The Seal of Henry, Clerk of Seale.

In August 2013, metal detectorists from the West Midlands were searching in Overseal fields and discovered something unusual.  About the size of an old penny (20-25mm diameter) and made of bronze, it turned out to be a seal matrix, circular in design, with an inscription around the outer face and a pattern in the centre.  A seal matrix is a tool used to make an impression into a heated daub of wax, which was then used to close a document and make it private, and to authenticate it.  Once the find was cleaned up it was possible to make an impression from the seal matrix, perhaps for the first time in many hundreds of years.  We can approximately date the matrix from the design and wording; this one had an inscription around the outer face that says:

S. Henrici, Aveo

 

This has a meaning.  S. is the standard beginning of a seal matrix inscription and simply means ‘the seal of’ or ‘the seal belonging to’, followed by the genitive form of the latinised name for Henry, and the Latin word ‘aveo’ meaning greetings or salutations.  The central design is categorised as radial, and this category usually has two or more intersecting branches, petals, leaves or lobes.  In our case these are truncated by an upright staff with a cross bar making this into a Christian cross design.  Ours does not quite conform to the standardised form in that the central design appears to be a double intersecting spiral, almost labyrinthine, cut across from the centre to the top by a tall cross.

This then would be the seal of a person called Henry and the style dates the seal matrix to the 13^th century.  I thought that this would be as much as we would be able to say about the seal matrix, but separately I had been researching the old Church Way, the path along which our ancestors walked to church from Overseal to Netherseal and came across a reference to not only ‘Chirche Weye’ but perhaps to Henry himself.  Translated from the original Latin text, the document is a deed dating to circa 1280, in a land transfer deed:

A gift by William son of Henric the Clerk of Greate Seale to the Abbey and Monks of Merevale of one acre of arable land in a field of Seale beyond the Chirchweye.

 

Is this him?  Certainly, the date is correct, the seal matrix is from the 13^th century, the name is the same and it would have had to have been owned by someone of local importance, learning, and who was literate.  If so, then we know he had a son, William, who gave an acre of land to the church, and that Henry himself was the ‘Clerke of Greate Seale’.  Greate Seale is Netherseal, the main village in the parish as it then was, and the clerk would have been an important local dignitary and have worked for the church.  This dates the seal matrix neatly to around the third quarter of the 13^th century and tells us just a little more about our history.

 

It would be wonderful to bring this item back home one day and help tell the story of our village.

 

The River Trent in prehistory: Trisentona and the birthplace of a goddess.

 

Figure 1. The confluence of the three rivers. To the right is the River Trent, the centre is the River Tame, and the River Mease is out of shot to the left.  ©Mark Knight 2022. 

It is well established that the prehistoric peoples of Britain believed that rivers were a representation of the feminine divine and that each river had its own goddess, or more correctly, that the river was a manifestation of the goddess herself and pondering this caused me to start thinking about our own River Trent.  The pre-Christian people of Britain believed in genius loci or the spirit of place; trees, springs, mountains, rivers – all were represented by a spirit or a god or goddess.  

In that respect they align with many of the world’s indigenous religions.  Indigenous peoples often describe and understand the world in very different terms to those of the Western world, sometimes in radically disparate and seemingly incongruous ways.  Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro describes these radically different worldviews as ‘perspectival multinaturalism’, suggesting that the world is ‘inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human’, which all act in the world but with a variety of sensory apparatus and implying a unity of nature and a multiplicity of cultures and multinatural worlds with a diverse corporeality and variety of perspectives.[1]  In this worldview therefore, a tree or a river, or a rock, mountain or forest might have individual physiognomies (described by some indigenous cultures as ‘earth beings’) that may be apprehended by a human individual and understood as identifying the entity’s character and personality.  So too for all rivers, and in the past the River Trent was no exception, being believed to be represented by a specific ‘earth being’, or goddess.  Work by etymologists over the years reveals that the name of the goddess was Trisentona, shortened over the millennia to Trent.  Efforts in the past to understand the meaning of the name resulted in translations such as ‘Trespasser’, ‘Flooding One’, or more tortuously, ‘the Great Feminine Thoroughfare’.

 

More recently, Professor Andrew Breeze of the University of Navarra has identified a new derivation of the name meaning.  Whilst acknowledging the river as a manifestation of the goddess, he offers a different conclusion for the meaning of her name.  He breaks the word into three parts, Tri, which he translates as meaning ‘very’ or ‘great’ related to the modern Welsh word ‘dra’ with the same meaning.  The second part he gives as ‘suant’ which gives us the modern Welsh ‘chwant’, meaning ‘desire’, with the third part ‘ona’ modifying the ‘suant’ to ‘suantona’, giving us the related modern Welsh ‘sorchan’, meaning ‘beloved’.   This results in Trisentona meaning as something like ‘the goddess of great desire’, or perhaps better rendered in English as ‘greatly beloved’.[2]

 

I think we can get closer still.  An archaeological team led by Professor Henry Chapman of the University of Birmingham unearthed an incredible series of finds at Catholme, near to Alrewas.  A ritual landscape based around a series of ceremonial monuments focussed on the confluence of three rivers, The Trent, Tame and Mease was discovered to have existed between about 3,000 BCE and 1,500-1,000 BCE.[3]  The importance and sanctity of this unusual triple confluence was of utmost significance to our forebears, and starting in the late Neolithic, these monuments may have stood in the landscape for well over 1,500 years and influenced the building and placement of later Bronze Age burial mounds and other landscape features.  This ceremonial complex was of very great importance and national significance, despite there being nothing visible above ground now.

