A very remarkable needlework sampler has turned up in the village. It seems that the sampler was discovered in an attic in Birmingham and as the word Overseal is clearly mentioned in the text it has eventually found its way home. A sampler came to be a standard piece of tapestry or cross stitch used as a [...]
The invading Danish Viking army spent the winter of 873-4 in Repton and the earliest pagan Danish burial site in England is at nearby Ingleby. The Danes had been ravaging England for years and gradually all of Northern England fell under Danish Viking control; on a map this would approximate to all of the area [...]
We’ve finally managed to complete the tree planting after delays caused by inclement weather. There were two sets of trees being planted; the first were a series of Lime trees around the perimeter of the Recreation Ground to replace 10 that have been felled due to disease or damage over the years. Originally there were [...]
I love it when a plan comes together. Over three years of planning and at last the milepost is in and the faceplate went on this morning. Three years you ask? First the post was rescued, we then contacted the Milepost Society for advice (I kid you not, such a society exists) and then found someone with the ability to [...]
Monkey Parades were popular from at least the 1840’s and were a British working class institution which probably started life in the crowded urban cities. Certainly the middle classes became concerned in the cities that working class people were taking over the open spaces! Be that as it may, Overseal along with the surrounding villages [...]
My great grandmother used to scare successive generations of the family with tales of a wild man who, if you strayed too far from home, or weren’t home at the appointed hour, would snatch you and sell you to the gypsies. The name of this fiend? Jimmy Grabber. In my great gran’s version of the [...]
The following remarkable letter was taken from “The History of the Moira Collieries of Bath, Marquis and Rawdon” by V.A.Shaw. In his History of Leicestershire Nichols records a letter written by Shaw, the Staffordshire historian, in 1792 in his actual words. “Having this morning walked from Seile about a mile to Donisthorpe, a hamlet partly [...]
After all this time, we’re nearly there! I’ve collected the milepost from James Shenton and Sons, along with the new top casting, which looks great. All of the required permissions are in place so just a coat of paint and we can get the post replaced. It’ll be very close to it’s original position (it was [...]
I walked over to the Green Man at Clifton Campville yesterday and while I was taking my refreshment the Landlady came out with an old saying I’d never heard before- she was talking about a couple of whom until recently she’d only ever met one partner. After seeing them together she said “I wouldn’t have [...]
Response to the old street names has led me to consider a lifestyle which had only briefly occurred to me before and it happened like this- One lady was so pleased with the fact that we were recognising our street names that she had a dig around in her photo collection and sent me a [...]
I’ve been puzzled for a long time now about the site of the village mill. The entry in Domesday for Overseal lists a mill valued by King William’s assessors at 5 shillings. It doesn’t sound much now does it? When you consider the value of the entire village was assessed at 65 shillings it perhaps helps to [...]
You may have noticed some new street names going up around the village- these are the names by which these streets were formerly known in days gone by. I’ve never been quite sure why the earlier original names were changed or who makes that kind of decision. Anyway, the Parish Council has managed to get hold [...]
Overseal is an Anglo Saxon word, the earliest form is in the Domesday book- “Alia Scela”-with the same meaning as the modern name (seal implies a wooded area, perhaps marshy). We were part of the larger parish of Seale, in fact we were the northern outlier of that parish, on the Western edge of the [...]
The Burton – Market Bosworth turnpike (a toll road) ran through Overseal, along the route of the modern A444, taking the left fork in the road by the Crickets Inn and then into Measham. The way was marked by mileposts indicating the distances between Burton, Measham and Market Bosworth. Overseal had two of the mileposts, one [...]
(Originally published in free4all) Overseal Shops. Modern lifestyle changes things; car culture has affected our lives in many ways and shopping habits are one of the major things to have altered the framework of village life. Vast out of town superstores selling cheap food and mass produced goods are what we all think [...]