Part Five - A Trek through old Mumbles Village by Stuart Batcup
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A Trek through old Mumbles Village
and Thistleboon by Stuart Batcup
and Thistleboon by Stuart Batcup
Part Five
Thistleboon House: Origins
Our Trek, using the 1844 Tithe Map has taken us to the site of the building originally known as Thistleboon House.
This sketch of The Mumbles, shows Thistleboon house overlooking the village.
This was a great lump of a building sitting high on the skyline looking towards Mumbles Village from Norton as shown on the Sketch shown of ‘The Mumbles’ and two of the old Mumbles Railway Carriages made in the eighteen seventies. It is also shown on the very stylised Painting also shown. This was painted about a hundred years earlier showing its South facing elevation to Higher Lane, its Crenelations or Embattlements and its four grand chimneys.
When it was built it clearly had an amazing panoramic view out over Swansea Bay as well as a clear view of Oystermouth Castle, described in Oliver Cromwell’s Survey of 1650 as;
“An old decayed castle called the Castle of Oystermouth beinge for the present of noe use, but a very pleasant situation and near into the sea side;”
Not until two hundred years later when Graham Vivian rebuilt Clyne Castle, and Henry Crawshay built his ‘summer house’ Llan y Llan at Langland, apart from the Castle, Thistleboon House was clearly the largest dwelling in the Parish of Oystermouth in the late Seventeenth Century. A great deal has been written about it. In particular, in Gower 53 published in 2002 Wendy Cope, writing about “Oystermouth in the late Seventeenth Century” deals extensively with what went on there from about 1670 onwards starting with the Hearth Tax Return for that year. Thistleboon House seems to have been occupied by a ‘John Robin’ at the time, and with eight hearths had nearly twice as many hearths as any other buildings in the Parish, which were mainly cottages.
When it was still a private house in 1808 it was described in an Article in The Cambrian newspaper as having on the ground floor an entrance hall, a parlour twenty foot square, a breakfast parlour, an excellent kitchen with two ovens, a smaller kitchen with oven, butler’s and other pantries, laundry and servants’ hall. There were “capital arched cellars” below, and twelve more rooms on the first and second floors, presumably the living rooms with the views and the bedchambers, for family and servants.
Wendy’s Article is well worth reading as it explains how Thistleboon House was used for Meetings of the Manor Courts under the legal system in force at that time; in particular the Baron Court dealt with matters relating directly to the administration of the land as an estate, and the Leet Court dealt with petty offences. Both Courts seem to have met half yearly on the same days and dealt with such matters as the appointment of constables, the repair of the Village stocks, whipping post and ducking stools!
As will be seen from Rod Coopers latest extract from the 1844 Tithe Map the Thistleboon Pound was nearby, and that was the subject of suits for payment of fines for the release of impounded stray animals, and for the more serious offence of ‘Pound Breach’ where owners had unlawfully recovered their stray animals from the Pound. Rod’s Article in Gower 68 “Pounds in Gower” in 2017 is a fascinating account of how extensive these Pounds were across the Peninsula. There were in fact two Pounds in Oystermouth: the other being a square one beside Limekiln Lane close to Oystermouth School.
Other Articles have been written by Wendy “Thistleboon House School 1841 -1894” in Gower 46 in 1995 and by Gerald Gabb “ Limeslade to Rotherslade: a Few Surprises” in Gower 48 in 1997.These contain a wealth of information, but none of them have been able to tell me:
Who built Thistleboon House, and when?
Why the hamlet is called Thistleboon?
For the reasons mentioned in the last Part of this Trek these are questions which have intrigued me for years, and now with the benefit of retirement and time I have been able to focus on the issues. I do not profess to be an historian of the calibre of Wendy or Gerald who have spent much time examining resources locally and in the National Library. However, having spent a life of forensically working with evidence of all sorts and none to come to conclusions “on the balance of probability”, I have been able to apply that experience to the questions, and come up with what I regard as some respectable conclusions.
This chapter will not be as light-hearted as what has gone before, but I trust that, gentle reader, you will bear with me on this part of the journey and enjoy the accompanying Images. So, let us move on.
Who built Thistleboon House and when?