 

The belief in a triple goddess is a pan-European one, representing the three aspects of the feminine divine.  Consider here the three fates of Greek myth, the three norns of Germanic and Scandinavian myth, or the Irish and Welsh triple goddess figures.  The connection between water, life, and the life-giving goddess is very ancient, dating back far into prehistory and has perhaps continued into historic times with the celebration of holy wells with their female patron saints.[4]  

 

The number three was of great significance, and it is my contention that in the ancient past the three rivers were understood to have given birth to the triple goddess.  The ritual landscape and ceremonial complex that stood for so very long acknowledged this, and importantly, may have been recognised and celebrated by our ancient ancestors as the birthplace of the goddess herself.  The prefix or word-forming tri is of proto-Indo-European origin, meaning (of course) three, and is represented in almost all modern European languages as a variant of this, as well as Indian languages through Vedic Sanskrit and Indo-Iranian languages (Persian, or Farsi).[5]  This means that a small revision to Professor Breeze’s derivation of Tri, instead of mutating to ‘dra’ meaning ‘very’ would remain with the usual meaning of ‘three’.  The goddess Trisentona’s name would then mean ‘thrice-beloved’, emphasising the tripling of the regard in which she was held, and as a recognition of the ‘three-ness’ of the triple goddess and the importance of the confluence where three rivers meet.  

 

Bringing these aspects together, these three rivers, the Mease, Tame and Trent gave birth to the triple goddess, with the creation of the Catholme Ceremonial complex as the celebration of that birthplace.  The river then becomes a manifestation of the goddess, and the goddess a representation of the river.  Almost lost to us on the verge of forgetfulness, she was called Trisentona the thrice beloved, shortened over the years to Trent.

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[1] Adamson, J in Iovino, S. & Opperman, S. (eds). Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press 2014 p:261.

[2] Elar.urfu.ru/bitstream/10995/97222/1/vopon_2021_1_05.pdf Accessed 21^st January 2022

[3] https://doi.org/10.5284/1000311 Accessed 30th January 2021

[4] Gimbutas, M. The Living Goddesses.  University of California 1999 pp: 11-12

[5] https://www.etymonline.com/word/tri- Accessed 22nd January 2022

A Date with Destiny: William Arnold, the Last Abbot of Merevale.

In the middle of the 1530s, the English church was in a state of crisis.  On the 15^th of January 1535 King Henry VIII had declared himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England, creating a permanent rift with the Catholic faith.  Whilst the debate around the reasons for this has centred on his desire for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, one of the consequences was a land grab on a scale not seen in England since the Norman invasion of 1066.

Artist's impression of Merevale Abbey from the Henry Tudor Society website https://henrytudorsociety.com/2015/08/20/merevale-abbey/

Much land in the parish of Seale had, over the centuries, been given to the church, and to religious institutions, specifically in the form of land grants to the Abbey of Merevale in north Warwickshire.  This institution had been founded by Robert, Earl Ferrers, in 1148 as a house of the Cistercian order.  It is of significance, as will be seen below, that there was a close connection between the Cistercians and the Order of the Knights Templar and it may be that that connection was remembered long after the Templars were dissolved. When the Knights Templar were founded in 1119, they were unpopular in many quarters of the Church and it was only following support in the form of a letter from Bernard of Clairvaux in 1129 that they were granted recognition by Pope Honorious II.  Bernard also founded the Cistercian Order and the link between the orders was strong, indeed the Templars were considered a branch of the Cistercian order.[1]  The wearing of a white mantle by knights (the monks of the order, other ranks were lay people and not monks) was influenced by the white robes of Cistercian monks and represented purity and the casting out of darkness.  The close connection between the orders was kept until the Knights Templar were suppressed following events in 1307.  For example, it was not the norm for Knights Templar to leave the order, and if expelled they were expected to enter a monastery, often of the Cistercians, who followed a strict code of practice.  It was possible for permission to enter a Cistercian house to be withheld and other houses of the Benedictine or Augustinian orders to be entered instead.[2]

 

