History
One suggested explanation for the derivation for the Harptree name is from "hartreg", an Old English word for a grey hollow. According to Robinson it is listed in the 1086 Domesday Book as Harpetreu meaning 'The military road by the wood' from the Old English herepoep and treow.
In November 1887, while searching for the source of a spring, a labourer called William Currell put his pick into a pewter vessel full of Roman coins. The jar was 6 inches (15 cm) below the surface in swampy ground. It contained 1,496 coins, five ingots of silver and a ring. The coins covered the period between the reigns of Constantine the Great and Gratian.
The parish was part of the Winterstoke Hundred.
Around 1870-1880 the 'East Harptree Lead Works Co Ltd' mined the area around the village for lead, but this seems to have been largely unsuccessful and did not last for many years. Smitham Chimney is a visible reminder of the work.
Read more about this topic: East Harptree
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)