1. The turning point appears to be the outbreak of the Civil War in 1640, but first we must go back to the Norman Conquest of 1066. As Juliet Barker says in her scholarly book “Agincourt” ‘The new technique of fighting which had won the Battle of Hastings for the Normans was also adopted in England; instead of standing or riding and hurling the lance overarm, these new warriors, the knights, charged on horseback with the lance tucked beneath the arm so that the weight of both horse and rider was behind the blow and the weapon was re-usable….Intimately connected with these military developments was the equally significant rise of the feudal system of land tenure, which provided the knights to do the fighting by creating a chain of dependant lordships with the king at its head. Again, it was William the Conqueror who introduced feudalism to England from France. Immediately beneath him in the hierarchy were his tenants-in-chief, each of whom had to perform a personal act of homage, acknowledging that he was the king’s vassal, or liege man and that he owed him certain services. The most important of these was the obligation to provide a certain number of knights for the royal army whenever called upon to do so. In order to fulfil this duty, the tenants-in-chief granted parcels of their own land to dependent knights upon the same conditions, so that a further relationship of lord and vassal was created.’
2. As the Welsh proved harder to control, the role of monarch was granted to the Marcher Lords. Until 1536 and the first Act of Union, the Lordship of Gower was, like other marcher lordships almost an independent realm. It was bound to the English crown only by its lord’s fealty to the monarch and by statute law. However, within such lordships the manorial systems were broadly similar to those of other more ordinary lordships in England. The details are complicated, but the marcher lord ‘owned’ the lordship, and in his lordship everyone who had land held it as the lord’s tenant. If the lordship had not been a marcher lordship, all its land holders would have been tenants of the king, including its lord and he would have been the king’s ‘tenant in chief’.
3. It was this link between providing fighting men and occupation of land for fealty that gave rise to the peculiar system of land tenure that crops up from time to time hereafter. From 1492 the Lordships of Gower and Kilvey have belonged to the Somerset family. In battles in feudal times, both sides were not always intent on killing the leading Knights on the other side, as there was much money to be made from capturing such individuals and holding them to ransom. The book “Agincourt” goes into great detail about this but suffice it to say for present purposes it was necessary to know what a knight was worth to enable the captors to value the ransom. This, then, was one of the reasons that Surveys of the Lordships were carried out.
4. So back to the Lordships of Gower and Kilvey , and in particular to the Manor of Oystermouth, the boundaries of which almost aligned with those of the Parish. In 1640 our marcher Lord was Henry Somerset, 5th Earl and 1st Marquess (sometimes Marquis) of Worcester (c1577-1646) whose seat was at the magnificent Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire. He was a Roman Catholic and supposed to be the richest man in England with great influence and power. When Parliament decided to depose King Charles 1 in November 1640, triggering the First Civil War he decided to espouse the Royalist Cause and, indeed the end of that War centred on Raglan Castle in August 1646.
5. The details of the campaign are covered in great detail in Rowland Phillips two volume work ‘Civil War in Wales and the Marches’ published in 1874. Its Appendices include the written exchanges that passed between Col Thomas Morgan, and later General Sir Thomas Fairfax, both of Cromwell’s New Model Army on the one side, and the Marquess on the other during the siege of the Castle that began on 29th June 1646.
6. It also contains a list of the 500 Officers and Gentlemen who surrendered at Raglan on 19 August 1646, and the Articles for the Surrender of the Castle which is a ‘stiff upper lip’ sort of document setting out how the garrison was to march out of the Castle, and the terms on which they were all to be pardoned after the expiration of three months. All, that is, except the Marquess.
7. The Marquess was 84 years of age and died a prisoner later in 1646, and his son Edward Somerset (1601-1667), the 2nd Marquess outlived his father by only a year. Edward’s eldest son and heir was Henry Somerset (1629-1700), 3rd Marquess of Worcester and 1st Duke of Beaufort. Raglan Castle was mined and rendered uninhabitable by General Fairfax (see photo) so the Duke transferred his principal seat to Badminton in Gloucestershire in 1650 and so it continues to this day. It is now the seat of the 11th Duke of Beaufort.
