18 November 2025

Our speaker in November was Ann Featherstone who, appropriately for the last meeting before Christmas, gave us a Brief History of Pantomime.  As a teenager, Ann had once played the principal girl and she brought her enthusiasm for both performing and teaching to this entertaining talk.

Pantomimes were originally short, light-hearted productions presented year-round at the end of longer, more serious plays.  They were performed without words (hence “‑mime”) and featured four standard characters derived from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte: the dashing Harlequin, his sweetheart Columbine, the foolish Clown and the old man Pantaloon.  Harlequin carried a “slapstick” – a pair of boards fastened together at one end so that they could be clapped together to highlight a dramatic effect – which might be the origin of the Fairy Godmother’s magic wand.

The most celebrated Harlequin of the 18^th century was John Rich.  The money he earned from staging pantomimes (as well as the Beggar’s Opera) enabled him to build the famous theatre at Covent Garden.  Rich’s great rival was David Garrick, who ran the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.  Rich was a brilliant dancer so, in order to compete with him, Garrick introduced speech into pantomimes for the first time and commissioned lavish stage scenery and costumes from professional artists.

In the early 19^th century, the most famous player of the Clown was Joseph Grimaldi.  Having been introduced to the stage by his tyrannical and violent father, he suffered from bouts of depression but he introduced aspects of Clown’s costume and character that have carried through into today’s pantomime dames.  Pantomimes continued to evolve through the century, with an enormous variety of stories and a growing cast of characters including adult and children’s choruses.  The first performance was traditionally on Boxing Day and a successful run could continue until Easter.  The Victorian stage was a dangerous place, with naked flames, trip hazards and moving machinery.

As performers from Music Hall began to take roles in pantomimes, they brought with them the catchphrases and audience interaction that are such major features of today’s shows.  Among these performers were some extraordinary animal impersonators, who played roles such as Dick Whittington’s cat.  In the 20^th century, radio and television celebrities increasingly appeared in pantomimes – with varying degrees of accomplishment!  During the Second World War, theatres at home continued to produce pantomimes with the limited cast and resources available, moving performances from the evenings to the afternoons to avoid the Blackout.  Serving soldiers frequently put on their own shows to boost morale.

Pantomime survives as a thoroughly British popular tradition, despite it having Italian origins and mostly telling French and German fairy stories.  It appeals to the whole family from children to grandparents but its crude humour and cross-dressing are mystifying to other nationalities.  Long may it continue!

18 February 202

In February, we welcomed Charlie Corcoran, who told us about the ‘History of Morris Dancing’.  Charlie is the Bagman (Treasurer/secretary) of Leicester Morris, one of Leicestershire‘s best known dance groups.  He arrived, dressed for the occasion, in white trousers and shirt, sporting a flower-decorated hat, and carrying two hefty sticks, a fiddle, a concertina and a harmonica (plus many informative books and leaflets).  Over the next hour, we examined questions as to where Morris dancing started, what it represented and which groups of society practised it over time.  Unfortunately, there were no clear answers, but Charlie shared lots of possibilities.

No one knows how old Morris Dancing is, nor really why it is done.  Nothing was written down many years ago when ordinary people were often illiterate.  In the Middle Ages, Morris dancing was popular in European courts, as part of masques, with elaborate entertainment, outlandish costumes and special effects.

In Leicester, in 1599 six Morrismen were taken to court for performing at Whitsuntide.  Others were prosecuted for erecting a maypole in the town centre and dancing around it.  There was growing tension between the church and the state as to what activities should be allowed, especially on Sundays.  Finally, it was decided that Morris dancing could be permitted provided that there was ‘no impediment or neglect of divine service’!

William Shakespeare referred to Morris dancing in three of his plays and it is known that his contemporary, William Kemp, danced a Morris jig from London to Norwich, and a wood cut of this event is probably the earliest picture we have of Morris dancer.  Morris dancers entertained the rich and apparently it was only later that ordinary working men became involved and then dancing took place on public holidays, in parks and outside pubs in village centres.

