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Abbotsbury
Nigel Melville, MA 1959, BD 1962
"Abbotsbury, sketched in mist and sunlight" is an account of a Dorset village which has known only three owners since the earliest days of English history - Wessex nobles, Benedictine monks from 1024 to 1539, and the Strangways family ever since. So little is widely known that this is only the fifth popular history to have been published: the first three are at least 150 years old, and the most recent one before this was last reprinted in the 1950s.
A shame, because this tiny village has seen more than its fair share of English history - the closure of its great monastery and its purchase by the family who still own the village, skirmishing in the Civil War, decline and neglect turning eventually to the development of tourist attractions and its place in the World Heritage Jurassic Coast.
This paperback tries, as did the author's "Tidal Range", to tell the village story as if writer and reader are having a friendly chat - perhaps in one of the village pubs ...
ISBN: 1 873129 01 7
