OUR INVESTIGATION

Conclusion

The range of sources and evidence explored in this investigation gives a glimpse of late Anglo-Saxon territorial organisation in the Wantage area.

There are a number of tantalising references to suggest that Wantage in this period claimed both royal and minster status but sadly there is little substantial archaeological evidence currently in the records to support this.

However, our investigation has raised several indications which suggest that Wantage may have once formed the centre of an agricultural estate larger than its present day parish:

• Occurrence in the vicinity of wic place-names to indicate specialist production, and use of the place-name Charlton to identify a dependent settlement within a large estate.
• References to the ‘king’s boundary’ in tenth century charters of East Hanney, where defining bounds of the estate corresponding to the northern boundary of Grove.
• A pattern of narrow elongated strip parishes, running north to south in a band east to west across the downs, which suggests fragmentation of a larger unit whilst retaining a proportion of the clay vale, scarp face and higher chalkland within each sub-division.

Our investigation has been confined to an area covering Wantage and neighbouring parishes. To determine the extent of a possible late Saxon agricultural estate at Wantage, we will need to look beyond our immediate study area – an exciting prospect for future exploration! At present it is difficult to say at what point in the hierarchy of estate fragmentation Wantage became the main settlement focus. Kingdoms emerging in the seventh century were later gradually divided up by their tribal kings into great agricultural estates (often these are described as composite or multiple estates) which in turn were then divided into smaller and smaller units. However, if royal and minster status at Wantage can be proven, then we may need to look to an extensive area within the Vale of White Horse to identify the bounds of its estate.

We have seen here the beginnings of the parish system; historians agree that the ecclesiastical parishes we know today are based on agricultural estates of the late Anglo-Saxon period. In time, as the estates were divided up, local lords established churches on their newly acquired holdings. We discuss in our Victorian Investigation how both ecclesiastical and civil parishes function in the landscape, therefore we find that the story is a little more complicated than this.

Many present day parishes can be shown to have been made up of a number of individual townships (or hamlets), each regarded as a separate community in its own right. These units seem to have been in existence before the ecclesiastical parishes were firmly demarcated and in some instances can be shown to have been based on an outlying settlement within a larger agricultural estate which, through the process of estate fragmentation and the break up of its interdependent relationship with the estate centre, became a township community in its own right with its own field system. Charters from this period indicate that open field farming was well established in the Vale by the middle of the tenth century and at the point when the boundaries of the agricultural territories of neighbouring townships became fixed they often had to ‘step’ around established strip fields. We find in our investigations that township (hamlet) boundaries often survive as those of later civil parishes.