The Shaping of the Village and the Parish

Broadmayne parish runs roughly from south-west to north-east on the axis of Chalky Road and Knighton Lane, with the village and its Main Street crossing the axis at right angles. Its shape reflects the age-old needs of the peoples who have found their livelihood here for two millennia: a dwelling site with a water supply, some low-lying meadowland, some rising land for arable crops, and pasture on the higher slopes.

Like the great majority of Dorset villages, Broadmayne is a ‘street’ village, where church and chapel, farmhouses and their outbuildings, public houses and cottages and trade premises have grown up in a string along the main street or very close to it. Twentieth century development, and the removal of the old school to the new one in Knighton Lane, have partly obscured the original ‘street’ plan, but it is plain to be see in the ribbon-like distribution of the village buildings of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It was an obviously convenient lay-out for the original valley settlement, and was kept in being by the open-field system of farming which lasted in Broadmayne until the Inclosure Award of 1811 – for there could be no spread of buildings onto the communally farmed fields.

Once the village of Friarmayne, now a grassy field in the parish of Broadmayne. Many other fields in the area around Dorchester are the sites of deserted villages

Part of the village area was certainly occupied during the first three or four centuries AD. Remains of Romano-British farming settlements have been discovered beneath a garage at 17a Knighton Lane and in the Conway Drive / Broadmead area, where diggings in various gardens have produced Iron Age pottery, Roman coins, a grain-drying oven and a grain-storage pit complete with the small bones of the mice who fed on the grain – and, leaping forward in time, some medieval glass and a Georgian penny.

The Anglo-Saxons who reached Dorset in the seventh century were great villagers, and Broadmayne offered just the sort of site they liked – tucked away in a valley, with water at hand, out of sight of the coast with its marauding pirates and away from the decaying Roman roads that might still offer a thoroughfare for inland pillagers. Nearly every village we know today was in existence by the time of the Norman conquest, and is still called by a modernised version of its Anglo-Saxon name. Broadmayne’s name (like Dorchester’s) is exceptional in having even earlier roots, for Mayne comes from the Celtic ‘maen’ meaning a stone. The fact that the Anglo-Saxons took the name over from their British predecessors suggests that they did at any rate settle down fairly peaceably together and the Britons were not driven out neck and crop.

The name of Broadmayne first appears in full in 1202, as Brademaene, so called to distinguish it from Little Mayne. The Domesday Book lists two Maines in 1086. One had been held by a Saxon called Ednoth, and included ploughland, meadow and pasture, 3 slaves, 6 villagers and 2 smallholders. The owner of the other had been Edric, and had ploughland and meadow but comparatively little pasture, 4 smallholders and one slave. Both estates were handed over to King William’s nephew Hugh of Avranches, Earl of Chester. Broadmayne may have been one of the two Maines; or it may be that they were Little Maine and Friarmayne, with Broadmayne being included in the royal manor of Dorchester which William kept for himself and which the Domesday Commissioners might have seen no reason to include in their mighty compilation of taxable properties. Broadmayne soon passed into the possession of the Martel family, and until the seventeenth century was often known as Maine Martel.

Whatever their status at the time of Domesday, Broadmayne has grown into a reasonably prosperous village, while Little Maine and Friarmayne have not. Dorset has scores of deserted villages which have dwindled into single farmsteads or small hamlets, or disappeared altogether. Often their desertion has been due, directly or indirectly, to the Black Death, a form of bubonic plague which made its first appearance in England, via Weymouth, in July 1348. Known at the time as the Great Mortality (and said to be grimly commemorated in the nursery rhyme, ‘Ring-a-ring-o’-roses’), the plague is estimated to have killed between a third and a half the country's population. Some villages may have been left too weakened to continue in existence; others had grown up on poor land which was no longer worth cultivating in the labour shortage that followed. Within what is now Broadmayne’s parish the remains of the deserted village of Friarmayne could be traced in the grass until the field was ploughed in 1963. Friarmayne probably owed its medieval existence to the preceptory of the Knights Hospitallers there, and its desertion to the disappearance of that foundation under Henry VIII's Reformation. A string of villages along the Winterbourne valley (Winterbourne Herringston, Farringdon, Germane, Came and Whitcome) were killed off more deliberately. They had all been populous places with their own churches until the owner of the land, Sir William Fyllol, evicted the tenants in the sixteenth century to make way for sheep pasture. One way and another, Broadmayne has been one of the lucky survivors.