Merevale Abbey was dissolved almost 400 years after its founding, when the article of surrender was signed by the Abbot, William Arnold, in 1538.[3]  The Ferrers family had kept a connection and patronage with Merevale Abbey over the centuries and encouraged donations of land.  Land ownership was as important then as it is now, and even seemingly minor transgressions or infringement of rights were often contested in law, in fact the earliest document held in the Derbyshire Record Office dates to the twelfth century and is for land transfer in the parish of Seale.  By the sixteenth century, although having had financial difficulties over the years, Merevale Abbey owned considerable tracts of land in the Midlands, including in Seale.  Seale Grange, to the west of Netherseal was an estate rented from Merevale, as were other fields in Netherseal alongside significant areas of Overseal.  A large part of the Great Wood – Grange Wood – was owned by the abbey.  One of Overseal’s three great fields was called Church Field and Overseal Farm (also known as Grange Farm) was also owned by the Abbey.  The name grange indicates  that the land was owned by the abbey and rented out to tenants.

 

Although he could not have known it when he was appointed, William Arnold would be the last Abbot of Merevale Abbey.  The first surviving record of William Arnold dates to 1522, when he appears on a list drawn up by Thomas Cromwell in the February of that year, although he was probably appointed as abbot sometime after 1518 when records of the former abbot, John Baddesley, end. Positions of lay and secular authority were commonly appointed for a fee to the person who could afford to buy their way into them, bribery was considered normal in Tudor England, a perquisite of power.  Arnold appears on a list drawn up for Cromwell by William Brabazon, in September of 1522 in which it was stated that: ‘the abbot of Merevale is very short of money, but at Christmas he will pay most part of his duty’ and for Cromwell’s trouble over his election he forwarded 53s. 4d. Further difficulties in paying his ‘duty’ to Cromwell are apparent in the records; Arnold sent 4d to Cromwell in 1532 due to a poor harvest that year and he again appears on a list with a payment to Cromwell in 1536. Arnold continued to fight to keep his position as Abbot of Merevale, although it was contested by others.  It is difficult to judge Arnold’s abilities as abbot from the available evidence.  His payment of bribes to Cromwell was considered normal in Tudor society, and considerable bribes were offered by rivals keen to assume the position, which Arnold managed to fight off.  It is known that Merevale was a valuable abbey with considerable rents but also that Arnold took his duties very seriously: beer and loaves were doled out weekly to the poor at the monastery gates and from the churches owned by the abbey at Mancetter and Orton on the Hill, along with the hospices attached to those churches  Fish was doled out on Maundy Thursday.[4] The abbot seems to have ministered to the poor well, enacting his duties to the best of his abilities, which must have been considerable, as evidenced by his fighting off other suitors to the position right to the very end.  Inevitably, despite Arnold’s best efforts to fight it, the writing was on the wall and Merevale Abbey was surrendered in 1538, following Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries Act.  

 

William Arnold may have provided an unusual and startling twist to the story, and there is a possibility that the connection to the Knights Templar was remembered more than 200 years after the order’s dissolution.  This dramatic twist is hinted at by William Arnold in his final act of signing the surrender of the house and his choice of date to do so may be a darkly significant one.  As a Cistercian abbot and an educated Christian and godly man, Arnold would certainly have known his own order’s history, and the history of what had been, in effect, the military wing of the order.  On Friday 13^th October 1307 Philip IV of France had ordered the arrest of the Templars, including the Order’s Grand Master, where many were tortured into admitting charges of heresy.  These ‘confessions’ were used by Philip to bully the Pope, Clement V, into finally dissolving the order in 1312.  In 1538, and facing the inevitable, William Arnold chose the same date, the 13^th of October, to sign the letter of surrender of Merevale Abbey following the Dissolution of the Monasteries ordered by another bullying tyrant, Henry VIII of England.  We will never know for certain that Arnold was signalling the suppression of a religious order by a tyrant by his choice of date, and we must also consider the possibility that it may be entirely coincidental.  Alternatively, Arnold may be sending a signal to history.  My feeling is that William Arnold was a brave and capable man who ministered to the poor and fought off rivals through his tenacity.  In a final act of defiance to a tyrant and bully, insofar as he sensibly could, Arnold drew attention to the connection between one despot and another by highlighting a dark and significant date in the Cistercian order’s history.

 

William Arnold was pensioned off, avoiding the fate of other abbots, like Richard Whiting, who was hung, drawn and quartered for remaining loyal to the Catholic faith and refusing to hand over the Abbey of Glastonbury. Following the letter of surrender the Merevale lands were handed over to their patron, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, two days later on the 15^th October.  Lord Ferrers’ son sold the Seale manors to his cousin, Sir William Gresley, in 1563, and so began a new chapter for the parish. 

 

In one final footnote, the Seale Parish Register begins in that same year, 1563, and it may be of significance that the surname Arnold figures strongly in the parish.  It could be that the burial of one William Arnold on September the 8^th, 1585 is another man entirely, but it could also be that the name points to a family connection with the parish.  Perhaps future research may resolve the question of whether William Arnold was from the parish of Seale.

