'The Place called Dyrham'

This is a very full and comprehensive history of a south Gloucestershire parish, which includes the well-known National Trust property Dyrham Park, by actor and medieval scholar Nail Stacy, who has lived there for many years. It traces the history of the two villages, Dyrham and Hinton, that make up the place from the era of the Iron Age fort on Hinton Hill to modern times, examining the origin of the parish and manor, the layout of its settlement, the lives of those who worked or leased its land, and provided the crafts, trade, public houses, and local government that enabled it to function. Its society is studied as it developed from one of peasant cultivators into one of a few farmers and many landless farmhands, while the manorial authorities struggled to house a rising population, and the parochial officers sought to alleviate poverty. Religion in the parish is examined through the careers of rectors from the late 12th century onwards, describing the stress they endured during the Tudor Reformation, their contribution to the education of their congregation in the 17th and 18th centuries, and their reaction to the growth of Nonconformity in Hinton in the 19th. The book follows the descendants of the builder of Dyrham's baroque mansion as they struggled to preserve his legacy, falling into debt as their income failed to sustain the lifestyle he bequeathed - a problem exacerbated by an embezzling bailiff, by the elopement of an heiress with a penniless adventurer, and by the plunder of the estate by the family of a long-lived widow who had lapsed into senility, and finally by crippling taxation.It has been produced alongside and to inform the Victoria County History volume for the area currently in preparation