Spillmans Road on Rodborough is my home. Spillmans was the name of the Spilemon family whose origins here can be found in official documents going back to the 1200’s.  The Spilemons were described by the Custumal of the Manor of Minchinhampton as holding lands by sergeantry. In the Norman hierachy of England ‘Sergeant’ is a Latin term meaning originally a professional foot soldier. I believe a sergeant later came to mean a man who had a position in a village similar to a bailiff, who were like land managers. The Spilemons were certainly among the upper peasant classes when first mentioned. They were tenants on the Manor of Minchinhampton which Rodborough was part of, and the whole estate since the Normans came was under the ownership of the Abbess of Caen in Normandy who skimmed the revenue off its lands into their cofffer.

A bit later on in the 1400’s the Spilemons are found again in documents now owning the mill at the bottom of Rodborough by the river Fome called Lodgemore. Back then it was a fulling mill called after the old name used for this stretch of the Frome, Higher Lademoor. Just below Higher Lademoor Mill is what is now the Fromehall Mill, called then Nether Lademoor. Fromehall Mill (Nether Lademoor) was according to more venerable documents was the oldest of the mills by the 1400’s.  I think it is likely Fromehall Mill may have been there before the Normans. The English Saxons were using the Cotswolds for the raising of sheep for their wool, as the uplands had been in the Roman era. Minchinhampton and Avening had recorded in the Domesday Book as possessing many mills down in the valley, and it seems they were possibly grinding wheat flour but perhaps were fulling cloth. Villages along the upper Frome like Frampton Mansell and Sapperton are all well sited to take advantage of the water flow and like Avening and Minchinhampton were just next to the Cotswold uplands where the sheep whose valuable fleece was being grown on the rich limestone grasslands.

The Spilemons were already living in a landscape where the economy of raising sheep for their wool was long established with the Saxon English, and the processing of the fleece into finer cloth I would not be surprised was already happening to some degree. In the centuries from 1500 onwards the Stroud Valleys would become increasingly exploited for all the stages of making the fine cloth it would become famous for. This long laboured over cloth of course was only for the wealthy of those times, after all it was a luxury product hence the arduous process of getting it to its quality where the sweat and tears of dozens of poor cottage workers had gone into its creation. The Spilemons family built up their wealth through acquiring land in the Manor of Minchinhampton primarily through the conduit of marrying offspring to other local families with titles and lands. They became owners of Lodgemoor Mill (Higher Lademoor) which carried out fulling (also done manually called ‘Walking’ see the place names around, like Walkley Hill (clearing or meadow of the walkers) and Walkley Wood in Nailsworth).

Towards the end of the 1400’s the Spilemon family had no more male heirs but they had Maud daughter of John the third John of the Spilemons (they seem to have run out of imagination regarding male names, one reason I prefer the Saxon English is they have far more interesting names than the Norman English). I’d like to know more about Maud Spilemon. She was duly married off to another last in the line of an local family of importance: the De Rodboroughs of Senkley (note: Senkley is St. Chloe these days in Amberley). The production of male heirs though was not going well and the Maud and Edmund were given Margery, who later was married to the Paynes. There ends the Spilemon line. But their house on what would become Spillmans Court Rd remained owned by Richard Payne, with Lodgemoor Mill run by his tenants the Merrets. Spillmans Court itself no longer exists, it’s last owners were a nurseryman of the Victorian era when the decaying house was burnt. But the family name stretching back hundreds of years ago remains imprinted on this side of Rodborough, where Spillmans became the name of three streets going in layers of brick uphill and Spillmans Pitch the most evil slope in Stroud. I’d like to have somewhere named up here after Maud Spillmans the last of the Spilemons. We could do with a ‘Maud’s Pitch’ or a ‘Maud’s End’?