The land at Manor Farm House in Sherborne St. John has been occupied since before the Norman Conquest in a settlement that the historian Rupert Willoughby describes ‘as old a community as any in England’. The name 'Scir bourn' ('bright stream') is Saxon, and the village entry in the Domesday Book (1086) records a thriving community and a church.

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Until the construction of the Vyne in about 1500, a house on the Manor Farm House site was almost certainly the principal manor house in the area.  Professor Christopher Dyer dates the large fishpond to the west of Manor Farm House to before 1302: the size of the pond indicates that the manor house it adjoined was of high importance.

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It is likely that the building of the Tudor mansion of the Vyne led to the Sherborne St. John manor house becoming a manor farm, though memory of the house’s former status persisted at least until the early 18th century as a Vyne estate map of about 1730 describes Manor Farm House as the 'Manor House of Sherborne St John’.

 

For the next 400 years, Manor (Farm House) and its buildings were important to the Vyne estate. Over time, the medieval manor house went through many adaptions (its grand ‘Tudorbethan’ front dates to 1828) until a Vyne estate sale in 1919 returned Manor Farm House to its ancient independence. Sales post WW2 and then again in 1979 reduced the Manor Farm House holding to its present form of about 10 acres.

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Professor Christopher Dyer CBE, FBA. FSA. Ph D Emeritus Professor of History, University of Leicester (formerly Director of the Centre for English Local History) writes of the Manor Farm site:

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I would urge you to step back from the pond and observe the historic landscape in which it is sited. Next to the pond is a farmhouse, which is not a very old building, but stands on the site of the manor house occupied by the Ports and St Johns. Next to the manor house in a typically close relationship, we see the parish church, which is very likely to have been founded in the 10th or 11th century by the lord of the manor, initially as a private church, but then became a public asset, serving the lord’s tenants in the village, with a house for the priest. The pond was added as a practical asset and a mark of prestige, but over the land to the east of the manor and church a park was laid out, the boundary fence of which is still visible in modern hedge lines. A park with a herd of deer was again a practical resource, as the venison could be part of the household’s diet, and the park could also be used to graze some of the lord’s cattle and horses. But a park also reflected the abundance of land belonging to the lord of the manor, and his ability to hunt, the ultimate aristocratic pastime. To the south of the manor house lay the village, a source of profit for the lord, where he could hold a court and hope to dominate the local people.

 

 

Of the Manor Farm House fields and setting,  Dr. Paul Sterry, who has kindly acted as ecological advisor to the Manor Farm Rewilding project, writes:

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History and natural history in the English countryside are inextricably linked and nowhere better exemplifies this connection than Manor Farm, which sits at the heart of Sherborne St John. The area’s heritage is reflected in its biodiversity wealth, with designated Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation to the south and north, and conservation projects being undertaken on the neighbouring National Trust’s Vyne Estate to the northeast. Historically, the way land was farmed, and hedgerows, tree belts and freshwater were managed, inadvertently created the biodiversity richness that was present in the landscape until as recently as 50 years ago.