Charney Bassett

Charney Bassett today

Charney Bassett stands on slightly raised ground beside the River Ock, which splits into two channels here for about a mile. It is a village of around 280 people, gathered round a green with an old stone cross that now carries the war memorial. The Chequers Inn faces the green and at the time of writing is open, with rooms. Charney Manor, beside the small church of St Peter, is run by the Quakers as a retreat and conference centre. There is also a village hall. The watermill south of the church is owned by the county council, leased to the parish council and cared for by volunteers, and it opens for visits from time to time. Lanes lead to Charney from Lyford, Denchworth, Stanford in the Vale and Longworth.

History

Name and early finds

Charney is usually explained as ‘island on the River Cern’, Cern or Cearn being an old name for the Ock or one of its channels. The ‘Bassett’ comes from a medieval holding called Basses, not from a Norman family. A prehistoric flint axe was dredged from the Ock here in 1978. About a mile north of the village is Cherbury Camp, a large Iron Age enclosure with several banks and ditches. Unusually it stands on flat, once marshy ground rather than a hill. It was excavated in 1939 and is a scheduled monument. Stories that Cnut camped there, or that Alfred visited it disguised as a minstrel, were already dismissed as unlikely in 1924.

Abingdon Abbey and Domesday

Charney belonged to Abingdon Abbey. Grants of Longworth land dated 811 and later are recorded in the abbey’s chronicle, but some of those charters are forgeries. In 1086 the abbey’s land here had 20 households. Charney was a dairy farm for the monks, sending them cheese each year and taking turns to carry fish, eggs and beans to the abbey kitchen. The abbey’s steward lived at the grange now called Charney Manor. It was built in the 13th century, perhaps between 1250 and 1290, and its first-floor solar and chapel are among the oldest surviving domestic rooms in the county.

After the Dissolution

In 1545 the Crown granted the manor to William Gorfen of Reading. It passed to the Paulets, then from 1582 to the Dunch family, later to the Kecks, and in 1833 to Philip Pusey of Pusey. Joan Vokins, born Joan Bunce in Charney and died in 1690, became a Quaker minister who travelled to America and the West Indies in 1680 and 1681. In 1909 Berkshire County Council bought the estate from the Bouverie-Pusey family and divided it into smallholdings. The council also repaired the mill, which stopped working around 1915. In 1948 Lucy and Henry Gillett bought Charney Manor and gave it to the Society of Friends.

Church, school and village life

St Peter’s is a small church with a 12th-century south doorway framed by carved heads. Over a squint in the chancel is a Norman tympanum showing a figure holding two winged creatures. The 1924 county history calls them dragons; others read the scene as Alexander the Great being carried into the sky by griffins. The church was restored in 1878. Charney had a school from 1871, known as the Bouverie Pusey School from 1906, which closed in 1981. It also had a Wesleyan chapel and a second pub, the Horn, which closed during the Second World War. Charney moved from Berkshire to Oxfordshire in 1974.

Things to see

• Church of St Peter (Grade I): Norman doorway and the carved tympanum.
• Charney Manor (Grade I), the 13th-century abbey grange, now a Quaker centre.
• The village cross and war memorial on the green (Grade II).
• Charney watermill on the Ock, open on occasional visit days.
• Cherbury Camp, the Iron Age earthwork a mile north, reached by footpath (scheduled monument).