Milton Abbas Local History Group

Jobs to do

Please contact us here if you can help us, or need more information.

Note that almost all these jobs can be done wherever you are.

Transcribing

We are enormously grateful to our correspondents in Canada, Australia, Scotland and England who have done a tremendous job of transcribing. We are always looking for more – so if you would like to help please contact us here. In particular we have digital images of the 1932 Milton Abbas estate and house contents sales catalogues awaiting transcription. For examples of documents needing transcription click here. Are any of our members interested in cloud sourcing such tasks?

Research

Can any members search for instances of Milton Abbas and its people in newspaper archives, especially the early ones.- Western Gazette/Sherborne Mercury which was founded in 1737 and available on microfilm at Yeovil and Taunton libraries. Most unfortunately British Newspaper Archives has not, as of 2023, digitised it for all dates, and of course, finding anything using a digital search with such an appallingly OCRd archive is very hit and miss.

The Land Tax records for Milton Abbas have been transcribed so that members can easily search for names and note the continuity or otherwise of the tenancy in the critical period of the move of the town, the last quarter of the 18th century. It would be useful to research Land Tax records in general to see what questions they can answer. How have other history groups used them? Are there any useful articles in the family history magazines such as WDYTYA or Family Tree?

Can members help with social research of the 18th century? For example were constables appointed for every parish or for the hundred? Where was the lock-up? How was the pound used? How many people travelled by coach? What people used the markets, how far did they travel? Who visited the inns? What did poor people eat?

Can members compare the censuses to see the changes in population, occupations, numbers of tenants per household 1841 – 1921? We need to study the demographics from the baptisms, marriages and burial registers of Milton Abbas from 1651 onwards and compare the movements of names of people in the parish with those of adjacent parishes. All these records are available online and searchable at opcdorset.org Our priority is to do this for the 18th century to see what changes the removal of the Old Town caused.

Are any members interested in the architectural history of the cottages of the Street built in the 1780’s – were they designed for two families or four? How were they built?

Can any members visit the Dorset County Museum? We know for example they have Milton Abbas trade tokens, and a huge photographic archive.

Can any members visit The National Archives? We have a list of documents which would be useful for the history of Milton Abbas.

Can any members visit The Dorset History Centre? We have a list of documents which would be useful for the history of Milton Abbas.

We have a good collection of digital historic images and postcards of Milton Abbas covering the past one hundred years. These need cataloguing and naming.

Can any members compare this Abbey town with other local manor parishes? Such as Clenston, Stickland, Ibberton, Woolland, Cheselbourne and Milborne St Andrew. How did life compare for the rural poor and yeomen?

We had John Wellsteed born in Milton Abbas on HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. We need to research his life.

The Milton Abbas Martyrs 1803 and the early career of James Frampton are very important in national and Dorset history. Can any members doing family history trace our martyrs family history, and explore the newspaper articles around this time?

We would love to find an 18th century author who wrote about rural life of the labourers. Thomas Hardy is very informative of 19th century rural life, for example Tess of the D’Urbevilles, but we cannot find the like for earlier times. Books such as Tom Jones, Pamela, Rides Round Britain, etc feature the middling sort or aristocracy, not the labourers. We can’t find any diaries of these people either.

Can any members help with the Dorset Quarter Sessions books, and the Plea Rolls, especially for the 18th century? Deborah Paterson has extracted all the Milton Abbas entries of the sessions books for the period 1754-1804, and Bryan Phillips has similarly extracted the Milton Abbas entries from the transcribed Book 1 1625-1638. There is plenty of other information waiting to be found in the Dorset History Centre Quarter Sessions records and they are all available on Ancestry including the page images. Experience has shown us NOT to rely on Ancestry name searches because they are NOT well indexed.

Family History

Family Reconstitution – please go to the page. It may be possible to put our Milton Abbas people and your ancestors who lived in Milton Abbas into a family tree and explore their relationships. Contact us if you can help with this.

For family history progress please go the tab ‘Family History‘ and click on the drop down menus. There is plenty of work still to be done.

Archaeology

Apart from some small excavations to the west of the Abbey in the 1950’s there has been no archaeological survey – wouldn’t it be great to get some geophysical surveys done.

We know that there was a town south of the Abbey at least since 934, but there is not a shred of evidence for Anglo-Saxon occupation. Metal detecting and field walking could provide the vital clues to their presence.

Landscape or field archaeology might also prove useful for determining the layout of the dwellings, roads and fields in Anglo-Saxon and medieval times.

LIDAR data covering the whole of England is now freely available. Steve Griffin has download this data onto a GIS.

Maps

We have large scale maps and plans of 1652, 1770, 1806, 1852, 1902 and today with names of fields, roads and tracks. It would be great if we could get the information off these maps into a database or GIS so that we can find places which are referred to in documents such as the Quarter Sessions Order Books.

All the field names have been added to a spreadsheet.

We also need to measure the field sizes and their use as arable, pasture or meadow. We need to digitally overlay the maps to see the changes which have taken place. We need to identify the fields and farms to individual tenants.

We need to compare and overlay these maps with modern aerial or satellite images.

Clive Barnes has located the old roads and tracks before Lord Milton moved them. They need to be plotted using GIS so that we can understand the routes that pilgrims and travellers took.

Recording

We need to record the Capability Brown landscape of today in summer and winter, preferably by using a drone at a horse rider’s elevation. This needs to be compared with the views that were designed to be seen by Lord Milton’s family and his visitors.

The structure and furnishings of the Abbey and St Catherine’s Chapel need to be recorded in high resolution images to produce 3D views, and to compare with images from the 1950’s survey of the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments.

We need to record all the listed buildings and monuments – there are about 100.

There are memorials scattered around Milton Abbas – in St James Church, the churchyard and graveyard, in St Catherine’s Chapel and in the Abbey Church. These need photographing and the text recorded.

For those interested in 20th century history, we have residents today who have lived in Milton Abbas for many years. Their oral histories need recording.

Publishing

We have been given a typescript copy of ‘A History of the Tregonwell Family’, by Sir Mervyn T Medlycott, 1969. Bryan Phillips has retyped this 100 page document into a digital format and we would love to publish it.

We have a large amount of data on the TREGONWELL family in Milton Abbas, including their legal cases, wills and leases, all transcribed and waiting to tell their story……

Medieval history of Milton Abbas

We have some nationally important documents from fourteenth century Milton Abbey. These give a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary people. Bryan Phillips is researching and writing these up. It would be helpful to work with other medieval enthusiasts to exchange ideas.

Indexes are continuously being updated at the AALT website. Finding the pages relevant to Milton Abbas are always a challenge.

Metal Detecting

We are very fortunate to have Charles Bullock as a member. He found and reported the Milton Abbas Pendant, and the Milton Abbas Local History Group helped to fund the Dorset Museum to purchase it. Again this is nationally important medieval evidence. We are working together to put his finds into the context of Milton Abbas history. We would love to be in contact with the other detectorists working in Milton Abbas.