There has probably been a nucleated village settlement on this site since the late 10th century – Saxon times. However, scattered homesteads and complete cultivation of the land will have occurred since at least the Iron Age and throughout Roman and Romano-British times. The village has an ancient history and today boasts many houses dating from the 16th century or earlier.
c 600 AD
The Saxons were farmers speaking a language that was to become the basis of English. They constructed rectangular wooden buildings and lived in family groups. Two dispersed farmsteads can be noted in the field names of ‘Worthy’ and ‘Huish’; both imply land sufficient to support a family – a ‘hide’. Each hide needed to be sufficient to keep a family and provide one man for the county-wide muster of troops for the ‘fryd’, the Saxon army..
c 10th Century
Two lost Charters record parcels of land being given to Wulfric and Aelfswith, probably from the Saxon Estate at Yeovil. Both were eventually bequeathed to Glastonbury Abbey. Saxon England was divided into ’Shires’ and the Shires into ‘Hundreds’. Tintinhull was the head of its Hundred.
c 11th Century
The Norman Invasion of 1066 brought an end to Saxon dominance but not their governmental structure, the division of the land or the English tongue. Robert, half-brother to William the Conqueror, obtains Tintinhull and Montacute. At Montacute he builds a castle on St Michael’s Mount.
The Domesday Book records: “The Count holds TINTINHULL himself. Glastonbury Church held it in the time of King Edward. There are 7 hides and 1 virgate of land, but it paid tax for 5 hides. There is land for 10 ploughs. Of this [land] 4 hides are in lordship and [there are] 2 ploughs there and 5 slaves and 19 villagers and 9 smallholders with 8 ploughs. A mill there paying 30d and 60 acres of meadow and 200 acres of pasture and 57 acres of woodland. It is worth £16. Drogo holds 1 virgate of this land from the Count and it is worth 1 silver mark.”
c 12th Century
In 1102, to atone for the dreadful massacre of native Saxons after an attack on the Norman castle at Montacute, William, Robert of Mortain’s son, built a Priory at Montacute. He endowed it with the Tintinhull ‘manor’. A ‘cell’ of the Priory was probably the beginning of our village church
16th Century
Henry VIII’s Secretary of State, Sir William Petre, acquired the manor of Tintinhull. In 1546 he assigned the tenancy of Tintinhull Parsonage to an old university friend, Edward Napper. So began the Napper family’s 250-year association with the village.
Nicholas Napper (d. 1579) purchased the rectorial lands from the Crown in 1559. Within 100 years the family had acquired lordship of the manor and the three largest houses in the village.
The area was fertile and prospered; many of our ‘vernacular’ buildings date from around this time.
c 19th Century
In 1875 Robert Southcombe built a Glove Factory and census information from the time shows village females gloving, initially all working from home to supplement the domestic income. By 1891 the factory employed 27 women and 24 men.
20th Century to Today
Over time the landscape surrounding this self sufficient, agricultural community gradually changed from labour intensive, arable ‘open fields’, clustering around the Saxon nucleated village, to enclosed fields supporting numerous 19th century cider-producing apple orchards to the mixed farming that we witness today. A decline in agricultural jobs in the 18th/19th centuries meant a degree of emigration to Australia and America. However, housing expansion occurred in the late 20th century as ‘infill’ and ‘street-side’ ribbon development, many residents coming from ‘far afield’ and looking to Yeovil for their occupations and their shopping needs.