Iwerne Courtney (), also known as Shroton, 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 below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authorit ...

in the English county of

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 , ...

. It lies approximately north-west of Blandford Forum. It is sited by the small River Iwerne between Hambledon Hill to the south-west and the hills of

Cranborne Chase Cranborne Chase () is an area of central southern England, straddling the counties Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. It is part of the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The area is dominated by, ...

to the east. In 2001 the parish had 187 households and a population of 400. In 2013 the estimated population of the parish was 410.

Toponymy

The names Iwerne Courtney and Shroton both have long histories. Iwerne () is a Celtic rivername that perhaps refers to a goddess or may mean "yew-river". The village was recorded as ''Ywern'' in 877 AD, and 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 manus ...

it was ''Werne''. The addition of Courtney is a result of land by the Iwerne stream being owned in the 13th century by the Courtenay family, the

Earls of Devon Earl of Devon was created several times in the English peerage, and was possessed first (after the Norman Conquest of 1066) by the de Redvers (''alias'' de Reviers, Revieres, etc.) family, and later by the Courtenay family. It is not to be con ...

. The name Shroton derives from the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

''scīr-rēfa'' and ''tūn'', meaning "sheriff's estate" or "sheriff's town",North Dorset District Council, ''Official District Guide'', Home Publishing Co. Ltd., c.1983, p36 and its use is due to the lord and

tenant-in-chief In medieval and early modern Europe, the term ''tenant-in-chief'' (or ''vassal-in-chief'') denoted a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opp ...

at the time of Domesday being Baldwin of Exeter, the sheriff of Devon. In 1403 the name was recorded as ''Shyrevton''. The name Shroton is preferred locally; in his 1980 book ''Dorset Villages'', Roland Gant stated that "I have heard only visitors to Dorset call it Iwerne Courtney".

History

At the time of the Domesday Book, Iwerne Courtney had 17 households and was in 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 Gillingham. It had 2 mills, of meadow, 8 ploughlands, and its value to the lord of the manor was £10. In 1261 the village received a grant from Henry the Third, enabling it to hold two annual fairs and a weekly market. The autumn "Shroton Fair" used to be "one of the main Dorset events of the year". It is mentioned in Owen's book of fairs (1788), under the name Shroton. In 1965 Dorset-born broadcaster

Ralph Wightman Ralph Wightman (26 July 1901 – 28 May 1971) was an English lecturer, journalist, author, and radio and television broadcaster. He wrote many books on farming and the countryside and in the 1950s and 1960s became a well-known national figure, esp ...

wrote of the fair that "For many years time was dated in this part of Dorset by Shroton Fair. Old men recalled events by the number of months they had happened before or after this event." However the fair has now "vanished without a trace". The civil parish of the village was formed by the joining of three settlements: Iwerne Courtney in the centre, Farrington to the northwest and Ranston immediately east of the river. Each settlement had its own

open field system The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acr ...

. Farrington now consists of a few farms, and at Ranston only the manor house remains.Ordnance Survey (2013). 1:25,000 Explorer Map, Sheet 118 (Shaftesbury & Cranborne Chase).

Governance

The parish of Iwerne Courtney or Shroton is within the Dorset Council ward of Beacon and the parliamentary constituency of

North Dorset North Dorset was a local government district in Dorset, England. It was largely rural, but included the towns of Blandford Forum, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton. Much of North Dorset was in the River Stour vall ...

. The MP since 2015 is Simon Hoare of the Conservative Party.

Geography

Iwerne Courtney civil parish covers nearly in an L-shaped area on either side of the River Iwerne. To the east it extends over the

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. Ch ...

hills of Cranborne Chase, reaching an elevation of over . To the west it extends north-west over

greensand Greensand or green sand is a sand or sandstone which has a greenish color. This term is specifically applied to shallow marine sediment that contains noticeable quantities of rounded greenish grains. These grains are called ''glauconies'' and co ...

gault The Gault Formation is a geological formation of stiff blue clay deposited in a calm, fairly deep-water marine environment during the Lower Cretaceous Period (Upper and Middle Albian). It is well exposed in the coastal cliffs at Copt Point in ...

and

Kimmeridge clay The Kimmeridge Clay is a sedimentary deposit of fossiliferous marine clay which is of Late Jurassic to lowermost Cretaceous age and occurs in southern and eastern England and in the North Sea. This rock formation is the major source rock for Nor ...

at an altitude of about , although in the south-west it rises to over on the slopes of Hambledon Hill, an outlier of the chalk.

References

External links

{{authority control Villages in Dorset Civil parishes in Dorset