The small village of Abbotsbury, along the Dorset coast, is known today mostly for the Abbotsbury Swannery, just down the road. To look at it today, with its population under 500, you’d hardly think it had once been an important battlefield.
The village, and surrounding lands, are part of the Ilchester Estate, which covers about 15,000 acres (about 23 square miles) of Dorset, including most of famous Chesil Beach. How the Earls of Ilchester came to own all that (and a good chunk of Holland Park in London) starts with the dissolution of Catholic monasteries and abbeys by Henry VIII, but the town’s history is older.
Abbotsbury had its origin in an Iron Age hill fort whose ruins are nearby. In the 10th century, King Canute gave the area to a Scandinavian lord, Orc, who settled there with his wife and started the Abbey. The Abbey prospered and operated a serious agricultural enterprise, including the Swannery.
Henry had the Abbey torn down; only its barn survives. But it didn’t disappear: the land was granted to the Strangways family, who built a mansion, using many of the stones. But the Strangways family chose the wrong side in the English Civil War; a battle in the village resulted in the destruction of the house.
The Strangways family got the land back in the Restoration, but lived elsewhere. The Ilchester name comes later; the first Earl of Ilchester married into the Strangways, and added their name to his own, which was Fox.
When fires in the late 17th and early 18th century destroyed almost all the remaining medieval buildings in the village, the ancient stones no longer in use for the manor house were put to good use, and there’s the town we see today.
