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The History of Harby
Hi, I'm Fluttery the butterfly flying easily over the centuries of Harby history
The history of Harby - it is as full of strange and comic happenings as the Harby pantomime every Christmas. But instead of sitting watching it on the village hall stage let us in imagination go to sit on the hillside to the south of the village where the Wolds come down to the Vale of Belvoir. In front of us is the stage where the Harby developed into our home of today. The play begins ten thousand years ago. The ice age has now ended after a quarter of a million years when humankind lived in the Old Stone Age hunting and gathering. The Vale is entirely covered by trees apart from the marshy land beside the rivers. Smoke from a campfire is curling into the autumn air on the high ground where the church now stands. A dozen people are living in a couple of tents made of animal skins - babies, fathers and mothers and the grandparents. The young men are coming back to camp after a day's hunting with the
carcass of a roe deer carried tied to a long pole on the shoulders of the two strongest. The little band of middle Stone Age people will eat well tonight, venison and also hazel nuts which are so abundant now.
Nothing remains from their camp site for us to find today. The night comes down and we go forward five thousand years in time to scene two. The stage is still set with abundant trees stretching into the distance. But in front of us there is a large clearing with half a dozen houses made of wood and mud walls and thatch for roofs. A coarse type of wheat is has been planted in little fields and grazing on the grass there are cattle and some strange animals not seen before in the land - sheep. Sheep dogs watch over the animals, especially to keep off the wolves of the forests. The people came into the Vale a few generations ago from the continent. They are the first farmers. A line of people come out of the houses with six strong men carrying something on their shoulders. They are singing a lament; although we cannot recognize any words we can feel the sadness of the music. The funeral party, because that is what it is, paces slowly up the hillside towards Stathern where the burial is to take place of their chief where he can look down over his beautiful Vale.
The people will soon move on and nothing will remain of their simple
houses. Our next scene is only three thousand years ago. Around Harby the land has been parceled out into little square fields but with areas of woodland where people manage the trees for firewood and grow long thin tree trunks by coppicing. Big changed have come now that people have learnt the new technology of sharp axes of bronze and jewellery of gold. Pigs forage in the woods but cattle and sheep graze in the fields. The houses are still made of wood, mud and thatch but there are round with a hole in the top where the smoke from the hearths inside drifts into the air. Coming down the hill behind us is a sprightly party who have been to celebrate a religious ceremony at Eastwell. Here there are the burial mounds of their ancestors. Celtic Coritani. The final scene of act one is two thousand years ago. For the first time the people on the stage have a name that has come down to us
from the writers of the Roman Empire - they belong to the Iron Age Coritani tribe. Riding across the Vale and up the hill in front of us is a party of men coming from their town at Lincoln to join the track that follows the edge of the Wolds where the road now runs. They are on their way to the iron ore mines at Holwell and will then ride on to the town at Leicester. They are dressed in brightly coloured woollen cloth which resembles the patterns of the tartans of Scotland. They speak in a language which sounds like the Gaelic still spoken in remote parts of Scotland and Ireland. As they disappear over the hilltop behind us we stretch our legs at the end of act one. The curtain rises on act two. We have had our cup of tea or can of beer kindly supplied by the village hall committee. At first we wonder if we have jumped into the present because the stage looks so like today, fields and woodland. And there are a few buildings around the site of Harby. But these are single storey farm buildings not a regular village.
Only a few fragments of broken pottery have remained for us to find
today. Behind us we hear the sound marching feet and a body of soldiers goes past on
the Roman road towards the town called Causennis near Grantham. The
soldiers have been at the Roman village at Goadby Marwood and they will
pass the villa at Denton on their way. Some of us can recognize the language they are speaking - Latin. These soldiers have come from all around the empire from North Africa, Syria, Spain to make a career in the Roman army.
At the back of the stage on our left we can just see the town of Margidunum on the A46 near Bingham. What a change in the next scene. Harby is deserted and the Roman farm buildings have fallen down, the woods have expanded into the fields and only a few crops are growing. But we can see the well kept villages of Bingham and Hickling where settlements have been built for the first time, the people came from north Germany about a hundred years ago after the Roman empire came to an end. It is AD 627 and at Bingham the villagers have collected in a circle and are listening to a man dressed in black. He is called Paulinus and we can see his black hair, slender, aquiline nose and thin face. He has a slight stoop but is tall and commands respect. He is a Christian missionary from Italy based in Northumbria but who has come south and converted Blecca, the governor of the city of Lincoln. Now he is on his way to baptising many other people in the river Trent. With the next scene we sit forward with special interest, as there is so much activity at the front of the stage. Houses are being built, fields prepared and Harby as a village has at last begun.
