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History
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A Historical Guide
to the Village
It is thought
that
the British Isles may have suffered
three
Ice Ages, the last of which must
have left a bleak, bare landscape with
large areas of water and marshland.
Slowly trees like birch and pine began
to grow, and later great forests of
a variety of trees, especially oak,
covered the whole land. As the
population of the country increased,
man
cleared the forests, but in places
they survived, often retained by kings
and barons for hunting purposes.
Such a forest was Wychwood and it
became
one of the four great forests of
England, covering the area from Enstone
in
the north to Stanton Harcourt in
the south, and from Kidlington in the
east
to Burford in the west. The
Domesday boundary shows the forest
coming right
down to the river at Minstre, but
Henry II in the middle of the twelfth
century had the forest extended to
beyond Brize Norton and Ducklington, so
that for some time, Minstre was a
village enclosed by forest.
The Windrush
Valley was an obvious place for
habitation from
the earliest times. Minstre had the
advantage of the sheltered valley on
the
edge of, or within, a forest. The
river and the forest would provide
protection. The river and the
flooded areas, which would have been
more
extensive in earlier times, would
provide fish and fowl for food and
reeds
for roofing. The forest would
provide animals for food, skins for
clothing,
wood for building, for fuel and for
weapon-making. The river was also a
favoured means of transport when
the roads were badly made and kept, and
it
also provided power for the mills
which were necessary to all medieval
villages. The forest also provided
work, for the trees had to be
systematically coppiced and
pollarded in order to secure regular
crops of
brushwood. The woodland was divided
into fenced sections and men were
involved in making hurdles and
gates and keeping the fences and gates
repaired. There were the tree-
fellers, the swineherd with his pigs,
the Lord
of the Manor's overseer, the
charcoal-burners, the makers of deer-
traps, and
the collectors of dry bracken for
animal bedding or nuts for their own
consumption. The forest, the land
and the river would have been busy
places,
quite different from today. Because there are no
existing deeds, there is no evidence to
show how Minstre came into the
possession of the Lovell. However the
Lovell
were related to Roger D'Ivry,
butler to William the Conqueror, and it
is
likely that they supported William
in the conquest and were rewarded with
gifts of land, among which was
Minstre. But of course we have evidence
that
Minstre is much older than the
Lovel's association with it. The
remains of
Stone Age man's occupation can be
found in the fields. Neolithic pottery
was
found in the upper field on the
Witney side of the village. The names
Windrush (Wenrisc), Bushey Ground
and Harbour Hill are of Celtic
derivation.
The discovery of a cache of Roman
coins is not conclusive of Roman
occupation, although the fact that
Akeman Street, the Roman road to the
city
of Bath, crosses the northern
boundary of the parish, makes it more
likely.
There is also the remains of a
Roman staging post and bath-house
between
Minstre and Worsham. The Minster
Lovell very early English cloisonne
jewel
could have been made in the same
workshop as King Alfred's jewel, about
A.D.
875. In 1086 the
name of the village was Minstre. Later
it was
called Magna Minstre, then Minstre
Level. Little Minster was named Minstre
Laundell (after John Laundell
1425), Parva Minstre and Lutelminstre.
Minstre
in Old English means monastery, but
as there was no monastery here it can
only mean that there was something
special about the ecclesiastical status
of the place. It was an
administrative centre for the Abbey of
Ivry and it
may have been that priests went out
from Minstre to work in other parishes.
In 1122, William Govel or Lovel and
his wife Maud, who was the sister of
the
Earl of Leicester, owned Minstre
and so began the Lovel connection with
Minstre which was to last 383
years. We must assume that William
built the
first manor house and also a church
dedicated to St. John. After William's
death, Maud, who by birth was of
the House of Perceval, Earls of Ivry
and
Dukes of Normandy, gave the church
and certain lands to the Benedictine
Abbey of Ivry, and the village soon
had a tiny, alien priory, with a prior,
perhaps one other monk and servant,
and their task was to collect tithes,
rents and gifts and to send the
money back to Normandy. A priest was
appointed to take services and
serve the people.
In 1197
another William Lovel and his wife
Isabel, gave a
corn mill and a fulling mill at
Minstre to the monks of Thame, possibly
as a
belated thanks offering for his
safe return from Richard I's crusade.