When the rural population moved into towns during the industrial revolution, traditions were lost and Morris dancing almost ceased to be a village activity.  Fortunately, old dances were remembered and adapted creating new steps and styles.  Today there are groups of Morris dancers in many parts of the world.

Charlie mentioned the names of many famous people who have revived the Morris dancing tradition in the early 20th century among them was Cecil Sharpe who collected folk songs, folk dances and instrumental music.  In addition, Mary Neal, who provided a dance club for young working-class women in the London slums in the belief that it would improve their lives.  These young female dancers played a key role in keeping Morris dancing alive after the first world war when many male dancers lost their lives.

Was Morris Dancing pagan?  A fertility rite?  Moorish?  No one knows.

The history of Leicester Morris is apparently better known.  Charlie mentioned an early photo from 1938 and also told us that the current ‘Side’ was started in 1953 by Stephen George, a prominent Leicester city architect.  Records kept over time, suggest that they have danced in every town and village in Leicestershire at least once.  (See www.leicestermorris.co.uk for the list and photos).

Two types of dances are performed by Leicester Morris (although Charlie mentioned many other groups).  In summer they dance Cotswold Dances; in the winter they perform Border Morris. These dances originated in the counties of Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire which all border Wales.  In the 19th century, border teams were small and the music which accompanied the dancing featured a lot of percussion, including triangles and drums.  Contrary to belief, the dancers do not blacken their faces (although they do paint them red in the winter).  The only other form of Morris dance that Leicester perform is the Mumming Play.  These happen all over England, Scotland and Ireland and are a type of drama which was historically performed by local men (not professional actors) at specific times of the year, such as Boxing Day, Easter or Halloween.

A talk on Morris dancing would not have been complete without a bit of fiddle playing, a demonstration of stick dancing, and a display of very complicated dance steps, accompanied by the flicking of white handkerchiefs and the jingling of bells.  Charlie provided all of these and we enjoyed his talk and his demonstrations very much.

17 June 2025

We began our programme of summer events on a beautiful midsummer evening, with a guided tour of Anstey.  We were led by Jane Cole of Anstey Local History Society, who had been our speaker in March, so this was a chance to explore the village for ourselves and see its historical locations in context.  Even those of us who have lived in the area for many years found new corners of Anstey to discover.  What follows are just a few snippets from a very interesting walk.

The main Anstey car park is on the site of the former Nook Yard.  Next time you’re there, look out for a surviving timber post from one of its cruck cottages, which is embedded in a wall behind the vehicle charging points.  Old maps show a building in the middle of the Nook itself, where the roundabout now stands, which was probably the village lock-up.

It’s always worth looking above street level!  Opposite the QD store on Cropston Road is a plaque reading “Amphora Cottages 1899”.  Why?  Apparently, this terrace was built with the winnings from a bet on a horse by that name.

Our route took us from the Lower Green and the famous Packhorse Bridge, along the jitty to Latimer Road, where the 1896 primary school building is a fine example, with separate Girls’ and Boys’ entrances and a turret still containing its bell.  Outside the church, we saw the stump of an ancient cross and some affecting inscriptions on the slate headstones.  The churchyard is overlooked by the Curate’s House, which was needed because St. Mary’s was the responsibility of the Rector of All Saints’, who lived at Thurcaston.

If you only ever travel along Bradgate Road by car, you’ve probably never noticed what a variety of old buildings it contains, from Georgian farmhouses to Victorian shopfronts.  One of them – Till’s – has been in continuous use as a butcher’s since at least 1841.  The road also once had four pubs, along with Pettifor’s Brewery which supplied all of them.

Our return route from Top Green was via Hollow Road, where several of the owners of Anstey’s many shoe factories lived.  The former factories have now been repurposed in diverse ways, from Bradgate Brides to the Sapori restaurant, new apartments and an undertaker’s.  Recent months have seen the closure of box manufacturer Bosworth Wright, bringing to an end the village’s long association with the footwear industry.

Anstey Local History Society has developed a set of historically-themed walking routes around the village.  Based on our experience, they will be well worth looking out for when the new website (www.ansteyhistory.com) goes live later this year.

