An Account of the Farms and Farmers of the Parish of Axminster since the Agricultural Revolution. Including Smallridge, Westwater, Weycroft & Wyke Compiled by David Knapman © November 2017 To the reader: The research on which this document is based was mainly carried out in 2015. On the next page I explain how it has evolved since then. Any errors and omissions that you may find are entirely mine, but if you draw them to my attention, I will happily correct them in later versions. If you have additional information which you would be happy to share, I will do my best to accommodate it. I can be contacted at david.j.knapman @ btinternet.com. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Overview of the Farms 9 3 Between Membury Road and Smallridge, north of Cloakham 15 4 Millbrook, Weycroft and Lodge Lane 24 5 North of Sector Lane to the Hawkchurch boundary, including Cuthays Lane 32 6 Between Sector Lane and Cook’s / Woodbury Lanes 38 7 Wyke, Trinity Hill and Great Trill 48 8 Down the Axe Valley and along the Musbury Road 56 9 Up the Yarty from Hunthay Lane 66 Appendix 1: Index of Axminster Farms 78 Appendix 2: On-line Mapping from 1800 Onwards 83 Appendix 3: An 1828 Survey of Cow Keeping in Axminster 85 I wish to acknowledge the help and information that I have received from several current Axminster farmers and other interested parties. In particular, and in alphabetical order, in 2015 I benefitted from extended conversations with Ann Bond, Lisle Burrough, Dick Hurford, Dudley Hurford, Shirley Hurford, Jim Rowe (who also lent me documents from the archive of Messrs R&C Snell) and Ken Voysey. After this document was first posted on the axminsterheritage.org website in mid- 2016 I received information and feedback from several persons, some of them living outside the UK. In most cases their interest arises from family history researches, and much of their feed-back is reflected in this revised version. I am particularly grateful to Christopher Moran, who has provided addional information, primarily on the Gage and Denning families; and to Dave Scott Mear for his information mainly covering the Mear and Rowe families. I have made a small number of other changes to the text based on information which I have found since 2015, but the basic structure and content reflects my original researches. Chapter 1: Introduction The purpose of this document Farming has been central to Axminster for centuries. Axminster may be more industrial than the average Devon town, but it owes much of its character and a lot of its accumulated wealth to farming, and to its role as a hub serving the farmers of surrounding parishes. The purpose of this document is to draw together in one place such information as I have been able to find about the farms of Axminster parish since the early 19th century, and in particular the people who were farming them. My narrative therefore covers roughly two centuries, from the early 1800s to the present, during which period agricultural improvements have been widely if not universally adopted, culminating in the highly technical farming which is characteristic of the early 21st century. By around 1800 the foundations of modern farming were increasingly evident within the wider farming community, not just among the elite pioneers, marked by growing levels of mechanisation, attention to soil fertility, scientific animal breeding and improved animal nutrition. All of this built on the foundations laid by generations of earlier agricultural pioneers who had been at work over the period from about 1650 to 1800, the middle period of which is sometimes called the ‘agricultural revolution’. Although I make some use of, and reference to, documents from the 18th century (and before), the quality of documentary sources improves considerably from the early 19th century. The 19th century was also a time when few farmers could afford to ignore ‘scientific farming’ altogether, and during which employment on farms started to fall in response to the ‘pull’ of industrial employment (and, particularly during the late 19th century, emigration). The late 19th and early 20th century is also the period when family farms and owner-occupation were becoming more widespread, if not quite the norm in all areas. To survive in business in the 21st century, farmers have to achieve a level of scale quite different to that which is represented by the pattern of farming traced in this document. As a consequence many of the farmyards and farm houses identified and discussed here are now substantially divorced from the real business of farming. It would be almost pointless to regret or to resist these changes, and one of the main purposes of this document is to record a past era while the evidence is still reasonably fresh. The structure of this document In this introductory chapter I try to explain more precisely what I am (and what I am not) seeking to achieve, not least by setting down some definitions. I also set out my principal sources. Chapter 2 provides an introduction to the farms themselves, including (as far as I have been able to establish it) information on where each one either can be found, or used to be located. I have described a series of routes starting in the town which, between them, pass close to all of the named farms. In Chapters 3 to 9 I have grouped the farms into seven blocks of land. The first of these blocks lies to the north of the town, and after that I work clock-wise around the town, covering the whole of the parish. In these seven chapters I set out all of the information that I have found showing who was farming each farm, and over what period. Finally, Appendix 1 provides an index to all of the farms that are mentioned in the text, and Appendix 2 provides guidance on where and how to find detailed on-line maps from the late 19th century onwards, covering the parish of Axminster. Appendix 3 contains the results of an 1828 survey of cow keeping in Axminster parish. Some definitions Farms and farmers The question ‘what is a farm?’ may seem extremely easy to answer at first sight, but the more we think about it, the less certain we may become. Examples of what a farm is are easily given, but a water-tight definition which can successfully be applied to all cases is much harder to pin down. Farms in Axminster. Page 1 At its simplest, a farm comprises a block of land, probably (though not always) some animals, a set of farm buildings (to accommodate whatever animals there are at certain times of year, and to store crops and farm machinery), and a farmhouse. Almost all such farms have a name, which may have remained unchanged for centuries. In effect such a farm is a physical and geographical fact, which can be marked on a map, and which provides the owner or tenant with several of the necessary elements needed to run a farm business. However, many farm businesses have access to more than one distinct parcel of land, and may well comprise more than one ‘historical’ farm. Over time a farm business may well rent, buy or sell land, or move from one location to another. Sometimes as land is aggregated into larger units, the original farmhouses, and some of the original farm buildings, are hived off and sold to non-farmers. We may think of this as a modern phenomenon, but in fact it has been going on for hundreds of years. What is more, while the total number of farms in a parish tends to decline over time, that does not stop new farms from emerging. There is therefore a clear distinction to be made between a farmer and his farm business (on the one hand) and those distinct entities that most of us would think of as farms (on the other). This document is about farmers as well as farms, but it is structured round the farms, and in particular round the farms to be found around Axminster. What I have then attempted to do is to trace who worked those farms as tenants or owners. I am much less interested in who owned or leased the land: it is the persons who were running the farm businesses which interest me, including the moves which some of them made from farm to farm. I considered producing an index of surnames, but on reflection I concluded that for anyone accessing this document electronically, the ‘find’ function represents the most effective aid to tracing the names of interest to them. Most Axminster farms were owned by large landowners until the 20 years running up to World War I. At that time there was a wave of selling as estates were broken up in response to changes in the taxation system, and the pendulum swung strongly in favour of owner-occupiers. Anyone interested in the history of the Manor of Axminster can find this in the writings of George Pulman (Ref 11) and James Davidson (Ref 2). The only comment that I would make in passing is that Axminster is unusual in Devon in having neither a clearly identifiable Axminster Manor House nor a single Barton farm2. As towns expand they inevitably swallow up adjacent farmland, farm buildings and farmhouses, though generally not whole farms at a time. In this document I refer to some former farmhouses which now lie well within the boundaries of the town. There were almost certainly many other instances where individuals lived within the town and rented farmland nearby, probably without any recognisable farm buildings either around their houses or on their land.