The following is transcription from a small black notebook (6”x4”) kindly loaned to the Archive Group by Mrs Sarah Wright of Swallowfields Farm, Church Road, Abbots Leigh. Sarah says the book belonged to her grandfather, William Lansdown. The notes in the book do not seem to follow any particular chronological order but all seem to be in the same ‘copperplate’ handwriting and depict events in the Village and lists of residents and officials.

Feb 20 1848 – The Vicar.

This afternoon while the bells were chiming for divine service, a fire broke out in the rafters of the roof on the north side of the Church, it was ascertained the next day that the fire was caused by a crack in the chimney of the Store which was most negligently & stupidly built of only one brick thick and placed in immediate contact with the wall plate upon which the feet of the rafters rested. The fire not withstanding the most active exertions of all the male inhabitants headed by William Miles Esq., whose exertions were almost incredible; the aid of the powerful engine from Leigh Court and after an interval of an hour and a half the assistance of three engines from Bristol consumed the whole of the roof of the nave and south Aisle, the gallery, pulpit, reading desk and nearly all the pews leaving the tower and chancel uninjured.

The Village Bells

The Peel of six Bells in the Tower of the Church of this Parish are greatly admired for their musical sound & are considered the best for their number for many miles around. They are rung by the young men of the Parish on one evening in every week in summer and usually twice in the week in the winter. They are heard with particularly fine effect on Durdham Down.

The History of the Parish of Abbots Leigh, written in the year 1886 by a former Vicar of the Parish (Rev. W Balmain).

The Parish owes the first half of its name to the fact that the Manor was formerly held by the Monastery of St Augustine at Bristol. The name Leigh in Doomsday Book ‘Lege’ has reference to meadow land and in a document noted below there is mention of meadows at Leigh. The Abbot was added to distinguish it from other parishes bearing the same name, the words ‘King, Queen, and Bishop’ are used in a similar way. But through the double name is the double and official appellation in lists and documents yet to the people of the place it is Leigh-Leigh only. To them it matters little that there are other Leighs, like the peasant who dwelt on the banks of a large river & when questioned as to its name replied ‘The River’. To the inhabitants it was Leigh at the beginning and to the end it will still be Leigh.

In noticing the early history of the Parish we must distinguish between the manor and the Benefice of Leigh. The Manor House, which in those days generally carried with it the propriety right to the greater part of the land made part of the Manor of Bedminster. In the time of the Conqueror it was held by Geoffrey, Bishop of Constance; was granted by William Rufus to Rt Fitzhamon was afterwards purchased from Rt Earl of Gloucester by Rt Fitzharding and by him bestowed on the Abbey of St Augustine, Bristol, AD 1148.

It remained in the possession of the Abbey till the Reformation when it passed first to Paul Bush, Bishop of Bristol, then by grant of Edward VI to Sir George Norton. On failure of the male line of his family marriage with the heiress transferred it to the Trenchards who held it till it was purchased by Philip John Miles early in the present century. The Church & Benefice however never came into the powers of the Abbey and were thus saved from Spoliation. In many cases the tithes in their entirety were appropriated by the monasteries, a monk being sent to do the duty as required, and so on to the Reformation when the monasteries were suppressed, the titles were entirely lost to the Church.

Leigh under the title of ‘Lege’ is mentioned in the Doomsday Book (AD 1086) and also in the Gheld Inquest (AD1084) or book of those liable to Dane Tax.

In Doomsday the entry is as follows: ‘Turstin holds Leigh and his father held it in King Edward the Confessor’s time and paid Dane tax for one hide. The Arable is one plough land. There are two cottages; two store cattle; six pigs’.

In the Gheld Inquest ‘Turstin has one hide, which he holds in elemosina of the King’. The benefice of Leigh, with those of Bedminster and St Mary Redcliff was granted in AD 1116 by King Henry 1st to the cathedral Chapter of Salisbury (Old Sarum).

‘Know that I have given the churches which Wido of Bristol, the father of John held at Bristol with all that belongs to them’. In the confirmatory charter of Henry II AD1158, the Churches of Bedminster, Redcliff and Leigh are mentioned by name. The members of the Chapter at Salisbury instead of an income from the common fund had separate estates granted to them. The four benefices of Bedminster, Redcliff and Leigh and St Thomas; fell to the share of one member who generally presented himself to all the four appointing Chaplains when necessary to t serve the churches. Walter of Dunstanville is the earliest known, AD 1190 when the Chapel at Bishopsworth was founded. Ad 1189 one Roger was Chaplain at Leigh. This arrangement of the benefices continued till the time of Mr Whish who actually held the four till separated AD 1852.

