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All Cannings Concise History

Introduction

History

Cannings is an interesting name, one of a small group (notably Hastings) which originally referred not to a place at all, but to a tribe – the followers of Cana. Such names are thought to have originated at an early stage (though not the very earliest) in the colonization of southern Britain by groups of Anglo-Saxon settlers in the sixth and seventh centuries. Cana’s tribe settled around the marshy bowl which heads the western end of Pewsey Vale, and which came therefore to be known as Cannings Marsh. The territory which they carved out for themselves, or which already existed before they claimed it, seems to have comprised the later parishes of Bishops Cannings and All Cannings, including its tithing of Allington. These three at Domesday (1086), although by the lying in different hundreds, were assessed in total at precisely one hundred hides, and so – it may be assumed – constituted the original hundred of Cannings.

The boundaries of the original hypothetical Cannings, before Bishops Cannings was granted to the bishop and All Cannings was granted to St Mary’s nunnery, Winchester, ignore Wansdyke, a defensive linear earthwork probably of the fifth or sixth century, but use in part a Roman road, suggesting that the unit may have been originally laid out in the Roman period, several centuries before Cana and his tribe acquired it.

The headquarters of this supposed Roman estate have not been discovered, although a Roman well, discovered in 1913 west of All Cannings Cross Farm, lies close to an area known in the late-eighteenth century as Black Lands, a name often associated with settlement remains. About 500m north-east of Black Lands lay an early iron-age village (of around 650–400BC), excavated between 1911 and 1922, which has given its name – All Cannings Cross – to a type of early iron-age pottery discovered there in profusion. A further 500m north-east, on a spur of the chalk hills beyond, lies Rybury Camp, an iron age hillfort on the site of a much earlier earthwork, a neolithic interrupted ditch enclosure or causewayed camp, of about 4,000–3,000BC.

Continuity in the landscape is a fashionable concept, and at All Cannings it can be made to sound quite convincing – a neolithic site reused as a stronghold in the iron age by villagers from All Cannings Cross, displaced by a Roman villa estate, its territory taken over in turn by Saxon settlers who made their base on the site of the modern village. But 6,000 years cannot be so easily bridged, and unless archaeological discoveries are made to strengthen each link, continuity at All Cannings, thus glibly stated, must remain conjectural.

Returning to surer ground, the ancient parish of All Cannings included Allington and Etchilhampton, although the latter was created a civil parish in 1866, and is described separately in this volume. It was probably not, in any case, an original portion of the Cannings territory, as it name appears to mean ‘a farmstead added to an already existing larger settlement’. A small detached portion of the ancient parish, Fullaway, is now in Stert. Cannings is first documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records that in 1010 a Danish force penetrated Wessex as far as Caneganmersc or Caningan maersc before returning home. Cannings Marsh still existed as a field name immediately north of All Cannings village in the eighteenth century, but it probably originally referred to a larger area, as we have suggested. Allington was described as being in Cannings Marsh in 1394; and it is still found on a map of about 1775, strangely transformed to ‘Vale of Candle Marsh’. Since the name Aldekanning’ (‘Old Cannings’ was in use by the thirteenth century to distinguish All Cannings village from Bishops Cannings, and since the latter has Norman and perhaps Saxon work in its church, it is reasonable to assume that there was a settlement on the site of All Cannings before the conquest.

The present village is closely built for about lkm, on lower chalk, along either side of its street, which runs between church, manor farm and green at the south, to an area known as Townsend, with a smaller triangular green (formerly containing a pond and the village pound), at the north. A certain regularity about the layout, particularly the survival of a common boundary and footpath behind the plots east of the street, seems to denote a planned village between the two greens, with Townsend a later addition. South of the church the street continues as a footpath through the farmyard to Etchilhampton Water, lkm further south, where a mill existed in the eighteenth century. Boundaries continuous with those in the village run parallel on either side, and building debris has been found in this area, so it is very likely that the village once continued south of the church along this footpath. On the ground, however, all trace has now disappeared.

In the fourteenth century All Cannings was one of the most populous parishes in Pewsey Vale, and probably in the seventeenth and certainly in the nineteenth century it had a larger population than today. Between 1851 and 1951 the combined population of All Cannings and Allington dropped by 47%, although it has since climbed.

