A Somerset Lad

Supper at the Podymore Inn gave the opportunity to read a reproduction of a 1791 history of the parish.

PUDDIMORE-MILTON

is a parish situated in a flat marshy country (whence the name) on the east side of the Fosse-road, two miles north from Ivelchester, and three east from Somerton.

In A.D. 963 King Edgar gave the manor of Mideltone, in which were contained two hides, to the church of Glastonbury, whereof Egelward was then abbot.

” The church itself holds MIDELTONE. In the time of King Edward it gelded for six hides. The arable is six carucates. Thereof are in demesne four hides and seven acres, and there are two carucates, and eight villanes, and six cottagers, with four ploughs. There are fifty acres of meadow, and one hundred acres of pasture.  It was and is worth six pounds.

In 1293 the abbot’s estate in Middleton was rated at 14l 12s. The manor continued in the monastery till its suppression, when King Henry VIII; by his letters patent bearing date the 36th year of his reign, granted to John Make, as a gratuity for his faithful services, all the manor of Myddelton, otherwise called Milton-Pidymore, other-wise Podymore-Milton with all its rights and members, together with the advowson and the right of patronage of the church of Myddelton, parcel of the late monastery of Glaston.

10 Eliz. the said manor was in the possession of John Horner, of Cloford, esq; and still remains in that family; Thomas Horner, of Meils-Park, esq; being the present owner. According to the certificate returned soon after the dissolution, the rents of assise and copyholders belonging to this manor, with the works and customs due to the same, were of the yearly value of 171. 1s.d 10d. the demesnes 61. 6s. 10d and perquisites of courts and fines 4l. 0s. 9d

The benefice was appropriated to Glastonbury abbey, and in the year 1292 valued at twelve marks three shillings and fourpence; the abbot of Glastonbury having a pension out of it of ten shillings. It is a rectory in the deanery of Ivelchester; the lord of the manor is the patron, and the Rev. Thomas Pearson the present incumbent.

The church is dedicated to St. Peter, and is a small building of one pace, having an octangular tower at the west end containing three bells. William Kemp, rector of this parish, was a great sufferer in the rebellion of the last century, being with eleven children driven from his house into the streets, and all his property plundered by the soldiers. He lived till the Restoration, was made a prebcndary of Bristol and died in 1664,

Before the days of the present National League, the top levels of non-league football were  the top divisions of the Southern, Northern and Isthmian Leagues. Yeovil Town played their matches in the Southern League Premier Division.

The 1970s were a time when there  was no automatic relegation from and promotion to the Football League and although Yeovil were Southern League Champions on a number of occasions, their applications to be elected to the Football League were unsuccessful.

Going to watch Yeovil Town in the 1970s was always a special moment, Yeovil was a small club with a large and noisy following, home crowds averaged over 2,000, a number that often dwarfed the attendances enjoyed by some of their rivals.

The advent of the Football Conference, predecessor of the National League, saw Yeovil’s fortunes decline. While clubs like Wimbledon and Wigan Athletic gained promotion to the Football League, Yeovil slipped. In the 1980s and the 1990s, they were twice relegated from the fifth tier of English football, to play their games at grounds where crowds might number no more than a couple of hundred. Relegation and geographical factors required Yeovil not to play their football in the Southern League from which they had come, but in the Isthmian League, a league for clubs from London and the Home Counties.

Living in Ireland, the opportunities to watch Yeovil in the years that followed were limited, if there was a match being played when I was visiting Somerset, it was a delight to go along. The new ground, in an industrial estate on the edge of the town, represented huge progress from the old ground with its pitch that sloped from one side to the other.

There was a huge sense of pleasure in seeing Yeovil win a place in the Football League in 2003, and to watch them to rise two further divisions to reach the Championship, albeit for only one season.

After sixteen seasons in the Football League, Yeovil were relegated back to the realms outside of the Football League. The recent seasons have not been happy ones, the club has not been competitive, the results have got steadily worse.

It is not mathematically certain but after yesterday’s home defeat against fellow strugglers Dorking, Yeovil face the prospect of playing in the sixth tier of English football. The title inflation that changed Division 1 to the Premier League, Division 2 to the Championship, Division 3 to League 1, and Division 4 to League 2, means that next season will be played in National League South. The Isthmian League sounded much more exotic.

Eli’s is having a tea party to mark the coronation in May. The American branch of the family who now have the pub have a mischievous sense of humour, the music for the afternoon is to be provided by a group called the Boston Tea Party.

More than a century before the citizens of New England decided that they wanted to rid themselves of the Crown, there were people from Langport who rallied to the Parliamentarian cause. On 10th July 1645, a decisive victory would lead to Parliamentary control of the West Country.

Not yet the oppressive dictator he was to become, Paraliament’s army at Langport was commanded Oliver Cromwell. He wrote a description of the battle that took place within sight and earshot of the ground on which Eli’s now stands:

In the morning, word was brought us, That the Enemy drew out. He did so with a resolution to send most of his cannon and baggage to Bridgewate’r, which he effected, but with a resolution not to fight, but, trusting to his ground, thinking· he could make away at pleasure.

The pass was strait between him and us; he brought two cannons to secure his; and laid his Musketeers strongly in the hedges. We beat off his cannon, fell down upon his Musketeers, beat them off from their strength, and, where our Horse could scarcely. pass two abreast, I commanded Major Bethel to charge them with two Troops of about one-hundred-and-twenty Horse. Which he performed with the greatest gallantry imaginable; beat back two bodies of the Enemy’s Horse, being Goring’s own Brigade; brake them at sword’s-point.

