- The old Minster Church of St Mary, newly dedicated to St Peter-in-Chains, has been given to their family Benedictine abbey in Normandy by the Lords of Stafford; the building is much enlarged with new nave, chancel, south aisle and transept to meet the needs of its vast parish.
- The Norman abbey has built a priory, with a prior and one or two French monks; the buildings stand around two courtyards with a hall, solar, stair and dormitory, gatehouse, bakehouse, kitchen and stable. Nearby stands a dovecote and a giant tithebarn and there’s a new fish pool.
- The motte and bailey castle site, a symbol of the conquest, is no longer in use, but houses a farmstead while its moat serves as a fish pool.
- Wootton Green remains the heart of the settlement; surrounded by the homesteads of Lord Stafford’s tenants, it now has a retting pool where hemp and flax are processed as part of the local linen textile industry..
- Beyond the crofts and tenements stretch three great open fields, where the fifty or so farmers and cottagers of Wootton cultivate their scattered strips of arable soil and tend their animals.
- A new development has been laid out for Stafford tenants south of the priory, ranging along both sides of the road and the deep new channel of the fish pool gutter.
- Further west, a more ambitious development of generous tenements, including the vicarage glebe, has been laid out by the Priory to attract incomers and create a market town. But the project has failed, so the plots are colonised by Wootton tenants of the priory.
- All that survives from the site of the first monastery of 400 years before, is the house of Edwin, the last Saxon priest of Wootton, who died about 1150.
- The Staffords held a manor house in Wootton, where their steward would have resided; the moated farmstead may have been the site, although later taken over by the priory.
- 10 A new water mill for the Stafford manor replaces the old one on a new site and water-course, with the miller’s house nearby.
Conches
The headquarters of the Stafford family (their Norman name was de Tosny or Tonei) was Conches, near Evreux in Normandy, where Robert’s father had founded a Benedictine Abbey in 1035. There were many such abbeys in Normandy and it was a policy of the Conquest to grant churches and estates in England to them as a source of income from rents and tithes. So Wootton became a little cell or colony of Conches, one of three in England. The Abbey of St Peter Castellione founded a small Priory opposite the church, rededicated St Mary’s to St Peter-in-Chains, and sent over a Prior and one monk to assist him. They held two small manors, one in Wootton and one in Mockley in Ullenhall, with a mill, farmed by about a dozen tenants and managed through two manorial courts.
Thus Conches Abbey restored the old Benedictine monastic tradition established at Wootton by Aethelric back in the 8th Century in the old Minster. The building of the huge chancel, the chapel of the Priory, was a confirmation of this restoration of ancient roots.
Wootton Priory became the keystone of Conches Abbey’s lucrative operations in England. The Priors (as Procurators General) collected tithes and Papal taxes from some 40 parishes and manors and shipped the proceeds back to Normandy. But Conches had its own fair share of trouble, including occupation by the English three times during the Hundred Years War.
Beaudesert
The chief representative in the area of the Earls of Stafford and Warwick was the Montfort family. A powerful clan in its own right, they established a base at Preston – “farm of the priests (of Wootton Minster)” – which they renamed Beaudesert, “a wild and beautiful place”. There Thurstan de Montfort built his castle on a magnificent site on the Mount and a true Norman church at its foot, a church that may have been planned as a great monastery. Supporting Queen Matilda against Stephen during the Civil War called the Anarchy, he secured a grant from her to hold a market, which prompted the growth of a new town at Henley. The Montforts rose high in national politics, usually on the more rebellious fringes. Thurstan’s grandson, another Thurstan, was involved in the baronial struggles with King John which led to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. His son Peter rose even higher in influence, allying himself with his relative, the great Simon, arch-rebel against Henry III, and died with him at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. The family castle at Beaudesert is thought to have been degraded as a punishment and the growing ‘new town’ of Henley burnt down.
Wauneswotton: War and Plague
Crusades
Between 1099, when Jerusalem was captured by Christian warriors on the First Crusade, and 1270, there were seven major Crusades, and many others, mounted against the Islamic Empire in the Middle East. An event of the Third Crusade directly affected Wootton’s lords. The fourth Earl of Stafford, Robert, died in about 1192 on that disastrous failure to re- capture Jerusalem from Saladin. His sister, the Lady Millicent, inherited the title and vast lands. Her husband, Hervey, for a payment of
£200 was granted the right to take the name and title of Earl of Stafford (he was a Bagot) by the regent King John (Richard I was on the Crusade). And so the Stafford dynasty was saved. Hervey later left one of the most informative charters on Wootton.
Fifty years later, with interest in the Crusades declining, the Bishop of Worcester, Giffard, mounted a campaign to whip up support by sending preaching friars around the diocese. There is little doubt that they would have come here, although there is no evidence of the result. No Crusader knight reclines on a Wootton tomb, his legs crossed to show how many Crusades he had fought in. Would villagers, perhaps a blacksmith or bowman have been tempted to seek fortune and salvation? One hopes not. The later Crusades were miserable failures. And there were men, locally, who would have known the realities only too well. The manor of Preston Bagot and its church belonged, for a while, to the Knights Templar, the fighting order of monks, whose mission was to service the crusaders. Their local HQ was at Temple Balsall, where the church and priory-hall have partly survived. When the pope suppressed the Order in 1312, the Knights of St John of Malta took their place – and their lands and churches.
The Black Death
Perhaps as many as a third of the population of the country are thought to have died as a result of the Bubonic Plague after its first deadly outbreak in 1348-50. We know it visited Wootton because the Prior, Michael de la Bouche, died of it in 1350. Spread by fleas living on the black rat and by contagion, death came quickly but with horrendous symptoms. Thereafter the disease became endemic in the villages of England until well into the 17th Century. The “Plague Months” of June and July were notorious for their periodic outbreaks. The Parish registers of Wootton in the 1500s tell a sorry tale in some years. But the community survived. Widows remarried, the next generations arrived.
Some arable land may have been allowed to revert to woodland – the woods around are full of old ridge and furrow ploughlands. But no tenements in Wootton appear to have been permanently deserted. Wootton held its shape with St Peter’s at its heart, unlike so many villages of the English countryside, resited far from their parish church.
Monks
Apart from the very early days in the 1130s, there appear to have been never more than two Benedictine monks at Wootton. How a Prior and one brother fulfilled their duties – chanting the eight Canonical Hours each day in the great chancel of St Peter’s, distributing bread to the poor and sick twice a week, celebrating the fifty major Feasts, managing the estate, holding a manorial court each three weeks, collecting the tithes and rents and getting the profits back to Conches each year – can hardly be imagined. It was all too much for one Prior, Peter de Altaribus, in 1281; he attacked his monk, sold all the church plate, refused to give charity to the poor and hunted illegally on the lord’s land. He was excommunicated and sent back to Conches!
The Priory was always an alien presence and, when the Hundred Years War with France broke out in 1338, it was quickly identified as the enemy. Profits were confiscated; Priors regularly fined; local gentry took over the management of the estate. In 1399, the end appeared to come when the Priory was handed
to the Carthusians at Coventry but it returned to Conches until 1443. In that year, Henry VI closed it down and transferred its assets and the church to his new King’s college at Cambridge. By then the old Priory was almost certainly in ruins; only fishpond, dovecote and tithebarn remained – and the mill at Pennyford, where John Priory, the miller, lived on, probably a lay brother the village could not do without.