Calverton, Nottinghamshire
| Calverton | |
| Nottinghamshire | |
|---|---|
 Main Street, Calverton | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | SK615493 |
| Location: | 53°2’13"N, 1°4’59"W |
| Data | |
| Population: | 7,076 (2011) |
| Post town: | Nottingham |
| Postcode: | NG14 |
| Dialling code: | 0115 |
| Local Government | |
| Council: | Gedling |
| Parliamentary constituency: |
Sherwood |
Calverton is a village in Nottinghamshire, about seven miles north-east of Nottingham, and ten miles south-east of Mansfield. With nearby Woodborough and Lambley, it stands by one of the small tributaries of the Dover Beck.
About two miles to the north of the village is the site of the supposed deserted settlement of Salterford.
The 2011 census found 7,076 inhabitants in 2,987 households.
Names
The place appears as Calvretone in the Domesday Book of 1086 and as Kalvirton in the Hundred Rolls of 1275. The name is from the Old English ‘’Calfra tun’’, which means "Calves’ farm”.[1][2] Calverton is one of a number of settlements in the area with animal names, along with Oxton, Bulcote and Lambley).
Salterford, a neighbouring hamlet, was Saltreford in 1086 and possibly means "ford of the salters", where salter refers to a salt–dealer or carrier, rather than a maker.[1] The place was situated in the forest, but the road to York, the King's Highway, passed close by, and this may well have been frequented by salt-carriers. An alternative explanation is that it is derived from a ford near to a saltery, or deer-leap, (Latin saltatorium) on the boundary of the royal hunting ground of Sherwood Forest, and had nothing to do with salt.[3][4]
Bonner Hill, Bonner Lane and Burnor Pool may each contain the Old Norse words brunnr’' (a spring) and haugr, a hill.[1]Gover, J. E. B.; Mawer, A. & Stenton, F.M.: 'Place-Names of Nottinghamshire , Part' (English Place-Names Society, 1940), page 180</ref> Alternatively the first element may be the Old English burna, meaning a spring or stream.[5]
History
Romans
There are traces of two Roman marching camps in a field north-east of the Oxton Road and Whinbush Lane crossroads on the west side of the valley of the Dover Beck (53°3’2"N, 1°5’1"W). The site of the camps is a protected Scheduled Monument.[6] A smaller one of four acres is set wholly within the defences of a larger, perhaps earlier, one of about twenty-six acres.[7] Marching camps traces are thought to be the remains of the entrenchments made by an army unit for an overnight stop, where there was the chance of an attack. The dimensions of the camp are dictated by the size of the army unit.
Middle Ages
The Domesday Book of 1086 notes that Calverton of 1086 was held by three parties: the Archbishop of York had one part, as a berewick (or outlying estate) of his manor at Blidworth, with a church and priest, and the other two parts were held by Roger of Poitou and the thegn Aelfric of Colwick.[8] Two freeman or 'sokemen', thirteen villeins, two bordars (smallholders) and a priest are mentioned.
During most of its existence Calverton was a forest village, in that part of Sherwood known as Thorney Wood Chase, with a rural economy limited by a lack of grazing land.[9]
Elizabethan, Stuart and Georgian eras
Stocking frames
Local tradition has it that William Lee, inventor of the stocking frame, was from Calverton[10] (though John Aubrey in his Brief Lives, written between 1669 and 1693, thought that he was born in Sussex).[11] and Charles Deering in Nottinghamia Vetus et Nova, published in 1751, claimed that Lee was of nearby Woodborough.[12] Failing to find much enthusiasm in England for his ingenuity, Lee went to Rouen and set up stocking frames there, and is believed to have died in France, in obscurity, in about 1615. By the end of the seventeenth century however, stocking frames, perhaps the most complex piece of machinery employed in the pre-industrial age, were in widespread use in Britain and elsewhere.