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[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/Knights_Templar/ Accessed 11^th December 2021

[2] Parker, T.W. The Knights Templar in England. Wipf & Stock Publishers. 2020 p:135

[3] https://historicengland.org.uk/services-skills/education/educational-images/remains-of-merevale-abbey-merevale-5317 Accessed 7th December 2021

[4] https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol2/pp75-78 Accessed 12th December 2021

The Curious Case of the Livery Button

Livery buttons are a fairly common metal detecting find, so for one to turn up in a field in Overseal near to the Netherseal boundary isn’t something of especial significance, and certainly of no financial value.  It was only a chance discussion over the internet with an interested member of the Overseal History Group that the local importance of the discovery became apparent.  Indeed, the discovery connects our ancient parish directly with the wider world of the 17^th century, even to the far side of the Pacific Ocean.  The button in question is in a fairly poor condition.  It depicts a greyhound courant or a running greyhound, alongside a wading bird, probably a heron or stork.  In a cartouche or banner is what at first, I took to be the word ‘Saardrim’ but what a group member, C.L. Redfern thought was the word ‘Saardam’.  It was during this online discussion that the penny dropped – or in this case, the livery button.

Figure 1. The livery button found in a field in Overseal.

Gilbert Morewood was born in 1585 or 1586, the second son of Rowland Morewood and Ann Stafford of Bradfield, Yorkshire.  At around the age of fourteen, young Gilbert went to London to join the Company of Grocers as an apprentice to Anthony Morewood, probably his cousin, a freeman of the Grocer’s Company. Young Gilbert showed an aptitude for the business and rapidly progressed until by 1616 he had himself risen to become a freeman of the same Company.  Once he became a freeman, he began to invest whatever he could in the import of pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and currants, brought in on trading ships from the east.  Later, he began to trade in exotic groceries and vices such as coffee, chocolate and that old favourite, tobacco.  He began to buy and sell property in the city and the country, lent money, and provided insurance for trading ventures.  He traded through the Levant Company, and he became a member of the Virginia Company, owning shares in ships trading to Brazil and South America, to Guinea and to West Africa.  England in the seventeenth century was changing, and that change was being driven by men like Gilbert Morewood.  Perhaps most importantly for our story, in 1619 Gilbert Morewood became a member of the East India Company, which held, deliberately vague by design of a Royal Charter, a monopoly on trade to the east.  By the year 1628 Morewood was wealthy enough to look around for a country estate and purchased the manors of Netherseal and Overseal in what was then north-west Leicestershire (now South Derbyshire) from Sir George Gresley of Drakelowe.  Morewood grew to love his country estate, and although his business interests often kept him away in the city, his family grew and prospered.  Morewood had a daughter from his first marriage, then a stepdaughter and three more daughters from his second marriage.  These three, Frances, Grace, and Elizabeth, were all christened at St Peter’s in Netherseal, although Elizabeth died shortly after her fifth birthday and is buried in the churchyard.  Morewood’s nephew, Reginald Eyre, also purchased property in the parish and remained there.

 

With a weather eye on the fortunes of trade and unlike many less canny traders, Morewood supplemented his trading activities through the Virginia Company, one of the few who did.  He also traded in lead and another very valuable and dangerous commodity, gunpowder.  In 1641 he rose to became one of the twenty-four ‘committees’, or members of the governing body of the East India Company, ensuring also that his brother and son-in-law were also elected as ‘committees’.  Later still, and very cannily, once it became apparent that the Parliamentarian cause would win the Civil War, Morewood steered the East India Company away from support of Laudian and Royalist causes and supplied the Parliamentary cause, most especially with lead from the family lead mines in Derbyshire.[1]

Figure 2. The Saardam in 1629, illustration from the book François Pelsaert, Ongeluckige voyagie van't schip Batavia nae de Oost-Indien (Amsterdam, 1647). Author unknown.

In July 1628 he petitioned to export lead from his brother’s lead mines in Derbyshire through the port of Hull to Amsterdam, and it may be here that the connection to the livery button was made.  Morewood’s lead cargo arrived in Amsterdam, probably in the August or September of 1628 after the petition had been granted.  The agreement to export the lead had been made with Dutch merchants before restrictions had been put in place by government, therefore the petition was successful.  What is not known is whether Morewood had travelled to Amsterdam himself or whether the agreement was made by an intermediary.

It transpires that the ‘Saardam’ (alternative spellings Sardam, Saerdam or even Zaandam) is the name of a Dutch ship that was constructed in Amsterdam for the Dutch East India Company and made its maiden voyage at the end of October 1628.  At 36 metres from stern to bowsprit (roughly 120 feet), and with a load capacity of 500 tons it was built for inter-island trade in the East Indies.  

