Life in 'comfortably off' Yorkshire village with silly sounding name

Roughly halfway between Thirsk and Northallerton is an ordinary village with an extraordinary name.

Don’t blame the residents of Thornton-le-Beans; blame the Saxons and the Normans. For it was they who gave this now middle-class settlement its puzzling epithet.

‘Thornton’ is of Saxon origin, meaning a farm with thorn bushes. Presumably the area was once covered in thorn bushes as just down the A168 are the villages of Thornton-le-Moor and Thornton-le-Street. Near Pickering is Thornton-le-Dale (also known as Thornton Dale) and near Castle Howard is Thornton-le-Clay.

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‘Le’ means ‘the’ in French and ‘beans’, well, it appears to refer to beans that were once grown for cattle in the area. At least, that’s one theory. In the 16th century it was called Thornton-in-Fabis which means the same thing in Latin.

Thornton-le-Beans looks more or less like any other village in the Vale of Mowbray. It’s surrounded by agricultural land and a mixture of medium to large houses, old and modern. Most have well tended gardens with mature trees.

“It’s a great place to live,” says villager Stephen Simpson. “It’s not on a through road and it’s logistically very good.”

“There’s quite a good community and the pub [the Crosby Village Inn] is quite vibrant,” says Stephen, who describes Thornton-le-Beans as ‘comfortably off’.

The core of the Crosby Village Inn was built around 1750 although it’s obscured by UPVC bay windows at the front. Inside, however, it’s very traditional with horseshoe-shaped doorways, low ceilings with exposed beams and a proper fireplace.

Chris and Moira Robson, originally from Doncaster, run the Crosby Village Inn. Moira says: “It’s a great place to live… It’s a very community-spirited place.” The pub hosts a social group for older men called the ‘Old Beans’. It hosted a social group of men who have since passed called the ‘Hasbeans [sic]’. And there’s an older women’s group with an even funnier name but I’ve promised not to print it. Sorry.

Scratch a little deeper and you’ll find other curious things about Thornton-le-Beans. The American-British author Bill Bryson liked the name so much he said he wanted to be buried in the village. The Friends of Friendless Churches, the charity that owns the village Chapel of Ease, has been only too happy to oblige. Bill is, however, still very much alive.

What is a ‘chapel of ease’ anyway? It’s a chapel built for parishioners who lived too far from the main parish church to pray there regularly. This church on the western edge of the village was built in 1770 for that purpose.

Now the elephant, or more aptly, the elephant-sized legume in the room. Do strangers remark on the village’s odd-sounding name? Of course they do. Stephen, originally from County Tyrone, says he’s always asked how to spell it when he’s on the phone to insurance companies. Chris, from the Crosby Village Inn, says: “We say, ‘Thornton as in chocolate’ and ‘beans as in baked beans'."

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