Syerston
| Syerston | |
| Nottinghamshire | |
|---|---|
 All Saints Church, Syerston | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | SK747474 |
| Location: | 53°1’7"N, 0°53’16"W |
| Data | |
| Population: | 179 (2011) |
| Post town: | Newark |
| Postcode: | NG23 |
| Dialling code: | 01636 |
| Local Government | |
| Council: | Newark and Sherwood |
| Parliamentary constituency: |
Newark |
Syerston is a small Nottinghamshire village, in the south-east of the county, to the east of the River Trent and about six miles south-west of Newark-on-Trent. The A46 trunk road runs south-west to north-east parallel to the Trent at the western edge of the village. A mile to the north-east is Elston, and a mile to the south is Flinton.
The village had 179 inhabitants in seventy-three households at the 2011 census.
The A46 diverges from the line of the old Roman Fosse Way just west of Syerston, the Fosse Way continuing from there to Newark.
Between Syerston and the Trent is RAF Syerston.
Name
The village appears as Sirestune in the Domesday Book of 1086 and as Sireston juxta Stok (which is to say ...'next to Stoke') in the Assize Rolls of 1278.
Scholars are in agreement that the name means 'Sighere's farm or settlement', from an Old English personal name.[1][2][3]
History
The Domesday Book records that the Syerston of 1086 was owned by four parties:
- the King's thanes;
- Robert of Moutiers from Count Alan of Brittany;
- Remigius de Fécamp, Bishop of Lincoln,
- Godwin from Berengar de Tosny.
Ten freemen (sochemanni), four villagers (villani) and five smallholders (bordarii) are mentioned. Assuming that these were the heads of nineteen households, the population of Syerston in 1086 was perhaps around 80.[4]
By the Restoration in 1660, Syerston was the property of Robert Sutton, 1st Baron Lexinton, a member of the Sutton family, who were landowners of Averham and elsewhere.[5] His son, Robert Sutton, 2nd Baron Lexinton, had a daughter Bridget who married, in 1717, John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland and so Syerston passed to the Dukes of Rutland by marriage (along with the manors of Averham, Kelham and Rolleston). Some sixty years later in 1775 Lord George Sutton, a son of the third Duke of Rutland, sold Syerston to Lewis Disney Ffytche of Flintham Hall.[6] Sixteen years later, Ffytche sold the village to William Fillingham (1734–95).
The landscape of present-day Syerston is principally the work of William Fillingham, who was of a yeoman family from nearby Flawborough. Following work as a land surveyor, he became steward to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, and also land agent to several other local families. He acted in the capacity of enclosure commissioner for over 20 parishes in Nottinghamshire from 1774, as well as several in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Rutland and Derbyshire.[7] The earnings from his work permitted him to purchase the manor of Syerston from Lewis Disney Ffytche and to begin construction of a small mansion.[8]
William died before the mansion was quite completed and the estate was inherited by his son George Fillingham (1774–1850).
Church
For most of its existence, Syerston seems to have been a chapelry of East Stoke, from which it is physically separated by Elston parish. Dr Robert Thoroton says ' I suppose this Town is in Stoke Parish, for the Vicar comes and serves the Cure here';.[9] This ecclesiastical arrangement was superseded in 1866 when one of the effects of the Poor Law Amendment Act of that year, was to make places which levied a separate poor rate into civil parishes.[10] So Syerston gained its independence from East Stoke.
The church of All Saints, Syerston is small, as befits a former parochial chapelry, and has an aisle-less nave. It measures within from the east wall to the door of the vestry at the base of the tower, just under sixty-seven and a half feet; and from the south to the north wall nearly fifteen feet. The nave and chancel are probably of fourteenth-century origin and were rebuilt in 1896 in memory of G. H. Fillingham, at the expense of his widow.[11]
About the village
The parish has seven grade II listed buildings:
- Syerston Hall and Attached Outbuilding and Garden Wall[12]
- Stable Block, Adjacent Pump and Attached Hen House at Syerston Hall – c.1800.
