East Lockinge

East Lockinge today

East Lockinge is a small village of estate cottages strung along The Street, a lane that runs south from Ardington towards the foot of the Berkshire Downs. Nearly everything here belongs to the Lockinge Estate, which still owns most of the houses in Lockinge and Ardington. The parish church of All Saints stands a little apart, in the wooded park where Lockinge House stood until 1947, beside a small lake fed by a brook that rises at Betterton. There is no pub or shop in the village itself; the nearest are in Ardington, a few minutes’ walk to the north. Above the village the ground climbs to the Ridgeway, where the Lord Wantage Monument looks out over the Vale.

The village is reached by minor roads from the A417 at Ardington, or on foot and by bike along lanes and bridleways from Wantage.

History

Name and early records

The name appears as Lakinge in the 9th century and Lachinges in Domesday Book. Place-name scholars usually read it as an old stream name, probably for the brook that runs through the parish. Like its neighbours, the parish is a long strip running from the downland to the clay of the Vale.

In 868 Æthelswith, Queen of the Mercians and sister of King Alfred, granted 15 hides at Lockinge to her thegn Cuthwulf, and the land later passed to Abingdon Abbey. In 1086 the abbey’s manor had 23 households, a mill and a church, and was valued at £8 16s.

Abbey, Tudor and Georgian owners

Abingdon kept East Lockinge until the Dissolution. In 1546 the Crown sold it to John Winchcombe of Newbury, son of the clothier known as Jack of Newbury, and in 1590 it went to the Keate family. In 1718 it was bought by Matthew Wymondsold, who built a brick manor house here around 1750 and later added West Ginge to the estate. His family and their heirs, latterly the Bastards, held it until 1853.

Betterton, in the south-east of the parish, was a separate Domesday settlement with a mill. It later belonged to Poughley Priory and then to Westminster Abbey, whose tenants were the Collins family for about four centuries. Only a house, a barn and farm buildings remain; the village it once supported has gone.

Lord Wantage’s model village

In 1853 the banker Lord Overstone bought East Lockinge, and in 1858 he gave it to his daughter Harriet on her marriage to Colonel Robert Loyd-Lindsay VC, created Lord Wantage in 1885. From 1860 the couple cleared the old cottages clustered round the church and manor house and rebuilt the village along The Street, with a school built in 1861, good cottages and allotments. Lockinge House was greatly enlarged and filled with the collection of paintings they assembled. By the late 19th century they had bought up Ardington, the Ginges, Betterton and West Lockinge, and Lord Wantage farmed many thousands of acres himself during the agricultural depression, employing estate craftsmen from a central yard.

Church

All Saints began as a 12th-century church; its north doorway, with deeply cut zigzag and billet ornament, survives from about 1150. The chancel was rebuilt in the 13th century and the west tower carries the date 1564. In the late 19th century, under the Wantages, a new nave, chancel and south aisle were built alongside, so that the old church became the north aisle and chapel. Inside are a 12th-century font, a Jacobean pulpit and a collection of wall monuments. Lord Wantage bought the right to appoint the rector from All Souls College, Oxford, in 1873.

The 20th century

Lord Wantage died in 1901 and Lady Wantage kept the estate until her death in 1920, after which it passed to her Loyd relatives. After the Second World War, faced with heavy death duties, Christopher Loyd demolished Lockinge House in 1947 and the family moved to Betterton. He kept the estate together by letting cottages and converting redundant farm buildings to new uses. East and West Lockinge were joined as one civil parish in 1934, and the parish moved from Berkshire to Oxfordshire in 1974.

Things to see

• All Saints Church: Norman north doorway, 1564 tower and the Victorian enlargement (Grade II*).
• The war memorial cross of about 1920 on The Street (Grade II).
• The former post office, built about 1885 in the estate’s timber-framed ‘Old English’ style (Grade II).
• The orangery of about 1730 at Lockinge Stables, one of the few survivors of the Lockinge House grounds (Grade II, seen from outside).
• Lockinge Manor, a late 18th-century brick house on The Street (Grade II, private).
• The Lord Wantage Monument on the Ridgeway above the village, a marble cross put up by Lady Wantage in 1903 (Grade II).