The History of Mells

THE HILLS (Pre-historic Mells)

The geology around Mells is extremely varied. A map of the underlying bedrock looks like an ice cream counter that has melted in the sun. 

300 million years ago there was immense geological pressure from the south. Waves of older rock were pushed up, sometimes burying younger rock to the north beneath them. This is why (older) limestone at Upper Vobster can be found on top of (younger) coal deposits. This Mendip Upheaval also caused the rift running from lower Vobster, through Mells to the Iron Valley.

Humans re-emerged around Mells after the last ice age ended c.14,000 BC. They were tool makers, picking the flints south of the ice sheet on Salisbury Plain, knapping them in the hilltop flint workshops above Mells then sheltering in the Mendip caves. 

The winters were bitter and, after the melting ice sheets flooded the English Channel, there was no retreat to the warmth of Southern Europe. But the humans weren’t the only ones trapped here - the winter drove animals south west and onto the flint tipped arrows of the local hunters. Remains of wolverine, bison and mammoth were found in Lime Kiln quarry.

Later Neolithic forts were built on Tedbury camp and the hills to the east followed by Roman camps on Newbury. Only then did people start creeping down from the hills and settling what is now Mells. 

What all local inhabitants discovered was the 'unexpected blessings out of the entrails of the earth' as a later observer once noted of their inheritance. The rich Mendip geology led to successive exploration of its flint, lead, woad, coal, sheep, iron and stone. The people here were miners and tool makers, their living was in their hands. 

The riotous geology was also, perhaps, the wellspring of that peculiar earth magic which makes the realm of Glastonbury a country set apart. A place which is simultaneously industrial, beautiful, hidden and homely.   

THE MILLS (Medieval Mells)

Wool was everything in Medieval Britain and Mells was at the heart of this boom. England exported huge amounts to Flanders and by the 14th century 60% of the Crown’s total income came from a tax on wool. The Lord High Chancellor sits on a wool sack in the House of Lords to this day.

Wool gave Mells it's church, many of its most beautiful buildings and, most probably, its name. In early documents the village was known as 'Milnes' from the French root 'meaulnes' in recognition of the 30 wool mills running along the river valley between Vobster and Mells. These were used for washing and carding the raw wool and processing it into cloth.

From 1342 Mells held a regular Monday sheep fair, one of the largest in the county, with several thousand sheep being sold there. It must have had quite a rough, carnival atmosphere. In the year it was started a William Pleytenyn was bound to live peaceably with his wife and 'not exceed the limits of conjugal chastisement by breaking her limbs or hurting her seriously'. The fair ran until the nineteenth century without manners improving much: 'A rough lot of men came on Sunday to put up the booths. Constables kept the peace.' one local noted sniffily, shortly before Prebendry Horner had the fair closed down because it clashed with his Harvest Thanksgiving service. 

Back in the fourteenth century, the Black Death hit hard. In 1349, 43 out of the 70 tenant householders had died. However the village bounced back and huge wealth was created for the Poyntz, Sharland, Cornish and Garland families who moved from wool production to become clothiers outright. Together they helped fund the building of St Andrews church (St Katherine, the patron saint of weavers, has her own chapel inside) whilst the Abbot of Glastonbury built the Tithe Barn, Bilboa house, New Street, Selwood house and part of The Talbot. All on the back of sacks of wool. 

Companion industries also thrived. Harvey the Woadman (‘a well known character’) ground woad in the Old Workhouse by the Post Office to make indigo blue dye while Thomas Blackborne grew toadflax. One can imagine the river Mells inky with effluent while Harvey stood grinning on its banks, his face and hands blue with the dye.

In time the industry declined: overtaxed at home and outcompeted abroad it went the way of all manufacturing. This left Mells wrecked by unemployment in the eighteenth century and the court records show officials worrying about 'loose and idle' persons. Richard White says ‘more men were transported from Mells than from any other village of similar size’. The court was constantly worrying about the state of the prison house, stocks, pillory, whipping post and ducking stool. No one seemed to do much about them apart from the Blind House (lock up) that still stands on Gay Street. 

