Introduction

My hope from the start was that I could help to bring to life the lives of the ordinary people of the village of Ringstead. Of course the sources are few and we rarely can see the personal lives in the way that the upper classes are recorded. If there seems more than an average amount of criminality it is because the newspapers usually only seemed aware of ordinary people when the law became involved. The other surprise that the two books have given me is the large number of villagers who disappear only to appear in distant corners of England or the Empire. We see in these stories that the villagers had an independence of spirit and an unwillingness to kowtow to anyone. Those who came from outside, the schoolmasters, constables and vicars, to bring order and respectfulness to the inhabitants were often exasperated and bewildered by them.

David Ball

October 2013

[Note a ‘c’ before a date in the text is short for circa meaning ‘about’ or ‘approximately’.