| EAST MEON AND THE MEONS | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Meons, which comprise of
Meonstoke, East and
West Meon
,are all separate villages that lie about three miles apart and a
friendly rivalry between each of them can be found and it is said this
rivalry goes back to the 6th century when a tribe of Jutes called
the Meonwara lived in the valley and drove the Celts out. West Meon has the church of St John the Evangelists which was rebuilt at the beginning of the 19th century by George Gilbert Scott and here is the grave of the found of Lord's cricket ground, Thomas Lord, who lived in the village until his death in 1832, and since then a member of the MCC comes to the village to tend his grave. The village also has its dark side as another grave holds the ashes of the spy and traitor Guy Burgess who defected to Russia and after being cremated in Moscow in 1963, he lived in the parish with his family East Meon which lies about four miles from Petersfield, may have started life about 400 and 600 AD when it was a part of a Royal Manor that was owned by Alfred the Great. The Manor is recorded in the Domesday Survey of 1986, as belonging to William the Conqueror and shows six mills. Bronze Age barrows have been discovered in the Parish boundary and these go back to around 2,000BC and just outside hte boundary on Old Winchester Hill an Iron Age Hill Fort was built just 500 years before the Romans came. The church was built after the Norman Conquest around 1075 and 1150 an resembles Winchester Cathedral in it s style and similarly it contains a black marble font made at Tournai in what is now Belgium. Not far from the church can be found the Court House with its mediaeval hall that dates back to the 14th century. East Meon belonged to successive Bishops of Winchester for many hundreds of years and the Court House was the administrative centre and home to a group of monks. The village has played many parts in wartime, in the English Civil War the Parliamentarians camped nearby just before the Battle of Cheriton in 1644 and it is said they took the lead lining from the font to make their bullets. And in World War Two the Luftwaffe dropped 38 high explosive bombs and around three and a half thousand incendiary bombs in the parish and the only casualty was a local pig!! The village was, during the 900th anniversary of the "Domesday Book" chosen as the Domesday Village with a model in Winchesters Great hall depicting the village as it was in those days, this can still be seen along with the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy.
The architecture in the village is varied and a former workhouse once stood on Workhouse Lane, hence the name, and this is the site of some fine old houses comprising of some Tudor and Georgian with a few earlier cottage in the village centre and what was once a butchers shop being the oldest.
The village though has kept up with modern trends and nearby can be found HMS Mercury which is a Naval communications school and comprises a gr oup of large buildings near Leydene House, which once was the home of Eleanor Countess Peel in 1924, which along with her husband built what is probably the last stately home in England The River Meon passes through the village and once caused a lot of flooding which has been recorded as being several feet deep but in the mid 1900s it was widened and diverted so it is just a shallow trickle. Most of the trades people have left the village as there were once four bakers here, two butches and two mills but today all that can be found is a general stores, a butcher, and a post office. IMAGES OF EAST MEON
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