This Blind House is a last, sombre full stop to the glorious period of medieval stone building that was enabled by the wool trade. More riches would come out of the earth to give the village employment - most notably iron in the nineteenth century and stone in the twentieth - but none left as beautiful a legacy as the humble sheep.

THE ABBOT (Reformation Mells)

'On 15 November 1539, a procession wound its way up Glastonbury Tor, a steep conical hill overlooking the peatlands of Somerset in the south-west of England. The journey over the windy ridges was arduous, for the crowd struggled to drag with them three men tied to sledge-like wooden frames. On the top of the hill stood a newly constructed gallows; near it was a fire, knives and a cauldron.’ (Clare Asquith, Shadowplay)

The three monks about to be hung drawn and quartered included Richard Whiting, Abbot of Glastonbury. The lands he administered had been in the Church's keeping for centuries and were about to be taken by Henry VIII. The church had taken rich tithes from its lands but also given many beautiful buildings and provision for the travelling poor. In refusing to surrender them Whiting had signed his own death warrant. 

 Of the many manors and villages in his domain, Whiting considered Mells his 'favourite'. Perhaps this was why he spent his last night of freedom in Mells before the King's soldiers came to arrest him. He would probably have slept in either the Manor or Bilboa House. Reports of a cowled figure appearing to sleepers in Bilboa suggest that this is where his ghost returns when he revisits his favourite village. 

The Abbot had been de facto lord of the manor. The vacuum was soon filled by one of the rising middle class, Thomas Horner. There is clear evidence that he bought rather than stole the newly confiscated manors of Mells, Lye and Nunney off the king in 1543. This, and the fact that the rhyme was of earlier origin, suggests that 'Little Jack Horner' may have been someone else (nice as it is to have another nursery rhyme village next to Kilmersdon's 'Jack and Jill' hill). 

However, Thomas, a tenant of the Abbot's manor at Haydon, had sat on the jury which sentenced the Abbot to death in 1539. The little Jack Horner rhyme implies more of the hidden truth than the more accurate one:

'Windham and Horner, Berkley and Thynne,

When the abbots went out, they came in.'

Five hundred years later, ironically, the Horner's descendants converted back to Catholicism. Perhaps the Abbot is having the last laugh after all.

THE KING (Civil War Mells)

The English Civil war split the country in a similar way to the referendum of 2016. And along oddly similar geographical lines. On 17th July 1644, at the turning point of the war, King Charles I visited Mells:

'The King lay at Sir John Horner's house at Mells, a faire large house of stone, very strong, in the form of an H with two courts. The Church is very large and faire adjoining. Horner is in rebellion, his estates sequestestrated £1,000 per annum.'

The king's stay in Mells was mere weeks after his troops were defeated by the Parliamentarians at the battle of Marston Moor. This was a seminal moment in which the King lost his second great power base in the north, leaving him with only the West country and Wales. Charles would have scribbled his letter to the city of Wells begging £500 to be repaid 'When God enabled it' from one of the bedrooms in the H shaped manor house (the showy 'H' was deconstructed by later Horners, perhaps by then as embarrassing as a personalised number plate, to build the more modern Mells Park). His Cavalier troops, meanwhile, would have been drowning their sorrows and twirling their moustaches in The Talbot. 

Where was John Horner, the master of the house? He'd been fighting for Cromwell and obviously having such a good time of it that he later felt a bit guilty. He led the Somerset Militia across upper Mendip, sleeping in a furze bush which he claimed was the best bed he ever lay on. On reaching Wells to find the Kings men fled, they broke the painted windows in the cathedral and 'made havoc with the wine, organs and pictures'. 

John was eventually taken prisoner by Prince Rupert during the storming of Bristol in 1643 and released on his word of honour not to act any more against the King, a promise he faithfully observed to his death. He was probably having a discreet dinner elsewhere in the village when the King came to stay. John was said to regret 'the overthrow of the entire constitution' and perhaps his youthful excesses in Wells. When news of the King's execution came to Mells the ringers set about ringing the bells in celebration, which suggests wider support for parliament in the village, but:

'Sir John, old as he was, took a good oaken stick in his hand and played it so well in the Belfry that he stopped their music and rejoicing.' 