21 October 2025

In October we welcomed back the archaeologist Mathew Morris, whose subject was “From Hunters to Farmers: The Story of Stone Age Leicestershire and Rutland”.  Major commercial developments must now be preceded by an archaeological survey, which has led to large areas of the counties being explored for the first time and has resulted in nationally significant discoveries about the prehistoric period.

The first evidence of human activity in our area consists of simple hand-axes found alongside the bones and tusks of elephants, deep in the 500,000-year-old gravel deposits at Brooksby Quarry.  At that time, before the local landscape was remodelled in the Ice Age, the Bytham River flowed east through the area and our ancestor Homo heidelbergensis perhaps followed the animals along its course.

Soon afterwards, the advancing ice made all of Britain uninhabitable for many millennia.  A flint spearhead from Glaston dates from one of the warmer spells and was probably left by a Neanderthal but no permanent occupation was possible until about 12,500 BC.  By then, the seasonal growth of the tundra provided rich resources for large herds of animals and the Homo sapiens who hunted them.  These people are mostly known from finds in caves but Bradgate Park has a rare open-air site, where nearly 5000 flint artefacts – spear tips, points and scrapers – have been excavated from a natural platform overlooking the end of the “Little Matlock” gorge.  The English Channel did not yet exist and the people might have followed the animals’ migration as far east as Moscow every year.

As the climate continued to warm, the landscape became woodland, which was still rich in resources such as deer and pigs but had to be exploited in a different way.  In this Middle Stone Age (“Mesolithic”) period, people lived in smaller family groups and travelled less far.  Because they regularly returned to the same sites, it became worthwhile to build huts and to create clearings, where they might have encouraged the growth of local food plants like hazel and bramble.  Though we now find the first flint woodworking tools, spear tips were made less carefully than before – perhaps because it was so easy to lose them in the undergrowth!

Farming began in the Middle East and spread to Britain – now an island – by about 4,000 BC.  This marked the start of the New Stone Age (“Neolithic”) period.  The cultivation of grain required permanent settlements and the clearance of land around them.  It also allowed the development of pottery, the domestication of animals and the emergence of local cultural differences.  The counties’ earliest artwork is a stylized face etched into a sandstone “plaque” found at Rothley Lodge.  In fact, the area surrounding the confluence of the Rivers Soar, Wreake and the Rothley Brook is full of pits, post-holes and circular ditches, which mark the sites of domestic dwellings and burials.  There will be much more to learn when all the recent excavations in the area have been analysed.

16 September 2025

For our return to indoor meetings in September, we heard from the Society’s member Peter Smith with the second part of his talk on Thurcaston & Cropston Before the Enclosures.  Having dealt with the settlement of the villages and the pattern of roads in his first talk, this time the focus was on fields and field names.

You might remember from school that during the medieval period much of central England was farmed in a system of open fields.  The system developed in about the 8^th century, when the Saxons moved from Roman-style country estates to live in nucleated villages at the centre of each parish, and it continued with little change for 1000 years.

Most villages had three large fields, which were sown in rotation with peas or beans one year, wheat or barley the next year, then left fallow.  Animals were grazed on the fallow field to fertilize it with their manure, as well as on the regrowth – the “aftermath” – in the other fields after they had been harvested, and on permanent meadows along the river valleys.  Farmers’ land was spread through the three fields so they would always have a balance of each crop.  The parcels were in long strips because of the difficulty of turning a plough pulled by a team of bullocks or heavy horses.  Blocks of adjacent, parallel strips were known as furlongs.

What evidence do we have for this system of farming in our two villages?  There are still surviving areas of ridge and furrow, which resulted from the plough always turning soil towards the centre of the strip.  Landscape painters were more interested in Tuscany than Leicestershire so images of the countryside from that time are rare but the tomb of Joseph Danvers (1745) in Swithland churchyard includes a fine slate carving of a furlong being ploughed.  There is also documentary evidence.  The Record Office holds several “terriers”, which are surveys of the land belonging to the lord of the manor, the rector or private freeholders.  Taking each open field and meadow in turn, they itemize all the strips belonging to the farm in question, naming the furlong in which each strip falls and often the occupiers on either side.  We also have surviving agreements between the farmers of Thurcaston, which deal with matters such as how many animals each person is entitled put into the fields; the fine for recovering a stray animal from the pinfold; and the annual election of field reeves to oversee the process.  References to the “wheatfield” and the “peasefield” confirm that crop rotation was being practised.

