Syerston is a small civil parish in Nottinghamshire, about six miles south-west of Newark-on-Trent, and is bisected by the A46 trunk road. It contained 179 inhabitants in seventy-three households as reported by the 2011 census, the count has since fallen to 169 residents at the 2021 census, which are almost all in a settlement to the east of the road.2011 Census The parish is bounded on the north-east by Elston, on the south-east by Flintham and to the east by Sibthorpe. Its southern boundary is the supposed pre-historic trackway called Longhedge Lane.
The Highways Agency constructed in 2011/12 a new seventeen miles long two-lane dual carriageway from the A606 two level junction at Widmerpool to an improved roundabout at Farndon. This passes through the parish between the old A46, which is thought to follow the line of the old Roman Fosse Way, and the settlement of Syerston.
RAF Syerston is almost all in Flintham parish, immediately to the south of Syerston parish and to the west of the A46 trunk road.
Toponymy
The place appears as Sirestune in the Domesday Survey of 1086 and as Sireston juxta Stok (i.e. ...'next to Stoke') in the Assize Rolls of 1278. Scholars are in agreement that the name means the farm or settlement of someone called Sigehere, from an Old English personal name + tūn.J.E, B. Gover; A. Mawer & F. Stenton, Place-Names of Nottinghamshire (Cambridge, 1940), p. 218A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of British Place Names (Oxford, 2011), p. 337E .Ekwall, Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names (Oxford, 1960), p. 458
Domesday survey
The Domesday survey indicates that the Syerston of 1086 was owned by four parties:J. Morris (ed.), Domesday Book, vol. 28: Nottinghamshire (Chichester, 1977), pp.2,6,21,30 the King’s thanes; Robert of Moutiers from Count Alan of Brittany; Remigius de Fécamp, Bishop of Lincoln, Godwin from Berengar de Tosny. Ten freemen (sochemanni), four villagers (villani) and five smallholders (bordarii) are mentioned. Assuming that these were the heads of nineteen households, the population of Syerston in 1086 was perhaps around 80.N.Goose, & A Hinde, 'Estimating local population sizes at fixed points in time. Part II: Specific sources’, Local Population Studies 78 (2007) pp.75–6
Landscape and ownership
By the end of the Commonwealth in 1660, Syerston was the property of Robert Sutton, 1st Baron Lexinton, a member of the Sutton family, who were landowners of Averham and elsewhere.R. Thoroton, History of Nottinghamshire, Vol 1 (1797), p.335 His son, Robert Sutton, 2nd Baron Lexinton, had a daughter Bridget who married, in 1717, John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland and so Syerston passed to the Dukes of Rutland by marriage (along with the manors of Averham, Kelham and Rolleston). Some sixty years later in 1775 Lord George Sutton, a son of the third Duke of Rutland, sold Syerston to Lewis Disney Ffytche of Flintham Hall.Nottinghamshire Archives DD/FM/1/3-4, 29 and 30 June 1775, 10 October 1775 Sixteen years later, Ffytche sold the village to William Fillingham (1734–95).
The landscape of present-day Syerston is principally the work of William Fillingham, who was of a yeoman family from nearby Flawborough. Following work as a land surveyor, he became steward to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, and also land agent to several other local families. He acted in the capacity of enclosure commissioner for over twenty parishes in Nottinghamshire from 1774, as well as several in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Rutland and Derbyshire.K. S. S. Train, 'The Fillinghams of Syerston Hall', Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 74 (1970), pp.22–30; M. E. Brown, ‘Aspects of Parliamentary Enclosure in Nottinghamshire’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Leicester, 1995), pp.109-110
The fees for acting as Commissioner, usually two guineas (£2 and 2 shillings) per day, together with profits from other ventures, such as a number of canal companies and urban property in Newark, enabled him in July 1791 to purchase for £12,375, without a mortgage, the manor of Syerston from Lewis Disney Ffytche and to begin construction of a small mansion.Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/FM/1/14
The manor consisted of 10 messuages, 5 cottages, 10 gardens, 10 orchards, 500a. land, 50a meadow, 100a. pasture, 10a. wood, 100a. furze and heath, 50a. moor, 10a. water, 6s.4d. rent, turbary, fishing, etc. in Sierston and Flintham.Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/FM/1/12 Because William Fillingham had himself surveyed the estate as early as 1775 and had arranged to have estimates made of the improved value of Syerston if enclosed, with costs of enclosure, it is not difficult to guess his next move.Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/FM/60/2
He seems immediately to have begun the process of petitioning Parliament for permission to enclose those parts of the parish, about , which remained unimproved: An Act For Dividing and Inclosing the Open Arable Fields, Meadows, Commons, and Waste Grounds, within the Township of Syerston, in the County of Nottingham, the (32 Geo. 3. c. 49 ), was published on 25 October 1791.
Bearing in mind Fillingham's expertise in these matters, it is surprising that while the enclosure map (by William Attenburrow of East Stoke, covering 769 acres or about 300 hectares), is dated 1792, the Award itself was not signed until as late as 27 June 1795.Nottinghamshire Archives, EA 82/2; DD/FM/59/1-10
The map reveals that Syerston formerly had a detached portion (or exclave), of about fifty acres around Elston Grange farm, reached along Brecks Lane, which was separated from the main part of the township by about of Elston territory.Nottinghamshire Archives, Ibid This anomaly was eliminated by one of the many Local Government Acts (perhaps the Divided Parishes and Poor Law Amendment Act 1882) when Elston gained the land, but seems still to exist as part of the ecclesiastical area of Syerston./Syerston Ecclesiastical Parish Map;1891 Census of England and Wales, Table 14…,24 Mar 1884;TNA, MH 12/9540/71:Draft orders from the Local Government Board amalgamating the detached parts...
