6th May 2024

Mells – the first million years 

12pm in St Andrews church

Have you ever wondered what the Mells landscape looked like before humans even settled it? How it was formed by eons of ice and heat; how ice sheets barred the way beyond Salisbury plain; how blackthorn evolved its long spikes to fend off the elephants and hippos crashing through our swamp valleys. How the wolverine, bison and mammoth found in Lime Kiln quarry would have stalked what are now the village streets.

And what did our first ancestors look like, stranded here after the English Channel burst its bounds? The toolmakers scavenging flints from the chalk plains, knapping them in the Mells fields and sheltering in caves near Coleford. The high ridgeways they trod from Cley hill to Mells, avoiding the wicked valleys. The Scythian-Celtic invaders, first horse masters, carrying plague and blades from Europe. Their high forts around Mells in Tedbury, Wadbury and Newbury camps. The Romans and Saxons who painstakingly edged them out. Who lived here before us – and longest?

Andrew Edwards is a local historian who has made numerous pre-historic finds. He has worked with Frome Museum and Michael McGarvie to uncover and preserve much of the deep history we live on top of. He lives in Frome, next to a neolithic trackway. 

Medieval Mells 

1pm in St Andrews church

Discover how Mells got its name - and its beauty - because of its sheep. Most of the stone medieval buildings were built on the back of wool wealth including the Church, New Street, Tythe barn and Manor house. The Abbey of Glastonbury took its share but so did the many wool merchants and clothiers who funded the building of the church. From the thirty mills in the valley to the massive and rowdy sheep fair held behind the church for six centuries, the village made a name for itself by being profoundly woolly-headed.

This was the high-water mark of Mells’ wealth which would be followed by a long decline as the trade moved elsewhere. Other industries took over, eventually reviving in the last two hundred years as the iron-works and quarries started up. But we shouldn’t remember the Medieval period as a pastoral idyll: illegal, open pit coal mining thrived and the river would have run purple with dye and Fuller’s earth from the workhouse. 

The Mells fete, and Daffodil Day before it, are echoes of the great medieval fair. As sheep reappear in the surrounding fields, come to the talk and celebrate the flock.

Raymond Oxford has spent years rebuilding, cataloguing and conserving the Mells records and archive. He wrote the history of Mells on the village website and has collaborated with local, art and political historians in publications involving Mells and its inhabitants.

Reformation and Civil War Mells

2pm in St Andrews church

King Charles I was executed little more than a century after the last Abbot of Glastonbury. Both spent a night in Mells before they were killed. And Mells had a stake in both of their deaths.

Meet Thomas and John Horner, the ‘new men’ of Mells who were interested in replacing the old regime in both centuries. And who became it in the centuries following. Find out about the Abbot’s last night in Mells, his grisly death and which building in Mells his ghost is said to haunt. 

Follow John Horner as he chases the king’s armies over the Mendips into Wells where he smashes the windows of the chapter house. Hear about the Cavaliers drowning their sorrows in the Talbot while the King writes a letter begging for money in a bedroom of the Manor house. Find out what John got up to in the belltower.  

It may look like a sleepy village but one thing’s for sure – life’s never dull in the country. 

Clare Asquith is the author of “Shadowplay: the hidden beliefs and coded politics of William Shakespeare”. Her interest in sixteenth century politics, skullduggery and intrigue was sparked by observations of similar hiddenness and code in Soviet Moscow. She lives in Mells as an escape from both. 

Nineteenth century Mells

3pm in St Andrews church

Thrift, industry…and beauty. 

After centuries of economic decline, Mells got busy in the nineteenth century. The Fussells tool works lit up the Iron valley with forges and clattering water wheels. Carried away by the power of water, they invented an ingenious balance lock for a canal across the Mells land. It – and the ironworks - was made redundant by the very commodity it was meant to transport. Coal ended up powering the trainline below the canal and the massive mills in the North.  

Dragged out of the coal pits, the children of Mells were thrust into newly forming schools. At one point there were five including the Manor house, which became a school for missionaries and artisans making stained glass and beautiful wood carving.

Into this world swept Frances Graham, marrying John Horner and bringing a crowd of artists and liberal politicians in her wake. Thanks to her, Mells boasts paintings by Burne Jones, statues by Munnings and stained glass by William Nicholson. Where boorish squires once mourned their hunting dogs above their wives, here was a woman who would become a muse to many and the mother of both beauty and tragedy.  

Helen Dunstan-Smith is a freelance Art Historian and Antique dealer specialising in the Decorative Arts of 19th Century Britain and as such has a particular interest in the arrival of Frances Horner (nee Graham) to Mells in 1883. Helen is a descendent of the Starr family, residents of Nunney and Great Elm since 1667.  Currently she is curating a small Exhibition of British 19th century design which can be found in the Byrne Gallery in Selwood Street, Mells.

Twentieth century Mells

4pm in St Andrews church (Film on Mells and the twentieth century)

The names of the Mells men lost to history are there for all to see on the war memorial. The worlds of the women who mourned them are less well known but bring a hard-won meaning to the suffering. 

Frances Horner’s son Edward died in the war, not long after her younger son had died of scarlet fever. She erected the moving equestrian statue you can see in the church to Edward’s memory. Her daughter Katherine had married Raymond Asquith, son of the British Prime Minister whose decision it had been to go to war. A decision that ended up killing his son.

Katherine was shattered by Raymond’s death and went out to the front line to become a VAD nurse. Half longing for death herself, she found herself closest to him when near the fighting. Eventually she found her way through the depression, converted to Catholicism and lived out her days in Mells. You can read excerpts of her diary and poems in the twentieth century area by the Manor gates. 

Luke Sherlock has recently opened Sherlock & Pages, a bookshop in Frome on local heritage and the recovery of our landscape. He has written ‘The Home of our Delight’, a brilliant essay on Mells and the war, available on his website.