In 1600, Thurcaston’s landowners agreed between themselves that they would enclose the common meadows for their private use.  Other cottagers, who had ancient rights to use the common land but were not parties to the agreement, were to be “satisfied” with the aftermath of Bybrook Meadow instead.  Various grievances rumbled on, especially when a new Rector was appointed, and eventually, when Richard Grosvenor wanted to sell the lordship of the manor to William Palmer of Wanlip, some of the payment was withheld.  It took a referral to the Court of Chancery in London, with all the local farmers appearing as witnesses, before the terms of the agreement were essentially confirmed in 1635.  By the 18^th century, parliament recognized the need for more widespread enclosure of open fields, which would allow landowners to invest in new agricultural processes that could feed the rapidly growing population of Britain’s cities.  The Enclosure Acts for Cropston (1781) and Thurcaston (1798) appointed commissioners to re-allocate the land, resulting in the private fields divided by hedges that we are familiar with today.

In the course of his research, Peter has compiled a list of about 500 old names of fields, furlongs and other features of the local landscape – but is it possible to locate them on the map?  Sometimes there are enough clues in the documents themselves.  For example, we know that Rye Leys was opposite David North’s because the Thurcaston Enclosure Award set aside land there to quarry materials for maintaining the parish’s roads.  Rye prefers to grow on well drained land so the presence of a gravel quarry and the name of nearby Sandhills Farm provide confirmation.

The Cropston Enclosure Award enables us to locate the village’s three open fields: Bybrook or Holgate Field to the west, Open Dale or Anstey Field to the south and Bashpool Field to the east.  From the terriers mentioned earlier, we know that Thurcaston’s open fields were Bybrook or Mill Field to the north, Beaumont Leys or Park Field to the south and Alitha or Littleland Hill Field to the east, though their exact boundaries are less certain.  The name “Alitha” has not been satisfactorily explained and, as an unrecognizable word, it has appeared in all sorts of variations over the years, from Albethough to Hollythorn.

A different approach is to see whether any of the old furlong names have survived in current field names.  The W.I. carried out a field-name survey in 1971 and Peter has identified 15 of them that can also be found in pre-enclosure documents.  Some are unchanged, like Mill Meadow and Lady Willows, but unfamiliar words are more likely to have altered over time.  For example, Thistle Bridge was originally Thistle Breach – “breach” meaning ground that was broken up for cultivation.  The strange name Monigo was originally Many Goars; when a furlong that was not square was divided into strips, a “goar” was one of the awkward tapering pieces left at the edge.  Incidentally, the W.I. survey names two fields along Anstey Lane as Miller’s Field and Millea.  Peter has not found those names in early documents but, as the fields are on top of a hill, quite far from the watermill, could they suggest that Thurcaston once had a windmill on this site?

Some of the terriers contain enough information about neighbouring plots that it appears it should be possible to fit the furlong names together like a jigsaw.  Peter felt he had had some success doing that with a 1759 survey of Thornton’s farm in Cropston but then found little overlap with another Cropston terrier dated only 8 years earlier.  Overall, he has to sympathize with a poor land agent, John Andrew, who was faced with the same task in 1596 and wrote, “Nether can I doe yt without the help of the tenants ... because one furlong hath some two or three names and yt taketh such a long tyme.”

19 August 2025

As our third and final evening visit of the year, a group of our members travelled to BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir on Catherine Street in Leicester.  This Hindu temple, one of the largest and most beautiful temples in the country, was opened in 2011 and funded by the local community.  A large proportion of the congregation are Kenyan and Ugandan Asians.  It is an imposing, huge building of white limestone with a beautifully and intricately decorated exterior.  The “shikar” towers on the roof represent the mountain peaks of the Himalayas.  Inside we were welcomed by Dipak Kalyan, who introduced us to our guide.  That young lady was “in training”.  We would never have known.  She efficiently gave us the history of the temple and told us of the travels of Swaminarayan, the god after whom the temple is named and who is worshipped daily by his followers.  She led us through the vast temple, explaining that lotus flowers and peacocks symbolise peace and beauty and showing us the huge hall where many celebrations take place, including weddings which attracted guests from around the world.  Training sessions were also held here regularly, for adults and for youngsters, teaching them about their gods, how to live their lives and how to help others.

