A settlement that stops - and leaves no paperwork of its stopping

[E_Selwood]

I have been working through the hundred for the parish-history group, and I have come up against something I cannot account for. Perhaps one of you can. There was a settlement in this county once. A vill of some size, a manor, and a church or at the least a chapelry. It is present in the record until the early seventeenth century, and is then simply not. It appears in the 1576 lay subsidy. It appears in the bishop's transcripts for the deanery. It appears in two manorial documents I have seen in transcript. After about 1605, nothing. Not a village lost by degrees, as one sees with the deserted settlements out on the chalk, where the population drains away over generations and the earthworks remain to be photographed from the air. This one goes between one set of returns and the next. The name is given variously. Candelmont, Candle Mount, and in one careless hand something nearer Candlemount, which is itself odd, since a vill of any standing has usually settled to a single spelling by the Tudor period. But here is what troubles me, and it is not the disappearance. Villages were lost; that is ordinary. It is that there is no record OF the loss. No enclosure award. No faculty for the demolition of the church. No entry in any plague register. No grant of the manor to a new holder upon the old line failing. A place does not fall out of the documents without leaving the paperwork of its falling, and this one did. I should be very glad to be told I have overlooked something obvious. E.S.

[Devizes_Mech]

Plague or enclosure, has to be one or the other. Half this county's got a lump in a field where a village used to be. Records burn, records go missing, half the clerks couldnt spell their own name. You're reading a lot into a gap. No offence but "no record of the loss" just means the record didnt survive. Happens all the time.

[E_Selwood]

No offence taken; it is a fair objection, and the one I began with myself. But the survival is precisely the point. The lay subsidy for the surrounding vills survives. The bishop's transcripts for the whole deanery survive, continuous, on either side of the gap. The manorial descents of every neighbouring manor are complete and unbroken. Candelmont is the one hole in an otherwise intact cloth. A clerk who could spell the eleven parishes around it could spell the twelfth. I will grant you plague, and I will grant you enclosure, as ordinary causes. What I cannot grant is an ordinary cause that erases its own evidence and touches nothing else's. E.S.

[Marlborough_Nan]

Hope nobody minds me digging up an old thread. My grandmother was a Cannings girl and she had a saying, for when you couldnt lay your hand on something youd put down not five minutes before. "Oh, its gone to Candlemount." I never thought a thing of it. Just one of her sayings, like "gone for a soldier." She had dozens of them. But I read this thread last winter and it stuck with me, so I asked my aunt, shes 91 now bless her, and she said her own mother used it too, and that it didnt mean lost exactly. It meant somewhere you had been and couldnt find the road back to. Not lost. Unreachable. I dont know if that helps you at all Mr Selwood, its only an old womans saying. Sorry to go on..

[Chalkways_Fran]

Late to this. I think Ive been to your village, Selwood, if its the spot I have in mind. Theres a ruin off the byway out that way, I can dig out the proper grid ref if you want it. Walked through it October before last. Whats actually there: two farm buildings, one still roofed and used for storage by the look of it, one open to the sky. A manor house, or whats left of one. Roofless, windows gone, a fresh survey peg driven into the yard. And stones. Three big sarsens in the field beyond, and more under the turf Id say, you can feel them come up through your boots in the wet. No church. No churchyard that I could find, and I did look, because the churchyard is usually the last thing to go. The footpath used to run straight through and doesnt any more. Diverted round the field edge, new stile, new waymarkers, all of it recent. Whoever holds the land does not want you in the middle of it. Ive walked a lot of empty places. Most of them are just empty. That one isnt, quite. Didnt stop for lunch.

[E_Selwood]

Miss Dunch, that is it exactly, and the absent churchyard is the detail that lifts the hair on my neck. A medieval church means burials. Burials mean consecrated ground, and consecrated ground outlasts the building above it by centuries. The stones remain when the walls are long robbed for a barn. For the church to be gone is strange. For the churchyard to be gone as well is a thing I find I would rather not commit to writing. If you would send the grid reference I should be grateful. I mean to write to the county record office for the original of that manorial roll; I have only ever seen the transcript, and I find I should like to see the hand. E.S.

[Marlborough_Nan]

This thread again. I do keep coming back to it. Something and nothing, but the empty cottages up our end have been going the same way. Three dark on the green now, curtains down, gardens gone over. A firm bought them. Solicitors, the letters come from London, nobody you could put a face to. The Pratt place and the two beside it. And I find myself setting Frans moved footpath next to my grans saying next to these cottages, and I know full well thats three different things and an old woman joining up dots that were never meant to join. But somebody is tidying us away, a little at a time, and being very quiet about the doing of it. There. Ive said it now.

[Devizes_Mech]

Nan its land agents. Somebodys building a portfolio, holiday lets, or sitting on it waiting for the planning to turn. London money buys cheap in the quiet villages and waits. its depressing, ill give you that, but it isnt a mystery. its just money. and a footpath diversion is a footpath diversion. you apply, you fence it, you put the stile in, done. ive seen fifty of them.

[E_Selwood]

I have let this thread alone a good while. I will add one thing, and then I think I shall leave it alone again. I wrote to the record office in 2016 for that manorial roll, as I said I would. The reply was a long time coming. The document is in the old printed catalogue; it is not, the archivist writes, "currently available for production," and it no longer appears in the online catalogue at all. The phrase used to me was "mislaid in an earlier reorganisation." I have used county archives for the better part of forty years. Documents are mis-shelved. They are not un-listed. The transcript I worked from in 2009 is still in my files. It may be, before very long, the only place that vill exists on paper at all. I have made copies. I would suggest, gently, that anyone here who holds anything of it, whether Miss Dunch's photographs or anything in Nan's family, does the same. That is all I wished to say. E.S.

[E_Selwood]

Locking this topic now. I'm sorry, I have no choice. BUT I AM NOT REMOVING IT