Northamptonshire
Contents
There has been a village settlement here since ancient times. An important archaeological discovery was made in 1942, during the reopening of an old gravel pit. A mechanical scraper, removing the top-soil, uncovered parts of an old Anglo-Saxon cemetery. About 50 graves were found, with quite valuable grave goods such as spear heads, shield bosses, bronze drinking cups and jewellry. Some were taken by Oundle School, but some examples are in Peterborough museum.
The cemetery was rather near the river, and liable to flooding, so the settlement must gradually have moved higher up the hill, where the first Anglo-Saxon church was built, and around which the present village still clusters.
The Prebendal Manor House, 1230, is the oldest inhabited house in Northamptonshire, and stands over much of the old Anglo-Saxon site. Excavations of parts of the garden prove this, and the excavations are still going on. From these works it has been deduced that King Canute owned a royal manor here. It would have been a large wooden building with a single aisled timbered great hall. Some of the post holes of the foundations have been uncovered, determining its size. Near this settlement an old stone quarry has been excavated, from which the first church was built.
Within living memory there were seven pubs in Nassington, but four have now been converted into private dwelling houses. The Black Horse dates from 1674, though of course it has been altered and added to over the years.
Nassington was obviously a very close-knit community at the beginning of the 20th century, before agriculture became so mechanised. Most of the people used to work on the surrounding farms, but now most people have to commute, some as far away as London. There used to be a blacksmith's forge, a tailor's and clock-makers shops, a laundry and an undertaker's. These have all gone now, but there are still two general stores, one with a post office, a good butcher's, a glassware and china shop, and a bread and cake shop.
There is still a good community spirit in the village and many and varied organisations are flourishing. Nassington still manages to maintain its rural atmosphere.
(The above extract from 'The Northamptonshire Village Book', compiled by the Northamptonshire Federation of Women's Institutes, is reproduced by kind permission of the publishers, Countryside Books, Newbury, Berkshire)
Lewis Sharratt, now living in Salisbury, Wiltshire, has written the following fascinating insight into life in Nassington in the 1920s and 1930s through the eyes of a young boy.
"In my childhood in the '20s and '30s, we (my parents, my sister Beryl and I) frequently spent the summer holidays at Nassington. My grandfather, G.E.T. (Tom) Sharratt (1859-1951), and grandmother Betsy (née Penson) were living there. And my father, T.H. (Harry) Sharratt, had a friend who was a local farmer, Fred Preston, who lived at the Manor House.
My memories of those times are childhood memories, so rather haphazard and perhaps somewhat inaccurate and certainly incomplete. I do not know, for example, how the family connection with Nassington originated. Grandfather was a Londoner and spent his working life there, so presumably they went to Nassington when he retired, around 1920 perhaps. Betsy was from Bicker in Lincolnshire, but that hardly constitutes a local connection. Nor do I know anything about the nature of father's friendship with Fred Preston.
My grandparents lived in a small house or large cottage across the street from the church. Years later my sister told me it was rented from a doctor who was abroad. It seemed comfortable enough to me at the time, but the fact that it had no plumbing, no mains water, gas or electricity, and a two-holer earth "toilet" in the yard, was perhaps not so remarkable in those days. Cooking and lighting were by kerosene, and water came from a pump in the kitchen or a large rain-water butt outside. There was a large fruit and vegetable garden, lovingly tended by grandfather, and beyond that a field sloping down to a brook. As far as we children were concerned, it was an idyllic place for a holiday, but a nightmare for our mother, according to my sister, who was obviously a more observant child. One year, father acquired an army-surplus bell tent, which we erected to a background of military imprecations, and that was another source of delight.
Next door on the eastern side was a farmer, Mr Lock (Bernard?), who probably owned our field, since one of his barns was our side of the dividing wall, through which a door gave access to his farmyard. We were all sometimes invited to tea with Mrs Lock, but all I can remember, apart from the cakes, is a huge kitchen with great black kettles singing on a vast coal range.
I remember grandfather as a tall white-bearded man, rather austere, with a cat called Bunty (which he always addressed as "you boys"). He was kind to us children, though, and often took us for walks, during which he would produce oranges from his pockets, stuff them with sugar lumps, and give them to us to suck. Grandmother I hardly remember at all; she died in 1927 when I was six, and is buried in the village cemetery beside the road to Yarwell. Frequently our walks took us there, to put flowers on her grave.
