… this ended up in the garden of 11 Wilcot. It is a flint spearhead that seems to have originated from eastern England about 4,000BC. People from eastern and northern England (and from continental Europe) were coming to south Wiltshire at that time, and presumably one of them brought it here.

This website explains the entry for Wilcot.

On the dissolution of the monasteries, the King granted Wilcot Manor to William Allen, who sold it to John Barwick in 1554.

John Barwick’s daughter Ann married Sir Thomas Wroughton, and their descendants, the Wroughtons, owned the Manor thereafter until 1919.

There were three different marriages between Montagus and Wroughtons in the mid 18th century.

The last of the three, that between Charlotte Wroughton and her cousin Admiral Sir George Montagu, resulted in their descendants owning Wilcot. That was because Charlotte’s only brother James died at the age of 16 without heirs:

Three Montagu Wroughton marriages

Admiral Sir George Montagu (1750-1829) was the third Montagu in the mid-18th century to marry a Wroughton: in his case, Charlotte Wroughton, co-heir to the owner of Wilcot. When the male heir, James, died aged 16, Charlotte came into the estate with her sister Susannah. Her husband, the Admiral, planned and built the new Stowell Lodge by around 1814.

The map below is from a survey of the Wilcot estate made in 1803. It already shows the canal (not yet completed in 1803), and has been annotated in pencil with a plan for the new Stowell Lodge.

Shown here by kind permission of Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre

From the sale prospectus of 1916

There was a school in Wilcot at least by 1783. But in 1841, after the new cottages had been built round the Green, George Wroughton gave the village a new school.

The agricultural unrest of the 1830s had stoked fears that the unrest might become revolutionary, a wider awareness of social deprivation, fears for Britain’s industrial competitiveness, and a stronger sense among the landed class that social improvement was necessary. Whereas the 1841 census recorded the occupations of heads of households only, the 1851 census showed lots of underage children in work. All these factors encouraged measures to improve education.   The Elementary Education Act of 1870 set the framework for schooling 5-13 year-olds.

Attendance in 1851 was said to be 159.

Here’s the school in about 1900. Note the school bell (which we still have):

The Golden Swan replaced the White Swan which for the last hundred years had been a few hundred yards further west.

Across Britain, summers were poor from 1875 to 1879. Harvests suffered. Animal diseases were unusually severe. At the same time the expansion of railways across the United States, the advent of trans-atlantic steamships, and the mechanisation of American agriculture flooded Britain with grain. British grain prices, agricultural employment, and rents all collapsed; the area under cultivation shrank dramatically. Britain became heavily urbanised, and the workshop of the world. The big landowners became poorer, and lost their dominance as local landlord, employer and bigwig.

Wilcot was shaped by these forces. Its population shrank. Dairy farming replaced arable. New jobs were beginning to replace agricultural labour (but slowly). Young men left for jobs elsewhere. Wilcot was ceasing to be a place where nearly everyone who lived there had been born there.

And the Montagus found their rents shrinking. It was the beginning of the process that saw them selling almost all their properties in Wilcot between 1900 and 1919. Eventually people in Wilcot would come more often to own their own houses, rather than renting them from the Montagus.

The Maidments arrived in Wilcot from Somerset in 1887. They took over Manor Farm from the previous tenants, the Redmans. The Redmans appear to have failed.

There had been a run of poor harvests; and by the 1870s better-quality wheat was being transported from the American prairies on the new US railways and then shipped in huge quantities on the new steam ships plying the Atlantic. Farming was in crisis across Britain, and about a quarter of the grain-growing area disappeared.

The Maidments had been dairy farmers in Somerset, and by the 1880s, the new railways from the Pewsey Vale to London enabled dairy farmers to get fresh milk to the London market every day. Before that, cows had had to be kept in the city, often underground, with their feed transported to them on slow wagons; but the fast railways meant the cows could live in the countryside, and their milk be transported fresh to the city. This photo shows empty milk churns returned from London to Woodborough station in about 1890:

The War Memorial at the north end of the Green was erected and inaugurated in 1923 (probably).

The Hut & Green Committee was inaugurated in May 1924 following the purchase of the Green from the owner of Stowell Park.

The houses that are now called 9-12 Alton Road were built in the 1920s, and called ‘1-4 Council Cottages’. Nos. 1-8 were built in the early 1950s and Canal Close in the early 1960s.

Electricity arrived in 1937.

Here is a view of Back Lane before electricity poles:

and here it is again after electricity arrived:

Here is a magazine from September 1937:

1937 North Wilts Church Magazine 010937 (Wiltshire Museum, Devizes)

The old (1842) vicarage was demolished in the 1960s, and replaced by the current building. Its stables were converted thereafter into private houses.

When the school closed, the village agreed to convert the classrooms into a village hall. At the meeting there was one passionate opponent of the decision, Jack Hilton. It is easy to imagine, given his deeply-held convictions about education for all, that his opposition was fundamentally to the closure of the school rather than the establishment of a new hall.

Jack Hilton

The village hall has been in the building ever since. Another wonderfully idiosyncratic villager, Winifred Felce, gave it a handsome bequest in her will in the 1990s.

More recently, the Heritage Lottery Fund has supported very generous local donors to restore the hall’s ceiling and fabric, and research and compile village history. This website is one result.

The hall is a great place to hire, or to visit to enjoy the community’s history: here’s a link to a description of the hall and how to book it.