"OLD STOKIE'S WEBSITE"

a condensed history of brassington.

In the county of Derbyshire in England, the remote village of Brassington clings to the steep western slopes of a north-south valley.  This bleak and inhospitable area, predominantly limestone and unsuitable for high volume agricultural output, has supported small community groups for thousands of years, although during its early times it would not have been known to the inhabitants as Brassington. (That would come later).  Excavations of burial mounds in outlying districts have revealed the remains of Beaker Folk from the Old Stone Age, (circa 2000 B.C.).  Also, at nearby Minninglow, their predecessors of the Neolithic age left remains of a settlement.

Life in Ancient Britain evolved slowly until the arrival of the Roman legions in the first century AD. Caught up in political and social upheaval, the Ancient Britons were quickly enveloped in an advanced civilisation whose sophistication was so alien to everything that had hitherto been.  The once free Britons were turned into the slaves of the Roman conquerors and used to extract veins of lead ore that lay near the surface.  A villa was built at nearby Carsington - not the finest in Britain by no means, but one that must have amazed the locals.  While they knew only cave homes or huts, their masters lived in a stone house with several rooms, roofed with sandstone slates.  It was a rectangular building with a large central hall with two rooms to the north of it and three at the south.  One room of the villa had underfloor heating and there were mosaic tiled floors, their patterns formed from a combination of orange chert tiles and yellowish gritstone ones, both from local quarries.  Added later to the south-eastern corner of the building was a truly Roman extravagance, a bath house, with underfloor heating and a terracotta tiled roof.  It had glazed windows, a feature which, like slate or tiled roofs, or central heating, or regular bathing, or solid roads, was to disappear for over a thousand years when the Romans left. The large central living room had two fireplaces.  The people of the villa used pottery dishes, bowls, jars and beakers from potteries in Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Dorset and across the Channel in Gaul.  This was the house of a rich man by Roman standards, but it clearly belonged to a family of standing, with a comfortable living that persisted for well over two hundred years.

The three centuries of the Roman period were a time of peace for the people of the area.  However, their lives depended entirely on events in Rome. Their rulers were always temporary ones; in spite the army's policy of settling old soldiers among the British when their service was over.  The moment came, about 420 ad., when the legions finally went, recalled to defend the heart of the empire, leaving the British to govern themselves.

Left alone, however, the people were no match for the next wave of invaders, the bands of farmer warriors who had set out from northern Germany in search of new land to settle on.  These were the Anglo Saxons from Schleswig Holstein.  They had long known all about Britain, its miles of woodland, ploughland and pasture, for many years. The Roman army had recruited their young men, valuing them for their love of fighting, and many of these Germanic soldiers had served in Britain. The departure of the legions was the signal for migration.

The name Brassington is Anglo Saxon and the village lies in what would have been, Mercia, one of the seven Kingdoms created in the 6th century A.D. by these Northern marauders after their conquest of Britain.

Although these tenacious pioneers were not the first to settle there, the location is typical of their desire to create small arable communities as they had in their North European homeland.  Perhaps an even greater incentive to settlement was the availability of lead in seams that were easily accessible.  History tells us that the well being of the village and its inhabitants was to depend on the production of this metal for the twelve hundred years following the arrival of the Anglo Saxons.

The first of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants to settle in the area was a group led by a chieftain who was probably called Brand.  Brand's group found springs running off the limestone strata into the lower ground of the valley, forming a stream for about a mile.  As was their way, the place was surveyed and a collective decision made to settle the area. With their experience and tools, they cleared a circular site at the northern end of the valley, sheltered by the steep and rocky slopes on its western side.  Near to the long rectangular communal huts they had erected, they established pastures and meadows for the animals they had brought with them.  With their ox-teams and heavy ploughs they cultivated the land.

The Anglians were pagans, worshipping the old German gods whose names we still use for our days of the week - Woden's day, Thor's day and Freya's day.  They continued to use the ancient burial sites that they found near their new village. Around the year 600, one of their leaders was interred at the two thousand year old grave at Galleylow.  This chieftain wore an elaborate necklace which consisted of a twisted spiral of gold wire joining thirteen gold pendants, eleven of them set with garnets.  He fastened his cloak with an ivory pin, and his grave contained beads and pottery fragments.  He was a warrior, buried with two of his spears, and his people were expecting him to live after his death when they provided him with weapons and pots.