In the course of editing the Sarum records there came to light an arrangement for the exchange of land in Leigh between the Abbot of St Augustine’s and the Chapter of Salisbury AD 1192. An attempt to trace this in our tithe map has been made.

The Abbot granted for the support of the Canon of Bedminster and the improvement of his cure, four acres lying behind on the south side of the estate and wood he has in Leigh. Also the curtilage which belongs to Walter of Leigh and which is reckoned at half an acre. The Canon in return makes over to the Abbot four and a half acres of land in five portions in the meadows of Leigh, which belong to the Chapel at Leigh. The portion transferred to the abbey cannot be traced by name, but the land made over to the Benefice is perhaps that called in the tithe map, ‘The Villa Field’ now traversed by the footpath from the Church to the Home Farm and which is four and a half acres the curtilage probably with message may be the present Vicarage, or it may be a piece of land between four and five acres with buildings adjoining the above and within 30 yards of the Church on the south side which is registered as prebendal land.

The area of the Parish is 2,220 acres. The boundary to the North East is the River Avon and so effective a boundary with its mud banks that to pass to the neighbouring parishes of Henbury or Stoke one has to make a circuit of some 4 miles. The Western boundary leaves the Avon at Chapel Pill crosses the rise at ham green and strikes Markham Bottom which it follows up to the Tanpits, under Failand. It then follows to the south east, a road to the Hug Stone meeting there the Parish of Long Ashton. From the Hug Stone the boundary runs along the road to Beggar’s Bush in a North East direction till it again strikes the Avon in the Leigh Woods.

The population is about 350 and had hardly varied since the beginning of the Century. The ecclesiastical name of the Parish is maintained by the names of the inhabitants. With only 65 families we have, besides the ordinary Vicar, a Pope, two Bishops and an Abbot!!!

The geology is very varied. Coming from Clifton and Long Ashton the carboniferous limestone shows itself in the quarries by the roadside. At the dip just before reaching the Village, the geological map gives the lower carboniferous - The ‘Street’ of the Village from the George Inn past the Church into the Park and a line to the South West in the opposite direction from the boundary between the limestone and the old red sandstone. In the Churchyard and Vicarage Glebe the two touch. You have limestone rock appearing on the surface and within a yard or two the red soil going down many feet with beds of strong red marl. The belt of the Old Red sandstone runs quite through the Parish from Failands to the Avon passing that River into Stoke Bishop. The fields on the Sandy lane part of the Old Park and all the slope of the Hill North West from Leigh are of this formation. The rest of Old park and the land about Leigh Court are new red sandstone and the intervening limestone in places cropping up into view. The Upper or more easterly part of the Parish on the limestone has a poor thin soil. It was formerly unenclosed and formed part of Leigh Down. This formation causes a great want of water in the Village, the rain either running, or, if sinking in, being lost in the rifts of the rock. In the Old Red Formation under the slope of the hill below the Village there are many and good springs of water. The houses are now all supplied by the Bristol Water Works.

The Church of Abbots Leigh (Bristol Mirror) 15 July 1843.

The silence and mystery that hover around the mouldering wall and aged ruin, where antiquity and decay seem struggling for pre-eminence, are never so sternly and forcibly impressive as in the peaceful retirement of a country churchyard, where no sounds of worldly toil or strife break the deep stillness of death’s lone dwelling and where a moral influence elevates the spirit with exalted purposes and hallowed hopes. Man sympathises with the desolation of which he is to become a part, and his dreary day of life with its clouds and its storms, the voice of ambition, the search of power and the thirst for gain, with the temporal attractions of this world are for a time forgotten and no mean or low or selfish thought invades the sanctuary of the soul. The village of Abbots Leigh derives its name from having formerly belonged ton the Abbots of St Augustine. The Church is pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill commanding from the tower and extensive view of the Severn with the intermediate and surrounding country. It has undergone many changes during a lapse of years of which no account has been preserved: its history is untold and of the period of its foundation; of the names of those, whose piety endowed the fabric, the world has no knowledge and the search of studious enquiry is in vain. We may however surmise from the portions of early English architecture still remaining that it was erected in the 13th Century during the prevalence of that style. The interior of the Church consisting of a nave, chancel AND South Aisle has no particular architectural features to merit a minute description. The division between the nave and the aisle is by two piers and two responds, the piers are low with a bell shaped capitals, the abacus consisting of a few round mouldings which support obtuse angled arches with recessed plain chamfered edges. The roof is vaulted and like early English roofs was of a much higher pitch and acutely pointed its original height may be seen on the eastern side of the Tower, the lowering of the roof has occasioned the destruction of the upper portions of the North Window of the Nave which has a clumsy horizontal termination a little above the heads of the lights.