The
Lovels prospered, partly from
grants of land, but mostly from a
series of
prudent marriages with rich
heiresses. John Lovel, who married Maud
de
Sydenham, lived at Titchmarsh,
Northamptonshire, which was then the
family's
principal seat. But they paid a
chantry priest to say Mass for their
souls
in a Chapel of St. Cecelia. It is
thought that the jamb and archway
embedded
in the south facing wall of the
farmhouse, easily seen from the
churchyard,
are twelfth-century remains of this
chapel. If a priory did exist it would
probably have been to the west of
the churchyard, and have consisted of a
simple hall, kitchen and buttery,
and a barn. As a consequence of the
renewal of war with France in 1369,
alien priories were seized, dissolved
and their estates vested in the
crown. In 1441 Henry VI gave the church
and
lands to Eton College which he had
founded the year before to prepare
students for his King's College at
Cambridge. St. Kenelm's Church is still
under the patronage of Eton
College. In 1430 Joan of
Arc was captured and she was executed
the
following year, and this brought a
weary William Lovel home from the wars
to
settle down and to try to recover
his failing health. Of his eighty
manors
he chose Minstre in which to
settle. From 1433 to 1450 England was
ravaged
by epidemics and it may be that
William thought that Minstre was a less
frequented, and therefore safer
place, for an already sick man to live
in.
He was one of only a dozen peers at
that time who admitted to an income of
more than £1,000 a year, and he
used his wealth to make himself
comfortable.
He had the hall rebuilt and he made
it into one of the finest houses in
Oxfordshire. There is no record to
tell us if William was able to live
full-time in his new house. Great
houses, without advantage of proper
drains, became intolerably smelly
after a time so that great landowners
tended to circulate between their
houses to make them habitable. Of
course
the close proximity of the river
Windrush to the hall and the rising
ground
from the river would help with the
drainage. William next rebuilt the
church
and dedicated it to St. Kenelm,
hoping perhaps that the Cotswold Saint
would
help him to overcome his sickness.
William's household was probably well
over a hundred people and this
would include the 'riding household'
which
provided the pomp and pageantry
needful to a great Lord and his
fighting
force if he was called to arms. The
Steward of the Manor was the general
manager of the estate and possibly
a landowner in his own right. Unfortunately William did
not live long to enjoy his lovely
house. He died in 1455 and his son
John did not inherit for long, dying in
1468. Now came the high point of
the Lovel family, Francis Lord Lovel,
Viscount Lovel, Lord High-
Chamberlain and Chief Butler of
England, Constable
of the Castle and Honour of
Wallingford and the Honour of _ St.
Waleries;
one of the Most Honourable the
Privy Council to King Richard III and
Knight
of the Most Noble Order of the
Garter. Francis was one of the three
most
powerful men in the country, a fact
which is celebrated in the old rhyme: 'The catte, the ratte, and
Lovel our dogge Rule all England
under the hogge'. The 'ratte' was Sir
Richard Ratcliffe and the 'catte' Sir
William Catesby. Richard III, a
Yorkist in the so-called 'Wars of the
Roses', was called the 'hogge'
because his coat-of-arms depicted a
white
boar. Unfortunately for Francis,
Richard only ruled for two years and he
met
his death fighting gallantly
against Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian, at
Bosworth
Field,
the last time when an
English king took to the battlefield
personally
against a rival. Francis escaped to
the continent but was not done with the
'Welshman' as Henry VII was
deprecatingly called. A bright young
boy,
Lambert Simnel, had been trained-up
to impersonate one of the princes of
the
House of York, the last of the
Plantagenets, who was a prisoner in the
tower. In 1487, Francis returned
with an army and after seeing Lambert
Simnel proclaimed king in Ireland,
met Henry VII at Stoke Field near
Newark,
where the war came to an end with
the final defeat of the Yorkists. What
happened to Francis is open to
conjecture. It is an interesting
reflection
on civil war that Thomas Lovel of
Norfolk, a relative but a Lancastrian,
was
dispossessed under Richard III and
then as a supporter of Henry Tudor
fought
against Francis at Bosworth and at
Stoke. Henry VII confiscated the manor
of
Minster Lovel where Richard had
stayed, and which he himself visited on
three occasions - in 1493, 1497 and
1503. Henry gave the house and lands to
Jasper, Duke of Bedford, half-
brother to Henry VI. It was Jasper who
commanded the Lancastrian army at
the battle of Stoke. When he died,
childless, the king gave the manor
to the four year old Duke of York, who
became King Henry VIII in 1509. It
was at this time that St. Cecelia's
Chapel was dismantled and the
stones used to repair the ancient
church at
Cokethorpe, and probably some were
used on the manor house for in 1518
Henry
VIII made substantial repairs and
perhaps additions to the house. In 1536
the manor was leased to Alexander
Unton, the king's servant, who was
later
knighted. He died in 1547, and in
1550, John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick
was
granted 'the manor of Munstre
Lovel, two granges and a warren of
coneys
'. In 1553 Warwick became
Earl of Northumberland, and he sold
Minstre Lovel and other lands back
to the king in order to buy the site
and
demesnes of the late monastery of
Tynemouth, Northumberland. The same [i]
year Northumberland's brother,
Andrew Dudley, K.G., was granted the
lordship and manor of Minstre
Lovel. Edward VI died that year and
Northumberland attempted to put
Lady Jane Grey on the throne. This
failed,
he was executed, Andrew was
imprisoned and Queen Mary cancelled the
grant of
Minstre Lovel. Sir Alexander
Unton's lease of twenty-one years was
unexpired, so Cecily, his wife, who
had married Robert Kelway, claimed the
tenancy. The particulars included
the said demesne, lands, stable next
the
great gate, tanhouse, dovecote, the
fishing in the water of Wenriche
(excepting the fishing in the
tenure of the miller), all woods,
underwoods,
mines, quarries, and other
royalties at a yearly rent of £13 10s.