The tithes were extinguished at the enclosure: Fillingham as impropriator (a layman in possession of church property) received 77 acres in lieu of the tithes, and the vicar of East Stoke, Thomas Wakefield, received allotments of land totalling about 41 acres.1865 (145-I), Returns of Land and Money Payments assigned in lieu of Tithes under Inclosure Acts, p.30 The land in Syerston allotted to the vicar was part of Cuthill Field (30 acres) and the Moor allotment (11 acres). He leased them to George Wakefield of East Stoke, gentleman (his son and heir), for 21 years at £29 10s. per annum.Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/T/114/1, Lease 7 October 1794; DD/T/64/17, Copy will of Thomas Wakefield of East Stoke, 25 February 1779
William Fillingham could perhaps be seen as an example of the 18th-century social phenomenon of newly wealthy men seeking admission to the landed élite by enclosure and "emparkment". Fillingham bought an open manorial estate, which had belonged to his former employers, enclosed the land, built a house and rearranged the property.
At this point William died and the land together with, the almost complete mansion, Syerston Hall, were inherited by his son George Fillingham (1774–1850). One of his first tasks was to arrange for the Award of the parliamentary commissioners to be put into effect and for the new fields to be hedged or fenced and new thoroughfares laid out. This meant, over about the next three years, organising the collection of stone for the making of roads; purchasing thousands of quickset (or whitethorn) plants, having them planted as hedges, and also arranging for ditches to be dug, fence posts put in, saplings bought for plantations, and all the other tasks that were specified in the Award.Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/FM 56/15, 186–190. George also finished the building of the Hall, and in time established the family amongst the local gentry. Upon his death in 1850 the estate passed to his only son, George (1809–1856), who enjoyed only a short tenure before being succeeded by his son George Henry Fillingham (1841–95) in 1856.K. S. S. Train, ibid
According to a contemporary newspaper obituary, George Henry Fillingham died on 17 January 1895 at the age of 53 of 'heart disease aggravated by an accident'. A sportsman, he had broken a thigh while out hunting with the South Notts Hunt at Halloughton six weeks before, but the writer, David Frith, asserted that he had shot himself in what was 'deemed to be an accident'.D. Frith Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides (Edinburgh, 2001), unpaged; He had played cricket for 'Gentlemen of the South' in 1870 He had only been married for four years and left a son, George Augustus Fillingham (1893–1974).Nottinghamshire Guardian, 27 August 1892; The Standard(London), 24 January 1895;Transactions of the Thoroton Society,75 (1971), p.30
Population
A hint of what the Syerston landscape looked like in 1517 is contained in the findings of enclosure commissioners who were appointed to discover the extent to which arable land in England had been converted to pasture for sheep. They found that since 1489, only five acres of arable land in the parish had been enclosed for pasture, this by Henry Boson in 1513.Commission of Inclosures, The Domesday of Inclosures for Nottinghamshire, from the Returns to the Inclosure Commissioners of 1517, in the Public Record Office, I.S. Leadham (ed.), Thoroton Society, Record Series, 2 (Nottingham,1904), p.43. Conversion of land use to sheep herding (which required few labourers) would not therefore seem to have been a concern at the time.
The Protestation Returns of 1642 were intended to record a full list of all male inhabitants aged 18 and over in each parish. The total population can be estimated by considering the likely proportion of the population under 18, perhaps 40%, and doubling to allow for women.vide A. Whiteman, 'The Protestation Returns of 1641–1642: part I, the general organisation', Local Population Studies, 55 (1995), pp.14–27 Thirty names are listed in the parish returns, with the note "no popish recusants and none refused".W. F. Webster (ed.), Protestation Returns, 1641/2 – Notts/Derbys, (West Bridgford, 1980), p.76 A population estimate for Syerston, immediately before the English Civil War, is therefore 100.
The Hearth Tax was introduced after the Civil War in 1662 to provide a regular source of income for the newly restored monarch, King Charles II. Sometimes referred to as "chimney money", the tax was essentially a property tax on households (rather than houses) graded according to the number of their fireplaces. The 1664 Hearth Tax returns show that Syerston had 21 chargeable hearths in 18 households and eight non-chargeable hearths in seven households.W F Webster (ed.), Nottinghamshire hearth tax, 1664:1674, Thoroton Society Record Series, 37, (1988) p.21 A multiplier, recommended by some authorities, is 4.3, which gives a population for Syerston at the end of the English Civil War of 108 in the 25 households.T. Arkell, 'Multiplying factors for estimating population totals from the Hearth Tax', Local Population Studies, 28 (1982), pp.51–7
Village surnames which span the Civil War period include Townerow, Browne, Hammond, Barnes, Ward and Leeson.
By 1676 it was of urgent interest to discover the religious opinions of the people, since the Catholic James was likely to succeed his brother King Charles II. This anxiety led to the Compton Census, a national ecclesiastical survey named for Henry Compton, Bishop of London. Adults (defined as those over the age of sixteen) in each parish were recorded as either communicants, popish recusants, or other dissenters.