We then entered the beautifully decorated room in which the Hindu gods ate and slept.  These gods, beautifully dressed and decorated were fed at specific times each day.  Around them, ordinary people sat, kneeled or prostrated themselves on a richly patterned carpet.  Other worshippers walked around the gods paying homage in their preferred way.  At the end of the evening our group were privileged to be invited to share “Arti”, the service at the end of the day.  People prayed or sang around us, whilst religious music was played, accompanied by bells.  The atmosphere was amazing, as the gods were put to bed.  The service generated a feeling of peace and well-being.  This visit was very informative in relation to just one of the many aspects of multi-cultural worship in the city of Leicester.

15 July 2025

The rain held off as 10 members of our group were treated to a very interesting tour and talk about the cemetery, its history and the many famous people whose graves and memorials are to be found there.

Welford Road, Leicester’s first municipal cemetery, opened in 1849, is the 3^rd oldest in the country and is still in use.  It is spread across 31 acres of land, on the edge of what was the old town of Leicester, and it is Grade 2 listed in the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens.

The Cemetery is a beautiful, calm, peaceful place with easy walkways and something of interest at every turn.  Many of Leicester’s oldest and unusual trees can be found there.  Our group visited the very informative Visitor Centre where we found maps, leaflets, grave layout plans and lots of helpful literature.  In addition, knowledgeable and committed members of the Friends of Welford Road Cemetery were present to help visitors to locate family graves.

Many of Leicester’s wealthy, famous and notorious Victorian and Edwardian men and women were buried there and we were shown the graves of Thomas Cook, Fielding Johnson and John Ellis, among others.

There are over 213,000 people buried in the cemetery with 30,000 graves and 10,000 headstones.  There are many military graves.  On the site of the original chapels (now demolished) there are plaques that remind us of many ordinary people from Leicestershire.  These plaques are numbered and have biographical information on them plus the grave location.  The amount of information and sign-posting in such a large area is exceptional.

For any group looking for an interesting and unusual activity, a visit to Welford Road Cemetery is certainly educational and very worthwhile.

18 March 2025

In March we were pleased to be visited by Jane Cole from our neighbours at Anstey Local History Society. She took on the task of explaining 16 centuries of the history of Anstey in under an hour!

The first written record of the village was in Saxon times, when it was called Hanstige, meaning a narrow forest path. The name went through several variants before settling on Ansty – until the 20th century, when the Post Office added an “e” to avoid confusion with another village near Coventry. Old Anstey had two centres, around the Top Green and St. Mary’s Church. Among the oldest surviving structures are the stump of a Saxon cross in the churchyard, the Norman church tower, the mill and the two packhorse bridges.

Until about 1800, the village was mainly agricultural and there were several substantial farms. From then on, families increasingly earned a living from framework knitting. The Luddites, who campaigned against that work being moved into factories, were named after local lad Ned Ludlam, who had broken a frame many years before in a fit of temper. Boot and shoe manufacture followed framework knitting as the major source of employment because parts of the process could similarly be carried on in people’s homes. By 1900, Anstey was a major centre of shoe production, having 23 factories along with supporting industries such as tanning and box manufacture. The population grew rapidly and the manufacturers built terraced housing for their workers. Other local residents joined one of the three Land Societies (“Lannies”) and paid a weekly subscription until they could afford to purchase a plot of land and build their own house on it. All the shoe factories have now closed but one unusual business that does continue is Ulverscroft Large Print Books, which is the world’s leading publisher in that field.