8d., the
Queen to keep the house in repair
and the lessee to have sufficient
firebote,
housebote and heybote (wood for
firing, house repairs and fencing). In
1560
Sir Robert Kelway, now Surveyor of
the Courts of Ward and Liveries, bought
the Manor for E691. When Sir Robert
died in 1583 his estates passed to his
daughter Anne, wife of Sir
John Harington, who was a godson of
Queen Elizabeth I. He was a wit,
writer,
'saucy poet' and, when he was not
out of favour with the Queen, was
prominent at court. He invented the
first flush toilet and wrote a book
called [i]Metamorphosis of
Ajax. Ajax was a
pun on 'a jakes' which in
Elizabethan times was the name for a
privy. His
daughter, Lucy, married Edward,
Earl of Bedford.In 1600
the Haringtons wished to sell Minstre
Lovel Manor
but to do this they had to break
the entail. They enlisted the help of
Lucy
and the Earl, and through a process
of law called 'Common Recovery' they
broke the entail and sold the manor
(which then extended to cover nearly
all
of the area now comprising the
parish of Minster Lovell) in 1602 to
Sir
Edward Coke, the great and feared
Attorney-General. (It was this Sir
Edward
who had Sir Walter Raleigh's old
death sentence revived which led to his
execution in 1618.) The price was
£5,000 and the Cokes held the manor for
over 200 years. Sir Edward and his
successors kept full records of all
matters pertaining to the estate
(the Coke mss.) and there are many
references to the village. The
mill, which was re-thatched in
1609, 'paid
for four loads of straw to thatch
the mill 19s. 6d.' (Coke mss.) was in
1602
owned by one 'Mr. Truman' who had
bought it from the Haringtons and who
sold
it to Coke for £500 in 1606. The
manuscripts also refer to many other
villagers
of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. After a programme of repairs
to the
house Sir Edward and his wife made a
visit in 1607. Furniture from Ditchley
had
to be brought and returned and my
Lady's preserves and lamprey pies had
to be
returned to London (Coke mss.). But the
Cokes rarely lived in Minstre Lovel
although Thomas Coke, in 1718, spent
his honeymoon at the hall and stayed on
until 1721. This Thomas was a great
collector of books and works of art and
he
decided to build a great hall at
Holkham in Norfolk in which to display
his
collection. In 1728 Thomas was created
Baron Lovel of Minstre Lovel thus
reviving the title, and in 1744 he was
created Viscount Coke of Holkham and
Earl
of Leicester. In 1747 Minstre Lovel
Hall was abandoned and the east and
west
ranges of the quadrangle and the
kitchen on the east side of the great
hall
demolished. There was a sale of the
building materials, for Thomas was
desperate
for money. Villagers then took the
stones to repair their own cottages. In
1759
Thomas died and the peerage became
extinct. His sister's son, Wenman
Roberts,
took the name of Coke and his son,
Thomas William Coke, born 1754, was the
well-known character Billy Coke of
Norfolk, the famous agriculturalist. In
1812
he decided to sell the Minstre Lovel
property. From 1711 the
hall had been leased out to John
Wheeler,
Gent., who was buried in the
church, with the proviso that 'Thomas
Coke be
allowed to keep court there'.