Lighting the South Aisle are two windows, the one to the Eastward is early English, of two lights, with a single foliated circle in the head, the other is square headed and a later introduction although square headed windows marked th3e decline of Gothic Architecture after the dissolution yet they are found of a much earlier period, as in the present instance. The ceiling is flat, slightly raised towards the arches of the Nave and separated into square divisions by coarse wooden rafters. Against the belfry arch has been erected a plain gallery, displaying in from the Royal Arms, an insignia of worldly dominion that is rightly placed in a hall appropriated to the administration of justice but unseemly here where it is but a symbol of a perishable and transitory power, shrinking into insignificance in comparison with the imitable power of Omnipotence in acknowledgement of whose greatness in devotion to whose worship, the surrounding pile was raised.

The Pulpit which is plain is against the North eastern wall of the Nave. It is chiefly remarkable for its faded appendages. At the South west of the Nave near the entrance is the Holy font of square massy form supported on a pillar. The Chancel is approached by three steps on the second of which is graven a cross of ancient date and on the first a half obliterated inscription belonging to some forgotten memory. These stones were doubtless removed from the burial ground when the steps were made anew. In the Chancel the ashes of several members of the Norton and Trenchard families repose within their stony vaults. Against the north wall is a monument without either day or inscription. Upon one of the Norton Tombs is the following inscription
"Near this place lies interred the body of Sir George Norton of Abbots Leigh in ye County of Somerset, son of Sir George Norton of the same place so eminently loyal in hazarding both his life and fortune by concealing in his house the sacred person of out late most gracious Sovereign, King Charles ye Second, till he could provide means for his escape into France and by his virtuous and Pious Dame Frances Norton, this monument is erected to his memory. He dyed the XXVIth day of April MDCCXV in the LXVIIth yeare of his age. He married Frances the daughter of Ralph Freke of Hamington in the County of Wilts Esq.; by whom he had issue three children, George, Grace and Elizabeth; the first and last dyed young; Grace married as ye monument in the Church expresseth."

The House of Sir George Norton stood near the site on which Mr Miles’s present mansion is built; and it may be considered as strange that, although only destroyed on later times , no drawing should have been preserved of a place so associated with events concurrent with the most exciting and momentous epoch of English History . In this house Charles IInd arrived after the Battle of Worcester, in the year of 1651 and remained here for some time disguised as a servant; from hence he removed to Trent in Dorsetshire and eventually embarked for France with Lord Wilmot in the garb of Isle of Wight coal merchants. Beside the inscriptions already alluded to, as belonging to the Norton and Trenchard families are others not devoid of interest and one of them is as follows:

"Here lies the Body of Mrs Anne Crush Born at Boxwell in ye County of Essex aged about thirty seven and Dyed ye 23rd day of May 1697 shee certainly was a person-Boni good Wise and Faithful."

The Tower contains six bells and is divided into two stages, surmounted by an embattled parapet, with four pinnacles one of which was destroyed by lightening some years back. The gargoyles, beneath the corbel table are particularly large. Attached to the North wall of the Nave is a modern vestry room, remarkable for it being erected in a style totally at variance with that of the Church. In the Churchyard at the North side are the steps and pedestal of an old cross the shaft remained until within a few years since, but like the wrecks of the past it has disappeared. Scattered about the ground are many headstones, slabs and massy table tombs all preserved with that order care and propriety that should be the predominant feature of a hallowed and sacred spot. On the south east side flourishes a goodly yew tree clothed in a garb of dark sepulchral green casting the shadow of its sombre boughs on the tomb of buried griefs, the records of mortality beneath.

My Historical Note

The History of Poor Relief in England
The Origins of the Old Poor Law

Up to the early sixteenth century, the poor and infirm were cared for by the church, through monasteries, convents and religious charities. With the decline of monasteries and their dissolution under Henry VIII, and changes in social structure, this voluntary system disappeared, and the parish became responsible for supporting its own poor, raising the money to do this by taxing the parishioners who could afford to pay.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries laws were introduced in an effort to suppress begging by able-bodied labourers, and to control the movement of vagabonds, beggars, and labourers roaming in search of higher wages and work in areas where labour laws were not strictly enforced. Gradually parish officers were given greater powers over their own inhabitants, and also over any strangers entering the parish.

