The Saxon Sanctuary Exhibition, designed by Blast Design of Birmingham,
traces the story of a tiny Iron Age settlement through to a mixed Midlands
village of the Third
Millennium.
Underlined "Links" on the Exhibition’s ten panels refer the visitor to a
colour handbook for more information. Click
on the sample Exhibition links below to see how the handbook takes up the story.
Click on the thumbnails to preview the Exhibition.
The Britons and the Roman interlude
Who knows what kind of rituals went on on this hilltop 2,000 years ago? What
is the mysterious tump in the churchyard? Who built the gigantic Puck’s Dyke?
What was, and is, so special about this place?
The Romans boxed Arden in with three great trunk roads. A Roman ‘shortcut’ passes behind the church to cross the Alne and connect
with an important military road on the other side of the river.
Later an Anglo-Saxon tribe turned the ancient network of farms round here
into a territory called Stoppingas, which in turn was absorbed into the small
kingdom of the Hwicce. With the rise of Mercia in the 7th century, the Hwicce lands became Mercia’s
new Diocese of Worcester to which this church belonged for over a
thousand years.
Wauneswotton: war and plague
In spite of the growth of Henley, St Peter’s was still the most important
church around. At the churchyard cross Friars urged people to join the Crusades;
here too the Bishop of Worcester came for his Warwick Visitation. The church was
magnificently enlarged.
The monks were having a rough time. They were French, and for a hundred
years England was at war with France. They lost their rights to the tithes, and
the Priory sank into decline. In 1443 it was closed by Henry VI and the church
and its estates were given to his new King’s College in Cambridge, which is
still patron of the parish.
For the ordinary farming families of Wootton, life was hard. A domestic
enclosure deep in Mayswood may have been a retreat from the Black
Death,
which killed the Prior and probably wiped out most of the village around 1350.