Most of Jane’s talk was about the last 150 years to showcase the Society’s enviable collection of historic photographs. We saw the Nook when it had thatched cottages, no roundabout and no cars; the succession of schools that never quite kept up with the growing number of children; and the Methodist Church that used to stand on Cropston Road where the Chinese restaurant is now. (The building opposite, where services are held today, was originally the church’s schoolroom.) For recreation there were many pubs and two cinemas: the Regent (“Up Top”) on Ellis Street and the Savoy (“Down Bottom”), which is now Broughtons. The two main rooms in the recently extended Jubilee Hall have been named after them.

The photographic collection was begun by Brian Kibble, who sadly died last year, but Jane and other volunteers continue to collect old photos and take new ones to document changes in the village, on the principle that “today’s photograph is tomorrow’s history!” Consistently with that, the last picture that Jane showed us had been taken only 24 hours earlier.

19 November 2024

Our final meeting of 2024 began with a short AGM, at which we looked back on a successful year with a diverse range of events, a modest increase in membership and a large increase in the number of visitors, resulting in a healthy surplus in the accounts.  The existing members of the committee were re-appointed.

As our speaker, we welcomed a much-loved broadcaster who has recently retired after a 25-year career at the BBC.  No, Gary Lineker is still under contract: in fact, our guest was Dave Andrews, who has been a stalwart of the Radio Leicester schedules since the early 1990s.  He began by recalling three chance incidents that led to his broadcasting career.  As a child at a new school, he sat in the wrong class and found a teacher who instilled a love of history that has stayed with him ever since.  Later, after taking a history degree, Dave decided to become a teacher himself and, unable to settle on which training college to apply to, he drew the name “Leicester” at random out of a hat.  He stayed in this area and went on to become deputy head of Anstey Martin School but then, ready for a change, he began volunteering at Radio Leicester.  The third incident was on Dave’s first outing with a reporter to a crime scene, when the colleague was suddenly taken ill and thrust the microphone into Dave’s hands to record the item.  It went well enough for him to be offered a post, which eventually became a full-time job.

An early challenge related to the death of Princess Diana.  Strict protocols meant that local radio was not permitted to announce the death but, because it had happened so unexpectedly, Dave and his colleagues had to scramble to fill the schedule with appropriate content.  His time at the station also covered two events when Leicester became the focus of international attention: Leicester City’s victory in the Premier League, and the rediscovery and subsequent reinterment of the body of Richard III.  He was also chosen to present the live coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the city for the Maundy service in 2017.  From his vantage point in the gallery, he had to fill the considerable time while she distributed coins to 91 men and 91 women (the number being equal to the monarch’s age).

Dave reminded us that Radio Leicester was the UK’s first local radio station, having been founded in 1967 at about the same time as the Home Service and the Light Programme were replaced by Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4.  A highlight of his career was the station’s 40^th anniversary, when he led fund-raising for an extension of Rainbows Hospice.  Drawing on their shared love of theatre, Dave and two colleagues put together a stage show of words and music from WWI, which was so successful that they repeated it for WWII the following year.

He interviewed many celebrities over the years – most often when they were appearing at the De Montfort Hall – but he gained as much pleasure from his conversations with local people.  Dave is now one of the Deputy Lieutenants of Leicestershire, in which role he represents the King at events such as citizenship ceremonies.

15 October 2024

In October, our member Peter Smith gave the first part of a talk about Thurcaston & Cropston before the Enclosures.  The present layout of the fields and roads was created in the late 1700s, when the larger landowners obtained Acts of Parliament – one for each village – which allowed them to group the land into the pattern of individual, private fields surrounded by hedges that we are familiar with today.  The commissioners appointed to carry out these Enclosures also diverted and straightened many of the roads.  For many preceding centuries, each village had been surrounded by three large, open fields.  These were farmed communally with a succession of peas & beans, wheat and then a year when no crops were planted but animals were allowed to graze and fertilize the soil so the cycle could begin again.  A farm’s land would be divided into narrow strips scattered through the open fields so that there were always some strips of each type in production.  Along the valleys of the River Lin and the Thurcaston Brook, there were also meadows for grazing animals and making hay – some in private ownership and some as common land.

