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The popular belief amongst modern Gosportonians is that the town of Gosport was founded in the middle of the twelfth century by either King Stephen who reigned from 1135 to 1153, or his brother Henry de Blois who was Bishop of Winchester between 1129 and 1171, who granted the right to hold three market days each week and two fairs each year.
Legend has it that Stephen was caught up in a great storm in the Solent but, being miraculously rescued by local fishermen, called the site of his landing God's Port.
This story is frequently taught as fact in local schools, is embodied in the motto "God's Port our Haven" added in 1946 to the Borough crest, and underlies the design of the latest Borough logo.
Clearly these stories strike a popular chord but can we, over 800 years later, separate fact from fancy? Here we attempt to do just that by examining the historical evidence.
In 1922 the Borough of Gosport consolidated two separate, but intimately linked areas; Alverstoke which covered over 3,000 acres, and the much smaller Gosport. Technically the names referred to two separate manors, but the manorial system had disintegrated some seventy years previously.
Professor Beresford writes of medieval new towns "there were characteristic forms which the interior plans of planted towns reveal especially the...grid-forms of streets. There were also characteristic positions for new towns to take up, in relation to older settlements. It has been shown that a planted town was likely to have a small area ...; it was likely to lie near the edge of an existing parish; and it was likely to be surrounded by the territory of the rural village from which the site had been taken. It was also unlikely, in the first instance, to have a town church with full independence; the typical situation is dependence, as a chapelry, on the parish church of the village within whose limits the new town had been set."
Given that there was indeed a chapel in the town by 1284 (it was in ruins by the 1530s) it is as if Professor Beresford was describing Gosport in the above paragraph. Of course the street map on which we are basing the theory is not medieval; could the town have in fact been laid out in the seventeenth century ? In Gosport the names of South Street, High Street and North Street were in use before 1640 but that is not of much help in this context. However it is almost self-evident that to lay out a new street plan requires that the land already be in the hands of a very small number of co-operating people.
There are many well-documented cases of new villages being laid out on estates under the control of the Lord of the Manor, but a pre-requisite of that was the copyhold system of land tenure under which each tenant held his land on a lease; in Gosport (and Alverstoke) that had not been the case since c1260 when the then Lord of the Manor had given outright ownership of the land to his former tenants in return for a yearly quit rent of 4d or 6d an acre.