Swindon in the Past Lane

Did you know that our neck of the woods was once just that - part of a wood, a very big wood? And not just any old wood but a Royal forest no less - Braydon Forest. The origins of Braydon Forest date back to the 9th century and a belt of woodland stretching from the Thame Valley to the Vale of Blackmore and known to the Saxons as Sealwudu. The Saxon lords were pretty easy going, it would appear, and then along came the Normans with their system of forest law, courts and officialdom. Braydon became a royal forest by 1135 and in the 13th century it contained an area of some 46 square miles. The forest bounds included not only woodland but fields of arable, meadow and pasture and even villages such as those of Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent and Purton. In 1256, during the reign of Henry III the king gave Robert Tregoze 3 bucks and 8 does from Braydon to restock his park at Lydiard Tregoze and in 1270 John Tregoze obtained a royal licence to 'inclose and impark' his woo...

The summer of 2008 saw the BBC's Antiques Roadshow set up camp in the grounds of Lanhydrock, a country house in Cornwall where a piece of Lydiard Tregoze local history made a surprise appearance. Expert Penny Britten provided a brief history of the printed Valentine and valued the 200 year old handmade one sent to Roadshow visitor Graham's great-great-great grandmother Alice Crook in 1803. Alice Catherine Crook was born in Lydiard Tregoze in 1782, the daughter of Simon Crook and his wife the former Elizabeth Woolford.  Flaxlands Farm, part of the Lydiard Park estate owned by Lord Bolingbroke, was occupied by the Woolford family at the time of the couple's marriage in 1777, with Simon taking over the tenancy in 1782. Although unsigned, Alice knew the sender of her Valentine.  Richard Hallilay, born in Greenwich in 1785, was the son of local girl Sarah Goddard and her husband, Richard Hallilay.  Graham supposes Alice and Richard might have enjoyed a holiday romance...

Family historians grow accustomed to unearthing the occasional coincidence, but I was unprepared for a connection between the nearby Wiltshire parish of Lydiard Tregoze and my husband's family in Pembrokeshire. A new century saw the arrival of a new Rector at St Mary's when Ebenezer Humphrey Jones moved into the Rectory in Hay Lane, close to the site of the present day Tregoze School, in 1900. The 1901 census records the widowed Rev Jones aged 58 living at the Rectory with his eldest daughter Gwendolin 21 and three young children, Mildred 11, Stanley B. 8 and Kathleen M. 6, all born in Steynton, Pembrokeshire. Rev Jones was no stranger to the congregation at St Mary's, having previously served nine months there as a curate in 1877.  After this first short stay the Rev Jones moved his young family to a parish in Fitz, Shropshire before taking up an incumbency at St Peter and St Cewydd, Steynton near Milford Haven in West Wales. Benjamin Roberts 25, a laboure...

Was Richard Woolford motivated by criminal intent or poverty when he picked up his gun and headed off for Lord Bolingbroke’s land one winter’s night in 1834? Records show that Richard was charged with ‘having in the night together with a great number of other persons armed with guns, and other unlawful weapons entered a certain coppice belonging to the right honourable Lord Viscount Bolingbroke for the purpose of destroying game at Lydiard Tregoze.’ At the time of Richard’s arrest, Robert Hiscocks was the gamekeeper at the Lydiard Park estate, a position subsequently filled by his son Harry who worked alongside him in the second half of the 19 th  century.  Sporting rights across the estate were protected in the farm leases and the duties of the Lydiard Park gamekeeper included the rearing of his lordships pheasants.   Victorian gamekeepers were known to shoot at anything that threatened the birds under their protection. Richard, a 21 year old labourer ...

Staff and volunteers have decked the hall with boughs of holly and Lydiard House is all dressed up for a Victorian Christmas. But how did an earlier branch of the family celebrate the festive season? Custodians of the 17th century Lydiard House were Sir Walter St John and his wife Lady Johanna. In 1652 the austere Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, abolished Christmas all together and for eight years the people of Britain had little celebrate. However, with the restoration of the merry making monarch Charles II in 1660 it was party time again and records show that plans for Christmas at Lydiard House in 1661 were well underway by October. "I doe intend gd wiling to be at Cristmas at Lidiard," wrote Lady Johanna St John from the couple's London home in Battersea to Thomas Hardyman her steward at Lydiard. Ahead of the festivities Lady Johanna instructs Hardyman to brew 40 gallons of ale "so that it may be a month old before we begin it." However the ...