Soon after the Restoration, Calverton lost its vicar, John Allot, for non-conformity, as he would not subscribe to the requirements of the Act of Uniformity 1662, requiring the use of the Book of Common Prayerin church services. Revd. Allot, a puritan, was one of nearly two thousand clergymen who refused to conform and were removed from office in the Great Ejection from the Church of England for not complying with the Act. He went to London and ministered in private, but died soon afterwards.[13]
A revolutionary change was brought about by the parliamentary enclosure of 1778–80. By the time that an enclosure petition was presented to Parliament on 1 December 1778 by ‘several landowners and persons interested’, some 996 acres, or about 30% of the parish had already been enclosed.[14]
Nineteenth and twentieth century
Textile workers of Calverton, already keen on non-conformity in religion, were drawn by pollical radicalism, in particular the chartists in the 19th century. One of the Nottinghamshire organisers of Chartism was a Calverton man called George Harrison (1798–1871) who was a farmer and Primitive Methodist preacher,[15] who objected to non-conformists paying church rates to maintain the Church of England church in the village. He invited the leader of the Chartists, Feargus O'Connor to Calverton on Monday 25 July 1842 O'Connor made a long speech at 'Bonner Pool' to a crowd, which the Chartists' own newspaper estimated at five thousand, and then a tea-party was served in a marquee 'in a beautiful pasture bounded by a splendid wood'. There followed an evening of singing, dancing and games, during which time a supposed government spy was pointed out and questioned. O'Connor spent the night in Calverton and the following morning, he set out for more speech-making in Mansfield.
Four weeks later The Northern Star reported that, on Monday 22 and Tuesday 23 August 1842, there had been skirmishes with the village constable and a general withdrawal of labour by workers in Calverton, but the Battle of Mapperley Hills, on that Tuesday 23 August, perhaps saw the zenith of Chartism in Nottinghamshire, and the working class began to focus instead on opposition to the Corn Laws and the high price of bread.[16]
The twentieth century
In June 1937 a new cricket pavilion was opened by James Seely (1901–1956) in the same week (as he noted), that he had attended the ceremony of ground-breaking in connection with the new colliery (q.v.). The cricket ground itself had been provided by his grandfather Sir Charles Seely in 1910.[17]
In 1937 the first shaft of a new mine was sunk by the Seely family's Babbington Colliery Co., though borings had taken place at Oxton, Thurgarton and elsewhere in 1910 to determine the extent of the coal field beneath. The 1,730-foot mine-shaft was completed early in 1939 and by September of that year, various buildings and twenty-two houses of a proposed colliery village had been built, to a design by Geoffrey Jellicoe. The Second World War then brought further work to an abrupt halt.[18]
In 1940 the Trent Fishery Board, a precursor of the Trent River Authority, opened the Calverton Fish Farm with the aim of breeding thousands of fish to stock rivers and still waters around the country.
On 13 October 1940, a Fairey Battle aircraft of No. 300 Polish Bomber Squadron crashed in woods close to Whinbush Lane while returning from a raid on Boulogne.
Work resumed on the mine after the war, and a new shaft was sunk in January 1946.[19] This was to be the last privately sunk shaft, before the coal industry was nationalised on 1 January 1947 and became the property of the National Coal Board.
In the 1970s and early 1980s the colliery employed some 1,600 workers, but by 1988 this figure had fallen to 1,000, of whom 300 lived in the village. By September 1993, the number had been further reduced to 648, of whom 148 lived in Calverton.[20]
The colliery closed in 1999 and while a small industrial estate provides some local employment, Calverton has taken on the character of a large commuter village.
Traditional cottage-based frame-working had died out by the mid- twentieth century, but the link between the village and the hosiery industry was retained, through the presence of a Courtaulds factory on Main Street. The destruction of this factory by fire in 1991, finally ended Calverton's association with the textile industry.[21]
Church of St. Wilfrid
The parish church, St Wilfrid's, dates for the most part, from the fourteenth century, when it may have been reconstructed with material from an older building.
The nave and tower were rebuilt in 1760–63, and over the west door is a commemorative stone 'Mr. Pugh, Vicar, Saml. Pugh, Ino.Barrett, Church Wardens, Wm.Barrett, mason'. In 1835 the chancel was reconstructed, and in 1881 the whole church was restored.[22]
An organ chamber was built in 1888 and an annexe in 1962.
