Dorset Standing Committee 1646, with Strangways Letters c.1643-1659, edited by Tim Goodwin.
In 1982 a missing portion of the Minutes of the Dorset Standing Committee was discovered at Kingston Lacy, home of Dorset’s largest landowners, the Bankes family. This came as a great surprise, as nobody knew that it existed.
The Minutes cover the period when the country was ruled by Parliament under Oliver Cromwell. King Charles I was exiled from court (and would eventually be executed). Standing Committees were set up in every county to take over the running of local government and to exert control over the people. Anyone who opposed Parliamentary rule was heavily fined or had homes and property confiscated.
Dorset’s Civil War history is rich in incident with the sieges of Corfe Castle and Lyme Regis being major events in the history of that conflict. Tim Goodwin, an expert on the period has transcribed this fascinating piece of ‘lost’ history which along with related material is due to be published by Dorset Record Society.
The launch event for this new DRS publication will take place at the Dorset History Centre at 2pm on 18th May 2024. All are welcome.
When Ralph Bankes died in 1981, he left Kingston Lacy and its estates in Purbeck to the National Trust. Beside the magnificent paintings, furniture and other works of art which suddenly would be available for the public to see, the house also contained the Bankes Archive, a major collection of documents dating from the 1600s to the 20th century.
The archives were taken to Dorset History Centre in Dorchester, where they were carefully catalogued and made available to the public. It was during this process that the missing portion of the Minutes was found. The main portion from 1646-1650 had been published in 1902, but this section covering March and April 1646 was an unexpected and exciting find.
The Minutes record the daily business, including charges for feeding Parliamentary soldiers, seizing horses from local people for the military, selling the goods of people whose property had been confiscated, cutting down their timber and harvesting their crops. They also ejected parsons from parishes if their beliefs didn’t conform to Puritan standards, and encouraged locals to pass on intelligence about their neighbours.
The Civil War-era letters of members of the Strangways family form the second part of this book. They are almost all written by women. Their menfolk were away fighting, imprisoned, or in exile abroad. Their wives remained behind to keep an eye on their houses and land, or in many cases, to petition the Standing Committee for the return of their property and relief from heavy fines.
The Minutes and letters are written in seventeenth century handwriting, which is not easy to read. The original documents have been damaged in places, which makes them even harder to decipher. Dorset Record Society has published them in a hardback volume in modern typeface.
Tim Goodwin’s book, Dorset in the Civil War was the first to be published on the subject since 1910, and was well received. He has been fascinated by the history of Dorset, especially in the 17th century, since moving into the county in 1988 and continues to research the period.
The book is published by Dorset Record Society price £14.95. Available from the Dorset Record Society or at the Dorset History Centre, Bridport Road, Dorchester, DT1 1RP.
Dorset Record Society was set up in the 1960s with the aim of publishing original manuscripts to make them accessible to the general reader. In January 2016 it became a separate charitable organisation. Dorset Record Society has concentrated on documents that are not readily available for study, those that are difficult to read, or those that are of particular interest both to academic and general interest.