Links in the Saxon Sanctuary Book picked up from the Exhibition

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 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. 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.

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.

Crusades

Between 1099, when Jerusalem was captured by Christian warriors on the First Crusade, and 1270, there were seven major Crusades, and many others, mounted against the Islamic Empire in the Middle East. An event of the Third Crusade directly affected Wootton’s lords. The fourth Earl of Stafford, Robert, died in about 1192 on that disastrous failure to re-capture Jerusalem from Saladin. His sister, the Lady Millicent, inherited the title and vast lands. Her husband, Hervey, for a payment of £200 was granted the right to take the name and title of Earl of Stafford (he was a Bagot) by the regent King John (Richard I was on the Crusade). And so the Stafford dynasty was saved. Hervey later left one of the most informative charters on Wootton.

Fifty years later, with interest in the Crusades declining, the Bishop of Worcester, Giffard, mounted a campaign to whip up support by sending preaching friars around the diocese. There is little doubt that they would have come here, although there is no evidence of the result. No Crusader knight reclines on a Wootton tomb, his legs crossed to show how many Crusades he had fought in. Would villagers, perhaps a blacksmith or bowman have been tempted to seek fortune and salvation? One hopes not. The later Crusades were miserable failures. And there were men, locally, who would have known the realities only too well. The manor of Preston Bagot and its church belonged, for a while, to the Knights Templar, the fighting order of monks, whose mission was to service the crusaders. Their local HQ was at Temple Balsall, where the church and priory-hall have partly survived. When the pope suppressed the Order in 1312, the Knights of St John of Malta took their place - and their lands and churches.

Monks

Apart from the very early days in the 1130s, there appear to have been never more than two Benedictine monks at Wootton. How a Prior and one brother fulfilled their duties – chanting the eight Canonical Hours each day in the great chancel of St Peter’s, distributing bread to the poor and sick twice a week, celebrating the fifty major Feasts, managing the estate, holding a manorial court each three weeks, collecting the tithes and rents and getting the profits back to Conches each year – can hardly be imagined. It was all too much for one Prior, Peter de Altaribus, in 1281; he attacked his monk, sold all the church plate, refused to give charity to the poor and hunted illegally on the lord’s land. He was excommunicated and sent back to Conches!

The Priory was always an alien presence and, when the Hundred Years War with France broke out in 1338, it was quickly identified as the enemy. Profits were confiscated; Priors regularly fined; local gentry took over the management of the estate. In 1399, the end appeared to come when the Priory was handed to the Carthusians at Coventry but it returned to Conches until 1443. In that year, Henry VI closed it down and transferred its assets and the church to his new college at King’s. By then the old Priory was almost certainly in ruins; only fishpond, dovecote and tithebarn remained - and the mill at Pennyford, where John Priory, the miller, lived on, probably a lay brother the village could not do without.

Black Death

Perhaps as many as a third of the population of the country are thought to have died as a result of the Bubonic Plague after its first deadly outbreak in 1348-50. We know it visited Wootton because the Prior, Michael de la Bouche, died of it in 1350. Spread by fleas living on the black rat and by contagion, death came quickly but with horrendous symptoms. Thereafter the disease became endemic in the villages of England until well into the 17th Century. The "Plague Months" of June and July were notorious for their periodic outbreaks. The Parish registers of Wootton in the 1500s tell a sorry tale in some years. But the community survived. Widows remarried, the next generations arrived. Some arable land may have been allowed to revert to woodland – the woods around are full of old ridge and furrow ploughlands. But no tenements in Wootton appear to have been permanently deserted. Wootton held its shape with St Peter’s at its heart, unlike so many villages of the English countryside, resited far from their parish church.