8. As a direct result of all this, and of the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649 The Rt Hon Oliver Cromwell MP (1599-1658) Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Wales 1653-1658 was granted, by Parliament parts of the Somerset family estates, including the Lordships of Gower and Kilvey. The Lordships belonged to him until he died in 1658. On the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 the then 1st Duke of Beaufort secured the reversion of Cromwell’s slice of his family estates and resumed management of the Lordship.
9. The Badminton Estate Records from 1262 to 1921 comprising some 5,537 items are deposited in the National Library of Wales, and have long been available for study, and have proved a rich source of materials for historians, including Wendy Cope. If she had come across any reference to the creation of a Grant of any sort referring to the building of Thistleboon House, then I am certain that she would have mentioned it. If it was built during Oliver Cromwell’s time as the Lord of Gower, then there probably is no record, and so the period of my search is narrowed to the years between 1649 and 1660.
10. Even without any record, it is clear that whoever built Thistleboon House must have been rich and powerful, and when this narrow time window is explored, one name becomes the obvious candidate, and that is Captain, later Colonel Phillip Jones (1618 to 1674). During the first Civil War this character met Oliver Cromwell in Swansea on at least two occasions. In his seminal work “Swansea and its History “ Volume II published in 2019 Gerald Gabb devotes some twenty pages of narrative and supporting data on Jones, describing him as ‘the most significant individual to come out of Swansea’.
11. According to Gerald his first important position was as Governor of the Town of Swansea, appointed by Parliament on 17 November 1645 when he was only 27. He consolidated his position locally by becoming Steward of the Marquess of Worcester’s Lordships of Gower and Kilvey in 1645 and on 1st October 1646 he became a Burgess of the Town. On 19th August 1650 he became an Alderman. By then he was being called “Colonel - steward and governore of the towne of Swansye” usually abbreviated to Coll. Jones.
12. The story of his rapid rise from then on to the rest of Glamorgan, throughout South Wales and then to Westminster is fascinating. In his “The Account Book for the Borough of Swansea, Wales 1640-1660; A Study in Local Administration During the Civil War and Interregnum”, by Michael Price published in 1990 Coll. Jones’ contribution is summarised in the following way:
‘Philip Jones, Governor of Swansea…had a profound influence on the government of the town and indeed the whole of South Wales during the Commonwealth period. Jones was probably born at Llangyfelach near Swansea of humble origins. After the Civil War, he emerged as the leading Parliamentarian in South Wales and went on to become a member of the new Council of State of the Protectorate in 1653 and Comptroller of Cromwell’s Household in 1657. However, his rule was marred by accusations of bribery, corruption and obtaining tithes by menaces, fraud and force. Eventually, a Petition of Impeachment was presented to the Rump Parliament in 1659, accusing him of amongst other things “oppression and high Breach of Trust”. Even though various witnesses were presented to testify against him, Jones emerged unscathed with his estates intact. After the Restoration, he faded into obscurity and died in 1678 at Fonmon Castle in Glamorgan.’
13. But what evidence do we have to link Phillip Jones with Thistleboon House. Fortunately, there are several threads:
Phillip Jones developed a landed estate for himself on a grand scale. Cromwell’s Survey of 1650 records a number of properties held by Jones in ‘Gower Anglicana/ the Town of Swanzey and the Libertyes thereof being a member of the said Seignory’, suggesting that he had, within five years, acquired three Mansions on High Street. One was later called ‘The Great House’ and is recorded in the Survey as “the new dwelling house of the said Coll. Jones” In the Eighteenth Century it became the home of the then Duke’s Steward Gabriel Powell and is identified by Bernard Morris in his “Survey of Gower 1764” on the extract from the Buck brothers “East View of Swansea” published in 1748 shown
This was in addition to holdings that he had built up on Gower and in the Vale of Glamorgan, the earliest acquisition being of some land in Llangyfelach in May 1642. Indeed, during the interregnum “he spent the massive sum of £15,800 on land, (worth £2,750,000 today) including £4,000 between 1650 and 1652.In 1650 he even bought £1600 worth of the 1st Duke’s Estate in the Vale of Glamorgan
With Mansions in the Town who would not want ‘a weekend retreat’ in somewhere as pleasant and convenient as Thistleboon in Mumbles with its spectacular views of the ruins of Oystermouth Castle and over Swansea Bay. I have reproduced the Section of the 1650 Survey that sets out the Customary holders of the Manor of Oystermouth with the rents they pay. As you will see at Ffistleboon Coll Jones had a ‘house and garden’ with a nil acreage, and a yearly rent of one penny! Strange at a time when a Welsh acre was twice the size of an English acre, and the ‘going rate’ for Oystermouth (per Grant Francis) was between 3s 4d and 15s per annum per acre. The 1844 Tithe Map suggests that with the walled Garden opposite, and the Coach Yard alongside, the Thistleboon House holding ran to some four acres. The Survey shows that the Marquess usually granted leases of land for 25 years at the going rate.
