Sambourne

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Sambourne, formerly spelled Sambourn, is a hamlet north-west of Coughton, and situated on sloping ground rising westwards to about 500 feet near the ancient Ridge Way, which forms the county boundary of Warwickshire with Worcestershire, England.

[edit] History

The mediaeval history of the hamlet is bound up with that of the Royal Forest of Feckenham, where the abbots of Evesham at one time enclosed a considerable amount of the King's hunting forest without permission, a crime for which they were heavily fined.

In the seventeenth century Sambourn was one of the earliest centres of the local needle-making industry, but the village has always been small, set round a triangular green at the road junction in the centre of the seventeenth-century timber-framed cottages, with the inevitable newcomers, in this case comparatively few, near the Green Dragon Inn, and the Chapel built in 1892.

Edward Cooke (1798–1873), a needle manufacturer who lived and died at Sambourn, had for a wife, Hannah née Turberville (1799–1873), whose family are said to have entered England with William The Conqueror.

Nearby are the remains of the mediaeval village of Spernall, depopulated due to the Black Death, and the population of the entire parish in 1971 was still only 41, less than in the Middle Ages. There remains, however, a church here, which at the time of the Conquest was a chapel attached to the Priory of Studley.