In pulling down the old town Lord Milton preserved the Abbey Church, and employed James Wyatt to restore it. Much havoc was then wrought in the interior, but at the same time the vast building underwent a thorough repair, which it needed very badly. There is a tradition that this restoration cost Lord Milton no less than £60,000; but this seems a fabulous sum.
With the materials from the demolished buildings of the old town Lord Milton built the present village of Milton (he also built some ecclesiastical-looking sham “ruins” in the park, which are still standing);[46] and the stone and timber from the old Abbey tithe-barn were used to construct a new church in the new village. The few interesting things in this church, which is dedicated to St. James the Great, were originally possessions of the Abbey—two bells of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, a thirteenth century Purbeck marble octagonal font, an old pulpit, two pewter plates, two oak coffin-stools, and three elaborately-bound volumes, in black letter, of Fox’s Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs (1632), which aforetime were chained in the Abbey to a desk covered with “red shagg” and studded with 200 brass nails.
But although St. James’ Church suffers loss by comparison with the other more ancient churches in the parish, its churchyard is remarkable in that it is higher than the church itself. The dead are buried not below the level of the church, but above the level of its roof. This is certainly unusual.
Yet it may be regarded as a fitting finale for the inhabitants of a parish that has been described truly as “a curiosity, surprising, and remarkable.”
The Seal of the town of
Milton in America.
Incorporated 1662.
WIMBORNE MINSTER
By the Rev. Thomas Perkins, M.A.
IMBORNE Minster, as it is called to distinguish it from the village of Wimborne St. Giles and Monkton-up-Wimborne, is at the present day a bright, clean, prosperous-looking little market town, showing few remains of olden times save in its church. There is no doubt that its name is connected with the little river or “bourne” on which it stands, for the two villages mentioned above, bearing names of which Wimborne forms a part, stand on the same stream, which, like some other Dorset rivers—the Var or Frome, the Piddle or Trent—bears two names, the Wim or the Allen.