Written by Bruce Watkin in 1983:
A kite-shaped parish, six square miles in extent, with a tail stretching south up chalk hills to the downland of the Great Ridge, and a wide head spreading over the low plateau of upper greensand folded in a great bend of the River Wylye.
There are a number of Bronze age round barrows, close to the presumed line of the prehistoric “great” Ridgeway, and remains of an important Roman villa at Pit Meads (formerly an outlier of Warminster parish) but there is no evidence of an early nucleated settlement.
There were three mediaeval buclei, at Newnham on the present crossroads, at Sutton Magna, centred on Duck Street and the disused church, and at Sutton Parva adjoining Tytherington. There was also the somewhat later development of another hamlet at Sutton End, near Crockerton, which was in a strip of the parish stretching along Five Ash Lane and across the Wylye. This hamlet and all the strip west of the Wylye was transferred to Longbridge Deverill in 1935.
The name “Sutton” means the south farm (Norton Bavant was the north). “Fenny” means marshy but the suffix may not come from the marshy nature of the parish but from some unknown Norman family name.
The settlements are all on the greensand but there is a wide belt of woodland on the west, an ill-defined area shared with Longbridge, and with the damp meadows to the north and the thin dry soils of the downs to the south, a good variety of landscape and land-use. The parish has few other natural advantages. It was on a Saxon route along the south side of the Wylye from Wilton to Warminster, and the 18th century turnpike road from Heytesbury to Bruton crossed it at Newnham. These were never important trade routes and the villages had neither market nor fair. Nevertheless they remained relatively prosperous from an early date.
At the time of the Domesday survey (1086) the Manor was divided between three landowners and the total population was about 110, while its value had increased since 1066. It is the only parish in Wiltshire for which we have any livestock figures. William of Mohun, who had one third of the land, kept one horse and 300 sheep. It was an important sheep-rearing area in the later Middle Ages though subsidary to the great Hungerford sheep farms at Heytesbury. In 1377 there were 33 poll tax payers at Newnham, 82 at Sutton Magna and 36 at Sutton Parva, while in 1576 there were 20 payers of the “super-tax” in Sutton Magna (then including Newnham) and 5 at Sutton Parva.
Two mills mentioned in the Domesday survey have a long history. One on the Wylye to the west, now called Job’s Mill (see below), served the Parva Manor. To the north-east, Magna was served by Mount Mill, a fulling mill by the 15th century when owned by the Hungerfords. It was later bought by the Bennetts of Norton Bavant and was used by Joseph Everett of Heytesbury as part of his cloth-making chain in the 19th century, but became disused by the middle of that century. Apart from the cloth made, or at least fulled, at Mount Mill there has been negligible manufacture in the parish which has been almost exclusively agricultural, though it retains one pub and a village store.
The population at the end of the 17th century was probably about 350. By the beginning of the 19th it had climbed, thanks to agricultural prosperity, to 622 and from this it grew fitfully to 881 by 1871 before declining like most rural parishes in the county for many decades. It was 601 in 1931 and in spite of the huge army camps here in both World Wars little trace shows in post-war years. By 1951 the population was below 500. The figure today is about 490.
Unlike many other parishes nearby, Sutton Veny has been divided between many owners for 300 years. This is because the two principal manors which had been owned by the Hungerford family (of Heytesbury and Farleigh Hungerford) were bought by Sir Stephen Fox in 1685 and immediately resold in small parcels. Nevertheless parts were held, as Southleigh Wood still is, by the Longleat Estate and other large parts were acquired by the Astleys of Bishopstrow (and Everleigh) and by the Benetts of Norton Bavant. The Hintons were on the Greenhill estate from before the Reformation, originally as tenants of Maiden Bradley Priory, and later they rebuilt and enlarged the house which is now called Sutton Veny House. The Everetts of Heytesbury did well enough in their cloth business to buy the Greenhill estate from the Hintons. The other large houses, the Old Manor House (formerly a rectory, see below) and Polebridge are now divorced from their former farm lands.
During the 19th century the old hamlets of Great Sutton and Newnham were joined by almost continuous building of small cottages along the High Street and the whole was visually, and to some extent socially, unified by the building of the new church with its prominent spire in 1868 and the National School alongside. Major changes since then, concentrated since World War II, have been the addition of Council houses at the southern end of the village and the rapid “gentrification” of the small houses in this increasingly popular village.
The following notes link the more interesting buildings, starting with the former parish church.
St Leonard’s Church. The former parish church was abandoned in 1868 and formally declared “redundant” in 1968. J.L. Pearson, the great Victorian architect of Truro Cathedral, was called in to restore the old church but boldly advised the parish to build a new church on a drier and more central site (see St John’s Church, below). The chancel of the old church was then walled off and used as a mortuary chapel for the graveyard, but retaining some of the old wall monuments. The unroofed body of the church and its transepts and arcades were left as a picturesque ruin. 14th and 15th century buttresses illustrate its instability at an early date.
