Lyford

Lyford today

Lyford is one of the smallest parishes in the Vale: a church, a manor farm, a few houses and farms, the almshouses and Lyford Grange, set among flat fields beside the River Ock. The 2021 Census counted 41 people. There is no shop, pub or school; the nearest are in the Hanneys and Charney Bassett. A lane from West Hanney runs through the hamlet and crosses the Ock at Lyford Bridge on the way to Charney Bassett.

History

Name and early grants

The name means the ford where flax grew, from Old English lin, and it appears as Linford in early records. King Edmund granted six hides here to a man named Ælfheah in 944, and Cnut added two more in 1034; both estates later belonged to Abingdon Abbey. In 1086 the abbey’s land at Lyford had 22 households, though Walter Giffard had taken the main part under his protection without the abbot’s leave, and it took the abbey years to win it back.

Manors and families

From the 13th century the main manor belonged to the Coudray family and then the Mordaunts. In 1568 it passed to John Ashcombe, whose family built the present Manor Farm; the gable carries the dates 1617 and 1621. The river forms part of its moat. In 1775 the manor was sold to Worcester College, Oxford, which also became patron of the church. The second estate, More Place, came to the Yate family in the early 16th century.

Campion and the Yates

The Yates stayed Catholic after the Reformation, and in 1581 Mrs Yate was sheltering a small community of Bridgettine nuns at Lyford Grange, the family’s moated house. The Jesuit Edmund Campion came to say Mass there. A government informer, George Eliot, got into the house, and on 17 July 1581 men searched it until they found Campion and two other priests in a hiding place. Campion was executed at Tyburn on 1 December 1581, and he was canonised in 1970. Lyford stayed a Catholic centre for a long time afterwards: in 1690 an informer reported that land had been set aside to build a nunnery here ‘when Popish times should come’.

Church and almshouses

St Mary’s was built in the first half of the 13th century as a chapel of Hanney and keeps its lancet windows. A timber bell-frame on four great oak posts stands inside the west end, probably 15th-century, and a clerestory was added around 1500. The church was restored in 1875, and it became a separate district chapelry in 1845. Oliver Ashcombe’s will of 1611 founded the almshouses, an open quadrangle of twenty small homes with a chapel on one side. The present buildings are mostly 18th-century, and they have since been made into fewer, larger homes.

Enclosure and the 20th century

Lyford’s open fields were enclosed under an Act of 1801. On 8 April 1945 a Lancaster bomber of No. 9 Squadron, HK788, caught fire on its way home from a raid and crashed about 400 yards south of the church, killing all seven crew. One of them, Flight Sergeant Gordon Symonds, came from Wantage. A memorial plaque was placed in the church in 2008. Lyford moved from Berkshire to Oxfordshire in 1974.

Things to see

• Church of St Mary the Virgin (Grade II*): 13th-century lancets, timber belfry, old screens and the HK788 memorial.
• Lyford Almshouses (The Alms Court, Grade II), founded 1611, beside the church.
• Manor Farm (Grade II), the Ashcombes’ house of 1617 to 1621 (private).
• Lyford Grange (Grade II*), scene of Campion’s arrest; a private farmhouse seen from the lane.
• Lyford Bridge (Grade II) over the River Ock.