Category: Sutton Veny: Gleanings

Ralph Whitlock in one of his many books (over 100), Wiltshire Folklore And Legends, published in 1992 by Robert Hale, in a chapter titled ‘Houses, Inns And Churches,’ noted:

“There was once a party at the fourteenth-century manor-house, once the rectory, at Sutton Veny and as the house was very full the hostess asked one of the guests if she would mind sharing her room with her little sister. The girl had no objection and in due course retired for the night, the little sister being tucked into a cot by the bed. In the night the girl awoke with the feeling of a child’s head resting on her shoulder. She thought that her sister must have crept into her bed but on striking a light saw that she was sound asleep in her cot. She went back to sleep but was awakened with the same impression – that a child’s head was resting on her shoulder. But again her little sister was sleeping peacefully. She couldn’t get to sleep again and in the morning related her experience to her hostess. The next night the same thing happened, so for the rest of her stay another room was found for her.”

“Some years later the girl was telling her story in another place when another guest overheard and intervened. She said that at one time she and her husband had bought the old manor at Sutton Veny but had so much trouble with that part of the house that they had the wing pulled down. When the workmen were demolishing it they found under the floor a cavity in which were the skeletons of five children!”

Friday 9 December 1988

Sutton Veny School comes under the spotlight in a booklet written by one of its ex-headmasters.

Sutton Veny C.E. School 1850-1950 by David Chatterton is concerned with the whole spectrum of organized child education in the village. This Church of England school started life as a pair of converted cottages in Duck Street and was intended to take 40-60 children of mixed age and ability.

The original deed, dated 1850, that set up the school specified reading, writing, the rudiments of arithmetic, Holy Scripture according to the doctrine of the Church of England and knitting should all be taught.

In 1869 a British School was also established and was later linked with the Congregational Church in High Street; it closed in 1910, and the Church pulled down in 1971.

A new Church of England school was built in 1872 to replace the old one; that new building still remains as part of the existing school.

Mr. Chatterton then goes on to record many anecdotes of school life through the ages. Such as the half holiday in 1917 for picking blackberries – for the food production department. Folk dancing featured during the inter war years, and both the senior and junior shields were won at a local festival.

1931 saw a major change at the school when all the children 11 and over were transferred to the Avenue School in Warminster. At first transport was provided but later on the children had to cycle. Any child who used their own bike was paid half a crown, the local education authority supplied cycles to the others.

There are several old school group photographs in the booklet, as well as many line drawings by Betty Greenwood.

Mr. Chatterton was appointed head teacher at Sutton Veny in 1969, having taught at Nelson Haden Boys’ School in Trowbridge, where he lives, for the previous 6½ years.

He has just returned from a trip to Australia where he visited Hornsly Heights School in Sydney which has been corresponding with children at Sutton Veny for the last few years.

Sutton Veny C.E. School 1850-1950 is published by Wylye Valley Publications and priced at £2.50.

Andrew Houghton in his book Before The Warminster Bypass, published November 1988, noted:

Each period has its own pattern of roads: not always the one which the people of that time need, nor what they want, but perhaps the pattern they deserve. Routes change, because they serve settlements which are themselves “mobile”, changing not just their social and economic status but also their location. At Sutton Veny, for example, the centre of settlement for thousands of years was to the south around the church of St. Leonard (ST 908415), with Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds in the fields to the south-east, and Medieval house platforms along Duck Street. By the 19th century, however, the focus of the settlement had moved north, and in 1868 St. Leonard’s was finally abandoned to become a silent ruin.

By Danny Howell.

From Warminster And District Archive magazine, No.1, Winter 1988:

Up until about 1984, a milepost adjacent to the B3095 road, between Bishopstrow and Sutton Veny, was clearly visible. In the early 1980s, when travelling to and from North End Farm, Sutton Veny, where I was working one or two days a week, I remember making a mental note of this milepost’s existence every time I passed it. In more recent years it has been hidden by brambles, bush and scrub; so much so that some people thought it no longer existed.

At my suggestion, Reg Cundick (Conservation Officer at the Dewey Museum, Warminster) and myself visited the area on the afternoon of Tuesday 12th January 1988, and with the aid of a large scale Ordnance Survey map we successfully located the milepost within a clump of brambles. With spade, scythe, and billhook we cleared all the undergrowth from around it, making it clearly visible to motorists and passers-by once more.

The milepost is situated west of the road, south of where the Warminster Bypass crosses under the B3095, and is approximately 50 paces north of the turning for Cooper’s Bottom. The milepost stands not on the edge of road but about 19 feet west of the edge, where the grass verge meets an adjoining strip of woodland scrub. The position of the post, so far from the edge of the road, suggests that it has either been moved or the road, somewhen in the past, has been realigned to the east. (Other mileposts in the area are close to the roadside). The Ordnance Survey map reference for this milepost on Sutton Veny Common is ST 893430.

It is constructed of five-eighths of an inch thick cast iron, with no back. Its pointed cap gives it something of a classical style (rather handsome I think), typical of the design followed by Carson & Miller at their Wiltshire Foundry in Warminster. Their initials “C&M” and “W” for Warminster, with the date “1840” appear near the base. The legend on the front reads: “WARMINSTER TOWN HALL 2 MILES, CHILMARK 8 MILES”. The design is identical to those on the A36 between Warminster and Wilton, some of those on the A350 between Warminster and East Knoyle, one in Sutton Veny, one at Tytherington, one at Imber Road, Warminster, and one at Parsonage Farm, Elm Hill, Warminster; and another similar example exists on the A36 at Chapmanslade. Not all are marked with Carson & Miller’s initials, which suggests that other foundries copied C & M’s original design.

I returned to the milepost on Sutton Veny Common, on the morning of Thursday 14th January 1988, to examine its condition and survey its dimensions. While doing so, two motorists stopped, quite independently, got out and had a chat with me. Each gentleman commented how nice it was to see an old familiar landmark again, and how it was a pity that more wasn’t being done, in an obvious way, to reinstate and maintain these markers. I agreed, but explained how it was probably the responsibility of the Highways Department of Wiltshire County Council, and they were no doubt having to heed the Government spending cuts!

While at the site I made the following notes: “The milepost is in good condition, shows no obvious faults in its structure physically, and serves well as an example of its type. The front, top and sides are painted white (which is flaking) and the raised lettering is black. The rim at the top of the stem is painted with a black line; and another black line is painted round the base of the roof (below the “eaves’). The location of the post away from the road edge, standing against a bank (the top of the bank comes about half way up the back of the post), affords it some protection from damage. The proximity of a strainer wire supporting a nearby telegraph pole is attracting and encouraging brambles. Apart from the use of weedkiller in the future (I abhor the use of chemicals) the site is going to warrant the regular use of manual labour to prevent the milepost becoming overgrown again. The stem of the milepost is 33 inches high (from the ground level rim to the base of the cap), 18 inches wide and 6 inches in depth. The measurement from the base to the tip of the cap is approximately 37 and a half inches. The cap, which slopes forwards and to the sides, left and right, is 22 and a half inches wide by 8 and a half inches deep. The height of the cap is nearly 5 inches.”

A full record of the measurements, including the height of the lettering and the spaces between the lines, I noted on some accompanying plans. I have deposited my origina notes and plans, together with photographs of the front, rear and sides of the milepost, with the files of the Warminster History Society at the Dewey Museum. Readers are welcome to consult these but should seek the permission of the Museum’s Curator first.

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.