 

Having left Amsterdam in October 1628, the Saardam arrived in Batavia (modern day Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, after over eight months at sea, in July 1629.  The story of the Saardam starts to heat up from this point.  The Saardam was involved in the rescue of the Dutch merchant ship, also called the Batavia, which ran aground off the coast of Western Australia in June 1629.  Most of the crew and passengers survived the initial wreck and were marooned on a small group of islands.  The captain, Jan Pelsaert, took most of the senior crew on a longboat to row to Jakarta, and arrived there thirty-three days later, an incredible journey in itself. Pelsaert was ordered to return in the recently arrived Saardam to rescue the remaining passengers and crew of the Batavia.  Arriving back on 2^nd October 1629, more than three months after the initial grounding of the Batavia, Pelsaert discovered the terrible sight of a mutiny in which most of the female passengers had been raped and murdered, the soldiers accompanying the ship had been deliberately marooned on another island some five miles away and any children and men who refused to join the mutiny had been murdered.  In total, an estimated 125 men, women and children were murdered by the mutineers.  Pelsaert dealt out swift justice, cutting off the right hand of many of the mutineers and then hanging them.  The mutineer’s leader had both hands cut off and was then hung.  All bar two of the remaining mutineers were transported to Jakarta, where they were tried before a judge and then hung.  The two were deliberately marooned on the island and left to die.  The remaining survivors of the wreck of the Batavia were then rescued by the Saardam and delivered safely to Jakarta.[2]

Figure 3. The excutions as illustrated in the Lucas de Vries 1649 edition of Ongeluckige Voyagie van’t Schip Batavia nae de Oost-Indien (‘Unlucky voyage of the ship Batavia to the East Indies’). Image: Spy007au via Wiki Commons.

The full horror of the story was published shortly after news of it was received back in Holland and quickly the story became the talk of Europe, especially amongst international traders such as Morewood and the East India Company.  The chance find of a livery button bearing the legend Saardam provides us with a connection to the world of international spice trade and the dangers of seafaring in the seventeenth century. 

Figure 4. The arms of the Morewood family of Bradfield, the 'Morewoods of the Oak'.

In yet another coincidence, it is also the case that one of the symbols of the Morewood coat of arms is a greyhound courant, the running greyhound.[3]  There are many unanswered questions.  Did Morewood himself, or one of his representatives see the livery button depicting a running greyhound and take a fancy to it through the connection with Morewood’s family coat of arms?  Or was it in fact the other way around?  Did the Morewood family adopt the symbol after seeing the Saardam’s livery button?  How did the button come to arrive in the Parish of Seale and country seat of Gilbert Morewood? Was there a closer connection with the Saardam – for example, did Morewood or his Dutch counterpart transport lead from Amsterdam to Jakarta?  Was the apparent coincidence of the lead cargo arriving in Amsterdam in time for the Saardam travelling to Batavia in fact a deliberate objective that had been planned for from the outset?  Was Morewood anticipating an import from the East Indies upon the return of the Batavia?  The list goes on and questions remain unanswered, and after so long are likely to remain so.

 

Here though, we have several curious facts, coincidences and timing that are too great to be ignored.  That Morewood was trading with Dutch merchants and that a delivery of his lead arrived in Amsterdam just as the Saardam was being prepared for a journey to the East Indies; that Morewood himself was already a well-established trader in spices and other goods from the East Indies; and that a livery button was found in a field in the very manor that Morewood owned bearing the symbol of the running greyhound and the name Saardam almost 400 years later are remarkable correspondences that connect a small parish in the centre of England to the wider world of the 1600s, the spice trade that dominated Europe, and to a gruesome 400 year-old tragedy on the other side of the world.  

 

All through the chance find of a button, a curious case indeed.

[1] https://www.sea.museum/2016/06/04/barbarism-and-brutality-surviving-the-batavia-shipwreck Accessed 13th October 2021

[2] Much of this story of Gilbert Morewood is brilliantly researched and told by Linda Levy-Peck, along with much more about the Gresley and Bennett families in 'Women of Fortune. Money, marriage and murder in early modern England'.[3] Glover, S. The History and Gazetteer of the County of Derby. 1833 p.14 Google Books: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_History_and_Gazetteer_of_the_County/PwOcagR5StAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+crest+of+morewoods&pg=PA14&printsec=frontcover Accessed 13^th October 2021

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Of Wind and Water: mills in the greater Seale parish. Part two.

                         

This second part of the discussion on mills follows the development of the first known watermill at Barratt Mill.  Alongside the advent of improved watermills, windmills began to be introduced into the greater parish.  All of these have now entirely disappeared, leaving little or no physical trace that they ever existed.  Indeed, in two cases, Donisthorpe and the first Netherseal windmill, the only record that a windmill ever existed on the site is through the field-name evidence.  The Chilcote windmill, mentioned in passing below, has also completely disappeared. The Barratt Mill windmill site has documentary and map evidence and the later windmill at Netherseal survived into the twentieth century, alongside documentary evidence that includes photographs.

Author’s impression of a medieval post mill based on an extant mill in Hessenpark, Germany. Overseal windmill is likely to have been of a similar design. Cloth sails would have been attached to the sail frames to catch the wind and provide the energy to power the mill.

