Until modern times, telling the story of the county was not easy, as discovered by a Winchester lawyer whose work was snubbed by the council and then lost for 300 years, writes Barry Shurlock.
DESPITE the arrival in the early 1900s of the pioneering Victorian County History (VCH), many places had little written about their past until 1960s or later. Now local historians have generated a vast amount of material of all forms that tell the stories of almost anywhere.
As its name suggests, the VCH benefited from a growing sense of heritage embraced by the Victorians. But before then there were slim pickings from those historians who tried to chronicle the past.
The Celebrating Hampshire Historians project of the Hampshire Field Club has been charting the path they trod, reaching back nearly 1,300 years to find the first significant mention of any place in Hampshire in a work of history. This was probably in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede, where Winchester gets half-a-dozen mentions.
Writing in Latin, Bede recorded the foundation by the Roman missionary Birinus of the first see of the West Saxons at Dorchester-on-Thames in 634 and its transfer in 660 to Winchester. Making good use of “networking”, much of his information on the diocese was obtained from its third bishop Daniel, described as “an intimate friend”.
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Bede’s great book was written before England and Hampshire even existed, when the city, as he records, was named Wintancestir. In fact, the most important place in the area at the time was Hamwic, where Birinus landed, in what is now the St Mary’s district of Southampton.
For almost a millennium after The Ecclesiastical History there are few historical accounts of the county. Prime amongst these are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and writings of Benedictine monks from St Swithun’s Priory, Winchester. One of the works that happened to survive (available in several editions, as well as online) is The Annals of Winchester by Richard of Devizes, dating from the late 1100s.
He wrote in a lively style which scholars have interpreted as a satire on antisemitism. In the context of mass murder of Jews in London he was the first person to use the word “holocaust”, and he lampooned the myth that Jews carried out sacrificial murders of Christian boys in Winchester.
The birth of historical writing as understood today is reckoned to have been in the early 1400s.
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Active at the time was another St Swithun’s monk, Thomas Rudbourne, who recorded the life of the priory rather than the fabric of the cathedral. At the time the existing building was thought to date from the 7th century, rather than the 11th, a misunderstanding that lingered well into the 19th century.
Many other glimpses of the past in Hampshire can be found in the works of the topographers John Leland (1503-1552) and William Camden (1551-1623), who travelled the country and left contemporary accounts, often laced with history.
On his visit to Winchester, Leland noted “the college of S[t]. Elizabeth of Hungarie, made by Pontissera Bisshop of Winchester”. Within a few years it was dissolved and sold to Winchester College by the Earl of Southampton, with orders to demolish it “before Pentecost 1547”.
The first local historian that Hampshire can claim was probably John Trussell writing in the early 1600s, who had been taught at Westminster School by Camden. Trussell’s manuscripts were lost until 1937, when Annie Johnson (perhaps from the family that owned the Chronicle) bequeathed Winchester City Council an early draft of Trussell’s history of the city, curiously entitled The Touchstone.
The quest for a later lost draft was taken up in the 1950s by Tom Atkinson (1893-1966), author of Elizabethan Winchester. He knew it had at some time gone to the library of Lord Mostyn in Mostyn Hall, Flintshire, but a descendant told him it had been sold at Sotheby’s in 1920. There followed a wild goose chase that, amongst other things, involved a special messenger with a manuscript from the USA – sadly, not the manuscript!
The mystery was not solved until 1974 when it was discovered that it was still, after all, in the library at Mostyn Hall. Apparently, it had failed to reach the reserve price set by Sotheby’s in 1920. Another of Trussell’s works, The Benefactors of Winchester, which lists city documents, mayors etc, and is held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Trussell lived through the early years of the Civil War and has long been recognised as a significant figure of his day. The tangled sentiments and loyalties of his life at this troubled time are explored in a Southampton University PhD thesis by Robert F.W. Smith (available online).
John’s father, Henry, was an attorney, who in about 1596, in a clear act of nepotism, was appointed by his brother-in-law John Harmar (c.1555-1613) to the post of steward of the manors of Winchester College. Harmar was a distinguished classical scholar who had just been put in charge of the school (the warden). In 1604 he was one of the translators for the Authorised Version of the Bible commissioned by James I.
A year later John Trussell followed his father to Winchester as a provincial attorney, working both in the local courts and assizes and in London. Although a jobbing lawyer, he had ambitions to be a poet and historian, and set out to write the history of Winchester, which he described as “much decayed”. His aim was to use the past “for the good and honour” of the city, to show what a glorious place it had once been, when favoured by royalty and the court.
Sadly, he failed to obtain the approval, or even the interest of the ruling council, “the twenty-four”, with an early draft of The Touchstone and turned his attention to writing national history. Within a few years he had produced an account from the reign of Edward III to Henry VIII for Samuel Daniel’s bestselling History of England.
Trussell boasted that his approach to history avoided such things as “monsters, inundations, petty offenders, or even triumphs and ceremonies”. However, he did accept uncritically a good deal of myth, even though his master, Camden, advised using only documentable historical sources.
In contrast, Trussell called those who adopted such an approach “dulpated ignoraunt droanes, or meachanicke precise plebeyans”, though he did, in fact, himself use legal documents, published chronicles, and the contents of the cathedral library.
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Trussell’s successor, Catholic priest John Milner (1752-1826) was critical of his work, though he made use of it in his celebrated History and Antiquities of Winchester, published in two volumes at the turn of the 19th century by one-time owner of the Chronicle, James Robbins.
Another local historian who left his mark was Robert Boyes (1723-1782), head master of the Free Grammar School’ (now Perin’s), Alresford, who left extensive notes that came to light in the 1930s and are now held by the Hampshire Record Office.
Rarely acknowledged by historians is Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, which covers the history of the village, with “pleasing information”, whilst being “light upon ancient customs and manners”.
The material is contained in 26 letters mostly concerns Selborne Priory, seized in 1459 by William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, to endow Magdalen College, Oxford. A later edition of 1875 with new material by Roundell Palmer, 1st Earl of Selborne (1812-1895), mentions the local discovery of a cache of 30,000 Roman and Romano-British coins.
This article is one of the series being published over the coming months (Chronicle, June 13, July 11) on the HFC Celebrating Hampshire Historians project, accessible at: hantsfieldclub.org.uk/ihr100/index.html.
barryshurlock@gmail.com
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