Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 306

The isolated hamlet of Whaddon is reached from the outskirts of Trowbridge in west Wiltshire by a narrow lane which at first inclines gently upwards through lush grazing pasture. After a mile or so, it descends to cross the Kennet and Avon Canal, then rises to a low ridge that gives an unexpectedly wide view of the River Avon, flowing south west toward Bristol, and of its tributary Semington Brook. Where the waters join, two farms and a scattering of houses comprise the hamlet. Passing a small church and graveyard, the lane descends to the Avon, turns briefly right, then dissolves into a web of footpaths and bridle tracks. A farm stands on the site of a long-vanished manor house. Beyond the brook, a now-dismantled railway once linked Devizes to Westbury and Chippenham.

From this quiet and unassuming location, Pam Slocombe, long-time organizer of the Wiltshire Buildings Record and member of the Medieval Settlement Research Group, has conjured a remarkable 600-page history of an ancient parish and its manorial owners, the Long family, whose association with Whaddon endured from about 1500 to 1996. They were first drawn to Whaddon from the neighbouring village of Semington to exploit its fulling mill, during the expansionary period of the white broadcloth trade that made Tudor west Wiltshire a driver of the national economy and enriched three generations of Longs. In the seventeenth century, now evolved into gentry, the family produced a notable wife, mother, and correspondent, Rebecca Long/Sherfield, and her son, the politician Walter Long. His story – leading from reckless resistance to Charles I and imprisonment in the Tower to a cavalry charge at Edgehill and promotion to parliamentary colonel, then disillusionment with the army, exile in France and knighthood (‘for loyalty’) by Charles II – forms the narrative heart of this volume, but is by no means its most signal achievement.

Slocombe’s work is unstintingly grounded in archival research, and the clarity of this focus has determined the division of the book into three parts of unequal length. The shorter first part takes the settlement of Whaddon from prehistory to the arrival of the Longs. A succinct opening chapter notes a few archaeological finds and Whaddon’s location on the boundary of Mercia and Wessex; then we are quickly into Domesday and the shape and distribution of the medieval village, identified with the help of laser imagery and aerial photography. Whaddon is set in its wider context between the great Selwood forest (which extended west to the Somerset border and as far south as the Dorset downs) and the forests of Melksham and Chippenham. In the fourteenth century, Whaddon had just 13 households, a manor house, fulling mill, and parish church, and has never expanded much beyond that scale.

The second and largest part, the history of the Longs, provides lucid summaries of most of the many surviving documents relating to the family up to the late seventeenth century, from which Slocombe extracts their sometimes uncertain pedigree. A troublesome issue for west Wiltshire genealogists has been to connect the Whaddon Longs to the senior branches of this extensive family, seated at South Wraxall and at Draycot, and this problem is thoroughly addressed. Some unavoidably dry material is enlivened by the will of the wealthy clothier, Thomas Long of Trowbridge (d.1563), who acquired as many as nine manors during the mid-Tudor upheavals. The inventory of his elder brother and heir, Henry Long of Whaddon (d.1558), reveals the scale of the latter’s activity both as a clothier and as a breeder and grazier, with over a hundred cattle and some thousand sheep dispersed among his various properties, including as many as 16 plough oxen in and near Whaddon itself.

In 1616, Henry Long’s daughter-in-law Rebecca, newly widowed, married Henry Sherfield, also widowed, a lawyer from Salisbury who was then working at the Court of Wards in London, with chambers at Lincoln’s Inn. Often apart, they wrote to each other frequently, and their surviving correspondence takes Slocombe’s narrative way beyond the confines of Whaddon and west Wiltshire. Slocombe transcribes numerous letters revealing Rebecca’s close attention to the management of her family as they grew into adulthood, especially those relating to marriage negotiations. The protocol of courtship amongst the gentry is clearly evidenced in these letters, along with the mundane issues of running estates at a distance. From this correspondence, Slocombe moves seamlessly into the career of Rebecca’s politician son Walter, sourced partly from his own letters to Sherfield but also from state papers and other major collections.

The male line of the Longs died out early in the eighteenth century and the last two centuries of absentee lordship are quickly dispatched before Slocombe turns to the third part of her history. Perhaps the most interesting part for village historians, this deals comprehensively with the buildings of Whaddon and their evolution over time, starting with the church, the long-lost manor house and the surviving stone mill-house. Slocombe’s expertise as an architectural historian is impressively deployed in her detailed account of the manor house as it was enlarged and elaborated from c.1580 to 1700, with its contents, outbuildings and gardens, before its decline under tenancy and destruction by fire in 1836. The final 180 pages, almost a third of the book, are devoted to the open and enclosed fields, and to the manorial demesne, copyholds and leaseholds, not just of Whaddon itself, but of its outlying settlements of Paxcroft and Hilperton Marsh, and to tracing the families identified with them since the sixteenth century.

This is a work of astonishing dedication, which has taken Slocombe the best part of a lifetime to compile. There can be very few if any other village histories of such depth and detail. Since the book has been illustrated with a large number of well-chosen maps and illustrations, and laid out elegantly in comfortably readable type by the specialist Wiltshire publisher, Hobnob Press, it seems almost churlish to point out its few shortcomings. Academic readers may regret the limited reference to the regional historiography, and the minimalist endnotes, which consist mainly of document numbers. Many of the maps and the pedigrees of the Long family would have benefited from enlargement. Most of all one might wish for a more substantial index, to help the reader navigate the wealth of rural themes which run through this extraordinary history. But Whaddon and the Longs will be an essential work of reference for all future studies of west Wiltshire.