The History of Ringwood

When Ringwood was acquired by King William it was worth £16. It had been worth rather more twenty years earlier when it had been owned by Earl Tosti. Given that, before William the Conqueror’s arrival, Earl Tosti was credited with ownership of some 265 places up and down the country and, after Williams arrival, he owned none, we can only assume that, following the Norman Conquest, it became a buyer’s market, at least for the Normans.

There is a record from 1108 that affirms that the tenants of the “manor of Ringwood and Harbridge” had common rights in the New Forest, among the knights and esquires, for their farm beasts and plough beasts between “Teg att Brokelisford” and “Ostaven” and “in the vill of Beaulieu for all their livestock except goats and geese”. For this they paid they paid the King an annual agistment (a legal instrument allowing them to use the land but not giving them any rights of ownership).

During the 12th and 13th centuries Ringwood was owned by the king as Overlord but assigned by the King to many different noblemen. The patronage of the King was a key element in the monarch’s hold on power and his manipulation of the nobility.

In 1226, Henry III granted Richard Marshall, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke and Lord of the Ringwood Manor, together with Gervaise, his wife, the right to hold a weekly market in the town on Wednesdays “until the King should come of age”. (Every Wednesday, almost 800 years after the original but temporary permission for a market was given, the Market Place in Ringwood is given over to a market.)

In 1280, custodianship of Ringwood Manor was given to Queen Eleanor of Castile.

In 1299, when Edward I married his second wife, Margaret of France (the daughter of Philip III of France), Ringwood Manor formed part of the new Queen of England’s dower. When Margaret died in 1318, Ringwood Manor was handed over to Queen Isabel, the wife of Edward II.

On Isabel’s death in 1331, Ringwood Manor was passed to William Montagu, the first Earl of Salisbury. For the next two centuries, Ringwood Manor formed part of the Salisburys’ family estates, not without interruption, but for much of the time.

In 1337, the Earl of Salisbury, the then Lord of Ringwood Manor was granted the right to hold an annual fair on St Andrew’s Day.

In 1460, Ringwood Manor was part of the estate of Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick and son of the Earl of Salisbury. Richard Neville who exercised power over the English throne for more than a decade, became known as the Kingmaker. Originally a supporter of King Henry VI, Warwick later allied himself with the Duke of York whose son, with Neville’s help, was crowned Edward IV in 1461. Then, when King Edward IV embarked on a marriage of which Warwick disapproved and opposed a marriage which Warwick very much favoured (the marriage of his own daughter Isobel to George, Edward’s brother) relations between the Kingmaker and the King quickly soured. Further disagreements over matters of foreign alliances persuaded Warwick that he should abandon Edward IV and restore Henry VI to the throne. This he did in 1470. A year later, the Kingmaker was killed in the Battle of Barnet and his estates, including Ringwood Manor passed to his daughters.

In 1553, in the reign of Edward VI, Ringwood’s right to hold its weekly Wednesday market was confirmed. It established itself as the main centre in the Avon Valley for the sale of agricultural produce, livestock and forest ponies.

In 1685, Ringwood played a part in the national upheaval of the Monmouth rebellion. James Scott, the 1st Duke of Monmouth, the eldest, albeit illegitimate, son of Charles II and a Protestant, challenged his uncle, James II, the last Catholic King of England, for the throne. Monmouth had little hope of success. His army was untrained and no match for the regular army but James II was Catholic and unpopular and, encouraged by his mistress Lady Henrietta Wentworth, Monmouth was persuaded to chance his luck.

The rebellion seemed to be progressing well at the beginning. Monmouth set out from Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, gathering volunteers to support his cause on the way. He was, rather precipitately as it proved, crowned king in Chard, and again in Cornhill. After two or three skirmishes with troops loyal to the real king, the armies met at Sedgemoor on the 6th July, 1685.

The battle did not go well for Monmouth. What was intended to be a surprise night-time attack by Monmouth’s army was a total failure. A random shot in the early hours of the morning confounded the element of surprise. Monmouth’s cavalry were demoralised by their inability to find their way in the darkness across the Bussex Rhyne, a substantial ditch that lay on their planned route. Monmouth’s infantry of untrained farmworkers and artisans was no match for the well-trained and well-equipped regular army. Estimates of deaths on the rebel side range from 727 to 2,700; of the regular loyalist troops 27 died.

Monmouth’s cavalry fled; his foot soldiers were routed and then massacred. Many of his troops were captured and several hundred were hanged. The notorious Judge Jeffreys, with scant regard for judic+ial process, made his way through Somerset hanging any rebels or suspected rebels he could lay his hands on.