Wheeler was to 'find food and drink for
the
steward, his servants and horses
for two days and three nights, and one
convenient dinner for the jury'
(Coke mss.). Wheeler appears to have
acted
for the Cokes in small disputes
[i]which arose on the estate. A
letter
from J. Wheeler talks about a buck deer [i]which
needed to be killed and
sent to Isleworth to keep Mr.
Coke's birthday. The estate woods were
of
great importance, not only for the
value of the timber but also for the
deer
which provided sport and meat. The
1707 Coke manuscript states, 'Agreed to
make Mr. Robert Parker keeper for
the Chace at Minstre LoveL woodward:
wallreeve and gamekeeper - to allow
him £10 a year salary and a green coat,
wastecoat and breeches. In 1708
paid for a gunn for ye keeper £1 10s.
Od.'
Ralph Allen and Sir Henry Lea were
also tenants and the names of local
families living in the village at
that time were Barratt, Brooke,
Buckingham, Howse, Locke, Preston
and Taylor. Buck in 1729 engraved a
north
view of the hall. It appeared in
perfect condition but by 1775 it was in
ruins. At this time the Coke
accounts make it clear that the estate
contributed to the upkeep of the
local poor and from 1710 to 1725
regular
payment were made 'for keeping poor
Windle, a lunatick.' In
1812 the manor was valued at £60,000
and it was offered
for sale in ten lots. The eight
smaller lots were sold, some to
existing
tenants, but the greater proportion
of the estate remained unsold. A year
later Thomas Henry Taunton, and his
son, William Elias Taunton, who became
recorder for Oxford and Justice of
the King's Bench, bought the farmhouse
and paddock and the site of the
ancient manor house together with other
land
and property in the village for
£10,000. Later they bought more
property in
the village including The Swan Inn.
All that remained of Coke's possessions
in Minstre Lovel was sold in 1854
to J. W. Kimber and Robert Abraham.
This
area was woodland towards Leafield
and was still part of the primeval
forest
of Wychwood. Henry II, who came to
the throne in 1154, spent the early
years
of his reign restoring law and
order and recovering the Crown lands
dissipated by Stephen in the
bribery of his opponents. He
significantly
increased the size of this royal
forest. By 1300 the forest had returned
to
the size recorded in Domesday. It
was in 1464, while hunting in the
forest,
that Edward IV slipped away to
marry secretly the widowed Lady Grey,
Elizabeth Woodville. Henry VI
granted Sir William Lovel the right to
cut
down Minstre woods. This would have
provided timbers for the rebuilding of
the hall and church, and the excess
was sent to Oxford for the building of
the new divinity schools. During
the reign of Queen Victoria, about
two-thirds of the forest, as it
then existed, was cut down and all that
was
left was enclosed in 1862. Woods
were cleared in the 1860s to allow the
building of Ringwood Farm. William Elias Taunton, in
1874, sold his holding to John
Deane, whose daughter, Emily, sold
part of it to Colonel B. de Sales la
Terriere, who had the idea of
trying to restore the old house, but he
abandoned
the idea as impracticable.
His widow placed the 'Ruins' in the
care of H.M. Office of Works in
1935. Between 1935 and the war, all the
low
footings of the hall were uncovered
and it became possible for the first
time in many years to see that the
design was of buildings on three sides
around a central courtyard with a
tall boundary wall on the river side.
The
farmhouse door is thought to have
come from the hall and the large barn
is
known to have very
ancient sections. But the
large dovecote is the most
impressive of the remains.The building of next most
importance to the manor house and
the church in the medieval village,
was the corn mill. Domesday records
three mills at Minstre. Two, a
grist or corn mill and a fulling mill,
would
have existed on the present mill
site; the other at Little Minstre, for
every manor needed its own mill and
Little Minstre in the early days was a
separate manor. The last grist mill
was a three-storey building with a sack
hoist and a plentiful supply of
water for power because the diverted
river
could store water without the main
course of the river, important as a
means
of transport, being affected. The
island formed by this diversion was
called
a ham. From early
times the miller was an important
person in the
village, and usually extracted more
than his due from those who needed his
services. The Harris family were
millers for many years. William Hudson
bought the mill at the 1812 sale.
