Seamer: A Village, a Church, and a Step Worn by Time

So, the weather being positively vernal, and since it is, after all, the first day of the meteorological spring, I felt obliged to take my bike out for a spin. The first time this year. Wishing to avoid any unnecessary exertion, I chose the flatter byways through the Vale of Cleveland.

Seamer is a village of little consequence. I used to pass through it daily on my commute to work. The name suggests some historical significance, for the etymology tells us it comes from the Saxon referring to a flooded marsh¹Mitchell, Peter K. (1965) West Cleveland land use, circa 1550 to 1850, Durham theses, Durham University. Page 11. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7973/ . This seems plausible, given the local fields, appropriately named Seamer Carrs, this morning looked rather waterlogged. At some point late last century, the pump that drains the land failed, and I remember seeing the area reverted to a lake, as if making a point. Archaeological evidence suggests that Mesolithic inhabitants were rather more prepared for the water than the more recent landowners²North Yorkshire HER NY SMR Number: MNY594/5.

A few thousand years later, Seamer and Tameton were part of a single manor, owned in Saxon times by Gospatric, Earl of Northumberland. He made the unfortunate decision to rebel against William the Conqueror, which cost him his land but, rather miraculously, not his head. William’s stepbrother, the Earl of Mortain, took possession. The Domesday Book, ever the font of thrilling statistics, records that the manor had 13 carucates of taxed land, five bondsmen, and two ploughs. Several neighbouring settlements were attached to it but were mostly reduced to waste because the Conqueror had been in his destructive mood³Cook, Hugh W. ‘Cleveland Re-Visited. | Cleveland Standard | 25 February 1933 | British Newspaper Archive’. 2022. Britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0003490/19330225/149/0008> [accessed 22 July 2022].

By the reign of Edward I, the manor had passed to Nicholas de Meinell, then by marriage to the D’Arcy family in the mid-1300s, and then, after much predictable shuffling of ownership, to Lord Leaconfield. No doubt each generation thought itself terribly important.

Seamer, aside from its church, seems to contain no buildings of great antiquity, but it did produce Brian Walton, a Bishop of Chester and the mind behind the “Polyglot Bible” in the 1650s. A text in nine languages, because clearly one was not enough.

As for the church itself, it is dedicated to St Martin and stands on the highest point in the village. Domesday Book makes no mention of it, but records suggest it existed as early as 1490 as a chapel under Carlton, later becoming independent. Pevsner, my go-to oracle for all matters architectural, notes that it was rebuilt in 1822 in the Gothic style. The windows, in his view, are an unusual mix of styles, with one genuinely Perpendicular nave window setting the tone. Inside, he finds little to admire beyond a marble font, which was apparently looted from a ruined church in Alexandria after the Battle of the Nile.

And finally, the reason I stopped: that worn step. Centuries of footfalls have left their mark, and stepping onto it, I understood why. The change in direction on that top step forces you to twist your foot. Small, unnoticed habits, shaping the fabric of a place. A fine metaphor for history itself, if one were feeling poetic.

• 1
  Mitchell, Peter K. (1965) West Cleveland land use, circa 1550 to 1850, Durham theses, Durham University. Page 11. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7973/
• 2
  North Yorkshire HER NY SMR Number: MNY594/5
• 3
  Cook, Hugh W. ‘Cleveland Re-Visited. | Cleveland Standard | 25 February 1933 | British Newspaper Archive’. 2022. Britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0003490/19330225/149/0008> [accessed 22 July 2022]