"There've been Odys farming in North Wilts for five hundred years," local resident Harold Ody proudly told Elspeth Huxley when she was writing her book  Gallipot Eyes – a Wiltshire Diary,  about Oaksey village in 1975. With such well established roots, Swindon based Ody family historians have a head start with local parish registers available on microfiche at Swindon Central Library and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham. Early parish records for St Mary's Church at Lydiard Tregoze reveal Richard Ody confirming the appointment of the churchwardens in 1742.  It was his descendant Noah Ody, who with the help of his wife Sarah, populated many of the local farms. Noah and his sons were tenants, at various times during the 19th century, at Hayes Knoll and Bagbury Farms in Purton, Haxmoor in Purton Stoke, Braydon, Marsh, Flaxlands and Glebe Farms in Lydiard Tregoze and Lower Shaw Farm in the parish of Lydiard Millicent.  It was the couple's ...

The November speaker at the monthly Monday lunch time talk at Swindon Central Library was archivist Robert Jago from the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham. Robert’s subject was Churchwardens’ Accounts and he described the many and varied tasks performed by the churchwarden, charting a role dating back to medieval times. The oldest surviving churchwardens’ accounts are those of St. Michael’s in Bath which date from 1349. The main duty of the churchwarden was to keep the fabric of the church in good repair and to attend to the fixtures and fittings, although he also had to sort out any unruly sexual behaviour in the parish especially when it involved the vicar! Pest control also took up a fair bit of the churchwardens’ time and account books list payments for song birds found to be depleting the local crops. Foxes presented a big problem as well and the accounts for Brinkworth reveal regular payment for foxes heads, a wily solution to parish enterprise where the ...

James Drake, a schoolteacher from Wootton Bassett, is another unsung hero of Victorian account keeping. In 1836 Drake was appointed Deputy Clerk by the newly founded Monthly Market Committee. His duties were to take the minutes of meetings, record the sales and names of the Christmas Show winners, and most importantly for the family historian, make full lists of those who were employed at the Hiring Fairs. Hiring or mop fairs as they were sometimes called, were events where job seeking labourers and servants presented themselves for hire. Traditionally the servant wore clothing or carried an implement to advertise their trade. A shepherd wore a lock of wool or carried a crook, a maid might carry a mop, hence the name 'mop' fair. Potential employers browsed the ranks, asking questions and stopping just short of testing muscle strength. It was the demeaning nature of these events coupled with improved methods of communication that eventually saw the end of the hiring fai...

One of the earliest trade directories was Samuel Lee's list of the City of London merchants published in 1677. It wasn't until 1800 that directories for cities and large towns began to make an appearance and it is Frederic Festus Kelly that we have to thank for the most comprehensive of all directories. The former Inspector General of Letter Carriers took over publication of the Post Office London Directory in 1835 and by 1845 was producing provincial directories for just about everywhere. Until the incorporation of the borough in 1900, Swindon received two entries for the old and new towns. The format for these publications was pretty standard with a general description of the place and a little local history followed by a list of the notable inhabitants followed by commercial enterprises. Kelly's Directory of Wiltshire dated 1899 describes Lydiard Tregoze, now pretty much absorbed into Swindon, as 'a village and parish, 3 miles south east from Wootton Bassett s...

So you've bought the certificates and tracked your family through the census returns back to 1841. Next stop is the parish registers. The keeping of parish registers began in 1538 on the orders of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's Vicar-General, although you will be fortunate if you manage to trace your family back that far. Few of the earliest registers survive, subject to nearly 500 years of the ravages of mice, mould and mayhem. If you are not living in the area where your family hails from this is where the hard work begins! Tracing ancestors in large cities involves dogged determination. My Ruthven ancestors lived in the City of Westminster, but with 11 children all born at different addresses and thirty-eight parish churches in the immediate vicinity, they took some finding. While the Wiltshire and Swindon Archives at Cocklebury Road, Chippenham holds the parish registers for all of Wiltshire, Central Library has microfiche copies of those within the Swindon area, incl...

Brook House Farm pub and restaurant has enjoyed a number of makeovers in recent years, but despite the alterations to the former farmhouse it is still possible to identify some structural features from its glory days. Standing on the corner of Middleleaze Drive and Tewkesbury Way, just inside the Swindon borough boundary, with views across Lydiard Park and its back to the sprawling town, today Brook House Farm straddles the divide between town and country. Once belonging to the St. John family at Lydiard House, a farm has stood on the site for at least 200 years, probably longer. Along with Wick Farm it made an early appearance on the 1773 Andrews and Dury map of Wiltshire. Nineteenth century particulars of the Lydiard Estate reveal that parcels of land, gardens and cottages on the two farms appear to have been interchangeable. Called Brook Farm until the beginning of the 20th century, the 165-acre dairy farm perched on the parish boundary of Lydiard Tregoze and Lydiard Mill...