He rebuilt at least part of the mill as
on one of the arches
over the wheel race is a date 1820
and the initials 'W. H.'. William
Hudson
died in 1823 and is buried in the
churchyard. Under the mill heading in
the
estate records appears one puzzling
entry. 'Constable for carrying coles
for
the prince: carrying the ship
timber for H.M. Paid Marshalsea, Kings
Bench,
maimed soldier 4s. 5'/2d.' In 1903
John Cooper had the mill and in 1924
Thomas Jefferys was the last
miller. The bridge, made
to funnel inwards to aid the counting
of
sheep and cattle, is thought to be
fifteenth century and the river, which
would have been wider and deeper,
was navigable, and almost certainly
would
have been used by the great
stonemason, Christopher Kempster, to
bring the
stone cut in Taynton Quarry, down
to the Thames to be floated down to
Oxford
for the building of Oxford Colleges
and Blenheim Palace, and further down
the river to build Windsor Castle
and rebuild St. Paul's Cathedral. Just
beyond the hall was a weir and lock
which was last repaired in 1740, though
attempts were made to prevent this.
Did the owners of the manor extract
dues
from those using the river? Domesday records that
Little Minstre was held by a certain
Saewold, an officer of the king.
Robert D'Oilly seems to have been the
king's bailiff, responsible for
Saewold's good behaviour. In 1107,
Roger de
Cherney was in possession of at
least part of Little Minstre. It would
appear that D'Oilly then held the
manor 'in chief' of the king, and Roger
was the copyholder, that is a
tenant of manorial land according to
the
custom of the manor. In the time of
Henry III, the male D'Oilly line ended.
The heiress married the Earl of
Warwick who now became the owner of
Little
Minstre. When Thomas their son died
childless, his sister, Margaret became
Countess of Warwick. She married
first, John Marshall, who was granted
the
Earldom, and second, Henry de
Plessis, who also became Earl. Both
marriages
were childless and the title passed
eventually to the Beauchamps. In the Lincoln Registers
is this curious entry: 'The Bishop granted
licence to the Lady Jocose Beauchamp,
widow, to cause to be disinterred
and conveyed, the remains of a certain
Lord Hugh Cokesay, knight, from the
parish of Minstre Lovel unto and into
the parish church of Kyderminstre.'
It may be that Sir Hugh had died while
visiting Minstre and was buried
here. In 1406, John Lovel and his wife
Maud
had a house and some land in Little
Minstre. When John died in 1408, he
seems to have held all the manor
and William, his grandson, bequeathed
it to
his son John in 1455. However John
Laundell's name is strongly associated
with Little Minstre (1425) and it
is said that he was the owner. It is
unlikely that the Lovels would sell
it and buy it back again, so perhaps he
was the tenant of the manor. At the time of the
Commonwealth and Protectorate, Colonel
Henry Heylyn, who fought for
Charles I against Oliver Cromwell and
his
Parliamentary forces, came to live
in the old manor house, 'a quaint and
picturesquely situated house half
in ruins through neglect ...' as Thomas
Hearn, the Bodley librarian
described it. The Heylyns came from
Wales and
the last of the name to hold the
estate in the Principality was Roland
Heylyn who became Sheriff of London
and died in 1637. He paid for a
translation of the Bible to be made
into Welsh.
The most famous of the
Heylyns was Peter. Born in 1599 in
Burford and educated there, he was one
of
the most learned and intellectual
men of the disturbing times that
preceded
Charles I's execution. Peter was
a 'living library' and a writer of
influential and fierce pamphlets,
and he eventually stirred up more
trouble
for himself than he could handle
and for some years he was forced to
travel
the country in disguise. At last he
arrived at Minstre Lovel, the home of
his elder brother, Edward, and
nephew, Henry, and they rented him a
farm and
house. From 1648 to 1653 he lay low
in Little Minstre, as Henry had done
after the Civil War, writing his
great book, [i]Cosmography, which
was a
study of the globe. Finally he
moved to Abingdon, to be nearer the
great
libraries of Oxford. He died in
1662 and was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
In 1699 Henry
Peacock of Asthall bought the lease of
the
Heylyn estate for E1,400 to hold
from the Cokes, who now owned both
manors,
for ninety-nine years or the lives
of him and his two sons, John and
Francis. The indenture also
included The Swan Inn and lands. Henry
Peacock
was Henry Heylyn's son-in-law, and
it may be that Heylyn sold out to the
Cokes and then built The Old Post
House (formerly known as Lock's
Cottage),
which bears the initials H.H. and
the date 1692, in which to live out his
life. Henry Peacock seems to have
had close associations with the Coke
estate as his name appears in the
records many times. One complaint
reads,
'Mr. Peacock was difficult to talk
to because he had great dogs that doth
bite and damage people much!' The
last reference in the Coke records to a
