The manor of BAMPTON DEANERY or BAMPTON EXETER, otherwise the rectory manor, originated in King Eadwig's grant to Bampton minster between 955 and 957 of lands in BAMPTON, ASTON, CHIMNEY. Before 1066 the estate was granted probably by Edward the Confessor to his clerk Leofric (d. 1072), later bishop of Exeter; he gave it in 1069 to the newly founded Exeter cathedral chapter, and in 1086 it was assessed at 6 hides. Three additional ploughlands, which paid no geld and were later held in demesne, were claimed in the 13th century to have been given by King Athelstan (d. 939). Four hides in Bampton, Weald, and ASTON, later BAMPTON DOILLY manor, were held in chief in 1086 by. Robert d'Oilly (d. c. 1093) and of him by Roger, possibly a relative.
At the time of the Doomsday survey, the soke of two hundreds belonged to the manor of Bampton. The parish now comprises four manors: Bampton manor, manor of Bampton deanery, and the manors of Shifford and ASTON. The Bampton manor was in the hands of the Conqueror at the great survey, and was subsequently bestowed upon the earl of Boulogne. On again becoming royal property, in the reign of Henry III., it was granted to William de Valence; his son dying without issue, the manor descended to Elizabeth daughter of John Comyn, who afterwards married Richard lord Talbot, in the time of Edward III. In the reign of Henry V., the manor became the property of the renowned Sir John Talbot; and is still partly in the hands of the Shrewsbury family, the earl holding one-third, and the representatives of the late Thomas Denton, Esq, two-thirds. Bampton Deanery Manor was granted in 1046, by Leofric, bishop, to the dean and chapter of Exeter, by whom it is still held; the present lord being F. Whitaker, Esq., by lease from that body.
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| Located in Oxford city centre, it is 12 miles northwest of Wallingford Castle, also built by Robert D'Oyly, adjacent to the River Thames. It was strengthened by Brien FitzCount before the wars between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, and Stephen's forces attacked it many times, before he was in turn attacked by the soon-to-be King Henry II. FitzCount established a prison within the castle, called Cloere Brien. Ealdred of Abingdon, Edward I, Maurice de Berkeley, 2nd Baron Berkeley, Owen Tudor and Margaret of Anjou were all imprisoned here. King John added further to the castle, and Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall spent substantial sums on it: during the 13th century it gained two further walls and ditches. Joan of Kent died at the castle in 1387. | | |
The parish is divided into four manors. Some of the hamlets of which the parish is composed are far apart, and at a distance of some miles from the central township. Six miles from its most eastern hamlet Brighthampton to the western boundary, and 4 miles from the Isis or Thames which flows along the south side of the parish to Lew, the northern hamlet.
The land in Chimney, Shifford, and Rushy by the river bank is very low and frequently subject to inundations; and generally speaking the district is very flat, with the exception of Lew, which is situated on a portion of a low chain of hills, stretching for a few miles on either side. About equi-distant from the Isis and the rising ground above mentioned is the town of Bampton, which contends for the distinction of being one of the oldest in England. Beamdune, as appearing in ancient chronicles: BENTON in Doomsday book; further altered to Bampton) - signifies in Anglo Saxon language, Tree Hill.
Until the late Anglo-Saxon period the royal manor of BAMPTON included all the ancient parish and much land outside it. From the 10th century or earlier it was diminished by piecemeal grants, described below, and in 1086 totalled 27½ hides; another ½ hide held by Ilbert de Lacy of the bishop of Bayeux's gift, a 'parcel' held by Walter son of Ponz, unspecified woodland held by Henry de Ferrars and formerly by a thegn, Bundi the forester, and 60 a. in Stockley (in Asthall) were said to be of the king's demesne. A separate 3-hide estate held by Ilbert de Lacy of the bishop of Bayeux has not been traced later, and was presumably reabsorbed into the royal manor, perhaps c. 1100 when Ilbert's son Robert was expelled from the country. Bampton manor was held in 1156, apparently at pleasure, by Thierry, count of Flanders, from c. 1167 by Thierry's son Matthew, count of Boulogne, who forfeited his lands in 1173, and from c. 1175 by Matthew's brother Philip (d. 1191), count of Flanders, whose lands were held in custody from 1180 by William de Mandeville, earl of Essex.