Many Mells residents may feel the same urge at three in the morning when the bells let out their most enthusiastic peals. Pleading what cause, it is never quite clear.

IRON AND EDUCATION (Nineteenth century Mells)

The nineteenth century bought an end to Mells’ misery years of cloth industry decline. Two things particularly bought jobs and hope: James Fussell’s tool works in the iron valley and the founding of a cluster of schools.

Fussell’s works, between Mells and Great Elm, employed 56 men in the early C19th exporting scythes and billhooks across Europe and America. The founding secret of Fussells was also to be their Achilles heel: water power. The mills were driven by the reliable flow of the Mells river, as most local industry had been before. The (over)abundance and power of water was so obvious to the Fussells that when the Dorset and Somerset canal was proposed, James Fussell was not only an active subscriber but even patented an ingenious ‘Balance lock’ gate that bettered previous designs. 

The problem was that steam power, coal and northern industry was rapidly superserseding water power and the south. The Frome-Radstock railway opened before the canal was even finished and Fussell’s reluctance to convert to steam meant the works had closed by the end of the century. 

As manual labour evolved, so too did mental work. The first school stands where it does now, leased by the redoubtable Colonel Horner in 1813 out of what was probably a weaving room. It had 100 pupils in theory but attendance was not compulsory and children were still wanted to work in the coal pits and elsewhere. 

There was clearly also concern about co-attendance criteria as a number of other schools rapidly succeeded. In 1840 the Colonel built a boy’s school in New Street (now adorned with the head of Queen Victoria). Mells First school became a girl’s and infants school and this is why Girls and Boys crossing (west of Longfield) is so called as this is where the children would split as they entered Mells. A school opened near the bus shelter at the manor gates but never had many pupils or much of a reputation, the path now know as Ticklebelly alley was previously called Twaddle alley. A school for Middle class children was opened at Prospect Cottage. 

The most Victorian effort was in the Manor itself, opened by Prebendry John Horner. John's father was Colonel Thomas Strangways Horner, a Tory, riot breaking squire who had a fireplace by his grand pew in St Andrews and black feathered horses taking his draped hearse between rows of obediently mourning tenants. His son lowered the family pew to the height of the rest, filled Mells park with 'stuffed birds, animals, seaweed, birds eggs, dried fish' and established an Anglican college in the manor for church restoration work and the education of souls. Skilled artisans and missionaries duly processed out into the world. High mindedness and iron was in, the loom and an age when your brain was in your hands was passing.

WAR AND RECREATION (Twentieth century Mells)

In twentieth century Mells the local finally collided with the global in art, politics, war and society. 

In 1883 the squire-ish John Horner married liberal, cosmopolitan Frances Graham. Frances bought a crowd of artists and Liberal political society to Mells Park including Edward Burne-Jones, Lutyens, Eric Gill and William Nicholson. Many of their works (and some of hers) survive in the Manor, Church and bus shelters. Future prime ministers Asquith and Churchill both visited. 

Their daughter Katherine married the Prime Minister's son, Raymond Asquith. It was at this point the inflowing tide to Mells became a dark one as the war took Raymond's life and many of the village residents. Their names are marked on the war memorial. Many must have wished again for blissful rural isolation, not to be at the centre of things, however false that image of the past might have been.

Frances' son Edward, another victim, is depicted in a moving equestrian statue in the church. It is telling that the sculptor Munnings had originally shown Edward with his head bowed but Frances had it changed so he looks more hopefully ahead. 

Katherine went out to the very battlefields where Raymond had died to serve as a VAD nurse, her diaries a testament to a hard-won choice of life over death. The village continued to attract artists and poets including Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon (buried in the churchyard) and David Jones. The second world war bought an influx of much-loved London evacuees and the post war years saw Italian immigrants and others being welcomed into the village. 

A village as beautiful as Mells could never remain a place of mourning. Perhaps its purpose is to act as place of recuperation: somewhere to both remember history and escape it, where an old beauty can be made perpetually new again.