Peacock was in 1748, 'Mr. Peacock,
a son of Henry, still pays rent (£10
per
annum) for the farm in Little
Minstre.' But there was a Mr. Peacock
who was
said to be in Fleet Prison and
after being discharged seems to have
disappeared. Another family who
held land at Little Minstre was the
Ewres,
Edward and Francis. Francis Ewre
Esq. appears in the Protestation
returns of
1641-42. At about the same time
Francis Rathbone had a farmhouse built
at
Little Minstre. The Duke of
Norfolk, whose home is at Arundel in
Sussex,
lived at The Old Manor House during
the war. The cottage standing on the
lane-side called Barn End House,
College Farm and Cot Farm were all
owned at
different times by members of the
Batt family. Another
national figure who came to live in
Minstre,
probably at the hall, in 1668 (John
Wheeler had died in 1661) was Sir
William Coventry, who , had been
Secretary to James Duke of York, a
Commissioner to the navy during
difficult times when the fleet was
being
rebuilt and the service
reorganised, and a senior and friend of
Samuel Pepys. He, like Colonel Heylyn,
sought a quiet retreat in
the country, after losing favour
temporarily with King Charles IL
Coventry
was a courtier and a very able
politician. Pepys thought him 'the best
minister that the king hath'. He
quarrelled with the Duke of Buckingham
and
challenged him to a duel for
telling lies about him. This the king
prevented
by putting Coventry in the Tower
where Pepys visited him. On his release
he
retired to Minstre where he lived
happily, entertaining his Oxford
friends,
and it is highly likely that Samuel
Pepys visited him here. Minster Lovell's
continuing historical significance now
moved from the river valley to the
plateau-land to the south of the main
road. This was treeless farmland,
partly reasonably deep soil and partly
brash. It became a centre of
interest in 1847 when 300 acres were
purchased
for £11,000 on behalf of the
Chartist Land Company by Feargus
O'Connor. The idea of
buying land on which to locate
allotments, each
with a cottage, which were to be
the homes of self-sufficiency for
inner-city artisans, was not
original, nor was Minster Lovell the
first
Chartist venture of this kind. The
1830s and 40s had produced growing
discontent among the working-class
town dwellers, and revolution in France
was a threat to the 'status quo'
here. William Allen influenced Feargus
O'Connor the most and it was
O'Connor's driving force which got the
land
colonies built. But the haphazard
financing of the scheme, O'Connor's own
difficult personality, and the poor
choice of people to occupy the
allotments, made failure certain
from the start. This was a pity,
because
the ownership of freehold property
of the minimal annual value of 40s.
qualified a man for a county vote,
although it must be said that the Act
of
Parliament giving the vote to all
men would soon be passed. The first cottages to be
built were three along the Witney
road next to The White Hart Inn.
Only one of these remains. A further
seventy-five were built down the
Brize Norton road, Bushey Ground, round
The
Crescent where the estate's school
and schoolhouse are to be found, along
the Burford road and to the north
of it. The school, which would have
preceded the National Education Act
of 1870 which brought a school to the
village, was never used as such. It
was used as a chapel and O'Connor once
held a soiree there to raise money
to buy a clock, which is still in the
house. Each well-built bungalow had
a plot of land of up to four acres, and
was provided with outbuildings,
built-in furniture and an underground
water
tank to receive water off the roof
which was then hand-pumped back into
the
kitchen, and all this was
accomplished, to the amazement of local
builders,
in a period of ten months. In
addition some wells were sunk, the land
cleared of fences and tree-stumps,
some of it drained, all of it ploughed
and harrowed and well spread with
manure. Local names appear in the lists
of
allotees: Townsend in 1847, Smith
and Bennett in 1848, Batts, Cooper,
Cross
and Holloway in 1852, and
Buckingham and Gould in 1891. Around
1889 the
'Estate', as it was called, was
also known as 'Little Evesham' and
people
came out from Witney to see the
fruit trees in blossom. An act winding
up
the Chartist Land Company was
passed in 1851. O'Connor died in
Chiswick in
1854 and according to the
[i]National Biography, 50,000
people attended
his funeral. The bungalows remain
to remind us of a significant, if
controversial, man.
The oldest
farms in the village are Windrush Farm,
on the
Witney side of the parish, which
the present owners are restoring and
uncovering some very old remains in
the original part of the house, Manor
Farm to the north-east of the
church built probably during the early
years
of Francis Lovel's inheritance,
College Farm and Cot Farm in Little
Minster.
None of these are now working
farms. Whitehall Farm, once called
Starveall,
to the west of the parish, is now a
plant nursery, and there is a working
farm nearby, called Folly Farm.