The Act of 1598
In 1598, under Elizabeth I, the Act For the Reliefe of the Poore was passed, requiring every parish to appoint Overseers of the Poor who were responsible for finding work for the unemployed, and setting up parish houses for those incapable of supporting themselves.

The Act of 1601
This Acte for the Reliefe of the Poore, passed 3 years later, was essentially a refinement of the previous Act, but is often said to mark the foundation of the Old Poor Laws. Under this Act, the responsibility of the parish was established. It was obliged to relieve its aged and helpless, bring up unprotected children in ‘habits of industry’, and provide work for the able-bodied who could not work in their usual trade.

The Overseers, who were unpaid, were to be elected annually by the parish vestry meeting, and they were to dispense money and bread, and supervise the parish poorhouse. The aims were to provide work for adults, apprentice poor children and set them to work, and suppress and punish beggars and vagabonds, in some cases by admitting them to county "Houses of Correction".

Thus every parish was a self-governing body, responsible for its own poor people.

Overseers were given the power to raise money by charging parishioners according to their ability to pay. This charge, called the Poor Rate, was originally a form of income tax, but evolved into a property tax or "rate" based on the value of real estate. Generally the tenant paid, instead of the owner. Failure to pay could lead to a summons to appear before the Justices, a fine and sometimes prison. You may find summons and distraints for non-payment of rates among parish records.5

Overseers kept account books, which recorded the poor rates collected and the payments made to and on behalf of paupers. Sometimes separate books – poor rate accounts, and disbursement books – were kept. A record of the arrangements made for the relief of the poor were sometimes recorded in vestry minute books.

The Settlement Act of 1662
Two years after the restoration of King Charles II, an Act for the Better Relief of the Poor of this Kingdom – also known as the Settlement Act – was passed. This sought to establish the parish to which a person belonged (ie his/her place of "settlement"), and hence clarify which parish was responsible for those who became "chargeable" to the parish poor rates. It also allowed the Overseers to "remove" newcomers that local Justices deemed likely to become dependent on poor relief. This could occur unless the newcomers were wealthy, were paying substantial rent, or had some form of security to indemnify the parish against the expense of supporting them. This might be in the form of a certificate from their own parish stating that they would be received back again.

In 1691 another Act laid down the qualifications for gaining settlement. Settlement in a parish could be acquired by:

• birth – a legitimate child took its father’s parish of settlement, even if this was not where it was born. An illegitimate child claimed settlement in its parish of birth.
• apprenticeship, by the parish or privately.
• service. A hiring agreement of a full year or more (ie continuous employment for at least 365 days), each subsequent settlement replacing the previous one.
• marriage or remarriage. A woman took her husband’s place of settlement on marriage.
• renting property worth at least £10 a year (well beyond the means of a labourer), and paying parish rates
• election to a parish office (e.g. overseer or church warden) for a year

From 1697, under yet another amendment to the Act, poor people could move to a new parish provided they brought a Settlement Certificate with them. This protected them from being removed to the parish to which they "belonged," unless they actually applied for poor relief. If they survived on wages alone they could not be removed. The parish Overseer often kept the Settlement Certificates addressed to him in the parish chest, and used these as proof of settlement when removing unwanted paupers who had claimed poor relief; this saved unnecessary time and the expense of examining the paupers and establishing their place of settlement.

A century later, in 1795, this protection against removal was extended to all poor persons not claiming poor relief, except pregnant unmarried women. Parish Overseers made them least welcome as they were considered the most expensive to support, and they were commonly removed from any parish they entered, back to their place of settlement. This was done by the issuing of a Removal Order signed by two Justices of the Peace.

Later Acts amending the laws relating to settlement, employment and relief of the poor allowed the setting up of parish workhouses from 1723 and the formation of unions of parishes which could set up a shared workhouse, for the old and infirm, from 1782. About 600 parish workhouses were set up in England by 1750. Less than 100 unions of parishes were formed under the 1782 Act, but it was under this Act that Exeter set up its Corporation of the Poor to better organise the relief of the poor living in parishes within the city walls.

The operation of the Settlement Act and all its subsequent amendments proved complex, confusing and contentious. Parishes often appealed to the Court of Quarter Sessions over disputed removal orders, settlement decisions, and over claims by other parishes for repayment of paupers’ upkeep costs. Expensive legal battles often took place between parishes over their responsibility to support individual paupers. The records of some of these disputed cases survive in parish records and Quarter Sessions records.