A Comprehensive Village History

Compiled by Diana Hart and verified by David Bond, Oct 2018

Although there is no written record of Cotterstock prior to the entry in the Domesday Book in 1087 there are indications of a much earlier settlement.  There was a Romano - British villa (one of the largest in East Anglia) on a south-facing slope with a spring nearby between present-day Cotterstock and Glapthorn. 

The Domesday Book records Cotterstock (“Codestoche” - possibly “code” = “sick house”, “stoche /  stoke” = “place of significance”) as being held by two knights who were tenants of the Abbot of Peterborough. There was meadowland and woodland, and the population can be estimated at around 80 - 100 people.

Glapthorn and Cotterstock were then one parish with the Roman villa in the centre, and the original settlement and church near to the River Nene. Glapthorn became a separate village in the eighteenth century. 

Farming would have been mostly arable with an open field system and three-crop rotation. Evidence of  ridge and furrow strips can still be seen in the field known as The Wyches and on fields near to Cotterstock Lodge.

The only surviving Medieval building is the church.  Vestiges of Saxon stonework in the nave and lower part of the tower suggest the site of an earlier religious foundation, with the aisles added during the twelfth century. The upper part of the tower was added about 1220 and the porch about 1440. Four bells were cast by Henry Penn of Peterborough in 1708 (two of which survive today) and two by Taylors of Loughborough in 1878. Lord Melville (5thViscount Melville) funded a tenor bell in 1892. All the bells were refurbished and a sixth one cast in 2017.

The first written reference to Cotterstock Mill is in a survey of 1280, and the Mill House was built in 1803 for the then miller, James Rickett.

Records show that there were two manor houses in Cotterstock.  In 1336 the one known as Provost Manor, which was probably situated near the church, was acquired by John Gifford.  He became Rector of Cotterstock, as well as being a Canon of York, Salisbury and Wells, a Deputy Justice in Wales, Master of St. Leonard's Hospital; and was extremely wealthy.  He had served both Queen Isabella and Edward III and in 1338 obtained a Royal Charter to found a Chantry College at Cotterstock, which was described as the largest of its kind in England. A provost, twelve chaplains and two clerks lived there and the disproportionately large chancel was added to the church to accommodate them. Theirs was a monastic lifestyle, and one of  their principal purposes was to say masses daily for the souls of Queen Isabella and John Gifford. The College eventually went into decline and was finally dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536. 

By the 1360s a second manor house was owned by Sir John Holt, referred to as Holt's Manor, which  then passed through the hands of several families and was bought in the seventeenth century by Sir John Norton. The Hearth Tax  of the 1660s refers to two large houses both lived in by Nortons, but only one inhabited by Nortons in the 1670s. Where these two manor houses were situated is open to conjecture, but by the 1650s Sir John Norton owned a large part of Cotterstock and built Cotterstock Hall to live in (date stone: J&MN 1658), most probably on a new site.  

Ownership passed to Elmes Steward, whose daughter Elizabeth struck up a friendship with her cousin the poet John Dryden (1631-1700), who lived in Aldwincle He was a frequent visitor to the Hall during the last two years of his life. It is believed that he wrote his Fables in a room upstairs on the south west side of the house, which is preserved to this day as “Dryden's Room”.

The present-day Manor House is dated 1720 (J&E on the date stone = John and Elizabeth Campion).

In 1736 a servant of John Campion discovered fragments of tesserae on a field near Cotterstock Lodge known as “Gilded Furlong” because Roman coins had turned up there over the centuries.  Along with other artefacts a mosaic floor was found and drawings made, one of which is in the British Museum. In 1798 another mosaic floor was discovered but the Earl of Cardigan had part of it removed and installed in a summerhouse at Deene Hall. No excavations have been carried out, but the site was clearly visible from the air during the dry summer of 1976 confirming that it was one of the largest villas in the country.

John Simcoe, a naval captain of considerable reputation came to live at Cotterstock Hall in 1748.  Four sons were born in Cotterstock, two of whom died in infancy, followed by their father in 1756. There is a memorial to all three in the church which includes a picture in relief of Captain Cook's ship “HMS Pembroke “ on which John Simcoe was serving when he died. Cook is said to have said of Simcoe that he (Simcoe) taught him all he knew about navigation. 

When he died his son, John Graves Simcoe, was 7 years old. The family moved to Exeter and he attended Exeter Grammar School, Eton and Oxford.  In Devon he met and married  Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim who was an orphan and coincidentally a great granddaughter of Elizabeth Steward of Cotterstock (Dryden's cousin). John Graves Simcoe went on to become MP for St. Mawes in Cornwall, and the first Governor of Upper Canada. He was well regarded in Canada, where 5th August is Simcoe Day.

Cotterstock's parish records survive from 1660 onwards but are incomplete, the quality of record - keeping depending upon the vicar's diligence in keeping them and looking after them. 

In 1815 the Enclosure Act saw the reduction of the strip fields into four main fields – Stemborough, Cotterstock, Dam and Monk Sink Field.

The Stewards had no surviving sons and Cotterstock Hall passed through the hands of various families, some as tenants, some as owners, one of whom, Dame Letitia Booth, in 1817 had the village street re-routed to its present position so that it was further away from the Hall.  A later owner of the Hall was Jane Huck-Saunders Fane, Countess of Westmorland.

From its highest recorded population of 211 in 1841 the village began to shrink, partly as the drift towards industrial towns began and partly because by 1900 half of all girls aged 15 – 21 left their homes to go into service.

