Sandford Orcas is a village and
parish
A parish is a territorial entity in many Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest, often termed a parish priest, who might be assisted by one or ...
in northwest
Dorset
Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset. Covering an area of ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...
, north of
Sherborne
Sherborne is a market town and civil parish in north west Dorset, in South West England. It is sited on the River Yeo, on the edge of the Blackmore Vale, east of Yeovil. The parish includes the hamlets of Nether Coombe and Lower Clatcombe. T ...
. In the
2011 census the parish had a population of 180.
[ Just to the east of the village itself is the hamlet of Holway. The village lies in hilly country on the Dorset/Somerset county border, and was part of ]Somerset
( en, All The People of Somerset)
, locator_map =
, coordinates =
, region = South West England
, established_date = Ancient
, established_by =
, preceded_by =
, origin =
, lord_lieutenant_office =Lord Lieutenant of Somerset
, lor ...
until 1896, with the land connected to the Abbot of Glastonbury __NOTOC__
The Abbot of Glastonbury was the head (or abbot) of Anglo-Saxon and eventually Benedictine house of Glastonbury Abbey at Glastonbury in Somerset, England.
The following is a list of abbots of Glastonbury:
Abbots
See also
* Abbot's Kit ...
.
The poetic-sounding village name has a more prosaic explanation. Three streams rise in the parish and in Saxon
The Saxons ( la, Saxones, german: Sachsen, ang, Seaxan, osx, Sahson, nds, Sassen, nl, Saksen) were a group of Germanic
*
*
*
*
peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large country ( Old Saxony, la, Saxonia) near the No ...
times, the water was forded over a sandy riverbed from which the name Sand
Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided mineral particles. Sand has various compositions but is defined by its grain size. Sand grains are smaller than gravel and coarser than silt. Sand can also refer to a soil texture, textur ...
ford
Ford commonly refers to:
* Ford Motor Company, an automobile manufacturer founded by Henry Ford
* Ford (crossing), a shallow crossing on a river
Ford may also refer to:
Ford Motor Company
* Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company
* Ford F ...
derives. The 'Orcas' descends from the Norman ''Orescuilz'' family, who came to own the village manor in the century after the Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings nrf, Batâle dé Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066 between the Norman-French army of William, the Duke of Normandy, and an English army under the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson, beginning the Norman Conquest ...
in 1066. The village was known as ''Sanford'' 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 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manusc ...
), ''Sandford'' in 1243, ''Sandford Horscoys'' in 1372, and ''Samford Orescoys'' in 1427. The manor house
A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals with ...
built circa 1550 during the Tudors
The House of Tudor was a royal house of largely Welsh and English origin that held the English throne from 1485 to 1603. They descended from the Tudors of Penmynydd and Catherine of France. Tudor monarchs ruled the Kingdom of England and it ...
is Grade I listed[Gant, R., ''Dorset Villages'', Hale, 1980, p65] and has changed little over the centuries. The two renovations completed over the past 150 years, have both been quite sympathetic.
The parish was part of the hundred
100 or one hundred (Roman numeral: C) is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101.
In medieval contexts, it may be described as the short hundred or five score in order to differentiate the English and Germanic use of "hundred" to des ...
of Horethorne.
Adjacent to the manor house is the Perpendicular
In elementary geometry, two geometric objects are perpendicular if they intersect at a right angle (90 degrees or π/2 radians). The condition of perpendicularity may be represented graphically using the ''perpendicular symbol'', ⟂. It can ...
church of Saint Nicholas
Saint Nicholas of Myra, ; la, Sanctus Nicolaus (traditionally 15 March 270 – 6 December 343), also known as Nicholas of Bari, was an early Christian bishop of Greek descent from the maritime city of Myra in Asia Minor (; modern-day De ...
, which has a 13th-century font
In movable type, metal typesetting, a font is a particular #Characteristics, size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "Sort (typesetting), sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of ...
, shaped like an upturned Canterbury bell flower. In the south chapel is a wall monument of carved and painted alabaster
Alabaster is a mineral or rock that is soft, often used for carving, and is processed for plaster powder. Archaeologists and the stone processing industry use the word differently from geologists. The former use it in a wider sense that includes ...
, showing a knight in armour kneeling between his two wives and eleven children. Seven children kneel, in black gowns and the others are in swaddling clothes
Swaddling is an age-old practice of wrapping infants in blankets or similar cloths so that movement of the limbs is tightly restricted. Swaddling bands were often used to further restrict the infant. Swaddling fell out of favour in the 17th centu ...
of red and lying in a heap behind their mother. The knight, who rests below the memorial is William Knoyle. The reading on the stone gives information on this tomb dated 1607. It seems he married 'Fillip, daughter of Robert Morgane...by whome hee had yssve 4 children & bee dead'. The knight's second wife was Grace Clavel, by whom he had three sons and four daughters, who survived him.
References
External links
*
Villages in Dorset
Places formerly in Somerset
{{Dorset-geo-stub