Apparitions are to be expected around any battlefield, both as lasting evidence of violent deaths and because the haunting is often a symbolic method of passing on a legend; even a comparatively small flow of blood can pass freely into the folk memory of generations. One insignificant affray of the Civil War left an impression so vivid on an isolated Dorset hamlet that the story was perpetuated in local lore for centuries.

Parliamentarian soldiers under the Earl of Essex were in June 1644 marching as an organised body towards Wincanton. (On his fatal march to Lostwithiel). At the small village of Poyntington, two miles north of Sherborne on the Somerset border, a few royalist sympathisers rallied poorly armed peasants in a rustic revolt to ambush the column. They were led by a delirious 20 year- old, Baldwin, Malet Esq., who impeached the troops to "halt in the name of the King."

Metal glinted at a meadow by the mill stream where, dashing horseborne into battle, the arrogant Baldwin swept his sword through a score of the foe. Within an hour he was a bloody corpse reposing supine at the house of his father. The ever present fear of plague followed the swiftness of the decision of battle and the next morning Baldwin was carried to the churchyard. Moist meadow soil was hurriedly used to cover the bodies of the other lifeless combatants of both sides, and these grave mounds can still be seen.

Up to 1870 the memory was so intense that no villager of Poyntington would at night approach the meadow for dread of a ghostly troop of headless men and one decapitated female; her part in the skirmish is not known. The reason for remembering the battle was to last as the fight left a depopulated village which fell to ruin and never returned to its pre-calamity status.

In the church is an heraldic painting with the arms of the Malet family and the following inscription: "Baldwin Malet, second sonne of Sir Thomas Malet, dyed in the King's service, the 3rd day of June A.D. 1644 in the Twentieth Yeare of his age."

Source: Parish Poyntington 1928: A.H. Bell.

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