- Pigeoncote at Syerston Hall – c.1800.
- Montague House – early nineteenth-century house on Church Lane.
- Low Farm House – seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century farmhouse on Moor Lane.
- Barn at Low Farm – early-eighteenth-century barn in red brick on Moor Lane.
- Church of All Saints – parish church of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, restored in 1896.
Longhedge Lane, called Vale Road in the Enclosure Award of 1795, may have begun as a Bronze Age trackway forming part of a route linking the navigable River Welland, east of Stamford, to the River Trent.[13] Its course is clearly defined from an island in the Trent, called The Nabbs, along the southern edge of the parish to the Sibthorpe boundary. Since the construction of RAF Syerston in 1940 the lane is no longer accessible as it crosses the airfield.
From Sibthorpe, Longhedge Lane is easily traced, coterminous with parish boundaries, as it passes Shelton, Flawborough and Alverton on its way to Bottesford, Leicestershire. To the east of that village, it seems to follow a course along Muston, Easthorpe and Woolsthorpe lanes to a point in Sedgebrook parish where it joins the better known trackway Sewstern Drift (or Lane) which runs from the Stamford area of Lincolnshire, north in the direction of Newark.
Longhedge Lane may therefore be seen as a spur to Sewstern Drift and an alternative way to reach the Trent from the south. At some stage, perhaps the turnpiking of the Great North Road in the 1730s and 40s, that more easterly route became preferred and Longhedge Lane sank into disuse and obscurity.[14]
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Syerston) |
References
- ↑ Gover, J. E. B.; Mawer, A. & Stenton, F.M.: 'Place-Names of Nottinghamshire , Part' (English Place-Names Society, 1940), page 218
- ↑ Mills, Anthony David: 'A Dictionary of British Place-Names' (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 978-0-19-852758-9
- ↑ Ekwall, Eilert, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 4th edition, 1960. p. 458 ISBN 0198691033
- ↑ N.Goose, & A Hinde, 'Estimating local population sizes at fixed points in time. Part II: Specific sources', Local Population Studies 78 (2007) pp.75–6
- ↑ R. Thoroton, History of Nottinghamshire, Vol 1 (1797), p.335
- ↑ Nottinghamshire Archives DD/FM/1/3-4, 29 and 30 June 1775, 10 October 1775
- ↑ K. S. S. Train, 'The Fillinghams of Syerston Hall', Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 74 (1970), pp.22–30; M. E. Brown, 'Aspects of Parliamentary Enclosure in Nottinghamshire' (unpublished PhD thesis, Leicester, 1995), pp.109-110
- ↑ Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/FM/1/14
- ↑ R. Thoroton, History of Nottinghamshire, Vol 1 (1797), p.335; Coddington was also a chapelry of East Stoke.
- ↑ Poor Law Amendment Act, 1866 (29 & 30 Vict. c 113)
- ↑ Nottinghamshire Guardian,19 September 1896, p.8
- ↑ Nikolaus Pevsner: The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire, 1951; 1979 Penguin Books ISBN 978-0-300-09636-1page 346
- ↑ Notts Archives: C/QDI 4, Syerston Enclosure Award; W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (Leicester, 1955), p.189
- ↑ W. Albert, The Turnpike Road System in England: 1663–1840 (Cambridge, 1972), p.62; M.Patterson, Roman Nottinghamshire (2011), p.156
- A. W. Bailey, 'Paper Read at Syerston to the Members of the Thoroton Society, on their Visit to the Church, on 26 June 1900', Transactions of the Thoroton Society (TTS), 4 (1900)
- G. A. Morley, 'Memorials of Syerston', Nottinghamshire Countryside, 23, 1 (1962)
- N. Summers, 'Syerston Hall', TTS, 74 (1970)
- K. S. S. Train, 'The Fillinghams of Syerston Hall', TTS, 74 (1970)
- Notts. Federation of W.I., Nottinghamshire Within Living Memory (1995), pp. 14–25 (Reminiscences of the village from 1927, by its former postmistress Mrs Frieda Klingbeil [1919–2012])
