Wantage

Wantage today

Wantage is a market town of about 13,000 people where the Berkshire Downs meet the Vale of White Horse. Letcombe Brook runs through it, and the Ridgeway follows the Downs about two miles south. It was a Berkshire town until 1974 and is now in Oxfordshire.

The Market Place, with King Alfred’s statue and Georgian and older frontages, holds markets on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The medieval parish church is just to the south, the Vale and Downland Museum is in Church Street, and Betjeman Millennium Park follows the brook. The nearest railway station is Didcot Parkway, about ten miles east; buses run to Oxford, Abingdon and Didcot.

History

Name and early settlement

The Old English name was probably first the name of the brook, meaning something like “the waning one”, for a stream whose flow rises and falls. Roman coins have been found in the town and Iron Age and Roman farmsteads to the north-east, but there is no evidence of a Roman town.

Alfred and the Saxon royal estate

Wantage was a royal estate in the 9th century. Asser, Alfred’s biographer, records that Alfred was born at “Wanating” in 849, and Alfred’s will left the estate to his wife Ealhswith. In 997 King Æthelred held a council here and issued a law code, now known as the Wantage code. In 1086 Domesday Book recorded Wantage as a large royal manor of 89 households, with a church and a mill, worth more than £60 a year.

Medieval lords and the market

Richard I granted the manor to Baldwin de Béthune; it passed to William Marshal, who before 1219 granted it to the Fitz Warins. The third Fulk Fitz Warin became the hero of a medieval romance, and his family held Wantage for two centuries, followed by the Bourchiers, Earls of Bath. The market grew up by custom rather than by charter: it is first recorded in 1203–4, when King John allowed it to move from Sunday to Monday, and a fair is recorded from 1212. In 1285 Fulk Fitz Warin was licensed to rebuild market stalls that royal justices had ordered removed.

The town lands and the town’s trades

In 1597 twelve governors were appointed to manage lands given for the town’s benefit, funding the grammar school, poor relief and roads. Cloth-making was declining by the 17th century. In the 18th century Wantage had hemp and sacking works, tallow chandlers and several tanneries; the knuckle-bone paving at the Stiles almshouses, founded in 1680 by Robert Stiles, an Amsterdam merchant, recalls the tanning trade. By the early 19th century the town had a poor reputation and is often said to have been called “Black Wantage”.

Canal, railway and tramway

A short arm of the Wilts and Berks Canal reached the town from Grove by 1810, and the Great Western Railway opened a station at Wantage Road, two miles to the north, in the 1840s. The Wantage Tramway linked the town with the station from 1875 and was among the first British tramways to use steam. It carried passengers until 1925 and goods until 1945.

The Victorian town

William John Butler, vicar from 1846 to 1880, founded the Community of St Mary the Virgin, an Anglican order of nuns, in 1848 (some accounts say 1850); its convent and schools became a large part of the town. The grammar school was refounded in 1850 as King Alfred’s School in new buildings by G. E. Street, who also restored the parish church in 1857. William Butterfield lengthened the nave in 1877. In the same year the statue of Alfred, the gift of Colonel Robert Loyd-Lindsay VC, later Lord Wantage, was unveiled by the Prince and Princess of Wales. Improvement commissioners, appointed in 1828, bought the manor in 1868 and gave way to an urban district council in 1894.

The 20th century and after

Wantage grew after the Second World War, helped by jobs at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. John Betjeman lived in the town from 1951 to 1972. In 1974 it moved from Berkshire to Oxfordshire, and since 2015 the Kingsgrove development has added a new neighbourhood to the north-east.

Things to see

• The statue of King Alfred in the Market Place (1877, Grade II).
• The church of St Peter and St Paul (Grade I), with its 13th-century crossing tower, 14th-century choir stalls and Fitz Warin effigies.
• The Vale and Downland Museum in Church Street, in a listed 17th-century house.
• The Stiles almshouses in Newbury Street (1680), with their knuckle-bone paved courtyard.
• King Alfred’s School buildings on Portway by G. E. Street (1850), with a reset Norman doorway.
• Betjeman Millennium Park and the Letcombe Brook path.
• The Ridgeway National Trail, about two miles south, with Segsbury Camp hillfort above Letcombe Regis.