The character of the village
Batheaston was never a closed village subject to the dictates of a dominant
local landowning family deciding who should come and go, how they should
earn their living or how they should be accommodated. Batheaston is a
large parish, even larger before local government boundary changes in
the second half of the 20th Century transferred large areas of the parish
to the City of Bath. In 1840 the largest landowner by far, William Eleazer
Pickwick, owned only 224 acres in Batheaston and he was an absentee landowner.
14 landowners held between 42 and 152 acres each and these included the
Batheaston Freeholders, Oriel College, Oxford, and Bath General Hospital.
The great majority of landowners, 117 of them, owned less than 40 acres
each. This appears to have always been the case. Batheaston had no manor
house, in the Middle Ages the village was not coterminous with a manor
– in fact, there appear to have been three manors. The various lords
were content to exploit Batheaston at a distance. As long as the smallholders
paid their dues and fines they were largely left to their own devices
(Dobbie, 1969, p. 13-14).
The population of Batheaston is mobile. There is no long lasting family (Dobbie, 1969, p.61). Good communications and the proximity to Bath have aided mobility. Until 1995 a major road ran through Batheaston based upon the Roman Fosse Way, which, in turn, became one of the first turnpike roads in England and, later, the A4. The people of Batheaston have never been isolated, never remote from new influences - and within three miles of the economically important and fashionable Bath. Perhaps significantly, of the three villages to the east of Bath with the prefix Bath in its name, only Batheaston seems to have consistently borne the prefix since early medieval times.
Over the centuries the changing mix of the inhabitants of Batheaston have left their individual marks on the properties in which they live or work by rebuilding, extending, re-fronting or rearranging them to meet changing economic and social conditions. The “unspoilt” property in Batheaston is a rarity. It is instructive to compare Batheaston with another village very close to Bath, Newton St Loe. In the buildings survey conducted by John Dallimore (2001), the picture emerges of a closed village dominated for generations by its local squire or lord exercising personal power over the community from the manor house. This village displays all the expected features of a closed village – small, rural and remote with tenanted properties and “unspoilt”.