The nave has the somewhat unusual form of a wide parallelogram 42 feet 8 inches long and 37 feet 2 inches wide, of one span and with no traces of any arcades. The chancel arch is not in the centre of the east wall of the nave, but about five feet nearer to the north side. This has led to the suggestion that when the building was rebuilt in the 1760s, the south wall of the nave was moved further south to enlarge the building.[23]
On the west wall of the ringing chamber, at second-storey level, is a sandstone carving, on its side, of a man apparently digging, while on the west wall of the clock chamber, at third-storey level, is a collection of nine sandstone panels believed to represent the occupations of the seasons. Seven of these stones are voussoir-shaped, and may have formed part of a band of ornament nine inches wide on the architrave of an arch in the earlier pre-fourteenth century building. Similar depictions of country activities may be seen on the fonts at Burnham Deepdale in Norfolk, and Brookland in Kent.
Carved into the capital of the north jamb is a small, 3" by 4", panel containing a three-quarter length depiction of a bearded bishop together with another figure. It is perhaps St Wilfrid himself, either with a newly baptised convert or, as the freeing of slaves was a distinguishing feature of the bishop's career, in the act of manumission.[24]
Outside links
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References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Gover, J. E. B.; Mawer, A. & Stenton, F.M.: 'Place-Names of Nottinghamshire , Part' (English Place-Names Society, 1940), page 158
- ↑ Mills, Anthony David: 'A Dictionary of British Place-Names' (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 978-0-19-852758-9
- ↑ Higham, M. C.: 'Take it with a pinch of Salt' in Landscape History, vol 25 (2003), pp. 59–65
- ↑ Shirley, E. P.: 'Some account of English deer parks: with notes on the management of deer' (1867), p. 14
- ↑ K. Cameron, English Place Names (1961), p. 162
- ↑ National Heritage List 1018264: Two Roman camps north east of Lodge Farm, Calverton (Scheduled ancient monument entry)
- ↑ D. N. Riley, 'Temporary Camps at Calverton, Notts', Britannia, vol. 14 (1983), p. 270; S. Malone & D. Garton, ‘Calverton Roman Camps’ Archaeology in Nottinghamshire 1999, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 104 (2000)
- ↑ J. Morris (ed.), Domesday Book, vol. 28: Nottinghamshire (Chichester, 1977), pp. 5,16,30
- ↑ J. Thirsk, (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol.IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 97; J. R. Birrell, 'Peasant Craftsmen in the Mediæval Forest', Agricultural History Review, 17 (1969), passim.
- ↑ Thoroton, R.: 'The antiquities of Nottinghamshire' (1677)
- ↑ Aubrey, J. ed. J. Walker: 'Letters written by eminent persons … and Lives of eminent men', vol. 2 (1813), p. 32
- ↑ C. Deering, Nottinghamia vetus et nova: or, An historical account of the ancient and present state of the town of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1751), p. 99
- ↑ Calamy, E. & Palmer, S.: 'The Nonconformist's Memorial: Being an Account of the Ministers…' (1775), p. 280
- ↑ W.E. Tate, Parliamentary Land Enclosures in the county of Nottingham during the 18th and 19th Centuries (1743–1868), Thoroton Society Record Series, 5 (1935), p. 66
- ↑ M.R. Watts, The Dissenters: Volume II: The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity 1791–1859 (1995), p. 515.
- ↑ The Northern Star (Leeds), Saturday, 27 August 1842; Issue 250; J. V. Beckett, p. 303
- ↑ Nottingham Evening Post , 18 June 1937
- ↑ NCB, National Coal Board, South Nottinghamshire Area, Calverton ; pamphlet (Nottingham, 1982?); Nottingham Evening Post , 18 March 1939
- ↑ Times, 12 January 1946, p. 2
- ↑ Calverton Parish Council, Our Village-Your Future, N.C.C. Quality Services Consultancy (Nottingham, 1995), p. 7; But Hansard, 20 December 1994, vol 251, has 694 'men on books' in November 1993
- ↑ Calverton Conservation Area Appraisal , 15 December 2005
- ↑ Rev. A. Du Boulay Hill, 'The Summer Excursion, 1908: Calverton church', Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 12 (1908), pp. 31–6; John Charles Cox, County Churches: Nottinghamshire (1912), p. 53;N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire, 2nd edition revised by E. Williamson (1979), p. 89.
- ↑ T. O. Hoyle, A Guide to Calverton Parish Church (Calverton, 197-?), p. 18
- ↑ D. Hill, 'Some Ancient Carved Stones in Calverton Church, Notts' in Archaeological Journal, Vol 58 (1901), pp. 459–63;Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland