II
CHURCH HISTORY
THE village, whose ancient and ecclesiastical name, is Shilling Okeford,1 stands on the south bank of the River Stour, five miles north-west from Blandford, and four miles south-east from Sturminster Newton. It is in the hundred of Cranborne, the deanery of Whitechurch (Milton portion) and the union of Sturminster Newton It is the second in area but the smallest in population of the three Okefords—Childe Okeford, Okeford Fitzpaine, and Shilling Okeford. In the time of Edward the Confessor it is said to have been a Manor of Harold, Earl Godwin, and at the Norman Conquest it was conferred upon the Norman family of Schelin, who are recorded as its Manor Lords in Doomsday. From them it took its name of Schelin (or Shilling) Okeford. The name has nothing to do with a shilling or a stone: it is simply the ' ton' or town of Schelin. This did not prevent the village wiseacres from fabricating tradition to account for the names of the three Okefords. A child, they said, was one day found abandoned on Hayward bridge, and the elders of the Okefords met to discuss its future. They resolved that one village should contribute one shilling, the second 5 pence and, the third should maintain the child. The villages thus became to be named Shilling Okeford, Fifepenny (Fitzpaine) Okeford, and Childe Okeford.
1 The name of the village been altered through the centuries ; its ecclesiastical name still remains, and for many years it was written as Shillingston, which would appear to be more correct, but as the final "e " is now the universal spelling, we have adhered to that throughout the book.
When Burinus, the Apostle and first bishop of the West Saxons, landed in 635, according to Bede he found the men of Dorset " most pagan " (paganissimos)." It was not until the military subjugation of the county by the Saxons that a bishop's stool was established at Sherborne in 705, and the real evangelisation of the people began. The first bishop was Aldhelm, a kinsman of King Ina of Wessex. Aldhelm had an estate near Corfe, where he built a church two miles from the sea. This church was still standing in the twelfth century and was venerated for the miracles it wrought, for though the roof had fallen in, the shepherds, knowing that no ram ever fell within its walls, sheltered in it from tempestuous weather. If Dorset entered late into the Church she made up for lost time. Religious houses sprang up at Wareham, Sherborne, Wimborne, Shaftesbury Milton, Cerne, and Abbotsbury, all within two hundred years and so complete was the conversion that it is to their preoccupation with religion that the men of Dorset are supposed to have been so ineffective in their resistance to the Danes. These pirates laid waste the abbeys as well as the homesteads. The Doomsday Survey of 1086 allowed that one-third of the county was the property of the Church. All through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries parish churches were being built, and it was no doubt that at this period the local masons erected the church at Shillingstone. In the list of Dorset parish churches, made for Pope Nicholas IV. About 1290, are recorded the names of 171. Many of these were controlled by monastic bodies, with curates in charge, and Shillingstone, as will presently be explained, was half under a monastery and half under lay patronage. In the fourteenth century many of the parish churches had fallen into decay. Efforts were being made to remedy this abuse when the Black Death (1348) swept the country, depriving the villages of parson, people, and even cattle. Church life then touched its lowest level. Many churches were without divine offices. Men almost illiterate, whose wives had died of the Plague, came crowding into orders. In 1389 Lollardry, the medieval form of dissent, made a brief appearance in this part of Dorset.
In June, 1389, one William Ramsbury confessed to having affirmed heretical opinions concerning the sacraments in Blandford, Sturminster Newton, and other places, and was sentenced to make a public recantation of his errors in Salisbury Cathedral. Dorset seems to have acquiesced in the suppression of the monasteries, but in spite of Protestant sympathies in Dorchester and Poole, attachment to the old religion was very general, especially among the women. As late as 1591 we find a Seymer of Hanford testifying that the Grand Jury had been secretly approached not to present recusants to be tried at Quarter Sessions, and in 1594 John Slade, Gentleman, of Manston, was fined £100 for non-attendance at church for five months. In fact, in spite of heavier penalties, recusancy increased, and many submitted to the forfeiture of their estates rather than abandon their religion. But though the great families kept their faith despite cruel persecution by the law and by treacherous servants, in 1634 Laud was able to complain that there were Puritans in nearly every village in Dorset.
