Yetminster
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Yetminster 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 of
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 south-west of
Sherborne Sherborne is a market town and civil parishes in England, civil parish in north west Dorset, in South West England. It is sited on the River Yeo (South Somerset), River Yeo, on the edge of the Blackmore Vale, east of Yeovil. The parish include ...
. It is sited on the River Wriggle, a tributary of the River Yeo, and is built almost entirely of honey-coloured limestone, which gives the village an appearance reminiscent of Cotswold villages. In the 2011 census the civil parish had a population of 1,105.


History

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 ...
Yetminster was recorded as ''Etiminstre''; it had 76 households, 26 ploughlands, of meadow and 2 mills. It was in Yetminster Hundred and the tenant-in-chief was the
Bishop of Salisbury The Bishop of Salisbury is the Ordinary (officer), ordinary of the Church of England's Diocese of Salisbury in the Province of Canterbury. The diocese covers much of the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset. The Episcopal see, see is in the Salisbur ...
. The parish church of St Andrew has Saxon origins, though only part of a 10th-century standing cross remains from that period; the current building dates mostly from the mid-15th century, though the
chancel In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar, including the Choir (architecture), choir and the sanctuary (sometimes called the presbytery), at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building. It may termi ...
was built around 1300 and the whole church was restored in 1890 and several times subsequently. In 1300 the bishop of Salisbury founded a weekly market and three-day annual fair in the village. Records do not state whether the market thrived, but the fair continued until the 19th century. It was revived in the 20th century, and today takes place on the second Saturday in July. Robert Boyle, pioneer of modern chemistry who is best known for
Boyle's law Boyle's law, also referred to as the Boyle–Mariotte law or Mariotte's law (especially in France), is an empirical gas laws, gas law that describes the relationship between pressure and volume of a confined gas. Boyle's law has been stated as: ...
, left an endowment for the provision of a school for poor boys in the district; the building was constructed in 1697 and functioned as a school between 1711 and 1945. In the early 19th century, several buildings in the village accommodated a thriving dowlas industry.Hall, J. J. (1898). James Padbury, obit. ''The Horological Journal'' October 1898, vol. 41. The British Horological Institute, Newark. Records from 1848 indicate Yetminster's degree of self-sufficiency as a community; nearly 20 trades and crafts were conducted in the village, including a glazier, a saddler, several shoe and boot makers, a tailor and a
maltster Malting is the process of steeping, Germination, germinating, and drying grain to convert it into malt. Germination and sprouting involve a number of enzymes to produce the changes from seed to seedling and the malt producer stops this stage of t ...
. In 1857 the Wilts, Somerset and Weymouth Railway between Weymouth and Westbury opened; it passed through Yetminster and a station was built for the village. Many of the buildings still standing in the village were built from the local limestone between the end of the 16th and the middle of the 18th centuries, resulting in an unusually unified architectural appearance. Writing in 1905 Sir Frederick Treves described the village as "probably the most consistent old-world village or townlet in the county", in 1965 Ralph Wightman stated that "Yetminster ..is the nearest Dorset equivalent to the stone building of the Cotswold country", and in 1980 Roland Gant wrote that "little has come since to spoil this largish village."


Governance

Yetminster is within an electoral ward that bears its name and includes Chetnole and the surrounding area. The population of this ward in the 2011 census was 1,564. The ward is one of 32 that comprise the West Dorset parliamentary constituency.


Geography

Measured directly, Yetminster village is about southwest of Sherborne, southeast of
Yeovil Yeovil () is a town and civil parishes in England, civil parish in Somerset, England. It is close to Somerset's southern border with Dorset, west of London, south of Bristol, west of Sherborne and east of Taunton. The population of the bui ...
, northeast of Bridport and north-northwest of Dorchester. The geology of the parish comprises a narrow central band of
Middle Jurassic The Middle Jurassic is the second Epoch (geology), epoch of the Jurassic Period (geology), Period. It lasted from about 174.1 to 161.5 million years ago. Fossils of land-dwelling animals, such as dinosaurs, from the Middle Jurassic are relativel ...
cornbrash limestone and Forest Marble that crosses the parish from west to east, with Upper Jurassic Oxford clay to the north and south. In the southeast and northeast the Oxford clay is overlain by
Quaternary The Quaternary ( ) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), as well as the current and most recent of the twelve periods of the ...
undifferentiated head deposits. The village is sited on the cornbrash.


Demography

In the 2011 census Yetminster civil parish had 531 dwellings, 498 households and a population of 1,105. % of residents were age 65 or over, compared to % for England as a whole. The population of the parish in the censuses between 1921 and 2001 is shown in the table below:


Amenities

Yetminster does not lie on a main road and experiences mostly local traffic. It has its own
railway station Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport using wheeled vehicles running in railway track, tracks, which usually consist of two parallel steel railway track, rails. Rail transport is one of the two primary means of ...
(on the Heart of Wessex Line), which is sited close to the village centre. St Andrews Church has a 300-year-old faceless clock which chimes the national anthem every three hours. As well as the expected local store and pub, Yetminster still possesses a variety of village amenities and services, including a GP surgery and health centre, and a sports/social club with playing grounds and tennis court.


Notable people

Yetminster was the birthplace of Benjamin Jesty (c.1736–1816), a farmer who lived in the village for much of his life, who is notable for his early experiment in inducing immunity against
smallpox Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by Variola virus (often called Smallpox virus), which belongs to the genus '' Orthopoxvirus''. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (W ...
using deliberate inoculation with the less virulent cowpox. Unlike
Edward Jenner Edward Jenner (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine. The terms ''vaccine'' and ''vaccination'' are derived f ...
, a medical doctor who is given broad credit for developing the smallpox vaccine in 1796, Jesty did not publicise his findings, even though they were made some twenty years earlier in 1774. Only two people pre-dated Jesty's work. There is a
blue plaque A blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom, and certain other countries and territories, to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving a ...
commemorating Jesty's pioneering work at Upbury Farm, near to the church. English
folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be ca ...
group The Yetties met in the Yetminster Scout Group in the mid-1950s and took their name from the village.


References


Notes


General references

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External links

{{authority control Villages in Dorset