Monmouth himself escaped from the battlefield and took refuge, hiding in a ditch under an ash tree either at Ringwood or at Horton in Dorset, where a local woman revealed his presence to those who were searching for him. Wherever he was caught, he was taken to a house in Ringwood where he was detained, pending a decision on what to do with him. He was already a condemned man, Parliament having passed an Act of Attainder in June, which sentenced him to death as a traitor and stripped him of all his civil and property rights. When word came from London, the Duke of Monmouth was taken from what is now Monmouth House in West Street, Ringwood, to the Tower of London. On 15th July, 1685, James Duke of Monmouth was beheaded. The execution was botched by the executioner, Jack Ketch, who after three blows which failed to sever Monmouth’s head, tried to quit, saying “God Damn Me, I can do no more. My heart fails me. I cannot do it.” The crowd needed to see the macabre ceremony completed and threatened Ketch who took up the axe once more and tried three more times to complete his grisly work. At the end, the head was still not completely severed from the body and Ketch had to use a butcher’s knife to complete a task for which one blow of the axe should have been sufficient.

Before we leave the Monmouth Rebellion and Ringwood’s association with it, we should mention the case of Alice Lisle, the daughter of Sir White Beconshaw, who was brought up at Moyles Court in Ellingham near Ringwood. On the 20th of July, Alice, who was by then aged 67, agreed to shelter two fugitives from the law, a Nonconformist preacher and a man who had fought in Monmouth’s army at the Battle of Sedgemoor. The two fugitives were arrested after spending a single night at Moyles Court. For her compassion, Alice was charged with treason. In a travesty of a trial presided over by Judge Jeffries, she was found guilty and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The king refused to exercise clemency, except that he commuted burning at the stake to beheading, a mode of execution thought more befitting Alice’s rank. On the 2nd of September, Alice was beheaded in Winchester, the last women in England to face the executioner’s axe. She was buried in St Mary and All Saints Church in Ellingham. Today Moyles Court is a prestigious independent school and Alice is also commemorated by The Alice Lisle, a rural inn in Rockford Green, Ringwood.

Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which James II was deposed by Parliament in favour of William of Orange and Mary, the daughter of James II, the tumult of her father’s reign came to an end.

For the next 240 years the Manor of Ringwood passed through the hands of numerous members of the English nobility.

In 1727 the Meeting House was built in Ringwood Town Centre.

​​In 1734, James Mansfield (1734 - 1821) was born in Ringwood Manor, the son of a Hampshire lawyer. After attendance at Eton and King's College Cambridge, Mansfield became an eminent British lawyer and politician. As a lawyer, he was involved in a number of noteworthy cases, including the trial in 1776 of Elizabeth Pierrepont, the Duchess of Kingston, for bigamy. (The Duchess was notorious for her unconventional life-style.) In 1779 Mansfield became Member of Parliament for Cambridge University (which, at that time, was entitled to send two members to the House of Commons). He twice served as Solicitor General and in 1804 was appointed Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and was knighted.

In 1741, Benjamin Bound bought the tannery in West Street and turned it into a brewery to compete with an existing beer-fermenting business on the site of the present Ringwood brewery on Christchurch Road. The origins of Ringwood's tradition of brewing of beer are lost in time and they certainly predate the founding of these brewing establishments but they both represent significant events Ringwood's illustrious beer-making history. in 1802, the Brewery that Benjamin Bound had founded came into the hands of Alexander Carter. Carter & Co. went on to own a number of public houses in Ringwood including the Ship Inn and the Lamb.

In 1794 the then owner of Ringwood Manor, Henry, the eighth Earl of Arundell, sold it to John Morant of Brockenhurst. (John Morant was the son of Edward Morant who had moved from Jamaica to England in 1759 and had, in 1770, bought Brockenhurst House and estate.) The Morant family retained ownership of Ringwood Manor until 1916 when death duties compelled Edward Morant, the great grandson of the Edward who had arrived in England 157 years before, to sell much of their Ringwood properties.

In the 19th century, Ringwood established a reputation for glove-making (Ringwood Woollen Gloves) , with the traditional glove-making stitch and patterns devised then still in use today. It also established a reputation for the manufacture of collars and cuffs.

In 1830 farm workers in the region took part in the “Swing” riots, so named because the supposed leader of the riots was a “Captain Swing”. Captain Swing was never identified and may well have been a fictional leader invented by the rioters. The cause of the riots was years of impoverishment of farm workers because of the increasing mechanisation of farm work. Threshing which, before the invention of the mechanised thresher, had provided employment for thousands could now be carried out by a handful of operators.