In these lamentable disputes, both parties lifted bloodstained hands to Heaven, invoking blessings on their cruelties But faction and intolerance seems to have passed Shillingstone by. While the recusants, the Non-Jurors, the Quakers, and the Nonconformists were alternately persecuted and triumphant in the throbbing life of Poole and Dorchester, Shillingstone did not concern itself with the questions of the day, and placidly took the colour of its religious views from those of the Rector for the time being. No priests were hunted down and hanged, no Quakers were committed to gaol for refusing to uncover before the Justices, or put outside the village on the pretence that they were vagabonds, or " set in the stockes." John Wesley passed within three miles of the village on his journey to the West; his forbears lived at Shaftesbury, nine miles away. Yet Shillingstone is rarely mentioned in the records of ecclesiastical strife, nor, with the solitary exception of the Royalist rising of the Clubmen, in the traditions of political events. In his History of Dorset Hutchins states that the " Ockfords " or "Okefords " take their name from the ford across the stream known in old times as the " Oak Ford," near the place where Hayward Bridge spans the river. Certainly, fine specimens of oak abound in the three parishes; one such tree formerly stood close to the old ford on the right bank of the little " Cuckoo," within a few yards of where that stream joins the Stour. The late Mr. William Cox, of Lamb House, used to relate that he remembered as a boy, in the exceptionally severe winter of 1812, seeing the ice piled up against this oak, which up to recent times plainly showed the scars and furrows made in its bark by the grinding of the ice in that ever-memorable winter. Perhaps the acorn from which this oak sprang may have dropped from one of the original oaks which gave its name to the ancient ford. There seems no doubt that in far-away times Shillingstone, which is in Cranborne Hundred, was only separated from Cranborne Chase by the width of the river.
In a book entitled The Hundred of Chalke by Charles Bowles (published in 1830), there is an interesting account of an action at law tried in 1816 at Salisbury Assizes, in which the then Lord Rivers, as owner of Cranborne Chase, sought to revive the old forest laws and accordingly sued Thomas King, the tenant of Norrington Farm in Wiltshire, for trespass in pursuit of deer. Lord Rivers lost his case, but incidentally it was shown by ancient records that at one time the south-western boundary of the Chase followed the course of the Stour, extending from Sturminster to Wimborne and beyond practically to the New Forest, and so it included a very lame portion of the BIackmoor Vale. Thus Child Okeford was originally in Cranborne Chase, but Shilling Okeford, alias Shillingstone, was outside it. As regards the stream now known as the " Cuckoo," in Boswel's Civil Division of the County of Dorset (published in 1833) there is a list of all the stone bridges in the county, and under Shilling Okeford two bridges are mentioned Viz : Hayward Bridge and Crickwell or Cuckwell Bridge. Probably "Cuckwell" has in course of time been corrupted into " Cuckoo." Hutchins in his account of the parish mentions six acres of land called " Woolands " or " Wool-lands " as being held in the time of Queen Elizabeth by " Robert Ryves of Brokesby."
Extent
The extent of the manor of Shillingstone as given in Domesday Book is worked out by Eyton to 7,533 acres, but the present parish includes only 2,223 acres. Eyton suggests the explanation that the plough land, the meadow land and a small portion of the pasture land constituted the Capital, or Horne Manor, which is now represented by the parish of Shillingstone. The bulk of the pasture land and all the wood land (say 5,310 acres) were subsidiary properties in other parishes and, it may be, in other hundreds.
Population
The population in Domesday (1086) was returned as 46, which represents adult males, the total population being perhaps about 230. In 1539 and 1543 there are muster rolls for the parish which are supposed to include all the males between 16 and 20 years of age, but there may be some mistake about this and it is possible that the returns are .not fully comprehensive. In 1539 the number given was 53 and in 1543 it was 42, which may represent populations of something like 265 or 210 respectively. In 1642 the " Protestation Return," which was supposed to be signed by all males over 18. years of age gives 101 names. This may mean a population of 500. The variations are as follows:-
In 1801 380 - 76 families inhabiting 74 houses
1810 385
1821 430- 214 males, 216 females; 86 families inhabiting 79 houses
1831 473
1841 512
1851 503
1861 509
1871 534-122 families inhabiting 122 houses
1881 566
1891 546-inhabiting 127 houses
1901 532 families inhabiting 121 houses
1911 565-136 families
1 Feet of Fines, Michaelmas, 7 & 8 Elizabeth