Iwerne Courtney (), also known as Shroton, is a village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...

in the

English county The counties of England are a type of subdivision of England. Counties have been used as administrative areas in England since Anglo-Saxon times. There are three definitions of county in England: the 48 ceremonial counties used for the purpo ...

Dorset Dorset ( ; Archaism, archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by Somerset to the north-west, Wiltshire to the north and the north-east, Hampshire to the east, t ...

. It lies approximately north-west of

Blandford Forum Blandford Forum ( ) is a market town in Dorset, England, on the River Stour, Dorset, River Stour, north-west of Poole. It had a population of 10,355 at the United Kingdom 2021 census, 2021 census. The town is notable for its Georgian archit ...

. It is sited by the small River Iwerne between

Hambledon Hill Hambledon Hill is a prehistoric hill fort in Dorset, England, in the Blackmore Vale five miles northwest of Blandford Forum. The hill itself is a chalk outcrop, on the southwestern corner of Cranborne Chase, separated from the Dorset Downs by t ...

to the south-west and the hills of

Cranborne Chase Cranborne Chase () is an area of central southern England, straddling the counties Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. It is part of the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The area is dominated by, ...

to the east. In 2001 the parish had 187 households and a population of 400. In 2013 the estimated population of the parish was 410.

Toponymy

The names Iwerne Courtney and Shroton both have long histories. Iwerne () is a

Celtic Celtic, Celtics or Keltic may refer to: Language and ethnicity *pertaining to Celts, a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia **Celts (modern) *Celtic languages **Proto-Celtic language *Celtic music *Celtic nations Sports Foot ...

rivername that perhaps refers to a goddess or may mean "yew-river". The village was recorded as ''Ywern'' in 877 AD, and in 1086 in the

Domesday Book Domesday Book ( ; the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book") is a manuscript record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of William the Conqueror. The manuscript was originally known by ...

it was ''Werne''. The addition of Courtney is a result of land by the Iwerne stream being owned in the 13th century by the Courtenay family, the

Earls of Devon Earl of Devon is a title that has been created several times in the Peerage of England. It was possessed first (after the Norman Conquest of 1066) by the Redvers family (''alias'' de Reviers, Revieres, etc.), and later by the Courtenay family. ...

. The name Shroton derives from the

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

''scīr-rēfa'' and ''tūn'', meaning "sheriff's estate" or "sheriff's town",North Dorset District Council, ''Official District Guide'', Home Publishing Co. Ltd., c.1983, p36 and its use is due to the lord and

tenant-in-chief In medieval and early modern Europe, a tenant-in-chief (or vassal-in-chief) was a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opposed to holding them ...

at the time of Domesday being Baldwin of

Exeter Exeter ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and the county town of Devon in South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol. In Roman Britain, Exeter w ...

, the sheriff of Devon. In 1403 the name was recorded as ''Shyrevton''. The name Shroton is preferred locally; in his 1980 book ''Dorset Villages'', Roland Gant stated that "I have heard only visitors to Dorset call it Iwerne Courtney".

History

At the time of the Domesday Book, Iwerne Courtney had 17 households and was in the

hundred 100 or one hundred (Roman numerals, Roman numeral: C) is the natural number following 99 (number), 99 and preceding 101 (number), 101. In mathematics 100 is the square of 10 (number), 10 (in scientific notation it is written as 102). The standar ...

of Gillingham. It had 2 mills, of meadow, 8 ploughlands, and its value to the lord of the manor was £10. In 1261 the village received a grant from Henry the Third, enabling it to hold two annual fairs and a weekly market. The autumn "Shroton Fair" used to be "one of the main Dorset events of the year". It is mentioned in Owen's book of fairs (1788), under the name Shroton. In 1965 Dorset-born broadcaster

Ralph Wightman Ralph Wightman (26 July 1901 – 28 May 1971) was an English lecturer, journalist, author, and radio and television broadcaster. He wrote many books on farming and the countryside and in the 1950s and 1960s became a well-known national figure, esp ...

wrote of the fair that "For many years time was dated in this part of Dorset by Shroton Fair. Old men recalled events by the number of months they had happened before or after this event." However the fair has now "vanished without a trace". The civil parish of the village was formed by the joining of three settlements: Iwerne Courtney in the centre, Farrington to the northwest and Ranston immediately east of the river. Each settlement had its own

open field system The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acr ...

. Farrington now consists of a few farms, and at Ranston only the manor house remains.Ordnance Survey (2013). 1:25,000 Explorer Map, Sheet 118 (Shaftesbury & Cranborne Chase).

Governance

The parish of Iwerne Courtney or Shroton is within the Dorset Council ward of Beacon and the parliamentary constituency of

North Dorset North Dorset was a local government district in Dorset, England, between 1974 and 2019. Its area was largely rural, but included the towns of Blandford Forum, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton. Much of North Dorset wa ...

. The MP since 2015 is

Simon Hoare Simon James Hoare (born 28 June 1969) is a British Conservative Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for North Dorset since 2015. He was formerly Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government from Novemb ...

of the Conservative Party.

Geography

Iwerne Courtney civil parish covers nearly in an L-shaped area on either side of the River Iwerne. To the east it extends over the

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. Ch ...

hills of Cranborne Chase, reaching an elevation of over . To the west it extends north-west over

greensand Greensand or green sand is a sand or sandstone which has a greenish color. This term is specifically applied to shallow marine sediment that contains noticeable quantities of rounded greenish grains. These grains are called ''glauconies'' and co ...

gault The Gault Formation is a geological formation of stiff blue clay deposited in a calm, fairly deep-water marine environment during the Lower Cretaceous Period (Upper and Middle Albian). It is well exposed in the coastal cliffs at Copt Point in Fo ...

and

Kimmeridge clay The Kimmeridge Clay is a sedimentary rock, sedimentary deposit of fossiliferous marine clay which is of Late Jurassic to lowermost Cretaceous age and occurs in southern and eastern England and in the North Sea. This rock formation (geology), form ...

at an altitude of about , although in the south-west it rises to over on the slopes of Hambledon Hill, an outlier of the chalk.

References

External links

{{authority control Villages in Dorset Civil parishes in Dorset