would be the end of the old Stockton. As a matter of fact it made very little difference. Stockton still “keeps itself to itself”, and the line is banished to so deep a cutting that the trains can hardly be seen or heard as they pass. But while the building was in process Stockton displayed its usual character of hospitality. The village people organised what would now be called a canteen for the navvies; they called it then a “soup kitchen”. In return for this gesture, Mr Bowden at the level crossing started a little school for the village boys in his hut. But the naughty boys used to put bags over the chimney so that the class should be driven out by smoke.

In those free and independent days any national festivity was seized upon by the versatile people of Stockton as an opportunity for one of their own jollifi cations. Royal weddings, coronations, jubilees, home coming of troops and such local events as the return of General Yeatman-Biggs from the Sudan – all these were excuses for fetes arranged by the villagers in their own way.

And while this active life was carried on in this village of under three hundred people, what always struck the newcomer was the beauty and peace of the place itself. As a continuous background to the life of the day, there remained the architecture of the church, which had been completed in successive centuries since it was first founded in the year 1200. It is set in a little side way off the street, with as its neighbours thirteenth -century almshouses, and as a quiet contrast the mellow red brick of Long Hall.

The main street of the village makes a harmonious curve, and the thatched cottages have their own gar dens to add to their beauty. One or two good farmhouses prepare the eye for Stockton House itself, at the end of the village, placed in a well-planted park. The actual date of the house is unknown as the original inscription upon it has been broken off; but the coats-of-arms of Elizabeth and James I in the Great Bedroom suggest that it was begun in the one reign and finished in the other.

The village is off the main Wylye Valley road. The way to it is indicated by no official number. Its most appropriate map is still that vellum one of 1640 which hangs in Long Hall, bearing the names of the tenants in the middle of the seventeenth century, and showing the open field system of that date.