A Short History of Yarnton and it’s Manor

 Yarnton is a village and civil parish in Oxfordshire about 1 mile (1.6 km) southwest of Kidlington and 4 miles (6.4 km) northwest of Oxford, England.

Our early knowledge of the history of Yarnton was transformed when early Saxon remains were discovered unexpectedly on the edge of an Iron Age and Roman settlement which was being dug by Oxford Archaeology in 1990. Subsequent work revealed a middle Saxon settlement immediately to the east, prompting the first excavation of a rural sit of this period in Oxfordshire.

Six years of excavations were undertaken investigating the wider landscape and contemporary settlements at Cresswell Field and near the modern hamlet of Worton. This work took place in advance of Hanson Aggregates’s Cassington gravel quarry, and the importance of the site attracted funding from English Heritage.

Scientific dating of remains from the buildings, and careful examination of the finds, revealed, however, that the earliest possible date for the Saxon features is the end of the 5th century AD, nearly 100 years later than our latest evidence of Roman activity.

When Saxons settled in the area from the late 5th century, they adopted the existing farming units, retaining the approximate positions of boundaries between them. Saxon settlements, however, were different to the nucleated Roman ones. Small groups of buildings, perhaps representing individual farmsteads, shifted about the gravel terrace, with apparently few constraints on location and no attempt to regularise the layout of buildings. Each settlement had its own small cemetery, although Yarnton’s burial ground seems to have been destroyed during railway building in the mid 1800s.

As a story of changing settlement and landscape, the record of Yarnton is truly remarkable with six millennia of human activity starting with the first farmers at around 4,000 BC. From the earliest evidence of permanent settlement on the gravel terrace in the Iron Age © 750 BC), the village has shifted gradually eastwards, and then Northeast to its modern location. In the late Anglo-Saxon period tofts (medieval house plots) and a smithy were laid out on top of the middle Saxon site. The medieval village of Yarnton appears to have been clustered around the Norman church, but by the 17th century it was centred further north, along the road between Kidlington to Cassington. Today, modern housing is being built over the medieval open fields to the north of the village, between its 17th-century focus and the turnpike road between Oxford and Woodstock (now the A44).

The name has evolved from Erdington in Old English to Eyrynten in 1495-1496, Yardington in the 16th century but also Yarnton from 1517.        The form "Yarnton" eventually prevailed.

Most of the land at Yarnton was granted to Eynsham Abbey in 1005 but Remigius de Fécamp, a supporter of William the Conqueror, took it during the Norman Conquest of England in1066.  In1226 King Henry 111 gave it to Richard, 1^st Earl of Cornwall, and in 1281 Edmund, 2^nd Earl of Cornwall gave it to Rewley Abbey.  In the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 Rewley Abbey was dissolved and King Henry V111 sold Yarnton to his physician.

The Church of England parish church of Saint Bartholomew was in existence by 1161 as a chapel attached to Eynsham Abbey.  The Norman building from that period was completely rebuilt in the 13th century in the early English style.  The nave windows were added much later in the Perpendicular style, followed by the clerestory in about 1600.  Sir Thomas Spencer (ancestor of  HRH Lady Diana) added the Spencer chapel, also in Perpendicular Gothic style, in 1611.  It houses monuments to three members of the Spencer family, and its windows contains much early 17th century heraldic stained glass representing branches of the Spencer family.

St Bartholomew's bell tower was been built in about 1611. One of its bells was cast in 1618 but needed repair and was recast in 1853. Five more bells were cast in 1620 to complete the present ring of six.  The windows of St Bartholomew's nave contain many examples of 15th and 16th century stained glass.  A few of these were made for Yarnton, but most came from elsewhere and were donated by Alderman William Fletcher of Oxford between 1812 and 1816.