The setting for our story is a river. Rising at the edge of the Arden plateau, it flows through rolling country, down to the Avon, draining a basin of perhaps eighty square miles. The Britons who settled here called it the Alwen, which scholars translate as “white”, “bright” or “shining” or all three! For the Celts, a river was a sacred thing, and the original meaning probably far more subtle. Nevertheless, we are left with a beautiful lilting name – the Alne.
For a millennium before Christ and long before the Roman legions marched, in times we call Late-Bronze and Iron Ages, the people of this region created a homeland. Wildwood was tamed and managed, the heavy marl soils and river gravels were drained and ploughed, lush pastures and meadows were made and a society of scattered farmsteads was linked by a network of roads and paths we still walk today. When the Romans came they found an organised and prosperous land – and from clues left behind we can tell that the spot which became Wootton was an important place, even then.
Horstow
Austy Wood has stood on its ridge south east of the modern village for over a thousand years, as its old boundary hedges tell us. But its name is really Horstow (perhaps a scribe sometime mis-heard or mis-spelt it!) or Halleston, both meaning “hallowed place”. Thus, for Britons who invested the landscape with a spirituality that many in our own day seek to recapture, a grove of oak indeed became a sacred place, a temple, where “priests of the oak”, the Druids, practised their ancient rites. Centuries later, Christian missionary monks may have sought to tune in to that holiness when they erected a preaching cross in a nearby field before moving down the hill to build the first church at another mystic spot, beside an old tumulus above the Alne.
Hillfort
North of Austy, along the same ridge, stands a military fortification of the late Iron Age.
Hiding in Barnmoor wood is a double ring of bank and ditch defences enclosing about four acres. Formerly known as Ashborough or “ashtree camp”, its history is unknown and it has never been excavated. It may well have been the capital of a local tribal chief of the
Dobunnii (or just the fortified site of a cattle ranch!). The little hamlet below the fort is called Kington, meaning “farm or estate of the King”. Perhaps it was the HQ (the “vill”) of the royal estate on which we know Wootton’s first church was founded. But could it have been, long before, the estate of a British king?
Puck’s Dyke
Hidden away behind Wootton’s village shop, a huge arrangement of banks and ditches, overlooking the pre-Roman ford on the Alne, poses questions that may never be answered. But a medieval nickname offers a hint. It was called Puck’s Dyke. Gods and spirits, which in Celtic belief inhabited the landscape, also found their way into the names they gave things, and this may have spilled over into the names the English chose later. Puck is a spirit name, so is Hob, so may be Gog. Hence we have Puck’s Dyke, and in Ullenhall Puck’s Hill where St Mary’s Chapel stands, and Hobditch also in Ullenhall, and in the fields by Pennyford, Gogbridge meadow. All may be echoes of the lost Iron Age.
Military road
There is so little evidence of a Roman presence in this area that it is safe to conclude that the British peasants of Wootton just carried on Barnmoor Wood hillfort meaning “farm or estate of the farming. No doubt they enjoyed the security and a good price for their corn. But to date, local finds (a few minor coins, a handful of pieces of second-rate pottery, a bit of concrete and traces of a small farm) hardly suggest that in 400 years the Romans made much impact hereabouts. We can at least be fairly sure that a major through-route from the Fosse Way to Ryknield Street used the ford on the Alne here, and there is evidence on the map if not on the ground for a military road heading directly North from Wootton to Watling Street. This might help to explain the strangely located moated ‘camp’ off Pettiford Lane – if it isn’t a lost manor house! Not much is certain, yet because of what we know followed, we can still speculate that somewhere the fields of Wootton may yield a prize. For it is a fact that important Minster Churches were often built near the sites of Roman villas.
Stoppingas
When the Alne region emerged from the Dark Ages, it was called Stoppingas, as we are told in our foundation charter. A clan of Angles now ruled the territory. The word may mean “followers of Stoppa” (their chief) or “folk of the stoppa” (meaning “stoup” or “bucket” – possibly the basin of the river Alne which defined their lands). A local wood is still called Stoopers wood. By the 7th Century Stoppingas had been absorbed into a small kingdom of a mixed English and British midland people called the Hwicce and had become an estate of their royal family. In the turmoil of the time, the Hwicce became a subject-kingdom of Mercia, the kingdom that now (in mid-7th Century) shared most of Britain with Wessex to the south and Northumbria to the north. Kings of the Hwicce were allowed to continue ruling their old lands. The centre of the royal estate may be enshrined in the name of Kington, the little hamlet nestling in the shade of the old hillfort at Barnmoor wood behind Claverdon.
Diocese of Worcester
Another wave of change in the 7th Century was the coming of Christianity to the pagan English. Mercia, and with it the kingdom of the Hwicce and the territory of Stoppingas, was converted by Celtic missionaries led by the brothers St Cedd and St Chad. As the Word took root in the ruling class the need to organise an effective Church among the ordinary people became paramount. The kings of the Hwicce established a diocese within the boundaries of their kingdom, with its centre at Worcester.* A programme of building missionary stations, called minsters, was planned, all of them sited at the centre of large and important estates. Among the promoters of this strategy were Oshere, king of the Hwicce, and his son, Aethelric, Wootton’s founder. By the dawn of the new century in 800 AD, there were minsters at Ripple, Fladbury, Bredon, Stratford – and Wootton. Wootton, whose parish covered the vast royal estate of Stoppingas, was now really on the map.