Melcombe Regis
area in Weymouth, Dorset, United Kingdom
Melcombe Regis is an area of Weymouth in Dorset, England. Situated on the north shore of Weymouth Harbour and originally part of the waste of Radipole, it seems only to have developed as a significant settlement and seaport in the 13th century.
History
Melcombe Regis received a charter as a borough in 1268.
Melcombe was one of the first points of entry of the Black Death into England in the summer of 1348 (the disease was possibly carried there by infected soldiers and sailors returning from the Hundred Years' War, or from a visiting spice ship).
The two boroughs, Melcombe on the north shore and Weymouth on the south, were joined as a double borough in 1571, after which time the name Weymouth came to serve for them both. Nevertheless, Melcombe Regis remained a separate parish and became a civil parish in 1866. In 1911 the parish had a population of 10,952. On 1 April 1920 the parish was abolished and merged with Weymouth.
After two centuries of decline, the town's fortunes were dramatically revived by the patronage of the Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III, in the 1780s, and then of the King himself, who regularly used the town as a holiday resort between 1789 and 1811. He is commemorated by a prominent statue on the Esplanade, or sea-front, recording the gratitude of the inhabitants, and by the locally well-known Osmington White Horse.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Melcombe Regis” as area in Weymouth, Dorset, United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as area in Weymouth, Dorset, United Kingdom. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q748863. Authority coordinates are 50.619, -2.454. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1268, 1348, 1571 and 1866.
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This entry incorporates text from “Melcombe Regis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.