To be published: 2026.
A4 size c. 200 page paperback.
Numerous coloured illustrations.
ISBN13: 978-1-914310-08-9. Price: c. £25.
Richard le Poore, Bishop of Salisbury, created the Borough of Newland in 1227–28. He established building plots of three standard sizes on either side of the road leading from St Thomas’s chapel on the Green to Sherborne Castle. Men with spare money were encouraged to raise their status by investing in these burgage-plots and building new homes on them. There is no record of how successful this was in the beginning, but the Sherborne Almshouse’s accounts contain several entries to show that by the middle of the fifteenth century (in 1454) the Almshouse was active in purchasing property in Sherborne, including burgages or burgage sites in Newland, so this is likely to be when the Myrtle Cottage site became Almshouse property.
This house history details the cottage’s subsequent history, reviewing the historic building aspects of the property alongside the story of the occupants, to show how the cottage had been used and developed over time. The book concludes with a series of appendices containing the bulk of the source material used.