Box People and Places
Latest Issue 47 Spring 2025 
  • This Issue
    • Millers of Box
    • Vezey Wall
    • Jesse Smith
    • Pauline Gibbons' Story
    • Great Quarry Trade
    • Rose, Rustic and Undercliffe
    • Kate Bull
    • Very Long Day
    • Roman Roads
    • Where Is This?
    • Who Are We?
    • Times Past
    • Recalling Mill Lane Halt
    • Wolf Hall
    • Canoeing and Caving
    • Dirty Arch Myth
    • Brook Northey Children
  • Previous
    • Issue 46 - Box Hill
    • Issue 45 - Moleyns Lordship
    • Issue 44 - Viking Hazelbury
    • Issue 43 - Late Medieval
    • Issue 42 - Beautiful Box
    • Issue 41 - Becket Plays
    • Issue 40 - Selwyn Hall
    • Issues 30-39 >
      • Issue 39 - Modern Box
      • Issue 38 - Railway Workers
      • Issue 37 - Mill Lane Halt
      • Issue 36 - Box Rec
      • Issue 35 - Inter war
      • Issue 34 - Fogleigh House
      • Issue 33 - KIngsdown Post Office
      • Issue 32 - Chapel Lane
      • Issue 31 - Saxon Box
      • Issue 30 - Georgian Rudloe
    • Issues 20-29 >
      • Issue 29 - Darkest Hour
      • Issue 28 - VE Day
      • Issue 27 - Northey
      • Issue 26 - Heritage Trail
      • Issue 25 - Slave Owners
      • Issue 24 - Highwaymen
      • Issue 23 - Georgian
      • Issue 22 - War Memorial
      • Issue 21 - Childhood 1949-59
      • Issue 20 - Box Home Guard
    • Issues 10-19 >
      • Issue 19 - Outbreak WW2
      • Issue 18 - Building Bargates
      • Issue 17 - Railway Changes
      • Issue 16 - Quarries
      • Issue 15 - Rail & Quarry
      • Issue 14 - Civil War
      • Issue 13: Box Revels
      • Issue 12 - Where You Live
      • Issue 11 - Tudor & Stuart
      • Issue 10 - End of Era 1912
    • Issues 1-9 >
      • Issue 9 - Health & Leisure
      • Issue 8 - Farming & Rural
      • Issue 7 - Manufacturing
      • Issue 6 - Celebrations
      • Issue 5 - Victorian Centre
      • Issue 4 - Slump after WW1
      • Issue 3 - Great War 1914-18
      • Issue 2 - 1950s & 1960s
      • Issue 1 - 1920s
    • Index By Author
    • Partner Sites & Book Reviews
    • Currency Converter
  • People
  • Places
  • General
  • FULL Series
  • Contact
    • Blog
    • Q&A
  Ditteridge in Tudor & Stuart Times  Rev John Ayers    Reproduced from One Bell Sounding   March 2016
In the late medieval period villages suffered from plague, civil war and the effects of weak government and heavy taxation. Cottages above the church fell into ruination as the population decreased. Over the country up to 60% of the village clergy died from contact themselves with the dead and dying.
Picture
By the 1500s, £16 was the necessary income to meet the necessary expenditure of parish clergy; this was provided in only a quarter of English parishes. More church lands were sold and the position of the patron became even stronger. Then came the final dissolution of the monasteries and the break with Rome. For the first time the patronage (by now a right which could be bought, sold or inherited) of Ditteridge lapsed and was exercised by the king in 1543 and by the bishop in 1554. This right of presentlng a priest to the bishop for institution to a parish is technically called Advowson, and the bishop could only refuse a patron's nominee if he had legal cause to do so; it was treated as a right of property.

Reformatlon
Parish records date from 1584. The basic shape of the church building was largely as we find it. There was no seatlng, unless the worshiper brought a personal stool, or the weakest went to the wall where a long bench was probably fixed. There ras no pulpit, organ, vestry, heatlng or lighting.

But life was rapidly changing. In 1549 the first Book of Common Prayer in English was authorised, The English Bible was accepted. The new literate middle classes of landowners and merchants were replacing knights and courtiers, and the patrons were gentlemen and yeomen.

Although tracts of un-enclosed waste and common remained; the buying, selling and inheritance of lands, honours and patronage meant that parish boundaries became important and later stones were set up. Box, Hazelbury and Dltteridge parishes were so intertwined that, as the boundary stones show, even the hamlet is divided between the parishes. Over 25 boundary stones for Ditteridge can stlll be seen. It was at this time that in many places the custom of beating the bounds; was established.

Picture
Ditteridge Upper Field (111 acres) and Ditteridge Lower Fietd (67 acres) covered Wlinnow Hlll, up the lane beyond the church. Here crops were cultivated by villagers in strips by rotation. A dozen or so enclosed (walled) holdings clustered around the church. Common land remained at Middlehill. Stray cattle were impounded, opposite the church in the small village pound. The iron staple remains in the wall of the barn, inverted to prevent the gate from being lifted from its hinges.

This wonderful map of 1626 by Frances Allen identifies plots and fields by field name and owner. The parish of each field is indicated by coloured spots. Though the spelllng has changed, many names are current today. From 1600 available land around Ditteridge was being acquired by Hugh Speke, whose family was to exert so much influence over the followlng century.

In a relatively short period the life of the village and the worship of the church had suffered ruthless reformation. The ministry of the church came out of these changes poorly rewarded and ln low esteem. Then came Civil War.

It has long been understood that the churchyard to the west, by the cherry tree, is the resting place of Cromwell's soldiers, casualties and strugglers from the running fight which began as the Battle of Lansdown. The fightlng which continued via Marshfield and Sandy Lane to Devizes, ended with the Battle of Roundway Down, Waller and the defeated roundheads then falling back on Bristol.
Restoration
During the turbulent years of the Civil War, Ditteridge was served by three generations of the Bridges family as rectors: Gabriel. Richard and then Charles. Sympathies seemed to have been towards Parliament. Box was more Royalist and the vicar there, Walter Bushnell, was removed from his living (on what he claimed were trumped up charges) and replaced by John Stern.
The King came to his own again in 1660. Cheyney Court was much enlarged at this time and claims to have entertained the Klng on more than one occasion.

In 1662 the Act of Uniformity introduced the Book of Common Prayer as we use it today, but consciences cannot be directed by legislation of Parliament. Seven hundred clergymen wete ejected from their livings and in 1666 a further one thousand were expelled by reason of the Five Mile Act. This had the effect of dividing the English church into conformists and non-conformists.
It is surprising that Ditteridge has no chapel. From after 1640 it had been one of the four places in North Wiltshire where anabaptist conventicles had been held. A conventicle was a meeting in a private house or elsewhere of more than five persons, in addition to the household, for worship other than that prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer. The Conventicle Act of 1664 declared such house groups illegal.

A second Act of 1670 mitigated the penalties but widened powers of suppresssion and was not repealed until the Toleration Act of 1689 under Willian III. It may be that Richard and Chartes Bridges had learned tolerance, but one wonders in which cottage Conventicles were held? The village also had a group of Quakers; George Fox visited Slaughterford nearby in 1663 and 1673.
Back to Main Article