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¤ How and
when did Pucklechurch become a village?
The layout of Pucklechurch today is the result of decisions taken hundreds of years ago. The position of the Church in the centre of the village is very important, the manor house looking straight up the central street towards it, houses positioned along the edges of the main roads into the village (Parkfield, Shortwood and Westerleigh roads). All three of these roads run into Pucklechurch from different angles and meet at the corners of the great enclosure called the Burrell on the 1843 tithe map, now the Recreation Ground and the Church. Where these roads meet the Burrell they have small open areas which are probably the vestiges of village greens. This suggests that the medieval and later village plan was three small street hamlets each abutting the Burrell. This may all sound very familiar to you, but everything was positioned in a particular way and for a particular reason during a period when villages were being built up and developed between the AD850’s and 1150’s all over Europe. In this anglo-Saxon period, the word 'burh' is also associated with royal administrative centres and important residences, and the road around it may be in its ditch. The church perhaps on the site of the early minster church, is inserted into one corner of this enclosure to be in close association with the royal manor
Villages like Pucklechurch were planned and laid out to reflect power and authority within the community by a new political system where the Church was at the centre. The change had started after the collapse of the withdrawal of the Romans, which was followed by a period of uncertainty when the Benedictine Monasteries started taking vast areas of land-holdings from around AD500 – 700.
Pucklechurch must have been an increasingly important village by the AD900’s because it had a very large amount of land as part of its manor, and must have included Westerleigh and Abson. It is not clear why Glastonbury Abbey had Pucklechurch manor, it is possible that it had something to do with King Edmund and his friendship with a political leader called Dunstan, before Edmund was murdered in 946.
After surviving a near fatal hunting accident at Cheddar Gorge, Edmund appointed Dunstan to Abbot of Glastonbury as pious gesture to the church because he thought divine intervention had saved his life (St Dunstan is the figure on the background of this page). The earliest documentation is a charter from King Eadred (Edmunds brother) dated to AD950, where he confirms the grant of Pucklechurch to Glastonbury.
King Eadred's Charter of AD950, note Pucelancyrcan on the 6th line down on left and Edmund's name is further along on the same line
At this time Pucklechurch was 25 hides of land, a massive territory of which Pucklechurch was the centre. We know that three other documents supported this amount of land, one of them written by King Edmund, but they are unfortunately lost. At the time of the Domesday Book in AD1085 Pucklechurch was 20 hides of land, and if we compare it with other villages in the hundred, organised by the late Anglo-Saxons, we can get some idea of its importance:
¤ Pucklechurch: 20 hides valued at £30 and held by Glastonbury Abbey
¤ Cold Ashton: 5 hides valued at £4 and held by Bath Church
¤ Wapley (Rectory): 1 hide valued at £1 and held by the Bishop of Coutances
¤ Wapley: 1 hide valued at £1 and held by Ralph de Berkeley
¤ Doynton: 5 hides valued at £8 and held by the Bishop of Coutances
¤ Siston: 5 hides valued at £5 and held by Roger de Berkeley
¤ Hinton and Dyrham: 2 manors together. 10 hides valued at £8 held by William, son of Guy.
The Domesday Book listed
the following inhabitants, inventories and taxes paid :
Pucklechurch was no longer a royal manor, it belonged to the church, so why was Edmund there? It is more than likely that he kept the manor house or palace and continued to use his old royal rights, and Pucklechurch had important status as the centre of the hundred. These ‘hundreds’ were created by the Anglo-Saxon Kings in the AD800-900’s possibly based on ancient tribal territories. The obligation people had to their King included serving in the army, or paying a tribute to the King, building roads and bridges or manning strong points in the landscape. The centre of the hundred would therefore have been a meeting place, and this is one of the main reasons behind the importance of Pucklechurch.
In 1548, Bishop William
Barlow, the last Bishop of Bath and Wells to exercise any rights over the Manor of
Pucklechurch, surrendered his rights to King Edward 6th.
The
Dennis (Denys or Dennys) family are notable in the history of the village, initially
settling in Dyrham and Syston, and it was a Dennis who enclosed Dyrham Park in the reign
of Henry XIII and earlier built Syston Court. Property in particular associated with the
Dennis family in Pucklechurch are Dodds Farm, formerly a Dower house of Syston Court and
since 1906 re-named Dennisworth Farm, and Moat Farm (Old Hall or Great House). They are
particularly associated with the Church of St Thomas a Becket, the North Aisle sometimes
called the Dennis Aisle and the side chapel the Dennis Chapel.
¤ The Black Death ¤
It is considered that the
Black Death came to Britain's shores at Melcombe Regis in Dorset from the Continent in
August 1348 and rapidly swept by Bristol, Gloucester, and Oxford to London and from that
centre it soon spread over England. The following year saw plague in Cornwall and by 1350
it had reached Scotland. Most cities seem to have lost about 40% of their population. In
January 1349 the Bishop of Bath and Wells reported….'the contagious pestilence of the
present day, which is spreading far and wide, has left many parish churches without parson
or priest…since no priest can be found …many people are dying without the
sacrament of penance'... adding that in such a case they make confession to each other or
'even to a woman'.
The 'Black Death' is the
general term used for the initial outbreak of the epidemic in 1348, but further outbreaks
of plague occurred in England during the next 300 years to the Great Plague of London in
1665. Thus, although by 1361 evidence suggests that the population was in the process of
recovery, the return of the plague in that year resulted in a demographic decline of
around 20%, the second outbreak being perhaps half as virulent as the first. In the years
1369-71 another outbreak is estimated to have killed another 10-15% of the population and
thereafter until the late fifteenth century the plague re-occurred every 6-12 years (Naphy
and Spicer 2000, 41).
A peculiar feature of the
Black Death was that it swept through rural villages as well as the towns, the second and
subsequent outbreaks being more confined to urban areas. The impact on the villages was
still great, however, as the earlier migration of villagers to the towns, after the
initial pestilence, resulted in a decline in the population of villages, some 1,300 being
abandoned in England during the period 1350-1500.
The impact in general on
the landscape was great, fields being left fallow and holdings abandoned to nature,
skilled and able-bodied men killed or left for the towns, loss of clergy and a general
adoption of less labour-intensive forms of production (shepherding for example as opposed
to grain growing).
The Effigies in the Parish Church
Information is, however, sparse. Mee (1938, 332) states that the effigy of the unknown woman in the Parish Church died at the time of the Black Death, and indeed the stone figure has been dated to the 14th. Century.
The male effigy in St Thomas
Church (Photo by Ann Wilson)
These effigies in the church can probably be dated to c.1360, and the canopy over the male figure was in the churchyard until the 1888 refit/restoration of the north aisle. Both the stone altar/tomb and the canopy were brought in and repositioned at that time. The stone altar was found again between the buttresses on the north wall and put in the place where it can be seen. It is thought that the two effigies were man and wife and that they came from the same monument.