We spent many holidays with grandfather, but sometimes we stayed with the Prestons at the Manor House, or "the Manor", as we called it. My memories of it include a spacious and well-kept walled garden, with guinea fowl on the wall, and indoors large rooms with ancient windows, flagstoned corridors, a kitchen with hams hanging from the rafters, and a dairy with dairymaids, one of them turning the handle of a shiny cream separating machine. Beyond the garden were the farmyards, containing pigs in stalls, horses in stables, huge heaps of manure, mysterious agricultural machinery, and what seemed to us a whole village of stacks of hay and straw the size of houses. We hardly ever saw "Uncle" Fred, because it was always harvest time when we were there, but his wife "Auntie" Lizzie was a great favourite. Sometimes she took us collecting eggs, which the chickens tended to lay in the most unlikely places in the garden.
It was always harvest when we were there. The fields were busy with horse-drawn reaping machines going round and round cutting the corn and bundling the harvest into sheaves to be erected into stooks by the people following, who would gather when the centre was reached to kill the rabbits (and rats) sheltering in the last part of the corn to be cut. And the lanes would be busy with wagons taking the sheaves to the farmyards for threshing. Threshing was a big excitement: a road train drawn by a team traction engine, then set up in the farmyards and connected by a system of leather belts. The main part of the train was a threshing machine the size of a double-decker bus (or so it seemed to me); sheaves were fed into it, and from one outlet came sacks of grain, from another the straw was fed on to an elevator which took it to the top of the stack where men were waiting with pitchforks to make it into a neat structure.
Another entertainment was rowing on the Nene. We pronounced it "nen", which I believe is the Northampton pronunciation, while in Peterborough they say "nin" or "neen". Father was a keen oarsman, and taught Beryl and me to row there. I suppose the boat was hired or borrowed from a friend in the village. We had a happy time with that boat and covered what to us seemed great distances; once we saw a diver in a helmet, working on the foundations of the railway bridge.
I have dim memories of the church. I think the date "1215" was engraved over the entrance. And from a corner of the churchyard there was a footpath across the fields to the station. There was a full peal of bells, which sounded out for all services. We heard them clearly from grandfather's house. Grandfather was a devout churchgoer, and we were taken to the services, but all I recall is the untuneful voice of Mr Fenn, one of our neighbours, during the hymns.
The only pub names I recall are The Three Horse Shoes and The Three Mill Bills. There were probably more, but I was too young for pub-crawling.
At first we went to Nassington by train. We lived in London, so it was L.N.E.R. from King's Cross to start with, first stop Peterborough. There we changed to the L.M.S.R. station (now no more), sometimes by the little shuttle train between the two stations, generally by taxi (the only time I ever went in a taxi in those days). From there it was a short journey to Nassington station (now no more, either, I believe). I remember the stops on the way: Orton Waterville, Castor, and Water Newton, where the line divided, the Nassington section going on to King's Cliffe and Market Harborough, the other to Elton and Oundle, and presumably Northampton. I suppose all this fell to the axes of Beeching and other vandals. There was a siding at Nassington, where goods wagons were shunted by a cart-horse. On arrival we would leave our luggage to be brought on by the milk float, while we took the footpath across the fields. Or sometimes the luggage would be sent in advance all the way from home, by train of course. And sometimes grandfather would use the railways in the other direction, to send us a box of local produce apples, sausages, pork pies all very welcome in the days of the depression.
Eventually father bought a second-hand Clyno touring car, with folding roof and mica windows. Much to mother's dismay, because he was a far from competent driver, never having had lessons. There was a famous occasion when the car stalled going up the hill in Stamford (the A1 went through the town in those days), and a lot of heat and undeleted expletives were generated before it could be got moving again. On another occasion father drove too fast over a hump bridge on the road to, I think, Fotheringhay, and Beryl and I in the back seat hit the roof, fortunately soft. Father said he got a splendid view of our startled faces in the rear-view mirror.
During later annual visits we would stay, not in Nassington, but in Yarwell. At first with a branch of the Lock family in a house by the cross-roads where the Old Sulehay road joined the Wansford road. Then we stayed with yet more Locks at Yarwell mill-house, where there were even more opportunities for messing around on the river, plus being allowed to explore the locks and weirs."
The Prebendal Manor House
An illustrated description of the Prebendal Manor House at Nassington.