Although Brand's people traded with their neighbours and more distant Anglo-Saxon settlements, they were forced to work out their own survival in a harsh landscape and a sometimes harsh climate.  The carpenters built wooden houses with thatched roofs and a door in each of the long sides.  The skills which had been used to build the boats which had carried them over the North Sea, were now used to waterproof the houses and to decorate the eaves and lintels with skilful carving.  The houses had fireplaces for cooking and warmth, and simple furniture - settles and chairs and tables.  They lived on oats, bread and vegetables, meat from wild animals such as deer and boar, and from pigs and cattle.  Grain, which included wheat and barley, was stored in large earthenware pots.

As they cleared the land to the south of the village, and brought it under cultivation, the people distributed it amongst themselves in strips, taking care that good and poorer land was evenly shared.  As the years passed and their numbers grew, the people enlarged the great fields in which the strips were grouped.  As succeeding areas came under the plough, they were shared out in the traditional way - every man had his share of strips.  Harvesting them was organised on a communal basis and this system ensured something for every family in the village.  However, open fields and intermingled narrow strips made for quarrels and required elaborate rules to regulate the farming.  Disputes over boundaries, rights of way over neighbour’s strips, over straying cattle, were settled at meetings of the whole village.  To avoid violent quarrels endangering the village itself, the meetings were held near the Bradbourne border, where the road crossed a hill.  The fields there are still called Spellow - "the hill where speeches are made".

Brands people, or their descendants, eventually controlled an area of about four thousand acres.

Near the end of the sixth century, the kingdom of Mercia was formed.  The second and great king of Mercia, Penda, who was killed in battle in 655, when he was eighty years old, was a pagan.  His son, however, married a Christian princess from Northumbria, and with her came missionaries and the conversion of his kingdom.  The nobleman buried at Galleylow was one of the last of the pagans.  His successors of the late seventh century, and their people, were Christians.

Two centuries later, another invasion was to again alter the lives of the villagers of Brassington.  This time it was the turn of the Scandinavian marauders - the Vikings - to sweep across the English pastures.  The English king, Alfred The Great, having suffered a number of humiliating defeats at the hands of the Vikings, regathered his forces and defeated the invaders. However, in 878, he made a division of the country with them.  Brassington was in the Viking part of the country, the Danelaw, and the old Roman town of Deventio became the Danish centre Deoraby. Wirksworth, four miles from Brassington, became the centre of the Danelaw administrative unit called a wapentake.  For almost two centuries, the Scandinavians remained strong in England and there was for a short time a Danish dynasty on the throne. This was Canute, king from 1016 to 1035, and his sons Harold and Hardicanute.

In 1066, William the Norman conquered the country, but by then, life for the people of Brassington had altered greatly.  Brand's people, although communal, were free, but under the Danes they became the servants of the lord of the Manor. The population in 1065, as described in the Doomsday Book, included no "sokemen", (freemen), and were under the stewardship of the Danish overlord, Siward.

When William the Norman conquered the country he found a state with a highly organised local government system and a subject people tied to the land they farmed.  He tightened up the system which then ensured maximum profit for the nobility and a reliable supply of men and arms for his armies. From 1066, the village became one of the many manors of Norman Henry de Ferrers.

The inhabitants of Brassington were now villeins - citizens owned by the lord of the manor. They could be given away, traded, sold; in fact they were simply slaves.  The villein paid "fines" (taxes) when he took wood from the wasteland; he paid fines if his son was sent to school or if his daughter was married.  He paid a portion of the price of any beasts that he sold and he was forced to take eggs to the manor house if he kept hens.  He was constantly reminded of his servile status, and he could not leave the manor in which he was born. This was the system, sharpened and strengthened by the Normans, and some variation of it was in operation in Brassington.

And so the social life in mediaeval Brassington went on with little change until it suddenly accelerated in the mid fourteenth century by the arrival in England of the epidemic of bubonic plague called the Black Death.  It reached this country in 1348, spread by infected fleas carried by rats in the ships trading across the English Channel.  By 1380 the death rate was so high that the population is estimated to have fallen by between a third and a half.  At Brassington there are no court rolls between 1347 and 1361, perhaps an indication that the effects of the plague were severe.

One momentous consequence for the surviving villagers was that the shortage of labourers working the manor lands forced a loosening of the system.  Villeins were set free, their wages raised, and tenancies made as attractive to the villagers as the lord could afford.  There can be no doubt that the effects of the plague were deeply felt in Brassington.  A document of 1410 suggests that whole families may have died.  It lists twelve men, eleven of whom have family names which were unknown in the village before the arrival of the plague.

The evolution of the village continued, becoming more and more reliant on the product that would ensure its survival throughout the following centuries - lead ore.  This period of evolution was not to feel the social unrest brought about by conquering armies, instead, cultural modernisation proceeded at a leisurely pace, largely unaffected by international conflicts.