MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

The earliest depiction of Bampton is that of Thomas Saxton’s 1574 Map of Oxfordshire.

18th Century maps of Bampton all characterise Bampton in very similar ways (likely an artefact of some degree of plagiarising by early map makers seeking to produce a viable commercial product for the least amount of effort). What features they chose to include when constrained by small scales are very interesting. All maps show the convergence of the three routes into Bampton on the market place. All make a point of describing the road today known as Landells as it makes a distinctive curved track around the perimeter of the churchyard. There are also usually concerted efforts to show the tracks of Broad Street and Church View as distinct and running parallel to each other, with the latter terminating at the church. Interestingly, most early small scale maps make an attempt to depict the track or path heading east from the settlement core to Beam Cottage, The 1767 ‘New Map’ actually depicts Beam Cottage, standing in isolation at the end of this track. Weald is depicted variously as a semiseparate settlement, perhaps centred on its own green. All of these features, taken together can be used to infer much earlier landscape features.

Modern landscape history, a practice that has developed greatly since Hoskins published his seminal work The Making of the English Landscape in the 1950s has long utilised map evidence to make inferences about the historic landscape, using these sources alongside other heritage data. Everything from historic place and field names recorded in manuscript, to modern topographical survey data can be used to build a picture of Bampton before maps. So far, this study has found the settlement pattern of the historic core of Bampton to be largely fixed through the medieval and early modern period. However, this largely high-medieval settlement pattern is masking significant evidence of early medieval Bampton, a settlement that we will find possessed a radically different topography to its successors.

Through a combination of studies it has been suggested that the chief east-west route through Bampton once formed part of an inferred minor Roman road which crossed the river Windrush at Gill Mill and continued through Weald towards Lechlade, entering Bampton from the northeast perhaps along the later Kingsway Lane, and

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

passing just south of the present market place. The name Kingsway implies that the lane, a minor track in the 19th Century, was once an important route associated with the Royal Manor, and its projected course south of the later market place passes close to where an early Anglo-Saxon house has been discovered by excavation in the grounds of modern Folly House (the site of the later medieval D’Oilly manor). Another early route probably ran from Cowleaze Corner north eastwards past the site of the “Lady Well”, skirting to the north of the Deanery. The modern roads north to Brize Norton and north east to Lew were also likely to be ancient in their origins even if the specific alignments have shifted through later history.

This early north-east to south-west and northwest to south-east network has been partly preserved in the later road and field pattern (e.g. in the NE/SE alignment of Weald which could be following a continuation of the postulated early route through Bampton), and therefore clearly influenced Bampton’s early medieval topography. Earlier Saxon settlement at Bampton probably focused on the area around modern

Beam Cottage, where a sizeable Saxon burial ground has been identified in excavations laying over the site of even earlier Romano-British settlement.

The Thames Valley Mapping Project recorded extensive landscape features as cropmarks in this area. Indeed, the name Beam is what gives the later settlement of Bampton its name.

In the later Saxon period the Christian church was rapidly expanding. John Blair, noted historian of Saxon Oxfordshire wrote that decades after 660 were the “golden age of the rich, cosmopolitan life of early Christian England. Never again, probably, would so much land and money be devoted in such a short time to the expansion of the English Church”. At Bampton this transformation was felt with the establishment of a minster community by the 950s, venerating an entirely local St. Beornwald who is not known at any other place. The church was built in the south eastern corner of a large oval enclosure forming part of a chain of similar minsters that began at Oxford in the east and stretching along the ‘islands’ of gravel terraces all along the upper Thames.

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

The developing religious community plugged into an earlier topography of routes and devotional sites, creating a complex settlement pattern that is arranged axially east-west. (as shown on next page). Beginning in the west is the site known in medieval times as the Lady Well, still marked on modern ordnance maps. Tracing East (along a postulated track), after crossing the Shillbrook, there is the modern Deanery (containing in its basement an early chapel). The Deanery is on east-west alignment with the church (containing the shrine of St. Beornwald). There may have been two separate churches here as reference is made in medieval times to a separate chapel (dedicated to the Blessed Virgin) in the churchyard- it was not unusual for Saxon minsters to have twin dedications. Further to the east there is documentary evidence of a lost chapel on Catte Street (modern Queen Street), and then finally, the chapel of St Andrew at the early religious site of Beam Cottage. Taken together, this is evidence of a significant, planned, religious settlement. The Deanery and probably the church of St Mary were constructed on the site of the ring ditches of Bronze-Age barrows, which presumably were then still visible in the landscape.

Remarkably much of this is still largely legible in the modern settlement pattern of Bampton.

The modern road of Landells, that so distinctly curves around the church and Bampton Manor, in part follows the line of the minster enclosure. It is known from archaeology that the road overlies a large ditched enclosure. Indeed, the area around the present minster church, along with its three vicarages, still reads very much like a miniature cathedral close today.

Another feature associated with Saxon Bampton that forms a significant element of the modern settlement pattern is the modern street of Church View. It is postulated that the northern end of Church View formed a broad open space, rather funnel-shaped in nature. This could be an early market place. A Saxon house of a distinctly urban form has been discovered in the plot now occupied by Thatched Cottage, demonstrating some of the earliest secular settlement around the minster. Other early features that may be observable in the modern landscape as topographical features include early attempts to make the Shillbrook and Highmoor Brook navigable to the Thames (via Great Brook). A wide stone-revetted canal has been identified by excavation running north-south to the west of the Deanery. It is just visible today as a shallow depression.

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

Taken together we can postulate that Bampton must experienced a great re-ordering away from its Saxon form sometime in the early high-medieval period. This process must have begun when the manor of Bampton began to be divided in to the eventual three major manors that persisted through the medieval period. Blair postulates that a major re-organisation likely occurred when Bampton’s market was reconfirmed by charter in the 13th Century, and at the same time relocated to its present location. This would have the effect of drawing the major routes through Bampton to a new confluence, shifting the focus of the settlement and as a result, created the need for a new route aligned on what is now the modern Broad Street. As mentioned above, the widening of Church View may now be all but lost except in the area immediately adjacent to the Old Grammar School and Churchgate House, but later map makers successively recorded the ghosts of this development in their depictions of Bampton.