Notices in the ancient chronicles, such as the following, from the Anglo-Saxon record, "A.D. 614. This yeare Cynegils and Ceuichelm (the king of Wessex and his son), fought at Beamdune, and slew two thousand and sixty-five Welchmen." King Alfred the Great, who was born at Wantage, in Berkshire, not far from this place, held an assemblage of thanes, &c., now called a 'Parliament,' once during his reign at Shifford, on the Isis; a spot is still shown as the site of the meeting. In this vicinity a conflict took place in the reign of Richard II., between Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, and several of the nobility, who envied his high favour with the crown.
Bampton with Weald, or Bampton in the Bush, is a parish situated on the southern border of Oxfordshire, in the hundred to which it gives name, and comprises the market town of Bampton and the hamlets of ASTON, Brighthampton, Chimney, Coate, Lew, Rushy, Shifford and Weald. The entire parish contains 10,250 acres, and its population in 1841 was 2,734 souls. Bampton is not famous in history. Aston is an area of Birmingham, England, in the north-east of the city centre. It is also a ward within the formal district of LADYWOOD. Back as far as the Domesday Book of 1086 in which it is recorded as ESTONE. Aston was once part of a large parish and formerly part of Warwickshire which stretched as far eastwards as Castle Bromwich. The townships of Duddeston and Nechells and Deritend and Bordesley were included in the borough of Birmingham in 1838, while the area known as Aston Manor stayed outside Birmingham, along with other manors such as Erdington, Witton and Little Bromwich.
Church- Although there is no reference to a church in PASSENHAM in Domesday Book, the royal estate there had soke over part of Cosgrove from the dedication to the 8th-century Mercian saint Guthlác (683-714 AD) from Lincolnshire, suggest that the church at Passenham had once been the centre of a larger Anglo-Saxon parochia. Bampton was the site of a late Anglo-Saxon minster whose extensive parochia seems to have included Clanfield, Alvescot, Black Bourton, Ducklington, Cokethorpe, Standlake, and Yelford.
Saint Guthlác was the son of Penwald, a noble of the English kingdom of Mercia, and his wife Tette. His sister is also venerated as Saint Pega. As a young man, he fought in the army of AÆthelred of Mercia and subsequently became a monk at Repton Monastery in Derbyshire at age twenty-four. He sought to live the life of a hermit, and after a long journey landed on the island of Croyland (now Crowland) on St. Bartholomew's Day, 699 CE. Ague and marsh fever assailed him, and the inhabitants of the island were rough and barbarous, it is written. One day, he gave sanctuary to Ethelbald, a pretender to the throne of Mercia, fleeing from his cousin Coelred. Ethelbad did become king, and even though Guthlác had died two years previously, kept his word and started construction of Croyland Abbey on St. Bartholomew's Day, 716 CE. Legends which surround Guthlác present a cultural echo of the world of the Hari-Heruli, a wolf-totem Germanic tribe.
William II Rufus inherited the Anglo-Norman settlement whose details are reflected in Domesday Book (1086), a survey that could not have been undertaken anywhere in Europe at that time and a signal of the control of the monarchy; but he did not inherit William's charisma nor political skills. Within a few years, he lost William's advisor and confidante, the Italian-Norman archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, in 1089. The division of William the Conqueror's lands into two parts presented a dilemma for those nobles who held land on both sides of the Channel. The pursuit of this aim led them to revolt against William in favour of Robert in the Rebellion of 1088, under the leadership of the powerful Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was a half-brother of William the Conqueror. Robert failed to appear in England to rally his supporters, and William won the support of the English. The two made up their differences and William agreed to help Robert recover lands lost to France, notably Maine. As in Normandy, William's bishops and abbots were bound to him by feudal obligations; and his right of investiture in the Norman tradition was unquestioned within the kingdom, during the age of the Investiture Controversy that brought excommunication upon the Salian Emperor Henry IV. William also quarrelled with the Scottish king, Malcolm III, forcing him to pay homage in 1091, and seizing the border city of Carlisle and Cumbria in 1092... The Latin text- a narrative Vita Sancti Guthláci ("Life of St. Guthlác") by Felix from the early 700s was also extensively summarized in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis, who was writing in the 1100s, during the court of William Rufus and just after Hereward's time.
