Wavens Wotton: “Better Strangers” (sometime between 1550-1650)
- St Peter’s achieves its final impressive form under the patronage of King’s College, Cambridge, with the addition of upper tower and spire, a castellated nave and clerestory, and new south aisle, all heavily buttressed.
- The site of the alien Priory has been cleared, save for the fish pool, dovecote and tithebarn. The gatehouse tavern (The Lion Inn) has come into its own.
- The motte and bailey site is now a meadow but the old pond moat still serves as a fishery and as a useful flood control for a village prone to flooding.
- Wootton Green remains the heart of the settlement, with the retting pool still part of a thriving linen industry; nearby stands a dyehouse at Blue Hole, with a great chimney.
- The new Elizabethan manor house has been built on the site of a miller’s cottage; the Harewell-Smith’s have bought the old Stafford manor and manage the lands of King’s College.
- The system of farming is unchanged in 1,000 years; here are the strips of Callowhill Field, one of the three great open fields; along the riverside are hay meadows; further afield are sheep and cattle pastures, and heaths and woods for pigs and game and for timber and fuel.
- The Harewell-Smith tenants have their farmsteads and cottages and crofts and orchards along the street and river, south of the church, and, across the ford, on three sides of Wootton Green.
- King’s College tenants occupy the tenements along Provost’s Street, running north towards Henley. Most of these homesteads have been re-furbished in the famous Tudor re-building boom of the time.
- The substantial vicarage reflects the importance of the church; the house where John Mascall lived for 60 years, had eight ground floor rooms including a dairy, hall and school-room, while upstairs were five bedrooms and a cheese chamber; the vicar farmed 30 acres.
- The old Roman road has long disappeared; but a memory survives in the local name for the path to the mill, known as the Street.
Tradition
James Walter, in his “True Life of Shakespeare”, published in 1890, tells a tale of how Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway in their courting days used to visit their friend, John Mascall, the Vicar of Wootton. Mascall was then just beginning his 60-year stint as pastor of the parish.
A doubtful yarn you might say. But care should always be taken with oral tradition. A grandfather telling a tale to a grandchild that his grandmother told him could cover a period of 150 years. We know John Mascall’s descendants were still living in Wootton in the 1740s – so “living” history could well have come down to the Victorians.
And there are more links. Anne’s father was a tenant of the Smith-Caringtons who, besides holding the manor of Wootton, were also lords of the old Harewell manor of Shottery. The manor house there possessed a private chapel where James Walter believed the undiscovered marriage of Shakespeare could have been solemnised in 1582. And, if the officiant wasn’t the domestic Catholic priest (as one theory has it), who better to do the honours than their friend, the young Fellow of King’s College, John Mascall?
And there’s another possibility. John Mascall conducted a little village school at Wootton Vicarage. One of the jobs some of his biographers think the future Bard may have held in the missing years before he appeared on the London stage in the 1590s, was that of village schoolmaster!
Tunnel
A tunnel runs from the cellars of the Hall under the park meadow towards the modern road for about 100 yards. Lined with brick and partly paved, it measures some 5’ high by 2’ wide; it then shrinks to a height of 3’ and divides
in two directions, one heading curiously straight for the church. Some imagine it was an escapeway for Jesuit priests fleeing arrest, but its original purpose was probably very mundane. The Smith-Caringtons built their
hall on the site of the old miller’s cottage, a position exposed to the river Alne’s famous floods. The tunnel may simply have been a useful flood drain running down to the ford, and bricked up as a culvert for effect. The modern village is still sorely in need of such anti-flood features! So while body snatchers from the Hall smuggling corpses from the churchyard or Jesuits making good an escape cannot be ruled out, we may doubt it.
Library
The chained library of theological works, donated by Puritan vicar Dunscombe, who was at Wootton during the Civil War 1642- 52, sadly did not betoken a healthy church in those years. Wootton was riven with division. The Smith-Caringtons were staunchly Roman Catholic and Royalist, ennobled as Lords Carington, Major-Generals in the King’s army, friends of Prince Rupert, younger sons and daughters were priests and nuns – and a good third of the villagers followed them in the old Faith, ministered to in secret by Jesuit fathers.
Life at St Peter’s in these years was at a very low ebb in spite of George Dunscombe’s fine library. St Peter’s and its vicarage were virtually in ruins; the Chancel and Lady Chapel were almost falling down. A 1670s inspection reported no Prayer Book, no 39 Articles, no Book of Homilies, no altar cloth and a defective Bible! Somehow the church recovered, led by a fine vicar (and doctor) Stanford Wolferstan and Churchwarden Richard Farndon, farmer at Yew Tree Farm. By the turn of the century in 1700, most of the deficiencies had been put right, although deep divisions in the community remained.
Vicar
Over a hundred vicars have served at Wootton since the mission was founded in the 8th Century. Of the early years, the missionary teams of monks and priests, possibly nuns as well, we know nothing. Recently, the name of the last priest to have links with the pre-Norman times has been discovered. His name was Edwin and he died about 1150 and lived in a house near the modern vicarage, probably on the site of the old Saxon monastery. Thereafter, our priests were usually French, appointed by the Prior, or frequently the Prior himself. When King’s College became patron of St Peter’s in the 15th Century, an era began that has continued down to recent times: the vicars were Cambridge men, often Fellows, distinguished intellectuals of their day.