Henry Dundas, 3rd Viscount Melville, inherited Cotterstock Hall from his cousin Henry Sutton Fane, son the Countess of Westmorland in 1857, along with orchards, farm buildings, arable and pasture land and a number of cottages. He was not married and on his death in 1876 it passed to his brother Robert Dundas, 4th Viscount Melville. It was he who gave land  for the building of the school and for restoration of the church. In 1886 his nephew Henry Dundas, 5th Viscount Melville inherited and it was he who made Cotterstock Hall his home (unlike the Melvilles before him he is buried in Cotterstock churchyard) and continued to take an interest in village affairs.

Cotterstock had a Dame School for 13 children, with 22 attending Sunday school in 1818, and in 1833 a school for 20 boys was run by a clergyman, with 33 attending Sunday school. In 1875, following the passing of the 1870 Education Act, Lord Melville (4th Viscount) gave land for a village school “for the education of children of the labouring, manufacturing, and other poorer classes in the parish”. A number of local benefactors contributed to the cost of building the school (£426, plus a £60 government grant) and the Reverend Francis Buttanshaw, rector for 30 years, who was very active and influential in the local community became Chairman of the Managers. In 1884 an extension was added to provide a separate teaching area for the Infants, funded by the sale of three cottages. The school accommodated, on average, two dozen children, but from 1928, when it came under the jurisdiction of the Local Education Authority the 10 – 14 year olds went to school in Oundle. It was closed in 1934, re-opening for a short time in 1940 to accommodate wartime evacuees living in the village. 

The 'restoration' of the church started around 1878, when plaster was stripped from the walls, memorial tablets moved, and the tiled floors laid. Removal of the plaster revealed that in order to cut costs John Gifford had had the chancel built internally with layered rubble rather than cut and dressed stone, so the Victorian renovators employed tuck pointing to try and improve the appearance of the walls. 

Lord Melville (5th Viscount) had a new plinth made for the Medieval preaching cross and had it moved to its present position outside the Manor House. The last written record of it being used as a preaching cross was when the Bishop of Peterborough preached there to school children and villagers in 1918. In 1897 Lord Melville requested that the Village Pound (now part of the front gardens of Appletree Cottage and Stoneleigh) be used as a play area for children and that any stray animals be put in “Mr. King's field by the church”.  

Cotterstock Parish Meeting was formed in 1894 as part of the local government structure, but the first meeting had to be repeated as it didn't conform to regulations!

At the turn of the 19th century Cotterstock would have been a busy place with most people, unlike today, employed in and around the village. The Hall would have employed a large number of people and occupations on the 1901 census include miller, governess, farmer, farm servant, cook, housemaid, gardener, laundress, carpenter, publican, shepherd, yardman, agricultural labourer, horse keeper, ploughboy, groom, railway porter, dressmaker, butler, vicar, gamekeeper, blacksmith, shoemaker, parlourmaid, errand boy, mason, baker, grazier, milliner, and assistant teacher. Thirty four households were  recorded in 1901,  thirty six in 1911. Only two new houses were built between then and 1978.

After the death of Lord Melville in November 1904 Cotterstock Hall was sold to the Marquis of Huntley whose daughter and her husband moved in in 1912.  She was Lady Ethel(reda) Wickham who was very active in local affairs and lived there until her sudden death at the age of 97 in 1961. As well as setting up the Northamptonshire District Nursing Association which she chaired for 43 years, she helped found the North Northamptonshire Music Competition in 1908 (still  taking place as the Oundle Festival of Music and Drama), formed a Cotterstock Ladies Choir, a Tansor and Cotterstock Choir, was a keen gardener, acquiring some exotic and unusual plants and trees for the Hall gardens, and a fearless horse rider. She was elected President of the Peterborough Agricultural Show at the age of 94! 

In 1956, after a statutory order was issued from Whitehall allowing the Church to sell all redundant village schools, Lady Ethel Wickham went to see the Bishop of Peterborough and was reassured that Cotterstock could keep its school (built by public subscription on donated land, and the whole maintained by villagers at their own expense since 1934).  Unfortunately  nothing was recorded in writing and the Diocese claimed ownership. Legal arguments ensued but finally the village had to accept a 28 year lease at a peppercorn rent. Since then a great deal of money has been raised for improvements to what is now the Village Hall, and the lease renewed, always with the hope that the Church will not decide to sell the building.

Electricity came to the village just before the Second World War but villagers relied on water from wells until the late 1940s, when mains water was installed. Mains sewerage followed in 1998. 

Sadly in 1968 Cotterstock Mill was badly burnt in a fire, and the Mill Office on the opposite side of the road from the mill itself was completely destroyed. 

At the turn of the twentieth century the village had a large and flourishing country house, a school, church, vicarage, post office, bakery, dairy, public house, blacksmith, coffin maker, several farms, as well as various other tradesmen inhabiting 36 dwellings. There was a church choir, a cricket team and a Pig Club, and paying guests (mostly fishermen) stayed at the The Gate Inn. The  Cotterstock Angling Association and Cotterstock Male Voice Choir both started at the pub and, as numbers grew, moved to the school. A Roll of Honour shows that during the Second World War twenty men from the village served in the Armed Forces, as well as five in the Home Guard, two ARP wardens and three in Animal Emergency.

The character of the village is greatly changed today. All that remains is the school (now the Village Hall) and St. Andrew's Church, and 67 dwellings (population around 145) with a very different but, nevertheless, thriving community.