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Transcribed from the 1898 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

JOHN KEBLE’S PARISHES: A HISTORY OF HURSLEY AND OTTERBOURNE

PREFACE

To explain the present undertaking, it should be mentioned that ahistory of Hursley and North Baddesley was compiled by the ReverendJohn Marsh, Curate of Hursley, in the year 1808.  It was well andcarefully done, with a considerable amount of antiquarian knowledge. It reached a second edition, and a good deal of it was used in Sketchesof Hampshire, by John Duthy, Esq.  An interleaved copy receivedmany annotations from members of the Heathcote family.  There wasa proposal that it should be re-edited, but ninety years could not butmake a great difference in these days of progress, so that not onlyhad the narrative to be brought up to date, but further investigationsinto the past brought facts to light which had been unknown to Mr. Marsh.

It was therefore judged expedient to rewrite the whole, though, wheneverpossible, the former Curate’s work has been respected and repeated;but he paid little attention to the history of Otterbourne, and a gooddeal has been since disclosed, rendering that village interesting. Moreover, the entire careers of John Keble and Sir William Heathcoteneeded to be recorded in their relations to the parish and county. This has, therefore, here been attempted, together with a record ofthe building of the three churches erected since 1837, and a historyof the changes that have taken place; though the writer is aware thatthere is no incident to tempt the reader - no siege of the one castle,no battle more important than the combat in the hayfield between Mr.Coram and the penurious steward, and, till the last generation, no strikingcharacter.  But the record of a thousand peaceful years is trulya cause of thankfulness, shared as it is by many thousand villages,and we believe that a little investigation would bring to light, incountless other places, much that is well worth remembrance.

For the benefit of those who take an interest in provincial dialect,some specimens are appended, which come from personal knowledge.

The lists of birds and of flowers are both from the actual observationof long residents who have known the country before, in many instances,peculiarities have faded away before the march of progress.

The writer returns many warm thanks to those who have given muchindividual assistance in the undertaking, which could not have beenattempted without such aid.

C. M. YONGE.
ELDERFIELD, OTTERBOURNE,
18th June1898.

CHAPTER I - MERDON AND OTTERBOURNE

The South Downs of England descend at about eight miles from thesea into beds of clay, diversified by gravel and sand, and with an upperdeposit of peaty, boggy soil, all having been brought down by the riversof which the Itchen and the Test remain.

On the western side of the Itchen, exactly at the border where thechalk gives way to the other deposits, lies the ground of which thismemoir attempts to speak.  It is uneven ground, varied by undulations,with gravelly hills, rising above valleys filled with clay, and bothalike favourable to the growth of woods.  Fossils of belemnite,cockles (cardium), and lamp-shells (terebratula) havebeen found in the chalk, and numerous echini, with the pentagon staron their base, are picked up in the gravels and called by the countrypeople Shepherds’ Crowns - or even fossil toads.  Large boulderstones are also scattered about the country, exercising the minds ofsome observers, who saw in certain of them Druidical altars, with channelsfor the flow of the blood, while others discerned in these same groovesthe scraping of the ice that brought them down in the Glacial age.

But we must pass the time when the zoophytes were at work on ourchalk, when the lamp-shells rode at anchor on shallow waves, when thecockles sat “at their doors in a rainbow frill,” and thebelemnites spread their cuttlefish arms to the sea, and darkened thewater for their enemies with their store of ink.

Nor can we dwell on the deer which left their bones and horns inthe black, boggy soil near the river, for unfortunately these were disinterredbefore the time when diggers had learnt to preserve them for museums,and only reported that they had seen remains.

Of human times, a broken quern was brought to light when diggingthe foundation of Otterbourne Grange; and bits of pottery have cometo light in various fields at Hursley, especially from the barrows onCranbury Common.  In 1882 and 1883 the Dowager Lady Heathcote,assisted by Captain John Thorp, began to search the barrows on the lefthand side of the high road from Hursley to Southampton, and found allhad been opened in the centre, but scarcely searched at all on the sides. In July they found four or five urns of unbaked clay in one barrow -of early British make, very coarse, all either full of black earth orcalcined bones, and all inverted and very rough in material, with theexception of one which was of a finer material, red, and like a modernflower-pot in shape.  Several of these urns were deposited in theHartley Museum, Southampton.

Of the Roman times we know nothing but that part of the great Romanroad between Caer Gwent (or Venta Belgarum, as the Romans called Winchester)and Sorbiodunum (Old Sarum).  It can still be traced at Hursley,and fragments of another leading to Clausentum (Southampton) on theslope of Otterbourne hill.

In Dr. Milner’s History of Winchester, written at theend of the last century, he describes a medallion of mixed metal bearingthe head of Julius Cæsar, which was dug up by a labourer at Otterbourne,in the course of making a new road.  He thought it one of the platescarried on the Roman standards of the maniples; but alas! on being sent,in 1891, to be inspected at the British Museum, it was pronounced tobe one of a cinquecento series of the twelve Cæsars.

The masters of the world have left us few traces of their possession,and in fact the whole district was probably scarcely inhabited; butthe trees and brushwood or heather of the southern country would havejoined the chalk downs, making part of what the West Saxons called the