Exploring the early history of Barton

The early history of Barton-on-Sea

The history of Barton-on-Sea is a long and fascinating one. Today Barton is thought of as a lovely area to live beside the sea. It was once the home to some of our earliest inhabitants, and was for many years used for agricultural purposes. It was also a site of lawlessness in the 18th and 19th centuries. A study of the available records gives clues as to who lived and worked in the area and what happened there.

Fossils

The earliest traces of life to be found in the Barton area of the southern end of the Hampshire basin are in the form of fossils that can be seen in the cliffs and in the clay under them. These fossils are mainly found in the form of sea shells, but it is also possible to find other items such as sharks teeth, coral, and fragments of turtle shell, echinoderms and fossilised fragments of wood. The fossils in Barton are invariably quite small. They have been in the cliffs for about 40 million years. This period of time is known as the Eocene period. Further west along the coast, the fossils are from an older time known as the Jurassic period which is 190 million years old.

The Barton fossil bearing area stretches from Taddiford Gap in the east to Highcliffe in the west and is known as the Barton Beds. They were first brought to prominence by Gustavus Brander, an English merchant who was also a naturalist. He came from a Swedish family but was born in London in 1720 and at the height of his career became a director of the Bank of England. Brander moved to Christchurch and had a large country house built next door to the Priory. He studied the fossils found along the coastline to the east of Christchurch and amassed an impressive collection from the Barton Beds which he presented to the British Museum in London.

Flints

Flint hand tools have been found in the Barton area especially along the beach. What is uncertain is whether they were found at the site of their manufacture and use or if they were moved to the area by the sea and the tide.

The late, great local historian Arthur Lloyd wrote in Focus Magazine in 1963 that Sir John Evans had a collection of these stone tools in the 1800s and that Barton has produced the most specimens in the region. Some fine examples can be seen in the Red House Museum and in the New Forest Heritage Centre.

Local resident Stephen Green has found many knapped flint hand tools while beach combing. Stephen has recorded his specimens with the British Museum and they are entered on the portable antiquities scheme database.

Bronze Age Urns

Writing in the 8th December 1928 edition of this newspaper, the Reverend JC Thompson stated that he had recovered two broken urns containing ashes and bone fragments from a garden in Dilly Lane. A third was later recovered. The Rev Thompson asked the workman who had discovered the urns if he could have the shards and was told that they were only going to throw them away. The reverend took them home and was in the process of assessing the remains when the owner of the property called and claimed them back. Several years later enquiries were made of the householder in Dilly Lane as to what had happened to the fragments. The reply was “they lay about the house so long, I threw them out”.

Arthur Lloyd wrote that the three urns were from the Bronze Age period. He further reported that two other Bronze Age urns had been found beside Barton Court Avenue during its construction in about 1897 and a huge barrel urn was found in the former gravel pit on Barton Common by a council worker, Mr Kitcher. This was placed on display in the museum at the New Milton Council Office in Station Road in the 1930s. It was taken to Lymington for safe keeping during World War Two and was never seen again.

Saxon times

There are numerous places in England called Barton, and these usually translate from the Saxon as ‘outlying barley farm’. The name of our Barton is derived from Beorma’s or Beormund’s farm. Arthur Lloyd points out that there are over 22 different spellings of Barton in the records. A ‘tun’ or ‘tune’ was the Saxon word for farm settlement.

Domesday Book

Barton is mentioned in the Domesday Book written in 1086. This is the earliest record for the area. The entry states that Roger de Montgomery, who was made the Earl of Shrewsbury, held seven virgates of land in Bermintune and a man named Durand farmed them for him. A virgate was the amount of land tillable by two oxen. It is roughly about 30 acres. The Domesday entry records that there was land enough for three plough teams. On the lord’s land there was one plough. Three villeins (a feudal tenant, subject of the Lord) and three bordars (a smallholder ranking below a villein) had two ploughs between them. Two serfs or slaves were also recorded as being at Barton. In 1066 the land was assessed as having a value of 40 shillings but this was reduced when part of the land was taken into the King’s Forest.

The Fernhill Manor estate included parts of western Barton. Through marriage the estate came into the possession of John Fromond. When he passed away in 1420 without issue, he bequeathed his considerable land holdings to Winchester College. Among the papers held in its archive are two deeds, circa 1315 to 1320, which detail the sale by the Le Vyel family of a serf named Roger Sprot along with his family, chattels and his tenement in ‘Bermetone’. The purchaser was Robert Ernis or Ernys who paid two marks of silver. The second deed details the later freeing of Roger Sprot and the granting to him of his land on which his tenement sat.

