Fritham
Coordinates: 50°55′32″N 1°39′40″W / 50.925558°N 1.6611920°W
| Fritham | |
 Fritham |
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 Fritham
Fritham shown within Hampshire |
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| OS grid reference | SU239141 |
|---|---|
| District | New Forest |
| Shire county | Hampshire |
| Region | South East |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | LYNDHURST |
| Postcode district | SO43 |
| Dialling code | 023 |
| Police | Hampshire |
| Fire | Hampshire |
| Ambulance | South Central |
| EU Parliament | South East England |
| UK Parliament | New Forest East |
Fritham is a small village in Hampshire, England. It lies in the north of the New Forest, near the Wiltshire border. It is in the civil parish of Bramshaw.[1]
History
The name Fritham may be derived from Old English meaning a cultivated plot (hamm) in scrub on the edge of a forest (fyrhth).[2]
The oldest feature in Fritham is a Bronze Age Bowl barrow, known as The Butt which lies just east of the village, although it has been partially damaged on top by a brick structure.[3]
Fritham is not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.[4] It was once thought that the Domesday settlement of Truham (or Trucham) may have been Fritham,[5] but this is now thought unlikely as Truham was within Boldre Hundred.[4] The first mention of Fritham appears early in the 13th century,[2] when Geoffrey de Baddesley held land in Baddesley and Fritham. Fritham remained attached to the manor of South Baddesley in the parish of Boldre at least until 1429.[5]
The Royal Oak - a thatched cottage with red-brick additions - is one of the oldest pubs in the New Forest, dating back to the 1600s.[6] Fritham Lodge, dating from 1671, may have been one of Charles II hunting lodges.[7] A school and chapel opened in Fritham in 1861.[5]
From the 1860s until the 1920s Fritham was home to the Schultze gunpowder factory.[8] The factory specialised in smokeless powder for sporting guns.[8] Established in 1865, it was at one time the largest nitro-compound gunpowder factory in the world, with sixty separate buildings and a staff of a hundred.[9] It supplied three-quarters of the world's annual consumption of gunpowder for sporting purposes and often sent 100-ton consignments to the Americas loading road vans and special railway trucks for the docks at Southampton.[9] Little now remains of the factory except for the superintendent's and gatekeeper's houses.[10]Eyeworth Pond, near Fritham, was specially created by the factory as a reservoir to hold water needed during the manufacturing process.[10]
Four young men from Fritham went down with the Titanic in 1912; Leonard Mark Hickman, Leonard Hickman, Stanley George Hickman, Ambrose Hood.[11]
The Ham class minesweeper HMS Fritham was named after the village.
Notes
- ^ Bramshaw Parish Council
- ^ a b Old Hampshire Gazetteer - Fritham
- ^ Hampshire Treasures - Bramshaw, page 21
- ^ a b Througham (Truham), Pastscape
- ^ a b c Victoria County History, (1912), A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 5, Pages 623-626
- ^ Hampshire pub guide: The Royal Oak, Fritham, The Telegraph, 03 Mar 2011
- ^ Fritham Lodge, Bramshaw British Listed Buildings
- ^ a b Norman Henderson, (2007), A Walk Around the New Forest: In Thirty-Five Circular Walks, pages 87-8. Frances Lincoln
- ^ a b Kenneth Hudson, (1968), The industrial archaeology of southern England: Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Gloucestershire east of the Severn, page 35
- ^ a b Eyeworth Pond, Fritham, and the Schultze Gunpowder Factory
- ^ The Royal Oak, Fritham, Lymington.org
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Fritham |
- Eyeworth Pond, Fritham, and the Schultze Gunpowder Factory, New Forest Explorers Guide
