The history of Shephall Village was written by Mary Spicer in 1984 in her
book "Tyme out of Mind" and manages to
capture the end of a way of life that had not changed much for perhaps a
thousand years or more. Shephall was essentially an agricultural village
that almost solely depended on the struggle to raise animals, crops and fruit from the land to survive from year to
year, everyone was involved in that struggle from birth to death. Many
of those lives went unrecorded as parish registers were not introduced until
1560. The further back in time we try to go the poorer the information.
The majority of the population was not literate and sometimes only the
landowners are recorded in odd documents that just give us fragments of
information.
This website was made to record the history of Shephall Manor which has
been inextricably linked to the village but I feel Mary's history is so well
written I have little to add. In her own words:-
Although there had been some
material changes in the village over the years some new cottages, the school,
the new manor house ‑ I think that the way of life of the Shephall people that I
knew as a
child had changed very little over the centuries. In the early twenties no man
went out of the village to work; the farms held the men, domestic service the
girls, although several girls had living‑in jobs outside the village. Men worked
a six day week, perhaps finishing by midday on Saturday; but if you were a
cowman or a horsekeeper you were seldom free even on a Sunday, for there was
stock to be fed, cows to be milked, a sick animal to tend. A gardener needed to
return to his greenhouses, in summer to check humidity and to water, in winter
to stoke boilers to maintain heat in the hothouses. Farmers, their sons and
their men worked side by side with the common aim of making the earth yield its
crops, suffering the bad and enjoying the good years together. At harvest time
they would work from dawn till dusk, then gather the symbolic bounty into church
for the Festival. Sheaves of every kind of grain, roots scrubbed, vegetables
trimmed, fruit polished, the biggest and best, all decorated by the autumn
flowers, would fill the aisles and window ledges. Barrows of produce would be
wheeled up from the Bury with specially selected bunches of grapes to decorate
the screen. This was one time when everyone from the village came to church, the
harvest hymns raising the roof by singers and non‑singers alike.
To go to the present website of St Mary's Church in Shephall
or Aston click on the name you want below