Old Church Farmhouse, Main Street. Some hundred years ago, the holding was farmed by a Mr John Samways whose “products of Stock and high-class samples of Corn always ranked with the first in Dorchester Market”

Parishes, like villages, were largely the work of the Anglo-Saxons. Although they were ecclesiastical units, their boundaries commonly followed those of existing estates, possibly even as far back as the pre-Saxon, Romano-British estates. Alongside the church parish, the Saxons set out the early framework of local government. The shire, known since the Norman conquest by the Frenchified name of county, was their invention. They divided it into groups of parishes known as hundreds, each with its Hundred Court for settling matters of local justice and administration. The Hundred Courts met regularly, and for several centuries assembled in the open air at some conspicuous or convenient ‘moot place’. The prehistoric barrow known as Culliford Tree, on the ridgeway just outside the Broadmayne boundary, was the moot place of the Culliford Tree Hundred. It was marked by a solitary tree which is mentioned in a number of documents from 1084 onwards, and is still planted with trees. It was not however our local centre of justice, for Broadmayne was in the Hundred of St. George.

Apart from the church, none of Broadmayne’s surviving buildings date from before the late 16th century. Until then, even the more prosperous of its inhabitants would have lived in timber-and-cob houses that were dark, draughty, uncomfortable, and all too quick to catch fire, while the dwellings of the labourers would have been little more than hovels. As a Spaniard at the court of Queen Mary said, “These English have their houses made of sticks and dirt”. About the time of the Armada, however, England was growing prosperous enough for notions of comfort, and even elegance, to percolate downwards from the upper layers of society. First the wealthier yeomen, and then the smaller farmers, began to build bigger and better houses for themselves, and the older houses in most English villages to-day have their origins – architecturally speaking – in the period between 1570 and 1770 or so.

At the beginning of the 20th century, some three-fifths of the parish of Broadmayne and most of the village was still owned by the Lord of the Manor, then Mr. John Roberts Furmedge. In 1911 the whole Manorial Estate, covering 572 acres, was put up for auction in several lots. Besides the farms, the estate included the small Cold Park Wood, the Black Dog Inn, the brickfield and yard, 23 cottages and various business premises – and the title of Lord of the Manor, which was bought by an estate agent in Dorchester. Manor Farm, Church Farm and Charlemont Farm were still farmed from houses of 17th century date on Main Street, surrounded by farm buildings such as granaries, cow stalls, stables, piggeries and dairy houses. The outbuildings of another Main Street house, of 16th century date, included piggeries and a slaughter house. Charlmont Farm – having dropped its ‘e’ by then – came on the market again in 1961; but a few years later the farmhouse and buildings, at the junction of Knighton Lane and Main Street, were burnt down, and the site was used for that fashionable and profitable 20th century crop, new housing.

Until the very end of this century, West Knighton parish extended long fingers of land along Broadmayne’s eastern and western boundaries, right up to the crest of the downs. This odd arrangement came about because the two fingers had originally belonged to the medieval settlements of Little Maine and Friarmayne but had been taken into West Knighton parish. Both were transferred to Broadmayne parish in 1990. The Little Maine finger to the west ran from the main road up to the Neolithic bank barrow, and was only one field wide. The bigger finger, to the east, was two or three fields wide, and stretched from the wash-ponds at the end of Watergates Lane to beyond the parish boundary where Half Moon Coppice can be seen on the horizon. So since 1990 the parish of Broadmayne has covered Friarmayne, Conygar and the area now known by Broadmayne's own ancient name of Maine Martel.