Wudutun – a Minster is founded (sometime between 850 and 950)
- A start is made on the new stone Minster church of St Mary. Rare Arden sandstone is being quarried nearby and there is plenty of blue lias limestone in the vicinity.
- The buildings of the first monastery and timber church have so far survived the Vikings. The mission of its monks and priests will eventually result in ten daughter churches.
- The estate farmstead and hall of Wudutun sit securely within ancient moated banks; Lord Wagen himself may have held court here 150 years later.
- In Wootton Green, site of the first settlement, a clearing from wild woodland called Wolfscot End, the peasants’ livestock graze safely surrounded on three sides by thatched “wattle and daub” farmsteads.
- On long arable strips, mounded into heavy ridge and furrow by bullock-led plough teams, crops of corn and barley are being harvested.
- Along the valley of the Alne, lush meadows have already been cropped for hay.
- Woodland is skilfully managed for timber, fuel, fruit and nuts, as well as for grazing sheep, cattle and pigs, and hunting and trapping for game.
- “Raven’s Street”, the Roman shortcut between Metchley Fort in Birmingham and Tiddington Fort in Stratford, fords the Alne here and so makes Wootton strategically important. An earlier ford and older tracks are
still evident and serve the monks’ missionary work well. - A stream called Frecesbroc runs in its little valley from a permanent spring, to feed the huge artificial pond at Pucks Dyke.
- The main stream of the River Alne hurries through the settlement; the farmlands, meadows and pastures of the extensive Wootton estate are framed around this riversystem and its waters provide the power to grind the corn and the fish and eels for holy feasts and Fridays.
Aethelbald
Aethelbald’s charter, like a lightning flash, illuminates the founding of our historic church early in the 700s. At Wudu Tun – an “estate in the woods”, near the River Alne, in the midst of an ancient royal territory called Stoppingas, the King of Mercia gave his blessing to Aethelric, a sub- king of the Hwicce people, who had founded a “monasterium”, a minster, there. No ordinary church, the old Minster of St Mary was a mission-station, staffed by teams of monks and priests, perhaps nuns too, to bring the Word to the people of Stoppingas. These black-cowled Benedictines preached at crosses set up among communities of scattered farmsteads, from which in time ten parishes and chapelries sprang, surviving to this day. At the centre, at Wudu Tun, a church was built, at first of timber and thatch, and then of stone, which in part survives itself. Aethelbald’s charter poses one of Wootton’s many riddles. Signed some time between 723 and 736, it authorises Aethelric (of Hwiccan royal descent) to allocate two thousand acres or so to support his minster at Wudu Tun. That could be taken to mean he was seeking assistance from the King of Mercia for a minster he had already founded. After all, we know that Aethelric’s father was founding minsters in the 690s and that the Bishop of Worcester himself, St Ecgwine, was a member of the Hwiccan royal house. Why would the royal family have waited until the 730s to establish a minster on one of their own extensive estates? It is entirely possible that the minster at Wootton was founded a generation earlier.
Wotone: “Waga held it” (Domesday)
Viking Wars
In years of intermittent war with Viking invaders, the church and monastery at Wootton may have been burnt and pillaged, as so many were across the Midlands. The church clearly survived, transformed from timber to stone, and maintaining its prestige and distinction as the Mother Church of a vast parish. The old monastic community may well have faded away, its missionary task done, to be replaced by the administration of the Worcester bishops and the interested patronage of the local landed thegns. One of these in the eleventh century was a man called Wagen.
During these fraught times, in intervals of peace and relative prosperity, we may imagine the great Mother Church of St Mary’s as a beacon in the countryside, its white plastered walls and massive tower visible for miles around, and its bells tolling the monastic hours and recording the joys and griefs of the hard lives of its scattered parishioners.
Abbey at Coventry
Wagen is not only the last Thegn of Wootton of the Saxon era, he is the only name we have of any lord of Wootton before the coming of the Normans. A man of high rank, lord of half a dozen Warwickshire estates, Wagen was an active councillor and companion of Earl Leofric, who governed the old Mercian province under the Saxon Crown.
A witness to many charters, at the founding of Leofric’s monastery at Coventry in 1043, he rubbed shoulders with King Edward the Confessor himself, and with the mighty Earl Godwin and his sons, among them the ill- fated Harold. Wagen may well, as patron of many churches, have participated in the monastic revival which the King was encouraging, and of which Leofric’s foundation was a spectacular example. The old minster church at Wootton was almost certainly enlarged at this time as if Wagen was planning to restore his own monastery. But his plan was interrupted by the trauma of 1066.
Wagen
There are many mysteries about Wagen. His origin is a puzzle. Traditions point to his descent from the Hwiccan royal family (hence his holding of Wootton) and that he was of old British stock. Another possibility is that he had Mercian royal connections; again, it has been pointed out that his name appears to be Scandinavian and so Viking! In fact all could be true. Marriage and descent over centuries could account for all these possible bloodlines.
Of his fate in 1066 there is more mystery. Was he still young enough to have fought at Hastings and died with his King? We don’t know. Did he and his family flee into exile?
Did he lead a local rebellion, which may have accounted for the laying waste of the old royal hamlet of Kington, as the Domesday Book records?
Whatever the case, the name he gave to Wootton, distinguishing it from hundreds of other Woottons in the country, has ensured his immortality.
Stafford
1066 was like an earthquake. The Wootton scene was transformed. Out went Wagen; in came Robert of Tosny, now Earl of Stafford. Lord of 150 English estates, Robert founded a dynasty that was a force on the national political stage for nearly 500 years. His knights probably built the little motte and bailey on the ancient earthwork controlling the ford on the Alne. Before he died in 1088, Robert had granted the old Minster at Wootton to the family Abbey in Normandy.
The Staffords were warriors, serving the Crown in one war after the other – against the Welsh, the Scots, and the French in the Hundred Years War. Honours were showered upon them: Order of the Garter, Privy Councillorship, an Earldom, marriage into the Royal Family, and ultimately, the Dukedom of Buckingham. But in the 15th Century, the pendulum of political fate began to swing violently against them. Two Staffords died fighting on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. Richard III executed another. When Edward, Third Duke of Buckingham, laid his head on the block in 1521, accused by Henry VIII of treason, the dynasty came to an end. The lordship of Wootton passed to the Dukes of Suffolk for a generation. Wootton’s villagers would hardly have given a thought to the fortunes of the great Stafford family. They would have visited rarely, if at all: perhaps on the way to Stafford, or to hunt the great deer park at Henley, or to stay in the manor house for a summer retreat. For the thirty or so Stafford tenants in Wootton, toil on the land, the shared chores of attendance at the manorial court and the paying of the rent were their mundane concerns, not the whereabouts of their overlords.
Domesday Book
The Domesday Book survey of 1086 describes Wootton as it was when it entered the new Norman world – and as it had probably been since the founding of the Minster 300 years before. 45 farming families of peasant farmers and cottagers cultivated the lord’s lands and their own amid an estate of some 1,000 acres of arable, pasture and meadow, growing corn, barley, rye and flax, raising sheep, cattle and pigs. Around were patches of well-managed woodland and heath. There were two mills and a fishery, a smith and a community of craftsmen, and the poor, landless, aged and sick. At the centre was the lord’s steward, the church with its priest and, a few years later, the little French priory. In all, a township of about 500 saw in the Norman era.
800 years later, the 1861 census recorded 675 living in Wootton.
In 1999, there were about 1,350 living in 625 households.