© Bryan Phillips Apr 2024

We have obtained some high resolution images of the deed of sale of the village of Hilton to Lord Milton. This was dated 15 May 1784, and there are twenty large pages of it. One of our super transcribers is working their way through it and like many eighteenth-century legal documents it is exceedingly tedious. However, it is full of wonderful detail of the village of Hilton at this time.

The sale price was £25 000, which shows just how wealthy Lord Milton was at this time. He also bought Winterborne Stickland! So definitely a man of means. His income we know at this time was about £6 000 per annum from his Milton Abbas estate and a similar amount from his Irish estate. His three sons unfortunately were not inclined to follow his example and the eldest son John ran up so much debt that he shot himself, and the remaining eldest son, George, owed over £100 000 when he inherited the title (but not the estates) in 1798. The will of Lord Milton is especially interesting because he disinherited his sons and left everything to his beloved daughter, Caroline, named after her mother.

I would like to thank all of our transcribers who have worked so hard to bring to life the story of Milton Abbas. We are still working on some of the stories, for instance the Tregonwell and Bancks families and their legal disputes over the inheritance of Milton Abbas estate; the life of medieval peasants on the Milton Abbey estates in the fourteenth century;

And there are still plenty of jobs that people could help with, see our Jobs to Do page and Contact us if you would like to help.