The fact that Coll. Jones was only paying a penny a year for an indeterminate acreage suggests that the Survey may have been self-serving for Coll. Jones, for Bussy Mansell and for the Walter Thomas mentioned in the extract. The Contents page to the 1650 Survey (which I have also reproduced) covers the whole of the Lordship, with the dates the various Surveys were carried out. The earliest relates to ‘Landewi ’in 1326, and the Surveys of ‘Landymore’ in 1598 and 1602 are typical. In each case a ‘Jury’ made up of tenants of a manor was sworn to confirm from local knowledge the extent of the various holdings, the occupiers and the rents payable. No such Juries were convened for the 1650 Survey, and it will have been noted from the Preamble I have already mentioned that Bussy Mansell was one of the authors of the Survey, and the fact that Walter Thomas had been the Steward of the Lordship until 1645 when Jones took over may not be coincidental!
Close examination of the entries on the Survey concerning the Manor of Oystermouth reveals that under ‘Freeholders paying Rents’ at Ffistleboon there are four parcels of land running to about four and a half Welsh acres which produced four pence per annum, and there are four further Customary holders mentioned , one of land only running to ten acres at a rent of 7s 1d. The remaining three each had a ‘messuage’ (dwellinghouse) and land running to a total of twenty acres at a total rent of 18s 9d.
All this seems to confirm that the holdings were all agricultural in nature, but Coll. Jones’ holding was something else because of the use of the word ‘house’ in the description.
Cromwell's Survey of Gower 1650
I am satisfied, on the balance of probability that the ‘house and garden’ at Ffistleboon mentioned in the 1650 Survey is in fact Thistleboon House, and that it was built by Col.l Phillip Jones in 1648/1649, so it could not be totally ignored when the Survey was carried out.
As an interesting counterpoint I am producing a photograph taken of me in our front garden in the Winter of 1952/53 with Thistleboon House in the background. The snow emphasises the Crenellations/ battlements and main elevation of Thistleboon House at that time. Alongside it is a photograph of Fonmon Castle taken by the late Roy Kneath for Gerald Gabb in May 2013. Can you spot the difference?
In Gerald’s Volume II there are a series of photos of the interior taken by Roy at the same time with the kind permission of Sir Brooke Boothby the present owner and resident of the Castle, who is a descendant of our Coll. Jones. For the avid Television viewer both Sir Brooke and the Castle recently figured in Rhod Gilbert’s ‘Work Experience’ on BBC Wales when he worked there as a butler for one evening. The Portrait of the good colonel in later life that I have reproduced also figured in the programme.
Why is the hamlet called ‘Thistleboon?
1. As will be appreciated from what I have already said, the first written representation of the name appeared in the 1650 Survey as ‘Fistleboon’ or ‘Ffistleboon’. Etymology being what it is, this may not have been what the scribe of the Survey was told, or what he heard. Indeed, he may have been given two words ‘Pissle’, ‘Fissle’ or ‘Fistle’ and ‘Boon’ as was the case in the 1799 Survey of Swansea Bay. That being the case it is worth breaking down my quest by looking at those two words, with English, Welsh and local dialect in mind.
2. The starting point seems to have had a lot to do with water. Although Thistleboon is quite high up, it was, and clearly still is a very wet sort of place because of the limestone strata on which it stands. Just look at the name given to Marespool in 1844. It was then called ‘Mear Pool’, which is a bit strange as ‘mear’ or ‘mere’ is an old English word for a lake or a pond ie the ‘Lake Pool’ or the ‘Pond Pool’? (Another meaning of ‘mere’ was ‘boundary’, so it may have meant ‘Boundary Pool’, which makes more sense). Even I remember the Pool regularly discharging water onto Plunch Lane, which is itself an anglicisation of the Welsh word ‘plwnch’ which means ‘plunge’.
