Hatch Beauchamp

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Map sources for Hatch Beauchamp at grid reference ST301205

Hatch Beauchamp is a village and parish in Somerset, England, situated five miles south east of Taunton in the Taunton Deane district. The village has a population of 575 ^[1].

[edit] History

The village of "Hache" dates from Saxon times, and was acquired in 1066 by Robert of Mortain, half-brother of William the Conqueror, shortly after the Norman Conquest of England. In the Norman survey, Hatch Beauchamp is described under the title of Terra Comitis Moritoniensis- " Robert holds of the earl Hache; eight acres of meadow, fifty acres of wood; arable, six carucates; in demesne, two carucates, and three servants, eleven villanes, four cottagers with three ploughs." By 1092, the village was in the hands of Robert of Beauchamp. The Beauchamp family were loyal allies of William the Conqueror, and had been granted large estates in contemporary Somerset and Bedfordshire.

Hatch Beauchamp is noted around 1300 as having a market every thursday, but this has long since vanished. The area - along with most of the South West of England, was staunchly Royalist in the English Civil War, although the local town of Taunton was a Parliamentary stronghold, and was besieged.

The village today contains an inn, and a manor house, Hatch Court, built around 1750, in the Palladian architectural style. Prior to this, a great house had existed on the same site since the Middle Ages, but had fallen into ruin by the 1600s. The inn dates also from around the mid-eighteenth century.

Hatch Court contains a small military museum commemorating the life and work of the renowned Brigadier Hamilton Gault, great uncle of the present owner, MP for Taunton, and member of the Quebec Chamber of Commerce, as well as a decorated Boer War hero. Hamilton Gault was the founder of the British Empire's last privately raised regiment, the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.

The regiment saw action in both World Wars, and were the first Allied force to enter Amsterdam in early 1945. They were more recently in action against the Taliban in Afghanistan, as part of Operation Anaconda in 2002.

Hatch Beauchamp is the burial place of Colonel John Rouse Merriott Chard, VC, RE (21 December 1847- 1 November 1897) a British soldier who won the Victoria Cross for his role in the defence of Rorke's Drift in 1879.