I have been delving into the History of Appleby Magna
for about 30 years and these articles are my attempt to create a picture
of the village’s past from the many fragmented pieces of information
available. No-one to my
knowledge has written a continuous ‘History’ of the village; indeed
such a thing is impossible. Even
John Nichols’ account published in 1811, along with the rest of
Leicestershire, is a collection of snippets: quotations from various
surviving sources, Latin documents, descriptions of buildings, anecdotes
and so on. Much concerns
land-owners and the Church, but this is not exclusively the case: for
example one Latin document, dated only thirty years after the Domesday
Survey, provides the names of the workers on Burton Abbey’s land at
Appleby early in the 12th century.
The survival or not of past records is a matter of
chance, perhaps the result of one person’s foresight and another’s
ignorance or neglect. One
of my university lecturers likened the historical process to being in a
vast medieval church on a stormy night.
The pitch black is broken by only occasional narrow shafts of
moonlight, penetrating the building from high clerestory windows and
briefly illuminating perhaps the base of a pillar, a carved screen or the
pulpit. Can we construct in
our imagination what the interior as a whole looks like?
This is what the local historian faces: dislocated
pieces of information from which he or she attempts to create as complete
a picture as possible. So my
approach has been eclectic: I have collected all sorts of pieces of
information on Appleby’s past to try to understand how the village has
developed over the centuries. Perhaps
surprisingly this information is often as much about geography and
topography as it is about ‘history’.
The lie of the land and its resources are the starting point for
understanding a settlement. Place names, field names and archaeology play their part too.
How the original settlement subsequently developed
depends upon economic and political, even military, factors. We do not live in isolation even on the Leicestershire
borders. External events,
such as invasions, civil war or epidemics, even the climate, must all have
had their impact upon the life of the village, although we cannot always
find a great amount of evidence for them.
In a converse way the discovery of particular facts
about a relatively small settlement can shed some light on the larger
world around. One example
that I have found is that Lady Godiva’s possession of land at Appleby
before 1066 points to a larger Saxon estate from which the parish appears
to have been carved. Another
example is that the ownership by Burton Abbey of a second estate at
Appleby shows that hereabouts the county boundary with Derbyshire was
established during the narrow time period after the Abbey’s acquisition
in 1004 and before the Domesday survey of 1086.
Both of these deductions contribute to knowledge of the early
development of the counties.
These articles arose at the invitation of the Appleby
Magna Web Site. Although I
have written small articles about the village before, in the Appleby
Parish Magazine and the Hinckley Historian, these web articles are
completely new and have appeared on the site at two-monthly intervals
since May 2000. I am grateful to the organisers of the web site, especially
the Site Manager Marilyn Dunkelman, for producing a public outlet for my
work and allowing me a free hand.
My approach has been to try to follow a chronological
sequence, although as parallel strands of the story develop this is not
always strictly possible. Each
article, or pair of articles, focuses on a particular topic or period in
detail and I have researched each topic and thought out my deductions as I
have gone along. Some of my
conclusions are ‘educated guesses’ at what lies behind the surviving
evidence, so inevitably there will be need for some revision at a later
stage - although I hope not too much.
I hope that the reader will be able to share with me some of the
excitement of gaining new insights into the village’s history.
Richard Dunmore, December 2001