Polebridge House amalgamated the house of the two farms adjoining the church, Polebridge Farm to the north and Church Farm to the south. It is a rambling stone house of many dates and incorporates on its north side a 14th century hall with an open roof which was later divided into two storeys. It has been much altered and extended, lastly by the west wing (dated 1902) by the Alexanders when they acquired the two farms. Wiltshire County Archivist Ken Rogers thought the farms were the demesne farms of the mediaeval manor of Sutton Magna.
South along Duck Street, past the picturesque thatched former smithy and the original village school (of 1850 to 1873) is the Old Manor House, another large stone house. Hoare and Wansey thought it had once been a manor house but records show that for centuries it was the home of the rectors of the parish, right down to the building of a new rectory in Best’s Lane in 1913. Following extensive additions by G.F.S. Powell, local historian and rector 1854 – 1888, its architectural history was unravelled in 1921 by the then owner D.E.W. Cowle, who revealed the mediaeval hall, uncovered its open roof with its curved wind braces and inserted or restored four stone traceried windows and its Tudor fireplace. The house and garden, screened by a high stone wall and stone and brick outbuildings, are picturesque.
On the road to Little Sutton (Sutton Parva) is The Old House, which is of 17th and 18th century stone with mullioned windows and thatched roof . . . .
. . . . and Glebe Farmhouse is of 18th century stone with 19th century brick additions.
At Little Sutton, more part of Tytherington than Sutton, is Haydon’s Farm, formerly Sutton Farm, in 18th century stone, and . . .
. . . Sutton Parva House, formerly Little Sutton Farm, hidden by high stone walls and having a stone 18th century skin to a 17th century timber frame. The adjoining outbuildings were kennels of the Wylye Valley Hunt from 1919 to 1927.
Tytherington Farm, still in Sutton parish, has picturesque stone buildings with brick dressings, and a square brick dovecot dated 1810.
The thatched stone Milestone Cottages adjoin a cast-iron milestone (by Carson and Miller of Warminster) indicating 4 miles to Warminster and 6 to Chilmark.
Back in the High Street the principal monument is the new parish church, The Church of St John The Evangelist, an impressive building in an Early English style by J.L. Pearson, 1866 – 1868, built at family expense as a memorial to Joseph Everett of Greenhill (see Sutton Veny House below), who died in 1865. It is built of Frome stone with Box stone dressings, cruciform in plan with a tower and tall spire over the crossing, large five-light windows to east and west and a rose window in the north transept. Inside are stone rib vaults to the crossing and chancel which are Pearson’s trade mark. There is stained glass by Clayton and Bell, and by Kempe. In the churchyard are the graves of 169 soldiers of the First World War, mostly Anzacs, many killed by a ‘flu epidemic. The graves of 39 German prisoners of war buried here were transferred to a German War Cemetery in Staffordshire in 1963.
Sutton Veny Primary School. This stone building of 1873 replaced the former school in Duck Street. It was designed by Pearson, extended with an additional classroom and eccentric tower by Quiney at the end of the century and again by the County Architect’s Department in the 1970s.
The High Street is lined with a large number of small houses, mainly stone and commonly with later brick dressings. The majority are of early 19th century but older buildings include . . .
. . . The Knapp (between Nos.80 and 81). A 17th century house of colour-washed brick, extended in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Bell House, a rambling stone house, was formerly a pub.
Newnhams (or Little Newnham), is an 18th century stone house with an old tiled roof, and stone mullioned and pedimented windows.
Nos.32 to 35, a range of cottages, with stone ground floors and timber framed uppers.
Sutton Veny House, formerly Greenhill and then Greenhill House till the 1920s, was the home of the Hinton family who had been in the village since the 16th century. It is a late Georgian ashlar-faced house, incorporating a 17th century part of the Hintons’ house, enlarged by the Everetts who acquired it in the mid-19th century, and resold it in 1898. There is an attractive domed semi-circular bay to the west front. The house was converted to a nursing-home in 1982.
The brick buildings of Greenhill Farm and its outbuildings were built by the Everetts in the late 19th century.
One mile west on the Wylye, beyond the steep scarp that ends Eastleigh and Southleigh Woods, is Job’s Mill, the former manorial mill of Little Sutton. It was once called Sutton Veny Mill, but got the name Job from two tenants, father and son, with that Christian name, who occupied it for most of the 18th century. It was later used by the Everetts of Heytesbury but never converted to cloth as most of their other mills had been. It was rebuilt during their tenancy in a symmetrical form, and engaging “Tudor” style, with steep tiled roofs and a projecting three-storey gabled porch. It ceased to be used as a mill by the early 20th century. After being divorced from the Longleat Estate for nearly 150 years (it had been sold to the Astleys in 1810), it was acquired by Lord Bath [6th Marquis] and refurbished by him as a private residence in the 1950s. The Mill house and garden, making good use of the river and mill-stream, are picturesque. The garden is open to the public on one Sunday in the summer of each year.