Yetminster

St Andrew's Yetminster

Yetminster is a village and parish 6 miles south of Sherborne. The village is situated on the River Wriggle, a tributary of the River Yeo and almost everything in the centre of the village is built from a pale yellowy local limestone. The Parish Church of St Andrew's is built in the perpendicular style, contains five bells and has a 300 year old faceless clock which chimes the National Anthem several times a day; the chimes were installed to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The Church has Saxon origins, though only part of a 10th-century standing cross remains from that period; the current building dates mostly from the mid-15th century, though the chancel was built around 1300 and the whole church was restored in 1890 and several times subsequently.

In 1086 in the Domesday Book Yetminster was recorded as Etiminstre; it had 76 households, 26 ploughlands, 42 acres (17 ha) of meadow and 2 mills. It was in Yetminster Hundred and the tenant-in-chief was the Bishop of Salisbury. In 1300 the Bishop of Salisbury founded a weekly market and three-day annual fair in the village. Records do not state whether the market thrived, but the fair continued until the 19th century and was revived in the 20th century.

Edward Jenner is renowned as the "father of the smallpox vaccination" yet 20 years before in 1774 during an outbreak of smallpox, a Yetminster farmer, Benjamin Jesty recollected the old  tradition that dairymaids who had contracted the much milder cowpox didn't seem to catch smallpox. Quite by chance there was an outbreak of cowpox in nearby Chetnole. Benjamin went along to the farm and proceeded to vaccinate his wife and two boys by scratching their arms and introducing pus from the udder of an infected cow. The cowpox ran its course and the boys came through easily with just mild fevers, his wife was quite ill but eventually recovered. Unfortunately the villagers ridiculed Benjamin and the family eventually moved to Worth Matravers.

Robert Boyle, pioneer of modern chemistry who is best known for Boyle's Law, left an endowment for the provision of a school for poor boys in the district; the building was constructed in 1697 and functioned as a school between 1711 and 1945. In 1857 the Wilts, Somerset and Weymouth Railway between Weymouth and Westbury opened; it passed through Yetminster and a station was built for the village.