There is no known map of our parish before the Enclosures so Peter has been trying to work out what it might have looked like and to find the locations of some of the wonderful furlong names like Bashpool Over Shoot, Lady Willows and Long Wong.

He began with a quick canter through how our local landscape might have developed, from the tundra-like conditions at the end of the Ice Age, through the growth and then clearance of the wildwood and the gradual settlement of the land by farmers.  It was not until the arrival of the Saxons that the settlements were in the form of villages under a feudal system, with the peasants owing service to a local lord, who in turn owed service to the king.  The -ton suffix of the names Thurcaston and Cropston tells us that they were founded in Saxon times but the prefixes are thought to derive from the Viking names Croppr and Thorketil.  They were presumably chieftains who seized the villages when our area fell under the Danelaw.  Cropston is situated on top of a ridge with good communications, while Thurcaston runs along the side of the valley, perhaps because this position gave the best access to drinking water.  The Domesday Book tells us that in 1086 there were 22 house­holds, a mill and a large wood (6 by 1½ miles), which probably lay between here and Leicester.

Peter reviewed some early maps of Leicestershire, of which the first to show the road network was made by John Prior in 1777, just five years before the Cropston Enclosure.  Many of the roads on it are different from today’s, although most of their routes have been preserved as footpaths or bridleways.  The modern Leicester Road did not exist: the main crossing of the brook was via Sandham Bridge, while the old road to Leicester ran from the bend at the top of Rectory Lane to Greengate Lane.  Bradgate Road seems to have continued in a straight line from the Hallgates to the Rothley boundary, and Station Road perhaps veered left to cross it and reach Rothley Plain; early OS maps show a long narrow field that might have been its route.  Some of the roads heading out of Thurcaston can be traced in the landscape as deep holloways worn by the passage of feet, hooves and cartwheels.  They show up clearly in relief maps produced by LIDAR scans.  Two seasonal ponds – one alongside Brooky Lane and another behind the mill – have a similar form and Peter suspects that they might be corresponding holloways on the western side of the brook.

Look out for Part 2 of the talk, which will say more about the open fields and furlongs, as well as trying to identify those names!

21 January 2025

Our January meeting marked the start of our 25^th year of events since the Society was founded, as part of a Millennium Project to encourage community activities in the two villages.  We welcomed old friends and several new members to hear from Nick Marshall about life “Below Stairs” in the Victoria Era.

In the days before labour-saving devices such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines, it was common for even a small household to employ at least one maid.  A vicar or minor country squire might have half a dozen staff, including a cook, a gardener and a stable-hand to look after the horses that were then the only means of transport.  Nick’s talk was mainly about the servants in larger establishments.  Were they really as portrayed in series like Downton Abbey?

The world of domestic staff was very hierarchical, from the maids-of-all-work to the housekeeper on the female side, and from the pages to the butler on the male side.  Indoor and outdoor staff rarely mixed, except for the head gardener who would enter the house to consult with the head cook.  A wage survey in the 1890s showed that the annual salary might be £15 for a house- or kitchen-maid, £25 for a lady’s maid or footman, rising to £40-£60 for a housekeeper or butler.  These figures could be supplemented by generous tips from guests if your employer was in the habit of entertaining.  Bearing in mind that food, lodging and uniforms were also provided, the income compared favourably with factory work or manual labour, and the conditions were generally better.  Some families were willing to pay much more to attract a prestigious chef, a head gardener who could grow exotic fruits – or a pair of footmen who were identical twins!

Servants’ working hours could be long: from 5 a.m. until after the family chose to go to bed, with only Sunday afternoons off and two days of annual leave.  Hiring fairs took place at Lady Day and Michaelmas but most recruitment was by personal recommendation.  Staff were not usually recruited from the local area because having family nearby might distract them from their work and there was a risk that they would pass on gossip about their employers!  A female servant would usually be dismissed when she got married but if a male servant had good references, the skills he had acquired could be valuable in other types of work, e.g. as a steward in the military, a grocer or a factory supervisor.  Many servants were able to build up savings from their income but otherwise, with no state pensions, provision for elderly staff depended on the goodwill of the family.