Have you ever heard of the lost medieval hamlet of Elyston?
Anne Brown spent over 30 years horse riding and walking dogs across fields near Sydling St Nicholas.
She stumbled upon Elyston through mentions of a ‘Deserted Medieval Settlement’ on maps.
“It’s not on a public right of way, so I started trying to find out what I could,” Anne says.
A group of villagers founded Sydling History Society and took up the challenge of uncovering more.
Sydling had once belonged to Milton Abbey, granted to the monastery in 934. It stayed in the abbey’s hands until the dissolution of the monasteries, when Henry VIII passed it to Winchester College, which held it until roughly 2008.
Crucially, the college kept its records through the centuries.
“They’re 700-year-old documents. Tattered, faded, handwritten in medieval script – in Latin – and
abbreviated. It took a bit of deciphering, but it turned out that the monks had a list of everybody who lived in the medieval village of Elyston.
“So that was incredible. To actually find out the people who lived there and follow them through several hundred years was just stunning.”
Who lived in Elyston?
One name has stayed with Anne. A 1527 rental, records ‘Johanna Kyrchell, widow, holds a toft containing a cottage with curtilage.’
“Elyston wasn’t a group of hovels. Johanna had 20 acres west of the river. She was a reasonably well-to-do peasant with enough to grow crops for her family and have sheep and sell the wool or make clothes.
“She must have had a cart, and she must have been able to bring her hay back.
“And in the curtilage of her cottage, she must have had some outbuildings and a pile of wood and probably some chickens.
“She may have kept some pigs, and you start to actually picture her life and wonder how old she was and what other family she had around.”
Anne says Milton Abbas Local History Group have been ‘immensely helpful’ in assisting with the project.
“At Winchester College, you go up a spiral staircase into an old muniments room that’s got a chest from 1396 holding documents.
“And there’s shelves and shelves of old ledgers of, records that are several hundreds of years old.
“The Elyston records are manorial court rolls, so they’re pages of parchments attached together in a roll.”
“It’s a lovely way to spend a day.”
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