So far, I have discovered four lost windmills in the parish, alongside the two known watermills.  The watermills were at Barratt Mill, now lost, and at Netherseal where the mill building, the mill fleam and millpool survive.  The story of Barratt Mill to circa 1900 and the lost windmills will be covered here; a later article will tell the story of the Netherseal watermill and the demise of Barratt Mill.

 

The earliest reference so far to the specific name Barratt Mill is in a document dating to 1609,[1] although the name Barratt Pool is mentioned in 1343, as noted in part one, and few instances of further evidence survive in the written records.  Difficulties in identifying the mill site arise as no maps were made to support Domesday, nor were maps drawn up for the records prior to the 18^th century, with Anno 1735 written on the map and therefore the date given by Leicestershire Records Office (LRO) of the earliest known map of the area.  This map, held in the LRO, depicts some areas of Overseal and the only one of these shown in detail is Barratt Mill.[2]

 

There are a small number of quite early maps extant depicting Seale, the earliest known of which dates to c.1578.  Unfortunately, this very beautiful Tudor map, held in the DRO, with the villages drawn in three dimensions, does not extend far enough east to show the mill or pool.  John Speed’s map of Leicestershire dated 1610 is too small scale to indicate the mill pool.  The next available map in the sequence, mentioned above and held in LRO, dates to c.1730-1735.  The mill pool at that date was depicted in a rough teardrop shape and was quite large, stretching north past Gorsey Leys into the fields below Overseal, an area known as Brooky Flats.  The mill complex is drawn in plan view and shows a lane leading to the mill from the road through Short Heath.  The main mill building backs onto the pool, with a smaller building shown just on the south side.  On the east side of the Hooborough Brook a windmill is depicted with the words Wind Mill next to it.  Across the southern edge of the pool is written Barret Mill Dam, and to the south of the complex is written Barratt Mill Holms (holms meaning small eyots or islands in the marsh).  We can safely assume that the land to the south of the mill site was marshy, perhaps with standing water year-round and with small islands of dry land rising from it, in fact, it still is in wet weather.  The fields either side of Hooborough Brook to the north of what would have been the level of the mill pool and running along the west side of Slackey Lane (not yet a lane in 1730) still have clear signs of mediæval ridge and furrow field systems.

 

Stafford Record Office (SRO) has a map of Overseal and is a much larger scale.  The date given for this map by SRO is c.1800 but that is unlikely.  Many of the people mentioned on the map as landowners were deceased before 1800, some of the buildings have been added later in a different colour ink and landowners’ names have been struck through and the new landowner added as property changed hands.  The hunting lodge built by the Rev Dr Thomas Gresley in Seal Wood in 1764 is missing, indicating that the map was drawn prior to that date.  This is very likely the lost original Enclosure Award map of 1755 (with later additions).  Whatever its origins though, for our purposes we can state that it dates to the second half of the eighteenth century and shows Overseal in great detail but only includes the western half of the mill-pool, crucially missing off a depiction of the dam and causeway from the eastern half of the pool.  What are clearly marked, despite an ink smudge, are the watermill buildings themselves.  Barratt Mill is at this time in the possession of Lord Huntingdon, Henry Hastings 11th Earl of Huntingdon.

A part of the probable ‘lost’ Enclosure Award map of Overseal held in SRO showing a section of Barratt Pool and mill.

John Prior’s map of 1777 is to a much smaller scale but clearly shows Barratt Pool and two mills, a water mill and a windmill, with much of the mill complex part of the Hastings family estate.  The map also shows Barratt Mill dam creating the mill-pool, fed by the Hooborough Brook.  

The gaps in the long years between each map can be partly filled in by looking at the documentary evidence.  The Overseal windmill is named in a survey of the village undertaken in 1626, probably for the sale of the manor to Gilbert Morewood.  There is no description of the mill and the specific site is not named, although it is unlikely that more than one mill site existed between the known dates, placing Overseal’s windmill not on a higher point of the village, but on the Woulds, a fairly high area anyway as described above.  There is no extant trace of the windmill at the Barratt Mill site and this is in keeping with post-mills of an earlier period, and to an earlier design.  These early windmills did not have the brick roundhouse and kerb of later mills and traces of them are very easily lost.  It may be that the later dwelling houses known to have existed well into the Twentieth Century occupied the former windmill site.  These houses too are long gone, with no evidence of their having existed visible on the ground.  It is not known how long prior to the 1626 survey that a windmill had occupied the site, although windmill technology was known in England from at least the 13^thcentury.  These windmills were called post-mills, as they stand on a single central post, which allows the mill to be turned to face into the wind and cause the sails to turn.

Without further evidence we have to place the windmill construction on the site to somewhere between the late Tudor period, and obviously no later than 1626, and was still in situ at least as late as Prior’s map of 1777, a minimum lifetime of 150 years and perhaps much longer.

