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About
Stilton
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Stilton
Village Website
| Stilton
History |
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Ancient
Stilton
No one knows who lived here first - the earliest finds date
from the time of the Roman occupation and are probably associated
with the road that runs from London to the army fortress at Lincoln,
which the Saxons later called Ermine Street.
For centuries this road seems to have been little used, the important
route was the east-west road, Fen Street and Church Street, which
is why our oldest building, the Church of St Mary Magdalene, is
found away from the main road that now exists.
Stilton
gets three mentions in the Doomesday Book of 1086 as three landowners,
the King, the Bishop of Lincoln and Eustace held land here. The
Great North Road had become a busy thoroughfare by the fifteenth
century and Stilton was a well-known staging post; at one time there
were 14 inns or ale houses for a permanent population of around
500 to 600 people. While most earned their living from farming,
an analysis of the 1841 census, taken just before the long distance
coach trade all but disappeared to be superseded by the railway,
showed that occupations directly connected to the coaches were important
too.
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Village
Pubs & The Cheese
All four of the present inns have very ancient origins, even though
their buildings have been changed and modernised several times.
We owe our famous cheese to the coach trade. Any Stiltonian can
relate tales of visitors asking "where is the cheese made?...",
only to be told "‘in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and
Derbyshire".
The most widely accepted explanation is that the cheese came down
to be sold at one of the coach stops in Stilton, perhaps The Bell
or The Angel. As early as 1722 Daniel Defoe (the author of "Robinson
Crusoe") ate some here and mentioned that the village was already
famous for its cheese. The recipe was passed down through the Beaumont
family of Quenby in Leicestershire. By 1830 a former housekeeper
at Quenby, Elizabeth Orton, made cheese in her farmhouse. Her daughter
married Cooper Thornhill who kept The Bell Inn and he sold the cheese.
He was famous (or infamous) as a larger-than-life character who
long held the record for riding to London and back.
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Modern
Stilton
Today, all Stilton cheese is factory made, but still only in the
three counties with milk produced locally. It takes a gallon of
milk to make one pound of cheese and a lot of skilled hard work
is still needed. Each cheese matures for 3 months after which the
blue veins appear naturally as oxygen is allowed to enter through
holes pierced by stainless steel needles. A whole cheese weighs
15lb.
Stilton’s
dependence on the main road has been its undoing twice; in the middle
of the nineteenth century when the railway line passed to the east
through Holme and Yaxley, and in 1959 when the present A1 Stilton
by-pass was opened. The village became a ghost village; The Bell
actually closed and fell into dereliction and other businesses also
disappeared. In 1962 Tom McDonald of The Talbot and Malcolm Moyer
of The Bell, aided and abetted by telephone engineer Fred Linstead
who provided a telegraph pole, cheered up their drinkers by organising
the first ever Cheese Rolling along a course outside the present
Post Office on Easter Monday.
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Other web sites of historical
interest
See also the Publications
Page
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