A stroll along the village street offers many reminders of its substantial past. Good vernacular houses and cottages, of timber frame and thatch, and later of brick, survive in profusion, and they are interspersed within more modern houses, including some very early (1860s) examples of concrete construction. Two larger houses at the northern end of the street, The Grange and Bridge House, and one at the southern end, The Old Rectory, were the homes of village notables. Bridge House was built by the 4th Lord Ashburton, of the Baring banking dynasty, which owned the principal manor for most of the nineteenth century. The Grange belonged to the Hitchcock family, lords of a smaller manor in the parish, which had once belonged to the Ernles (commemorated by a spectacular monument in the church). The Old Rectory was rebuilt by a Cambridge academic, Robert Byng (who erected an inscription in Greek on his house), just before the Civil War – and his ejection from the living. A later incumbent was the philanthropic and evangelizing Thomas Methuen, rector from 1810 until his death in 1869. He built in 1833 a village school close to the church, which continued in use until its replacement, across the green, was completed in 1999. Shortly before he died, and under the supervision of his two clerical sons, the extravagant high Victorian chancel of the parish church was completed.

Allington, 1km north of All Cannings, and separated from it by the Kennet and Avon Canal, which wanders across the parish obeying the contour, is a good example of depopulation. The village lanes form an irregular letter D; on a map of 1773 houses clustered on either side of its curve, which widened, perhaps into a small green. Other houses lay in the centre of the D, along a road marked now only by a footpath. At the northern end a church had existed and was still remembered by old inhabitants in 1869; it, or its predecessor, is mentioned in a document of 1100. A Baptist chapel, the centre of an evangelising campaign in Pewsey Vale by a seceded Anglican priest, Rev J C Philpot, was built in 1829 by a local farmer, Joseph Parry, and survives in use.

Baptist fervour in the nineteenth century posed one threat to the Church of England, represented in All Cannings by its large and impressive parish church of many architectural styles, from Norman to Victorian, and once dedicated to St Anne. Competition from another quarter was acted out on St Anne’s day, 6 August, each year (until discontinued after 1932) at Tan Hill (a corruption of St Anne’s Hill) on the downs above the village, which shares with Milk Hill the distinction of being the highest point (294m) in Wiltshire. To connect the name with pre-Christian fire ceremonies and Celtic deities, as some have done, is perhaps fanciful, but Tan Hill Fair certainly was held in the late middle ages; the earliest record is a grant of 1499. It became one of the most celebrated of all the downland sheep fairs, and played an important part in the agricultural and economic life of central Wiltshire, which in turn (although there were and are no proper roads to the hill) impacted on the pattern of tracks and paths leading to and across the parish. A remote and windy spot (the year the beer-tent blew down lingered long as a folk memory), Tan Hill with its fair was nevertheless a kind of metropolis for Marlborough Downs shepherds, who spent their working lives in view of it. A late-eighteenth century map marks ‘a Building for the Receptacle of the Implements used at the Fair,’ on the fairground site, alongside the ‘Jockeys Stauls’ and the ‘Devills Church.’ Other less than Christian activities continued in the village until the mid-nineteenth century, in the shape of back-swording, a maypole on the green, and mumming at Christmas.


NOTES (location: SU0762; area: 1,841ha; population (2001): 616)
General: VCH 10, 20-33; WANHM 11, 1-40, 194-203l Gough, B M, All Cannings in the past, 1956; Ozzard, R P, One street in Wiltshire: a history of All Cannings, rev. ed. 1997.
-ingas names: Medieval Archaeology 10, 1966, 1-29; All Cannings Cross: Cunnington, M E, The Early Iron Age inhabited site at All Cannings Cross Farm, Wiltshire, 1923; Early map: WSRO 1553/75; houses: Ozzard, R P, A walk in the street: a tour of the houses of All Cannings [ca. 2000]; Methuen: Young, S, Memorials of a happy home, 1995; Tan Hill Fair: Smith, C S (‘Peter Gurney’), Shepherd lore, 1985, 18-20.