Churchill, United Kingdom

There is also some archaeological evidence to support Windmill Hill being used in Iron Age and Roman times as a hillfort and look-out point respectively. A prominent feature in the parish, Windmill Hill divides Churchill from Lower Langford, and gained its name from a windmill recorded in Churchill Manor in 1652. There is thought to have been a windmill there as early as the 13th or 14th century when they were first introduced to the region.

The present village of Churchill, together with Lower Langford, has its more populous part either on or in close proximity to the A38 road: Churchill Court, the former manor house, and the Church of St John the Baptist that adjoins it, is isolated on its western edge. Furthermore, Barrow Fields, The Berrys, and Pitchbury, are bare fields in front and beside the church. It has been suggested that the field names are corruptions of the Anglo-Saxon words "burh" or "beorg", meaning townships or mounds of ruined buildings, and that they refer to a medieval settlement now vanished and buried. A large scale map shows a clear pattern of ancient strip fields. Even where later enclosures and the amalgamation of adjoining strips have put hedges around the medieval plots, the lines of these boundaries run at a right-angle to the original strip lynchets and ridge and furrow pattern, both common medieval agricultural practices. In the dry summer of 1996 cropmarks emerged in Barrow Fields, visible from surrounding high ground, showing outlines of dwellings and field boundaries.

There was a settled and developed farming community within Churchill, with the strip fields running out towards the open marshy North Somerset Levels, used for summer grazing, and with drove roads, still existing: Yanel Lane, Sandmead Drove and Common Lane giving access to them. It has been proposed that these droves converged at Churchill Green, the place where cattle, sheep and produce would be conveniently gathered and markets held. Accordingly, there is no clear reason why a village should disappear unless dispossessed by a landlord, anxious to surround his house with a park, or decimated by plague, of which there is no evidence. It is possible that as wheeled vehicles began to replace the packhorse trains, and traffic grew through the gap in the hills beyond Churchill Gate, the eastern end of the settlement grew and the houses around the church were deserted.

The Domesday survey did not mention Churchill since it was part of the Manor of Banwell, in the Hundred of Winterstoke, belonging to the Bishop of Bath and Wells and not held in fee direct from the King. Churchill is first mentioned as a separate Manor in 1231 in an award made by Bishop Jocelin of Wells concerning the "chapel of Churchill", and in the same document Robert Fitzpayne, High Sheriff of Somerset under Henry II, and John de la Stocke, are mentioned as local landowners. Stock Lane still carries the name of the 13th century inhabitant and the Fitzpaynes lived at Churchill Court for some two hundred years.

Sir John Churchill, knighted in 1670, purchased the Manor of Churchill from Richard Jenyns in 1671. He died in 1685, greatly in debt, and Churchill Manor, which he left to his daughter Lady Scroggs, was sold, after complicated litigation, with his other property. The deer park (Churchill Park) enclosed large swathes of land to the north of the main village, with some of the walls still standing around the boundary. There is also evidence of mills and fishponds associated with the manor.

Broad areas of land were enclosed by the inclosure acts in the 18th and 19th centuries. A steep, rocky and untarmacked lane called the Batch was the old Bristol and Exeter coach road, until 1824, when the Commissioners of the Bristol Turnpike Trust determined that they would create a new toll road to avoid the steep incline of the original. A new tollhouse was built and gate installed across Churchill Gate near Four Cross. The new road, now New Road that constitutes part of the A38, joined the Bristol Turnpike road of Winford and was completed by November 1826. Before that year, the toll road passed in front of the inn called the Nelson Arms in the corner of Skinners Lane and Dinghurst Road, and up to the top of the Batch, coming out into the present road again in Star, a hamlet in the parish of Shipham.