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Somerset Historic Environment Record

10926

Site Name:	Battle of Sedgemoor site, Westonzoyland
HISTORIC LANDSCAPE REGISTER:	Battlefield
Civil Parish:	Westonzoyland
Comprises:	PRN 28155 Watching Brief and metal detecting survey (2007), land to the north of Westonzoyland Sewage Treatment Works, Westonzoyland
Grid Ref:	ST 3522 3562 (ST 33 NE)
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Image:
	HER 10926 - Sedgemoor Memorial. Photo by Somerset County Council (June 1984)

Public access:

The public accessibility of this site is unknown or has not been checked. Please ask locally and do not visit without permission. [Information last updated on 21 May 2003]

Details:

The Battle of Sedgemoor was fought on 6 July 1685 between the Royalists under the Duke of Feversham, and a Rebel army under the Duke of Monmouth who was defeated. Stradling refers to the battle in detail, and mentions a large circular grave in which the slain were buried - he quotes an order of 1685 to erect a mound over the grave. A copy of a contemporary plan of the battle field is in Chedzoy church, and the original is in the Bodleian Library. In c1858 Boyd Dawkins and his father tried to site the burial place, and found a local inhabitant whose great-grandfather helped to bury the dead in trenches on the moor, covering them with sand from a pit on Bussex Farm. In the side of one of the ditches between Bussex and Bussex Rhine, they found human bones under a layer of sand. Six silver coins of small denominations of Elizabeth, James VI and I, and James VII and II, from a hoard of between 60 and 70 found c1820 on the site of the Battle of Sedgemoor are in Taunton Museum. Today the site lies on the flat peat moors. The fields are never ploughed and there is nothing to indicate the site of the graves. {1}

Bone was found in 1982 in a ditch side at ST35053560. Also at ST347356 near remnants of the old course of the Bussex Rhyne, "digging-in" positions from the battle have been noted. {7}

The Monmouth Rebellion of June-July 1685 was an attempt to usurp the crown of England by James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, from the Catholic King James II. Having spent a year in voluntary exile in the Netherlands, Monmouth landed in Dorset in June 1685. Despite a number of setbacks, he had gathered around him an army of 7,000 men by the time he was faced by the royal army near Westonzoyland. Monmouth decided to chance all upon a night attack. On the night of 5/6 July, Monmouth's rebels advanced. However, they hesitated at the Bussex Rhyne watercourse and instead of rushing the royal army, took it on at a distance in a firefight. All night the forces exchanged musket and cannon fire, but at daybreak the King's army advanced, crossed the Rhyne and forced the rebels to flee. Many were caught and killed in what is now Moor Drove Rhyne. The Battle of Sedgemoor was the last pitched battle to be fought on English soil. Three days after his defeat, Monmouth was captured and later executed. Hundreds of his supporters suffered at the hands of Judge Jeffreys' Bloody Assizes. The landscape of the battlefield was similar in character to that of today, with pasture on the moors and arable on the higher ground. The chief difference is the regularity of the drains, which were improved in the late eighteenth century. The Bussex Rhyne has been infilled but is visible on aerial photographs. {8}

A large number of human skulls, allegedly derived from a Battle of Sedgemoor burial ground, were kept in the loft of a local farmhouse for a number of years until sometime around the 1950s when they were put in a pond on the farm and a horse and cart driven repeatedly over them to crush them up. {11}

References:

Record created in May 1983

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