Childrey

Childrey today

Childrey sits where a dry valley, Childrey Hollow, opens out from the chalk of the Berkshire Downs into the Vale of White Horse. Like most villages on this stretch of the escarpment it grew up on the spring line, and its parish is a long, thin strip running from the downs south of the Ridgeway down to the clay of the Vale. The houses gather around a wide main street with a duck pond and a small green, with St Mary’s church at the north end. The village has been in Oxfordshire since 1974; before that it was in Berkshire.

The church, the village hall (opened in 1896 as the Reading Room) and the Ridgeway Church of England Primary School are all here. The Hatchet, a Grade II listed pub of about 1830, has had long spells of closure; at the time of writing CAMRA lists it as open on limited hours, so check before you go. The B4001 from Lambourn comes down over the downs into the village, and the B4507 road from Wantage to Ashbury runs just to the south, close to the line of the old Portway.

History

Early finds

In 2018 and 2019 Cotswold Archaeology excavated along a new Thames Water pipeline from Childrey Warren, on the downs, towards Wantage. They found Mesolithic flints and a red deer antler, a Bronze Age pit alignment, Iron Age roundhouses and storage pits, two small Roman cemeteries and a handful of Saxon graves. More than 30 people had been buried, roughly half of them in Iron Age pits. One Iron Age woman had been placed with her arms over her head and her feet removed and laid beside her. The archaeologists described the burial as unusual and left its meaning open; sacrifice and punishment are among the explanations they mention.

Domesday and the three manors

The name was written Celrea in 1086 and Chelrey in the later Middle Ages. Domesday Book records three holdings here, held by William son of Richard (Leofric), Roger de Lacy and Turstin son of Rolf, with 64 households between them and a mill on each. The three became the manors of Rampayns, Mautravers and Frethornes. Rampayns passed by marriage to the Fettiplace family in the late 15th century, and they held it until their baronetcy died out in 1743. The Fettiplaces moved to Swinbrook in the 17th century and their house at Childrey fell into ruin; what survives is part of the present Manor House.

Church, chantry and school

St Mary’s church has a late 12th-century nave and south doorway, a chancel rebuilt in the mid-13th century, transepts added in the 14th and a 15th-century west tower. Its 12th-century lead font carries twelve figures of bishops, and the church is known for its brasses, among them William Fynderne (died 1444) and his wife, often described as the largest brass in old Berkshire. The south transept is the Fettiplace chapel. In 1526 William Fettiplace founded a chantry with an almshouse for three poor men, and its priest was to teach the village children. When the chantries were abolished the endowment was kept to pay a schoolmaster, and Sir George Fettiplace built a new schoolhouse in 1732.

The orientalist Edward Pococke, Oxford’s first Laudian Professor of Arabic, was rector from the early 1640s until his death in 1691. A cedar in the old rectory garden is said to have been grown from seed he brought back from Syria.

Civil War to the railway age

In 1644 Childrey was the quarters of the Earl of Forth, Charles I’s lord general, and the King himself is said to have spent a night at the Fettiplace manor house. The open fields were enclosed after an Act of 1772. In the early 19th century the Wilts & Berks Canal was cut across the north of the parish, and the Great Western Railway followed in 1840, with Challow station on the northern boundary until it closed in 1964. Watercress, fruit and bricks from a kiln near the station supplemented farming into the 20th century.

Things to see

• St Mary’s church: the lead font, the Fettiplace chapel, the brasses and the 14th-century tomb recesses.
• The village pond and the High Street, with timber-framed and thatched cottages.
• Sir George Fettiplace’s red-brick schoolhouse of 1732, with its dated tablet.
• The Manor House (Rampayns), from the lane south of the church; it is a private house.
• Childrey Hollow and the path up to the Ridgeway.