Part of Overseal, The Woulds and Barratt Pool, from John Prior's 1777 map of Leicestershire. Note the road layout, the route of the lanes across the Woulds, different to today’s roads which were redesigned and laid out in 1815, after the enclosure of the Woulds in 1801.

 

Local cartographer John Smith of Packington was engaged to provide a survey of Overseal and Netherseal in 1785 and this map is held in DRO.  The original accompanying ‘Plan of Particulars’ is lost, but a copy by John Morewood Gresley in 1854 is extant.  The map depicts the Barratt Mill site (item 75), and the copy of the Plan lists it as ‘House, Mill, Garden & Croft’, so we can be sure the mill was in use at that time.  The Plan of Particulars copy also gives us the landowner, Lord Huntingdon, and for the first time we get the name of the miller, tenant to Lord Huntingdon, one John Tims.  The windmill, if it was still extant at this date, would have been east of the Hooborough Brook and is not depicted on the map.

Barratt Mill detail from the 1785 Plan of the Lordships of Overseal and Netherseal by John Smith of Packington.

That Donisthorpe too had a windmill must be considered here.  An 18^th century map of the village has the field name Windmill Close at a high point of the village near the junction of Acresford Road and Hill Street.  Nothing more is currently known of Donisthorpe windmill, when it was built, by (or for) whom, nor when it fell into disuse.  All we can say with any degree of certainty is that it was gone by the time the map was created, leaving only a field name as evidence of its existence.

Windmill Close on an 18th century map of Donisthorpe.

 

Netherseal too has a ‘lost’ windmill.  Situated near the junction of Clifton Road and Sandy Lane. The possible site of a second windmill in Netherseal was brought up through the village history forum on social media.  The location of a former windmill site ay the western end of Clifton Road, Netherseal, had been passed on as oral history and investigating the veracity of the oral information reveals that this kind of information can have very deep roots.[3]  An examination of the 1785 map and plan of particulars reveals the field names for field number 507, 539 and 540 as Windmill Field, Upper Windmill Hill and Lower Windmill Hill respectively.  The remains of a mound believed in the oral version of the story to be the mound upon which the windmill was sited in the southernmost corner of field 506 (opposite the junction with Clifton Road) is still visible on the ground but the plan of particulars has a blank for that field name. (See below).  As noted above in regard to the windmill at Donisthorpe, the field names – and quite remarkably – folk memory, retain a memory of what is lost from the landscape, and presumably the Clifton Road/ Sandy Lane windmill was of similar date to the Overseal windmill, namely from the Tudor period and had been lost during the course of the intervening years.  Prior’s 1777 map indicates a windmill to the south of Netherseal watermill, in the fields between Netherseal and Chilcote, and a watermill at Stretton-en-le-Field.  It does not show a windmill at the Clifton Road/ Sandy Lane junction, nor at the Donisthorpe site.

The site of the former windmill on Clifton Road/ Sandhole Lane junction, fields 506, 507, 539 & 540.

Netherseal Windmill on Hunt's Lane from the 1843 tithe map.  Author’s photograph of the original, held in DRO and accessed 18^th May 2016.

 

The Netherseal windmill that is remembered was situated on Hunts Lane.  This windmill is described in the Derbyshire HER under record entry Monument/MDR7132[4] as a post-medieval mill (1540-1900CE) and is described as follows:

 

The windmill at Netherseal was about 3/4 of a mile north-west of the village. The mill is not listed by Farey in 1808 but is shown on the first OS map in 1834 when it appears as a post mill, although at that time it was in Leicestershire. It was offered for sale by auction in 1841 according to the Derby Mercury of November 3 as follows: 'Newly erected Post Mill with round house and seven acres of land, near the village of Netherseal'. In 1843, under the Tithe Award, the mill and adjacent property was owned by Reuben Stevenson, with the family retaining control throughout its life. It was worked until about 1905 (when it appears as a 'windmill' on the OS map). Several photographs taken at the turn of the 19th century give a clear picture of the mill. The white painted, horizontally boarded buck, which has a curved roof, sits on the top of a tall, slender, brick round house with external buttresses. The round house, most unusually, had four round windows just below the curb (assuming it was a Midland type mill). The skirt does not appear to be complete but the tailpole and ladder were still in place. There were four sails, two common and two spring, complete with shutters, mounted in a double poll end. In 1994 the site, behind Windmill Farm, did not show any evidence of the mill structures, but a circular hedge enclosure, some 25 yards in diameter, denotes its location. There are several fragments of broken grey millstones which appear to have been about 5ft 4ins diameter in the garden, and also next door at 'The Mires'.[5]  

Netherseal windmill.  Photograph taken around the turn of the nineteenth century.  Image copied from a family postcard collection, original source unknown.

The windmill on Hunts Lane was the picturesque landscape subject for artists and photographers, including an etching by J. Dunne held at the V&A.

Etching by J. Dunne, copied from a postcard from the V&A Museum.  It depicts a view of Netherseal windmill from across the mere.