It was that very water which contributed to my mother turning over one of her Post Office vans in Plunch Lane in 1942!
3. We also have the ‘Well Field’ along Higher Lane which is the subject of the present lively and controversial debate about its proposed use for residential development, notwithstanding that it is within the boundary of the Gower Area of Outstanding Beauty. The well that was there has long been out of use, but the bottom of the field remains wet and marshy for most of the year: legend has it that it is a bottomless bog which has consumed mammoths in the past, and might do the same to houses!
4. When Coll. Jones came to build Thistleboon House in 1648/1649, he had no problem sourcing the necessary stone. I believe that it would have come from the site of the three cottages Nos 13, 15, and 17 Thistleboon Road, and the small quarry behind which is now almost totally overgrown. We certainly knew it as ‘the Quarry’ when we played there as children and its use to provide stone for building makes perfect sense as the stonemasons would only have to haul the stone a few yards across the natural gulley at that point. It also follows that they left a level plateau on which the cottages could be built later. Any timber needed in the construction would probably have been shipped to the ‘Key of Mumbles’ mentioned in the 1650 Survey and hauled up Village Lane.
5. Water would have been needed by the builders in the construction of the house, and, more importantly for its use as a substantial gentleman’s residence. It appears that when Thistleboon House was built, the main building was oblong in shape, with carriage access down the track at the left hand side (looking from Higher Lane) to a Carriage Yard, Coach House and Stables, and the Porch giving access to the House on the side. As I have already said, with the walled garden on the other side of Higher Lane, the whole site probably ran to some Four English acres.
6. About 25 yards from the Pound shown on the 1844 Tithe Map and up the hill forming the field shown as Pound Acre there was a well. Its location is probably under one of the present bungalows at the junction of Heatherslade Close / Higher Lane. In the nineteen fifties, the Pound was just a pile of stones, and the Well head was surrounded by brambles, but it was certainly still there. The Welsh word for a ‘spout or well’ was and is ‘pistyll’. This had become ‘pissle’ in the local dialect and is defined as “ A spring running from a bank or wall channelled down a pipe’ in Ben Jones and Rob Penhallurick’s ‘The Gower Glossary” published in 2018: just what was needed to service Thistleboon House, its occupants and their animals.
7. A clue as to the significance of the second part of the name lies in the name ‘Tichborne’ or ‘Tichbourne’ (as the City of Swansea spells it on their current street sign for Tichborne Street). ‘Borne’ ‘Bourn’ or ‘Bourne’ is a common suffix and is a variant of the Scottish ‘burn’. One of its OED meanings is “a small stream, especially one that flows intermittently or seasonally”. If ever you have trekked up Village Lane and the gully that is Thistleboon Road when it is raining, or just after you will have walked up something more than a ‘small stream’!
8. My theory therefore is that the name Thistleboon has nothing to do with thistles, but is derived from ‘Pissle Bourn’, with the Mumbles dialect turning ‘Bourn’ into ‘Boon’. Fistle or Ffistle is not a word known to the Welsh language, but it is known in Scotland as an intransitive verb meaning ‘to make a rustling sound, to bustle about or to fidget’, so I think we can discount that as well.
9. Sensitivity toward any connection that the word ‘Pissle’ may have had with Urine may have led the 1650 scribe to use the less offensive ‘Ffistle’ in his spelling of the word. He was, of course the scribe to the eminent gentlemen already mentioned who were all Puritans. It does not take a great leap of conjecture to conclude that their sensitivity to such a crude sounding word led to ‘Pissle Bourn’ becoming ‘Ffistleboon’ then ‘Thistleboon’ where we have been for the last Two hundred and twenty years or more.
Stuart Batcup
September 2020
N.B. - Tichborne Street ' is spelt Tichbourne Street.' on their current street sign, by The City and County of Swansea
Where was Thistleboon House situated
Thistleboon House and Orphanage, 1877 OS © .
The site of Thistleboon House at number 2, Western Close, Mumbles, on a Google satellite map ©.
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