Other deeds give clues as to the names of some early Barton inhabitants. In about 1300 a cleric named Henry Paterich is listed as leasing two acres of land in west Barton from a William le Hont. Robert de la Gore is recorded as renting three acres. One acre was identified as being ‘beside the land of ‘Midelton’ and two acres lying near ‘Chievton’ which Arthur Lloyd translates as being Chewton.

Another record held by Winchester College records that the Typetot family held land in Barton circa 1350. This family gave its name to the village of Tiptoe, near Ashley and Hordle.

Agriculture

Further evidence of agricultural land use was uncovered in 1956 when archaeologist Mrs Gill Hurst carried out a dig on land that was surrounded by a moat off of Southern Lane. Nearby was Milton Manor Farm and it was hoped to find evidence of a manorial dwelling. What Mrs Hurst found were three different periods of agricultural buildings including one that predated the moat, but no manor house. Her report was published in the ‘Journal of the Archaeological Association in 1967’. It was noted that there was only one other similar moated agricultural site that had been discovered in the UK at that time.

Before Barton Court Road was constructed, Moat Lane and Dilly Lane were connected together and ran into Southern Lane. This enabled workers to get from Becton and the south-eastern part of Barton to Milton village and the church.

Smuggling and other crime

Agriculture was not the only way in which a local resident could make a living. From the mid 1700s through to the 1840s smuggling took place along the coast of southern England and in the Barton area. Was the money made from this criminality simply for profit or was it a means by which impoverished workers could supplement their meagre wages?

The coastline was patrolled by men on horseback called ‘riding officers’. When they spotted potential smuggling vessels in the offing or groups of men gathering to handle the smuggled goods as they came ashore, they would ride off to the nearest customs post and report what they had seen.

In 1780 among the local riding officers was John Bursey who lived with his wife and family in a cottage in Chewton. Late one night two men called on Mr Bursey and informed him that they had found a cache of smuggled goods. They would show him the hide in exchange for a reward. When Mr Bursey stepped outside of his cottage he was set upon and beaten so severely that he later died of his injuries.

In 1822 he Royal Navy preventative service and the coastguard created a base on Hurst Spit near the castle. The following year HM Customs rented land in Barton from Mr John Dent of Barton Cottage. Here they built a coastguard watch station. This has long been lost to coastal erosion but was roughly south of the area where the Cliff House Hotel is now.

On the evening of Friday 3rd June 1825, Lt James Pulling RN and four men from the preventative service intercepted about 60 smugglers at Lobb’s Hole on Naish Beach. A struggle took place in which the Navy sailors were nearly overpowered. They fired their pistols and used their cutlasses in self defence. One smuggler, James Read, was mortally wounded. He was a young agricultural labourer and would have been paid a wage of about nine shillings a week. When he was being treated for his wounds by Dr Goddard, the parish doctor, he stated that he was owed 30 shillings by the smugglers for the previous five nights’ work.

In 1868 two rows of terraced coastguard cottages were built in Barton Lane with the officers accommodation built next door. The latter is now Windy Ridge nursing home, and the coastguard cottages are private family homes.

The Barton Court Estate

The 1841 tithe map and the apportionment list is the first reliable record that tells historians who owned each piece of land and property in the Milton Parish area. When used in conjunction with the 1841 census it helps to build a picture of the people who lived and worked in Barton. In 1841 there were only 28 cottages and houses in all of Barton including the coastguard cottages. In 1841 the entire population of Milton Parish, which covered Barton, Ashley, Bashley and Milton village, was just 1,185.

At this time much of Barton was owned by the Villiers Dent family who lived on the Barton Court Estate. The farm buildings stood to the east of the main house which later became the Barton Court Hotel. The western entrance to the estate was via a lodge house in Barton Lane. In the east, the entrance was via what is now Becton Lane.

On the death of Squire Dent in 1891 the Barton Court Estate was purchased by Sir Robert Affleck, who formed a company to develop the area now named as Barton-on-Sea, and to sell off land for housing.

The first auctions for plots of land took place in 1894. Much was done to advertise the sale and encourage potential buyers to come to Barton Court where the sales were held. The area was described as the ‘English Bay of Naples’ and great emphasis was made of the availability of sailing, hunting and fishing as well as abundant fossils in the local cliffs. The area became a desirable place to live.

• Nick Saunders MA is a local historian and chairman of the Milton Heritage Society. He can be contacted via nick@miltonheritagesociety.co.uk