Ringwood Farm, named after a famous
hound,
is to the north of the parish and
is still an active farm. Most of the
trees
between Minster and Leafield were
removed to create Ringwood Farm, and
the
Abraham family have always farmed
it. In 1851, when the population of the
parish was 450, Joseph Batts farmed
Cot Farm and John Gillett, Manor Farm.
Ann Hudson was farmer, miller, and
baker. In 1861, George Blake and
William
Brooks were shopkeepers and John
Lock was carpenter, wheelwright,
sub-postmaster and parish clerk. When Mr. Robertson left
Hill Farm in the 1950s he took
everything with him on a special
train to Devon, his family, his
belongings
and all his livestock! Between them
the farms provided most of the male
employment in the village. The 1881
census returns show farmers and farm
workers 102, shepherds S,
stonemasons 10, carpenters 3, millers
3,
inn-keepers 3, grocers/bakers 6,
blacksmith 1, cleric 1. The female
employment was gloveresses (out-
workers) 10, servants 9, dressmakers 6,
teachers 2, nurse 1, staymaker 1.
The shepherd was paid 1 [i]5s. a
week,
plus customary fees for each lamb
at lambing time born in excess of the
number of ewes, for sheep-shearing
and tail docking. In winter farm wages
dropped to [i]10s. a week. Self-
employed craftsmen, the blacksmith,
wheelwright and hurdlemaker, were
better off than farmworkers. A boy might start work at
ten years of age as a bird scarer.
At twelve he might be promoted
to 'drive plough' walking with the team
of
horses and turning them at the end
of the furrow. As third carter he
received 3s. a week. The head
carter's wage was 15s. with `average'
money -
twopence an acre paid at drilling
time or harvest. The cowman had 15s. a
week and free milk. The First World
War caused a drift of men to the
factories. It was during this war
that an airfield was constructed where
Smith's Industries now stands, and
this improved employment prospects
further. Soldiers returning from
the war had changed outlooks. Between the wars there
began a series of improvements that
transformed Minster Lovell. The
street was properly made-up and the
village
tidied up generally. Agricultural
workers' wages rose because, in
addition
to those farm workers who went to
the war, the drift to factories, mostly
blanket-making, where at least £I a
week could be earned, made for a
shortage of labour on the land. The
Windrush at Minster Lovell was famous
for its rushes and its crayfish.
Mr. Albert Greengrow, who came annually
for
thirty years from Kent to cut the
rushes which were used for
cauking, that
is sealing between the staves of
wooden barrels, declared that the rush
of
the Windrush was the best in the
country.
Mr. Greengrow used a flat
boat and
'tented out' the sweet-smelling
rushes to dry in the meadows.
Later, when he
could afford a small truck, he
brought the rushes up to the east side
of
Brize Norton road where he lived in
a caravan with his wife. Anyone
visiting
the village in the early years of
the century would have found crayfish
nets
drying beside the cottage doors.
The baited nets
were placed in the river at
intervals of a few feet. The
crayfish, cooked alive in boiling
water, were
eaten with butter, vinegar and salt
and were served cold.The Windrush has been
described as the 'windingest' river in
England, taking a fortnight to
reach the sea. The river near The Olde
Swan
was used for sheep-dipping and this
must have been one of those cheerful,
communal occasions for the farm-
hands like threshing days, for the men
were
allowed to send to the inn for
twelve pints of 'home-brewed' each,
which
must have made the day pass more
quickly! Beside the bridge a narrow
strip
of land was called 'Osiers' and
here the small branches of willow were
cut
for basket-making in the spacious
days when landowners sent gifts of game
to
friends and bank managers! Another
exciting event was when a steam plough
travelled through the village. The
flying sparks would be capable of
setting
a thatched roof alight so the
cottagers had to be ready, with pails
of
water. It is
surprising that Minster once had three
turnpikes, each
with its own house. The main one
was opposite The White Hart and was
erected
in about 1630 to raise money to
repair the roads. It was dismantled in
1879
though the house continued to be
occupied until 1956. There was a
turnpike
for the bridge and the house stood
on the river bank opposite Bridge
Cottage. This turnpike annoyed the
people of Little Minster who had either
to pay to enter the main village or
wade through the water. The third, very
small, turnpike was near Windrush
Farm, so all three roads were covered.