Hereward the Wake is believed to be the son of Earl Leofric of Mercia and his wife Lady Godiva. According to legend, Hereward's base was the Isle of Ely and he roamed the surrounding fenlands of what is now Lincolnshire, leading popular opposition to William the Conqueror. There is a long-distance footpath through the Cambridgeshire fenland from Peterborough to Ely, called the Hereward Way. From 1107 until 1837 the Isle was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Ely, who appointed a Chief Justice of Ely and exercised temporal powers within the Liberty of Ely. Its name is said to mean "island of Eels", a reference to the creatures that were often caught in the local rivers for food.
Guthlác is in fact a blood descendant of Woden. We are told in the very beginning of both manuscripts that Guthlác is a descendant of Icel, the king of Mercia centred on the valley of the River Trent and its tributaries in what is now the Midlands of England, (born circa 450 CE), and was "of the oldest and noblest of kin, who were named the Iclings." The early Old English genealogies of the kings of Mercia then give Icel as the fourth great-grandson of Woden or Odin.
The minster had lost its autonomy by the mid 11th century, and in 1153 Bampton church was confirmed to Exeter cathedral chapter as two prebends; 60s. were to be added to the common fund if the church came 'into a better state', an allusion presumably to damage sustained during the siege of 1142. Before the 1180s there seems to have been some reorganization, with the glebe, the house, and some tithes and offerings forming a 'prebend' or farm which became the later rectory manor. Two chaplaincies, portions, or prebends mentioned from c. 1190, and evidently in the gift of the farmer of the first 'prebend', presumably comprised the remaining tithes and offerings suggests a small, embryonic secular college, but in 1220 the bishop of Lincoln confirmed the chapter's appropriation of the portion at their disposal and arranged for conversion of the two chaplaincies into three perpetual vicarages, together owing a pension of 15 marks (£10) to the chapter.
The parish church, parts of which are 11th- century or earlier, may have been preceded as a religious focus by a site east of the later town at the Beam. Burials near the medieval chapel of St. Andrew on the site of Beam Cottage are known only from the 11th century to the 13th, but the chapel's dedication, its location near an area of early .settlement, and the name 'Beam' (which predates 'Bampton' and implies an important local landmark, possibly a cross) suggest an early religious site, perhaps with a large, early medieval cemetery shift to the site of the later parish church occurred presumably with the establishment of the royal tun between the 7th century and the mid 10th, by which time there was a small, endowed religious community apparently guarding the relics of St. Beornwald- perhaps a head continual of the Anglo-Saxon minster, whose relics were preserved at Bampton and whose cult survived until the Reformation and possibly beyond. His feast day (21 December) was kept evidently in the early 12th century and still in the early 16th, and in 1406 the reliquary of the saint's head was repaired, partly at Exeter cathedral chapter's expense. Probably about that time a brass showing a vested ecclesiastic holding a crozier was made to embellish his shrine, remains of which survive in the north transept.
An invocation to the Saint Beornwald in the 16th-century will of one vicar, and another's description of himself in 1521 as vicar of the parish church of St. Beornwald, suggest their participation, though the cult also had a popular basis: jurors in 1370-1 all claimed to have been present in Bampton church on Beornwald's feast day in 1349 to make offerings and to hear divine service in his honour, while a repentant Lollard reported men and women going barefoot c. 1481 to offer wax images and money at St. Beornwald's relics. Oblations from St. Beornwald's box were mentioned in 1497-8 and 1531-2, when they totalled £4 13s. 4d. It has been suggested that the burial in 1593 of one 'Barnold' may refer to the saint's relics, which had perhaps continued to be venerated by local Catholic sympathizers, and possibly at that time the brass was reset in the floor before the former shrine.
Little is known for certain about the priest Beornwald, whose memory was venerated at Bampton until the Reformation, and some of his shrine remains in the north transept marked by a brass depicting a figure clothed in vestments with a crozier but no mitre. His name is listed in the litanies of the 11th century and in martyrologies of 12th and 15th centuries. He may have founded the large Mercian minster church in Bampton (Farmer).