The Hooverville Hexagon: Local Histories

 

Call it a town, a city, a hamlet, a borough, an island…home is where the heart is.

 The Heroes of Yesteryear

by DG

Prompted by an unusual word, the writer is reminded of the inspirational heroes who gave their names to the local villages.

 

Have You Visited Your Local Library Lately?

by FWR

They're big Agatha Christie fans in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife..

 

Down-Home Music

(Video)

by DG

At a church picnic a few years ago. This music makes some people think of home.

 

SuzieQ Goes Shopping with the Romans

(in Carnuntum)

by Tavaron da Quirm

What? It was somebody's hometown, sometime.

 

This conversation took place in the sleazy space bar where the Core Team hang out.

 

Tavaron: This is in Carnuntum. I wrote an entry about it, it's a Roman city and there's an open-air museum where they rebuilt some houses on their former plots.
They add more and more over time and the newest addition is what they call the 'house of the oil merchant', which is the one with the amphoras.

They actually build the houses the way they did in the year 300 or something, so for instance the thermal bath has working under-floor heating and stuff.

Dmitri: I can see where the amphorae would be at an oil merchant's house. It was either that, or a Greek tourist shop....

Tavaron: Next to the merchant's house they had another small new building. I didn't take a picture because it was pretty dark inside, but it seemed to be a laundry room with a water basin and clothes racks.

I mean of course it was a Roman laundry room, not a modern one.

Dmitri: So, no washing machines?

 

This is the sort of high-level discourse you've come to expect from the Core Team.

 

Special Report:

Newtown, Isle of Wight

by Bluebottle

Kids: Try describing your town like this in a school report. Let us know what the teacher says. – DG

 

In the UK, a small settlement is a hamlet, a settlement with a church is a village, one with a charter granting it the right to hold a market and have a civic council is a town, while cities needed a cathedral before Henry VIII or a royal charter granting city status since the 1540s.

 

Between being granted a charter in 1256 and losing borough status in 1836 the smallest town on the Isle of Wight was Newtown, which has a church, a town hall and a pub that closed in 1911, but few houses or people since 1377.

 

The earliest written record of Newtown dates to 826AD when King Egbert gave the land to the Church of Winchester and then in 1001 the area was attacked by Danish forces under King Sweyn Forkbeard. Later in the 12^th century the area was still owned by the Bishops of Winchester at a time when Winchester was the wealthiest ecclesiastical see north of Milan. Wanting to supplement his London brothel income with other forms of revenue, in 1256 Bishop of Winchester Bishop Aymer planted a new borough town on the land next to Newtown Creek as an economic investment, naming it 'Francheville' meaning 'Freetown'. The town continued to be called Newtown, with both names used interchangeably. The land was divided into burgage plots, with roads named Gold Street and Silver Street, and while the Bishop of Winchester would collect rent, burgage owners were exempt from manorial duties and tithes and thus enjoyed greater legal, social and economic freedoms than most of the population. This stimulated growth and the town grew to be the largest on the Island and as busy a port as any on the Solent.

 

In 1284 Edward I requested possession of the town, confirming its liberties and customs in 1285. In 1297 a charter under Edward II granted, 'A market on Wednesday and a fair of three days'. Records show the town prospering through oyster beds and salterns and 70 of the initially planned 73 strips or plots occupied.

 

 Yet this prosperity was not to last. The town's population was devastated first by the Black Death in the 1350s and though it began to recover, the town was wiped out completely by a French invasion in 1377, when the town was burnt to the ground and the remaining population massacred. There is also local legend of a pied piper-like figure luring the local children away to their deaths, which some have linked to the Children's Crusade, but there is no evidence for this.