The
White Hart turnpike was
commemorated when the Toll House Cafe
opened where
Toll House Cottage now stands. At
about the same time there was the
Mistletoe Bough Tea Gardens at
Windrush Farm. The White
Hart was a popular coaching inn for the
London-Gloucester-Cheltenham
coaches. It was locally known as The
Pike
because of its close proximity to
the turnpike. Six horses were kept for
coach changes and for the hire of a
gig for local journeys from the coach
to
outlying villages. The White Hart
organised its own Sick Benefit Club
long
before the N.H.S., or even Lloyd
George's Insurance Scheme came into
being.
The subscription was 4s. a quarter
of which
[i]Is. was earmarked for
doctor's fees and 6d. a year went
towards the cost of the annual
dinner when members went in procession
to the
church with the band playing and
flags flying, followed by a stop at The
Swan for refreshment before coming
up the hill for the dinner. One of the
nineteenth-century landlords was
Decimus Clemans who is buried in the
churchyard. The New Inn was a
converted Charterville bungalow, first
licensed in 1896. The third inn,
well-known throughout the county, if
not
the country, is The Olde Swan,
formerlv called The White Swan
Beerhouse. It is said to
date from the time when William Lovel
rebuilt
the manor house, and was used by
drovers when bringing their sheep from
Wales to London. The day after
Minster Feast was a general holiday and
one
of the regular events was a game of
skittles for a goose in The Swan's
skittle alley. Swan customers
expected rhubarb wine to put in their
beer.
The compound was called Rhubarb
Jerkum.
Recorded keepers of The
Swan were
Elizabeth Lock (1848), Albert Busby
(1903), John Baker (1911), and in 1939
our literary inn-keeper, Alexander
Moat Williams, who wrote: 'In the 1930s
The Olde Swan Beerhouse was
reconditioned as an inn, with good
accommodation
for man and his motor car. Its
adaptation to accord with modern
notions,
changed it out of knowledge.
Refinements such as bathrooms, indoor
sanitation, hot and cold water, a
wine and spirit licence were introduced
to
give the old local several steps up
in the world of taverns.' On the
completion of their exams, students
came out from Oxford, purchased beer at
The Olde Swan and took it up to the
ruins to drink and sing through the
night. Sir Winston Churchill came
often and Harold and Mary Wilson spent
their honeymoon at our celebrated
hotel.
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John Taplin got in touch with with
the following.
On your web page you mention the
husband of Anne Kelway as the wife of
Sir John Harington, but he was not the
Sir John Harington who was the godson
of Elizabeth I. Anne Kelway's husband
was Sir John Harington or Harrington of
Exton, Rutland. He was created 1st
Baron Harrington by James I in 1603 and
was the guardian and tutor of Princess
Elizabeth at another of his houses,
Coombe Abbey, near Coventry, and during
her time there she became a target for
the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot
in 1605.
Princess Elizabeth later married
Frederick, Elector Palatine of the
Rhine and Sir John accompanied her to
Germany after her marriage at Whitehall
on St. Valentine’s Day, 14 February
1613, but died on 23 August that year
at Worms on his return journey.
Harrington’s service to the royal
family had been a heavy financial
burden and at his death he left huge
debts. Sir John’s heir was his son,
also Sir John Harrington, but he died
unmarried within a year of his father
and with his death the barony became
extinct.
Sir John Harington, the godson of
Elizabeth, was of Kelston, Somerset.
This branch of the Haringtons descended
from John Harington of Stepney, who
married Ethelreda Malte, daughter of
Henry VIII's tailor, though generally
regarded as an illegitimate daughter of
the king himself. Though this marriage
was childless, the estates Henry
generously granted his tailor and
Ethelreda in Somerset provided the
foundation for the Haringtons of
Kelston. John Harington’s son, John, by
his second marriage to Isabella Markham
was a godson of Elizabeth I and was a
poet of controversial distinction,
though history remembers him better,
unfortunately, as the inventor of an
early water closet.
Harington’s 1596, A New Discourse of a
Stale Subject, called a Metamorphosis
of Ajax, purports to be in part a
design for a water closet. Harington’s
Metamorphosis was also published by
Richard Field, who published
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in 1593.
However, Gerard Kilroy has recently
argued forcefully that marginalia,
particularly in two of the surviving
first edition copies, one now at the
Folger at the other at Princeton, put
Harington’s apparent satire of the
sanitary shortcomings of late
Elizabethan England in an entirely
different light – that of a tirade
against the excrement polluting society
in the form of spies and ‘promoters’
who were persecuting English Catholics.
See Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion:
Memory and Transcription, pp.94-8,
Ashgate Publishing 2005.
See Ian Grimble's The Harington Family,
published by Jonathan Cape, London,
1957, for a more detailed history.
Regards
John Taplin
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