Fritham

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Template:Short description Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Short descriptionScript error: No such module "Infobox".Template:Template otherScript error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters". 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 17th century.[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]

File:Eyeworth Pond, Fritham - geograph.org.uk - 7584.jpg
Eyeworth Pond.

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 one 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]

In 1904 the village gained a church in the form of Fritham Free Church.[11]

Four young men from Fritham went down with the Titanic in 1912: Lewis Hickman (aged 32), Leonard Mark Hickman (aged 24), Stanley George Hickman (aged 21), and Ambrose Hood (aged 21).[12]

The Ham class minesweeper HMS Fritham, launched in 1953, was named after the village.

Notes

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  1. Bramshaw Parish Council Template:Webarchive
  2. a b Old Hampshire Gazetteer - Fritham
  3. Hampshire Treasures - Bramshaw, page 21 Template:Webarchive
  4. a b Througham (Truham) Template:Webarchive, Pastscape
  5. a b c Victoria County History, (1912), A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 5, Pages 623-626
  6. Hampshire pub guide: The Royal Oak, Fritham, The Telegraph, 03 Mar 2011
  7. Fritham Lodge, Bramshaw British Listed Buildings
  8. a b Norman Henderson, (2007), A Walk Around the New Forest: In Thirty-Five Circular Walks, pages 87-8. Frances Lincoln
  9. a b Kenneth Hudson, (1968), The industrial archaeology of southern England: Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Gloucestershire east of the Severn, page 35
  10. a b Eyeworth Pond, Fritham, and the Schultze Gunpowder Factory
  11. Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  12. The Royal Oak, Fritham Template:Webarchive, Lymington.org

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External links

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