 

Queen Elizabeth I, in an attempt to promote growth and restore the town to its former glory, in 1584 passed a borough charter giving the town a mayor and the right to elect two MPs. A town hall was built in 1699 in which to hold the elections, which were based on those who held burgage rights. The

foundations of this building are known to be older. In 1664 there had been only ten occupied buildings in the town and for much of its time three families between them held the right to elect two MPs (poor men and women of any class not getting the vote before 1918). One MP was elected by the dominant Holmes family while the other two took turns to nominate the second. One of Newtown's MPs later became Prime Minister; George Canning. He was Newtown's MP twice, in 1793–1796 and 1806-1807 and later Newport Isle of Wight's MP 1826-1827 and was Prime Minister for 119 days (almost three Liz Trusses) in 1827 before his unexpected death. George Canning was a fascinating politician who dominated British politics for two decades, determined to act unofficially as Prime Minister even when he wasn't, only to die shortly after finally gaining the position he had strived so hard for all his life.

 

In 1783 John Wesley wrote,

 

'I went to Newtown, supposed to be the oldest town in the isle, but its glory is past; the church is in ruins and the town has scarcely six houses remaining'.

 

Newtown maintained having two MPs until the 1832 Great Reform Act. This was when parliamentary constituencies were changed to better represent the people of the United Kingdom, giving representation to those in cities such as Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester and eliminating many pocket boroughs, where one man determined who was elected, as well as 'rotten boroughs' like Newtown, where the degree of representation did not reflect the local population. The Isle of Wight went from having six MPs to one, becoming the UK's least represented constituency.

 

Newton's borough was dissolved following the Great Reform Act, with the Newtown Corporation deciding to build a new church as its last act. This was to replace the old church which had been built in 1592 and was known to be dilapidated by the 1660s. The new church, the Church of the Holy Spirit, was consecrated on 29^th November 1837.

 

While Newtown had been an ideal, if vulnerable, harbour in mediæval times, ships got bigger and

therefore needing deeper harbours as Newtown estuary silted up. However one industry survived, salt production. In 1700 a large sea wall was built. 120 acres of marshland were reclaimed to become pasture, nicknamed the Promised Land, while next to the sea salt flats were enclosed by a bank with sluices to control the water. Salterns or salt ponds were built there by the quay. Salt water was let into these rectangular ponds to a depth of a few inches and allowed to evaporate until a strong brine remained. This then was drained into the boiling house where the water was boiled, leaving behind crystalised sea salt. The quay was capable of berthing vessels of up to 500 tons. This industry was just beginning to turn the town's fortunes around in the late 19^th Century when salt mines were opened in Cheshire, making the harvesting of sea salt uneconomic. Salt production all-but stopped in 1900.

 

A sign of the brief period of economic prosperity can be seen in the Grade II listed village winding pump. Through the use of a wheel and internal geared winding mechanism, raising water was much less physically demanding than other types of pump.

 

In 1954 the Great Tide breached the sea wall and flooded the pasture, turning the Promised Land back into mud flats and ending 250 years of farming there. Consequently, much of Newtown was given to the National Trust in 1960. This was also as a measure to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant there that had been proposed by the Central Electricity Generating Board in 1958. The campaign against the Nuclear Power Plant received strong backing from the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, which described the Newtown area as 'one of the most beautiful stretches of sea and landscape in the British Isles'. It is widely believed that the nuclear power plant proposal was made purely to be opposed so that when the CEGB instead proposed building a fossil fuel power station on the mainland at Fawley instead, it was easy for them to get this accepted and built.

 

 In 1980 the World Wildlife Fund paid for the creation of the Scrape, a wide bank-backed lake with islands inside to create an ideal bird sanctuary.

 

Today Newtown is part of the Isle of Wight UNESCO Biosphere, the site of a National Nature Reserve, and MoD Gunnery Range. The pub still shows Newtown's borough Seal, a Heraldic lion passant guardant (a walking lion with a full-face gaze is called a 'Leopard' in heraldry despite being a lion) onboard a ship, which is why the pub despite officially being called the 'Newtown Arms' was nicknamed 'Noah's Ark'. The pub called Last Orders in 1911.

 

If you look at Newtown on Google Maps you can still see the 
mediæval grid street layout and burgage divisions today, even where the roads have gone.

 

urs, Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor