We gathered excitedly last Thursday around our computers for a Zoom talk by historian and author Nicola Cornick, fascinated to find out more about Swindon before the railway put it on the map as a destination between Bristol and London.I took copious notes, but not being a historian, I have only a hazy idea about what ages a medievalist might be interested in, it's between 6th-14th centuries. The map below dates from about 1804, a mere 37 years before the railway came through this idyllic country town 
It's interesting speculate on various places on the map, was the Direction Post the site of the current Magic Roundabout? And is the Small Pox House the site of the former Victoria Hospital? And the origin of the name Swindon, was it really Swine Down, or
Suindune in The Domesday Book. The place where pigs were raised?
Nicola took us back to when Swindon was a Saxon village with farmers and craftspeople living here, 1000 years ago there were blacksmiths and cutlery was being made here. The Vikings were here in 878 and were defeated. After the Norman Conquest, the area was divided into five areas. The town on the hill, what is now known as Old Town has a road system based on a square, with a market square in front of the Corn Exchange which goes back to 1346.
Above you can see a photograph of High Street which looks very similar today
What are mostly missing are the Holyrood Church above and totally missing, the
Lawn Mansion House which was demolished in 1952
The Bell was a pub for a long time, although apparently not as long as is claimed above the door, sadly no longer a pub
Swindon has a reputation for smuggling, with many passageways beneath Old Town supposedly used for this, the Moonraker's pub sign is a Wiltshire tradition, told
here.
This photo shows the interior of Ashdown House where some of the finest Swindon stone, Purbeck limestone was used for flooring.
The Cotswold Games involved lots of sword fighting as can be seen here, and also standing on your head, riding horses and shooting . What a great advertisement for the games this is.
And so we come to the end of the illustrated talk, with the last slide depicting a country lane.
Despite William Morris's disparaging remarks made about Swindon in the 1885, describing Holy Rood Church as 'insignificant', there's plenty of evidence that Swindon was a thriving rural market town, with plenty of advantages such as stone, springs and excellent farm land around. With a little bit of searching, I found this excellent blog post written by Nicola giving far more interesting details than I managed to note down.
The video recording of the talk is ready now, please click : here it is.
I've also had a couple of extra pieces of information, firstly in answer to my question, which I feel silly about now, I asked where the mill was! A member of the Friends has supplied these two paintings:
They are both by Thomas Luckett Jefferies who was Richard Jefferies'
uncle. He also owned the Mill, the bakers by the Locarno as
well as the farm.
Nicola was asked on the night about whether Wadard became Goddard and says this:
I also looked into the question on the night as to whether the Goddard
family were descended from Wadard, the knight who owned Swindon after
the Norman Conquest. Although there is a branch of the Goddard family
who do claim descent from Wadard, there isn’t actually a properly
authenticated family tree that proves this!
There was also a question about the pest house, here's the location:
'We have just watched the recording of Nicola's
talk, and we noticed the question about where the pest house was. The
pest house is marked on the 1873 OS 25 inch map of Swindon. The
National Library of Scotland has digitised old OS maps and overlaid them
on a modern satellite view.
The
link below should take you to the page (you may have to get rid of an
instruction sheet first by pressing X at its top right). On the map
page, you should see the pest house roughly in the centre, and there's a
control panel on the left at the bottom of which is a transparency
slider. Use this to get rid of the old map and see where the pest house
location is today - in the alleys between Goddard Avenue and The Mall.
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