A Steeple Claydons’ History
THE MIDDLE AGES
We hear of a watermill in possession of the Doilys, and a windmill (which must have been one of the earliest in England) and a decoy belonging to Oseney Abbey .The farmers’ land was in half-acre s trips which were scattered higgledy piggledy over the two large fields into which the parish was divided. Many of the place names and field- names mentioned in the charters still survived (or did until recently). Thus Kingsbridge (possibly from the king’s highway which passed over it), Redland (reedland), Bean Croft, Elder Stump, Little Marsh, Long Lands, Portal, Small Thorn Furlong and Whitfield are all Names with a continuous history in the parish from the thirteenth century. Claydon Brook was then called the Burn (later corrupted to Bune and Bone) and the stream From Twyford was always the Brook. Further glimpses into the life of medieval Claydon are afforded by the Hundred Rolls of 1278. The population had increased by then to some four hundred souls. This included five freemen, each farming from thirty to two hundred acres, and thirty- two villeins with thirty acres each (for which they paid in money or services 7s. a year).
There we’re also thirty-two cottagers with smaller holdings. The entire names arc given in full. The surnames were clearly mainly descriptive, either professionally (there are two Smiths, a Butcher, a Tailor, a Miller, a Woodward, a Gardener and a Fowler) or geographically ( e.g·.Richard Scot, Walter of Ireland, Stephen of Cornwall, Thomas Horwood).The Oseney charters also include references to Richard the Gascon, Robert Sent, William of Whitchurch, Thomas of Hampton (Northampton probably) and Walter of Twyford. Medieval Claydon was thus, a good deal more cosmopolitan than one might have expected. For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there is less to record.
T h e principal manor passed from the Doylys to a John Fitz Geoffrey, who may or may not have been the ohn Fitz Geoffrey who in 1242 fell from a cart into the Burn and was drowned, By 1300 the manor was in the possession of the Earl of Ulster, from whose family it passed by marriage to
Lionel Duke of Clarence (Edward Ill’s second son), and eventually to Edward IV and Richard III granted the manor for life to his widowed mother, Cecilia Duchess of York, and after her death Henry VII gave it first to Queen Elizabeth (Edward IV’s widow) and then to Katherine of Arragon. Few of these grandees are likely to have visited Claydon. The demesnes of both the Claydon manors were normally let and Claydon must have been generally free to manage its own affairs.
Some degree of prosperity and in dependence is proved by the fact that in the fifteenth century the village built for its own use a ‘ common house ‘ fifty-six feet long by eighteen feet wide. This apparent precursor of the modern village hall may have been identical with the Church House (to which there are several references in the seventeenth century and which was still in use in 1833), which was an alms house maintained by the parish for the deserving poor.