People have come from Denmark around AD 850 to settle in England. The language on stage now is Scandinavian and the people's religion is full of the gods
Tua, Woden, Thor, Frig and others from which we have taken our names of the days of the
week Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. The settlement is called a
"by" or settlement in the Scandinavian language and "heorde"
from the Scandinavian word meaning herdsman, the village of the herdsmen. Hardly two hundred years have passed before the next scene when the officials of William the Conqueror have arrived to gather the information for Domesday Book.
They are speaking to one another in French and have a translator for the
mix of Danish and early English spoken by the people. There is a simple wooden church now where the census is being held. Harby is
spelled Herdebi and Hertebi. Around the village are three large fields, one with wheat, one with beans and one lying fallow where cattle, sheep and goats are grazing. In the woods nearby the village pigs are rootling for fallen nuts and for grubs and roots in the ground. On the right of the stage work is beginning on a huge castle overlooking the Vale called "beautiful view" or in the old French language
"Bel vedeir". The final scene in act two is at night. The good villagers of Harby are asleep with only a candle alight here and there where a mother goes to her baby. It is November 4th 1645. In the middle distance is Wiverton Hall on the way to Bingham where the supporters of the king have been besieged for months. Far, far in the distance is Newark where the king's army is safely established behind huge earthworks. If we strain our eyes we can see a group of fiercely armed soldiers on horseback who left Newark at 11 pm to ride south. Now at nearly 3 am they are about to reach the next Royalist stronghold at Belvoir Castle. And riding surrounded and protected by the soldiers is a handsome man with flowing curly hair who is not a soldier. He is Charles the King of England. At the back of the stage on the left is Nottingham where the Parliamentary army is stationed ready for the final battles of the Civil War. In the last two acts the natural landscape has been taken over by farming and the struggle of emperors and kings has ended in the people ruling themselves. Now in act three it is 1660 and
the member of Parliament for Leicestershire has come to visit the rector of Harby, the Reverend
Thomas Daffye. Outside the rectory a cartload of his elixir is being loaded to go out to the shops. He is a doctor as well as a parson and his medicine is starting to sell over the whole of England. It is known for keeping patients cheerful and we suspect there is a proportion of alcohol in it. A hunting party goes across the stage over the three large fields where most of the villagers of Harby work. The dogs are following
deer, they are huge staghounds belonging to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle In the next scene two hundred years ago the landscape has been transformed. A barge is being pulled along the towing path of the new canal, carrying coal from Nottingham for the villages of the Vale. The huge fields of the past have been made into many smaller fields by new hawthorn hedges.
Harby is a village with about 320 inhabitants. On the barge the master and his son are tucking into their lunch, bread and some of the excellent cheese made around Harby. A lot of
the cheese goes to the village of Stilton where it is sold to travellers on the Great North Road from London to York. A party of horses and dogs comes across the stage from Belvoir Castle, hunting the foxes which are replacing the deer. It is a hundred years go. Coming towards us in the next scene is the train from Bottesford to Melton. It stops at the station half way between Harby and Stathern. In the foreground is the narrow gauge inclined plane railway where the trucks full of iron ore come down from the mines in the hills behind us. The ore is loaded onto the mainline. Many Harby people work on the railway and the mines. It is late afternoon and over in Harby the children are coming out of school. The school building is already 40 years old.
1940 and England is at war. Troops are getting out of the train at Harby and Stathern station, bound for the airfield just constructed on the flat land between Harby and Langar. The
top of the mill at Harby has being taken down as it is a threat to the aircraft coming in to land. In our final scene the canal, the railway and the aerodrome have all come and gone. Geologists have proposed mining for coal and sinking a well for oil around Harby but nothing has come of it. The village is as quiet and beautiful as you could wish for. However if we peep in through the window of one of the houses we can see the computer where you are reading this. Harby is in touch with the whole world through the modern technology. Our play has come to and end.
Copyright
© 2000 Leslie Cram. All rights reserved.
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