MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

his tone is certainly judgemental, implying the existence of a certain crude ignorance within the commoners of Aston compared to the modernity and enlightenment of those who had the foresight to abandon this ancient system of farming in Bampton itself.

In Bampton the commons were used for a myriad of other purposes, including residential and recreational. Shrewsbury’s survey of 1789 makes a small note of “several cottages on the waste which pay acknowledgements amounting in the whole to 20 shiilings“ equivalent to £1. This is the only direct evidence I can find of the practice of squatters setting up cottages on roadside wastes, on the sides of greens, and on larger tracts of commonly held land, which was a common practice in south east England from the 16th Century onwards. If a cottage built on wastes or common was allowed for 20 years, the cottager gained rights in law. Many land owners, Shrewsbury apparently included, therefore circumvented this by creating what we would understand in modern times as a licensing agreement, probably backed by a fine in the Manor Court that could be collected if the cottager defaulted. Once these de facto leases were granted, rent would be paid in perpetuity. It is possible a number of these cottages are depicted on the 1789 map, sitting interspatially without their own marked enclosures on the edge of the triangular open space that reads rather like Weald’s village green (the junction of modern Weald Street and Primrose Lane). It is likely that some of these cottages still exist today, having subsequently gained boundaries (and more importantly, title deeds).

In the middle 19th Century Rev Giles noted an only recently extinguished practice of ‘circuiting’. Ostensibly an annual exercise in village elders confirming the boundaries of the parish, it had by the 18th Century taken on the character of a three day round of feasting and drinking. Giles describes how the circuiters

“went to Haddon where they were regaled [with] good eating and drinking. On their return they went to place called Heart’s Yat on the common, (which was then unenclosed,) near Lew. Here they took their seats on the banks of a dry ditch in which were placed a bag of bread and a barrel of beer. When these dainties were consumed, they returned home.”

Taken together, centuries of settled practice had been written into the earth: parliamentary enclosure delivered a scale of shock to the landscape. It is not necessary to tell the full story of enclosure in Bampton: an excellent work on the subject has already been written by Miriam James on behalf of Bampton Archive. Nevertheless enclosure redistributed into designated units, consolidating small landholdings into larger farms.

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

This included the conversion of commons, wasteland and open fields to formally enclosed units of land, the conversion of some arable land to pasture and the partition of large areas of communally farmed land into small fields farmed by individuals. Bampton was a relatively late parliamentary enclosure, only achieving its act in 1812. The benefits of enclosure (that is, as they were understood by the major land owners of Bampton) are first mentioned in the late 17th Century. It is postulated that competing interests of the three principal manors left the matter of enclosure unresolved in the later 18th Century. Regardless, experiments by individuals saw new crops including turnips, clover, rye grass, and sainfoin being introduced on the Talbots’ manor before 1761. The issue was finally pushed by Coventry (a principal landowner) and an Act of Parliament was obtained in 1812. By 1821 an agreement on how to divide and award the former common land was reached, and by 1827 the final scheme was enrolled. The change to the spatial relationships within Bampton and those with its neighbours was profound. It is necessary to describe the impact on the character of the landscape around Bampton. The most striking effect is the regularisation of boundaries within the former open fields, broadly speaking now rectilinear in nature.

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

The division of the land of the former riparian meadows appears to be a little looser, reflecting the lower value of this land that regardless of enclosure boundaries remained of limited use due to its liability to flood throughout most of the winter. (Major drainage works only occurred later in the 19th Century.

Boundaries of new fields sometimes respected pattern of the major subdivisions in pre-enclosure open fields, but where new landscape features were created (e.g. the new Aston Road and the improved Buckland Road), the new field boundaries are generally at right angles to these. Most farms created by enclosure remained centred on existing homesteads, some of them in the centre of Bampton, though Coalpit Farm was built on the new Lew road very soon after enclosure, beginning a trend for farms to sit within their agricultural contexts. Most farms were consolidated to provide contiguous enclosures, but not all: in the 1860s and 1870s scattered allotments on College and Ham Court farms reportedly made them difficult (and expensive) to farm.

A perhaps more significant impact of enclosure in landscape terms is the creation, re-alignment, and abandonment of various pre-enclosure routes into and out of Bampton. Principal new routes were created to connect Bampton to Aston (Aston Road) and Bampton to Lew (Beam Road, now Mount Owen Road). Other more minor roads were placed across former open fields, e.g. Lew to Yelford.

Other roads represented upgrades of existing tracks and paths either as public rights of way or as private roads. Good examples of the former include Bowling Green Road (now known as New Road), shown as a simple path on earlier mapping, but now upgraded to a road; Black Bourton Road is given status as a new road that “follows the ancient path”; and Welcome Way Road, formerly probably little more than a short cut for inhabitants of Weald to reach Cowleaze corner now upgraded to full road status, albeit of secondary status. The majority of new roads were private in nature, and designed to give access to fields. This network of principal, secondary and private roads is substantially what exists in and around Bampton to this day.

Existing turnpikes (to Burford, Clanfield, and Buckland) were “not diverted or altered in any way”, although their width and boundary treatments were codified. Interestingly, the turnpike from Witney, which was only established in 1771 and from Curbridge, struck out east-west, skirting to the north of Lew before meeting the Brize Norton road further to the north of where the modern A4095 does so was abandoned. Instead the ancient route through Lew (A4095) was upgraded and extended across the former open fields to meet the Brize Norton Road further south at the present location of its junction.

Another important codification was the alignment and width of public water courses associated with the new allotments and roads. They would be too tedious to detail here, but many, if not all are still visible in the modern settlement.

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

As alluded to above, the townships of Aston/Cote, Shifford and Chimney were not included in the 1821 enclosures, and retained their open fields and commons until the middle 19th Century.

5. EXPERIENCING EARLY BAMPTON: MAPS AS HERITAGE DATA SOURCES

Bampton is depicted on various county maps of Oxfordshire dating to the 17th Century and 18th Century centuries, but detailed early mapping of the settlement eludes the historian. Where Bampton does appear on an early map, as a rule of thumb, the older the map the less detail with which the settlement is depicted.