The Enemy charged him with near 400 fresh Horse; set them all going, – until, oppressed with multitudes, he brake through them, with the loss not of above three or four men. Major Desborow seconded him, with some other of those Troops, which were about three. Bethel faced about; and they both routed, at sword’s-point, a great body of the Enemy’s Horse. Which gave such an unexpected terror to the Enemy’s Army, that it set them all a-running,

Our Foot, in the mean time, coming on bravely, and beating the Enemy from their strength, we presently had the chase to Langport and Bridgewater. We took and killed about 2,000, brake all his Foot. We have taken very many Horses, and considerable Prisoners. What are slain we know not. We have the Lieutenant-General of the Ordinance; Colonel Preston, Colonel Heveningham, Colonel Slingsby, we know of, besides very many other officers of quality.

Within fifteen years, the radical Protestants who were numbered among the Parliamentary forces would find England a hostile place to be. The place for radicalism would be the New England that would be the place for the Boston Tea Party.

It seemed unlikely that the web would provide much information about a Sixteenth Century Rector of High Ham. To find him mentioned in a 2010 PhD thesis was a real surprise.

Katie M. Nelson’s doctoral thesis Thomas Whythorne and Tudor Musicians presents Schaell as someone who was probably hardly typical of the rural Somerset clergy of the time:

We know little of Whythorne’s ‘divers’ friends, besides a few names. Particular friends, ‘who were learned’, wrote sonnets in commemoration of Whythorne’s music, which he printed with his 1571 Songes: Thomas Covert, Thomas Barnum, Adrian Schaell, and Henry Thorne. The latter three (of the first we know virtually nothing) seem to have been active in their own literary pursuits.

Schaell, a German, came to England as a schoolmaster after studying at University in Leipzig, but soon found a career in the church. At age 68, after nearly thirty years (1570-
1599) as rector of a parish in Somerset, he decided to write a memoir of Higham Church. Though his wit was ‘now waxing dull and decayed with drowsiness’, he was equal to the task, and one cannot help but wonder if Whythorne had any influence on Schaell’s activities.

Adrian Schaell seems to have been a diligent priest with a deep familiarity with his parish and his people, but also found time to gather with Thomas Whythorne and his friends in London. Commenting on a work of Whythorne, Katie Nelson writes:

A printed fragment at the British Library adds another intriguing piece to the puzzle of Whythorne’s manuscript. It is a single piece of paper on which is printed Adrian Schaell’s Latin poem, ‘In libros Thomae Whithorni Octostichon’, in praise of Whythorne’s music. The fragment has been identified as John Day’s work and dated to 1571. It appears to be a page from the front of the bassus part book of Whythorne’s 1571 Songes. Strangely, though, the document does not match the one extant copy of the Songes. The decorative marks at top and bottom are not the same, and in one version Adrian Schaell’s initials are printed below his name while in the other they are not. This is curious indeed, a tantalizing hint that there remains a great deal we may never know about Whythorne and his publishing activities.

The publication of Schaell’s poem is a tantalizing hint that Adrian Schaell was a very unlikely person to be priest of our village. How did he come to be here? And what made him stay here for so long?

The paternal grandfather of my ninth great grand uncle. It’s hardly a direct family connection, its interest lay in location rather than heredity.

Johannes Pople, was born in 1545. His wife Catherine Taylor was born ten years later. They were married in the parish church of High Ham in 1572. Their son Guilelmus was born the year of the marriage.

The details are those of ordinary domestic life. People are born, people get married, people die. It is the stuff of daily existence, the flesh and blood behind the countless entries in church registers.

The ordinary details assume a fascination because the era of John Pople and Catherine Taylor and their family is described by the rector of the parish Adrian Schaell in his 1598 memoir of the parish. Becoming rector in 1570, he remained in the parish until the end of the century.

From Röderaue in the district of Meissen, ten miles from the city of Leipzig, the reason why a German Protestant became rector of an obscure parish in the diocese of Bath and Wells are unclear. A man of scholarship who established a school in the village, Schaell must have been a fascinating figure in a community where most people never travelled more than a few miles from the place where they were born.

Did Schaell’s strong Protestant beliefs influence the attitudes of the parish in the years that followed?

William Pople would have been thirty-nine when his daughter Elizabeth was born in 1611. Elizabeth married Richard Sawtell from the neighbouring parish of Aller in 1627.

There are suggestions on the Ancestry website that Richard and Elizabeth Sawtell were among the Puritans who emigrated to Massachusetts, settling in Watertown in the county of Middlesex.

The Ancestry site suggests that the Sawtell family became established in the New World, Elizabeth and her husband both living until 1694. Watertown was a Puritan settlement established in 1630. Radical Protestants who regarded the Church of England as corrupted and unscriptural, the most famous of the Puritans were the Pilgrim Fathers who had departed from Plymouth in 1620.

Could it have been that the German Protestant rector of a small Somerset parish so influenced local families that some among them left the unchanging, gentle pastures of Somerset to embark upon a new life in the New World?

A Google search brought a website claiming that the association of Richard Sawtell of Watertown with Richard Sawtell of Aller was erroneous, but the evidence seemed unclear. If the association is correct, Schaell would have been pleased.