- St Peter’s, surviving near-collapse in the 17th Century, is restored by the Victorians in 1850 and 1881.
- The Smythes of Acton Burnell, Shropshire, are now lords of Wootton, leasing out the Hall, built in 1687 in the Palladian style by the 2nd Lord Tenants come and go throughout the 19th Century.
- The changed face of Wootton is due to Squire Holford, who had married a Smith- Carington; in the 1780s and 90s, he created Wootton Pool to the North of the Hall, re- channelled the river, constructed the weirs and built the great Paper Mill on the main
- A new road system including a bridge, ending centuries of wet feet in the ford, was planned and carried out by a Turnpike Trust in the mid-18th Century.
- Much of Wootton is re-modelled in brick;new prosperous farmsteads appear and the grand Vicarage has had a Regency face-lift.
- At Yew Tree, Field Farm and Manor Farm new buildings have appeared. These large farms are those enclosed under the 1775 Act of Parliament that ended the old system of unhedged, open fields of strips.
- The Birmingham to Stratford Canal, opened in 1816 after twenty years of building, has here a canal-port with two wharves, an aqueduct and an inn.
- Wootton’s vigorous Roman Catholic community has been provided with a chapel at the Hall, a school and reading room, a cemetery, and a presbytery at the “Cottage” opposite the Mill for their Benedictine priests.
- On the village sports field a cricket match takes place.
- In 1908 Wootton finds itself on the Great Western main rail route to the South West and, later, the A34 becomes one of the busiest trunk roads in the country.
Smith-Caringtons
The return of a branch of the Smith-Carington family to its old roots at Wootton in the late 19th Century was a remarkable coincidence. Richard Smith-Carington contributed much to the restoration work at St Peter’s, notably the Harewell tombs and brasses, while his son, Herbert Hanbury, provided the extraordinary west window of the nave.
They re-established links with the family that go back to the marriage of Agnes Harewell to Sir John Smith in the 1520s. Their son, Francis, expanded the estates around Wootton and in Leicestershire at Ashby Folville, where their
descendents still live. Loyal service to the crown brought a lordship. The family’s brief peak of influence came in the reign of James II when the second lord married for a second time, taking as his bride the Lady Anne Herbert, daughter of the Marquis of Powis, in 1687. Wootton Hall was built in her honour, and Lord
Carington was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire.
The collapse of the King’s attempt to overturn the Protestant settlement in 1688-9 and his flight into permanent exile spelt the end of the political prospects for the Carington clan.
Not that they gave up hope. During her long widowhood (she was in her twenties when she married the 60-year-old Lord Carington), from 1701-1748, the Lady Anne secretly married her late husband’s steward, actively supported the Jacobite cause and heavily mortgaged the Wootton estates in the process. When she died, the surviving male line also ran out. Their two hundred year connection with Wootton ended – to be revived briefly with St Peter’s Victoriam restoration.
After the 400-year Harewell-Smith-Carington- Smythe epic, Wootton became the country seat of a succession of Birmingham businessmen. GH Capewell Hughes, a wheel manufacturer, had great plans for the Wootton Hall estate (which included the delightful lodge and the roadside balustrade) but died in 1906, aged 57, before he could much enjoy them. It was during his few years in the Hall that the chapel was closed and its furnishings removed to a brand new church for Wootton’s ancient Catholic community in 1904. Hughes’ business associate, William John Fieldhouse, was already a resident of Wootton when his employer died. He came into his own, soon establishing a new Austy ‘Manor’ beyond the canal, from which his local benefaction knew no bounds. He built the almshouses in memory of his son Seymour. By the time of his death in 1929, he owned most of the village and had also helped to regenerate Henley-in-Arden, not least with the revival of its Court Leet.
Generous people followed him at Austy Manor: Mr WH Williams’ hospital charity Fetes, always opened by the great and the good, have gone down in folklore, and George Mansell, donor of the church organ, developed the Pound Field area with its school, social club and village hall.
Meanwhile at Wootton Hall, Capewell Hughes was followed by Robert Guinness, part of the brewing clan, but himself a banker. He maintained a steam fire engine at the Hall, which distinguished itself at the great fire at
Stratford’s Shakespeare Theatre in 1926 by demonstrating the strongest force of water. His son Richard at Field Farm, a builder of fire engines, helped his father install huge water- turbines in the Mill to generate electricity for the Hall. The Guinnesses left for Ireland at the outbreak of the Second War, and the Hall was requisitioned by the Army for educational purposes. Their ‘students’, housed in the attics, succeeded in setting fire to the roof.
As the conflict ended, the delapidated Hall was threatened with demolition, while a Mr Mayers set up a little caravan park in the grounds. This was the unpromising property which Mr Bill Allen bought up in 1958 as the proving ground for his entrepreneurial attempt to create a British equivalent to the American mobile home culture. His controversial development rescued and restored the Hall as one of the finest Palladian buildings in the Midlands and revitalized the Wootton community by providing homes for hundreds of newcomers in magnificent ‘manorial’ surroundings.
Saxon Saint
The most strikingly modern feature of the church is set in its most ancient wall. This stained glass window takes as its subject a legend dating from around the time the tower masonry was erected (see Church Trail 30, page 31).
Wootton’s 1300- year history is telescoped with this echo from the past.
The millennial revival of interest in the spiritual world-view of our ancestors, Celtic or otherwise, demonstrates how much we have been deprived of such stories over recent centuries as science made mystery superfluous.
Ironically, because of the mysteries of science, and our experience of the shallowness of material happiness, we are now allowed to wonder again, to celebrate Creation. The story-tellers are returning to remind us of worship.