The mill pool and the Hooborough Brook are mentioned in a letter from the Staffordshire antiquarian (and rector of Hartshorne after his father died in 1799), Stebbing Shaw (1762-1802), to his friend and fellow antiquarian, John Nichols, in 1792: 

Having this morning walked from Seile about a mile to Donisthorpe, a hamlet partly belonging to that parish, to see a salt spring there, I will give you some account of it while fresh in my mind.  ‘Tis in a small meadow by the side of a stream called Hooborough Brook, which issues out of Barrett Pool, a large mill-pond upon Ashby Woulds and is for a considerable distance between Donisthorpe and Seile a boundary betwixt the two counties.”[6]  

Part of Donisthorpe was then in Derbyshire, and the Seales were in Leicestershire.  Shaw does not mention either wind or water mill directly, but as he is referring to Barratt Pool as a mill pool it may be that the water mill at least was still functioning as a mill at this point in time, it being only seven years after the 1785 survey by John Smith.

 

An 1821 map held in the British Library and available to view online shows the map and names Barratt Mill.  The north-western and of the pool has been bisected by a new road from Overseal to Moira past Gorsey Leys, which effectively made the old Ashby Road past the mill into a byway.  The new road connected the Burton-Market Bosworth/Atherstone turnpike with the new spa at Moira Baths.  The map does not show a windmill but there are a couple of unfortunate creases at that point and it is unknown whether a windmill was still in operation on site at that date.  It is possible to discern the trace of a track that led across the dam, through Bath Yard and on towards Boothorpe and it may be this track that is referred to in The Story of Bath Yard: 

There is evidence on more recent maps of an old track coming from the Blackfordby and Boothorpe area and going to Barratt Mill.  Alf Jones can remember a man riding his horse down this track once a year in order to keep the right of way open […] The canal arrived in 1798 and bisected the path.  In order to keep this track open (it was obviously well used) a swing bridge was built across the canal at this point.[7]  

As Boothorpe belonged in the same parish, presumably the inhabitants were required to have their corn ground into flour at the local mill.

Overseal and Barratt Mill in 1821.  The village of Moira is new.  Note the lane leading from Barratt Mill to Boothorpe through the Moira Baths and ‘coal pit” (Marquis shaft), bisected by both the canal and the new enclosure road from Measham, through Moira to Swadlincote

 

Ordnance Survey published their first map of the area in 1835, with Barratt Pool named rather than the mill.  A number of buildings are indicated on the site with two to the east of the mill.  A house stood on one of those positions well into the twentieth century, so probably dates to this period.  The other building could perhaps be the site of the former windmill but whether it was extant at this time or another building stood at that position is not known, although the existence of the windmill seems unlikely by this date, it would surely have been obsolete by then.

 

The tithe map of Overseal and Netherseal dated to 1843 shows the mill and part of the pool, as far east as the Hooborough Brook.  A new, larger building has appeared south of the mill itself and may be related to the Moira Mining Company.  There is no obvious sign of a windmill on the tithe map, although it would not have been included as the map designates that area as Ashby Woulds and is not reproduced for the tithe map.  It seems probable that the windmill was completely gone by this time and replaced by the ‘new’ post-mill at Netherseal.  Whether the decrepitude of the medieval post-mill at both Netherseal and Overseal by the later eighteenth century led to the creation of a larger and more modern one at Netherseal in the early 1840s is a matter on which we might speculate, alongside the fact that Netherseal watermill was in operation at that time.  The Stevenson and Poultney families are connected to the Netherseal mills during the nineteenth century but whether they ground the grain into flour for the wider parish requires further investigation.

 

The milling of grain into flour to make bread was extremely important throughout history, and remains so today.  The discovery of at least three former ‘lost’ windmills alongside the known but now destroyed windmill at Netherseal demonstrates the economic importance of local mills and milling.  Their loss tells us something of the change from local production to provision of bread from more centralised manufacturers and changes to food distribution. 

 

The concluding story of Barratt Mill on the Hooborough Brook and the history of the water mill(s) at Netherseal on the River Mease will form a later story, part three of this history of the Seale mills.

 

 

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[1] DRO reference D809/A/PI/532

[2] LRO reference number: DG30/MA/249/2

[3] The information was given to me by Jim Marbrow, formerly of Grangewood, who was told the story by Herbert Curzon many years ago.  There has been no windmill on the site in living memory, nor, indeed of the lives of the previous generation.

[4] https://her.derbyshire.gov.uk/Monument/MDR7132 Accessed January 24th 2021

[5] https://her.derbyshire.gov.uk/Monument/MDR7132

[6] Nichols, J. The History and Antiquaries of Leicestershire. London 1795-1815 p: 998.  Further discussion of the rest of this remarkable letter in the chapter on local customs.

[7] The Ashby Woulds & District Local History Group.  The Story of Bath Yard. Moira Replan, Moira 1998 p:5