Most of Wootton’s incumbents had to struggle with the cross- currents of the age: like Edwin, the last Saxon priest of a church given over to the Normans; or the vicars of the Priory church, marooned as the enemy during the
Hundred Years War with France; or the priests of the Reformation years, like Thomas Ward, the first vicar to marry, only to be sacked for it under Queen Mary and then reinstated under Elizabeth.
Most of all, James Clifton, Fellow of King’s, embodied Wootton’s contradictions in his personal story. Arrogant in his hatred of papists, he came to Wootton to convert its large number of Catholics to the Established Church. But within two years, his mission had gone seriously wrong. Instead of converting, he was himself converted by the Jesuit mission hidden at the Hall. Going over to Rome, he took many of his Anglican congregation with him. Wootton was in uproar. Clifton fled the country. He entered the English College at Rome to re-train as a priest and died in 1704 (according to one rumour) as an army chaplain in a garrison in Flanders during the wars with Louis XIV.
Gunpowder Plot
The unwelcome news of Guy Fawkes’ arrest in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament was brought to the conspirators at Coughton Court, home of the Throckmorton family, barely five miles away from Wootton. The Harewells and Smiths of Wootton had been involved with the Throckmortons for centuries, and indeed in 1605 Sir George Smith’s wife, the Lady Anne, was a Throckmorton on her mother’s side. But it is unlikely that the Smiths, practical country squires, would have risked all in a plot by local fanatics to murder the king. Their motto was, after all, Regi Semper Fidelis! It is probable, however, that the Catholic grapevine would have kept Wootton Hall in touch with what was
going on, though the Smiths by this stage were actually living at their other manor at Ashby Folville in Leicestershire.
Battle of Worcester
In the story of his flight after his defeat at the battle of Worcester in 1651, which Charles II never tired of telling anyone who would listen, and which Samuel Pepys took down in shorthand, Wootton played a small part. The King, disguised as the manservant of the daughter of one of his supporters, Jane Lane, stopped at Henley to shoe his horse. There the blacksmith told him that “The rogue Charles Stuart would hang.”
Nearing Wootton his party saw ahead a troop of Roundheads, noted for looting royalist villages. They were forced to take back roads to Stratford, perhaps through Austy Wood and Edstone Park, and safely reached Long Marston that night. On October 27th Charles sailed to France from Shoreham and nine years later was restored to the throne. Greeting him when he returned was Lord Carington of Wootton, by then restored to the estate which the Parliamentarians had confiscated during the Civil War.
Edstone
As “Edricheston”, Edstone received a mention in the Domesday Book, and for a short while it was a manor of Wootton priory. Then the Staffords granted much of it to the Cistercian monks at Bordesley Abbey. In medieval times, the manor came down through the Aylesbury family to the Somervilles in the 1400s. One of them, distressed by the pressures of the time, announced that he was going up to London to shoot Queen Elizabeth. Easily caught, he was sentenced to death but committed suicide in Newgate gaol in 1578. His successors led quieter lives. The Somerville line ended with the death of the famed hunting squire and poet, William Somerville, in 1742.
The Somervilles were succeeded by the Knights of Barrells Hall in Ullenhall when Robert, Earl of Catherlough, bought the estate in 1745. The vast wealth of this family came from the profits of the South Sea Bubble, a financial scandal of the early 1700s. Thereafter, various landed families bought or tenanted until it became a hotel.
Although there are records of a 13th Century chapel at Edstone, the Lady Chapel of St Peter’s became the family mortuary chapel of the Edstone manor, hence the array of memorials to be seen today and the forgotten vaults beneath the old brick floor.
Mrs Fitzherbert
In 1781, Catherine Maria Holford, a descendent of the Smith-Carringtons, married her distant cousin Sir Edward Smythe, Bart. of Acton Burnell in Shropshire, in the Lady Chapel at St Peter’s. The era of the Smythes at Wootton lasted until the early 1900s when they sold the hall and estate.
Maria Smythe was a neice of Sir Edward, and, as Mrs Fitzherbert, a great beauty of the time. She had been twice widowed in her twenties, when George, Prince of Wales, became so extravagantly enamoured that he threatened suicide if she didn’t marry him. As a Roman Catholic, she consulted her Church which, surprisingly, condoned a Protestant marriage. It was secretly conducted at her home in Park Lane, London, in 1785. She was thus the wife of Prince George, never his mistress, and – having been put firmly aside – eventually retired to private life in the early 1800s, much revered by the Royal Family.
None of her biographers, nor those of George IV, ever mention Wootton. After her death in the 1830s, the Duke of Wellington burnt all her papers, so there is very little evidence to go on. But in those years, the age of Jane Austen, social visiting among the landed classes was the norm, so the probability of Mrs Fitzherbert coming to Wootton after the Smythes set up house here in the early 1800s is very strong. But it is doubtful if this utterly correct and sensible lady would have inflicted the flamboyant heir to the throne on her kind relatives! Nor that the place was so significant to her that she should haunt it as ‘the grey lady’.
For the identity of the grey lady, a spectre well-attested by nocturnally observant Woottonites, we need to look elsewhere. In 1664, the first Lord Carington was murdered by his valet at Pontoise in France. He was visiting his niece, Sister Magdalen, the Abbess of an English Benedictine nunnery there. His heart was brought back to Wootton and dramatically discovered in a cupboard in the Hall during the 19th century. Was it Sister Magdalen who brought her uncle’s sad relic back home? Does she return still to look for it?