A muddle of old gifts
During the 15th and 16th centuries, in the reigns of Henry VI and Henry VII and later, people in Wantage left houses and land for charitable purposes: helping the poor, repairing the roads and paying a schoolmaster. By the 1590s the management of these gifts had fallen into what Parliament called ‘certain irregularities’.
The Act
In 1597, the 39th year of Elizabeth I’s reign, an Act of Parliament put the property in the hands of twelve people incorporated as ‘the Governors of the Town Lands of Wantage’, with a common seal. Their purposes were set out: the relief of the poor, the amendment of the highways, and the maintenance of a schoolmaster to teach grammar in the town. The old Norman chapel of St Mary in the churchyard was fitted out as the grammar or ‘Latin’ school, and an ‘English School’ followed between 1604 and 1619.
Not a town council
Because the governors had a seal and a corporate identity, Wantage was sometimes described in the 18th century as a borough. The Victoria County History found no basis for this. The governors had no control over the government of the town, which stayed with the lord of the manor’s courts and constables until the Improvement Commissioners of 1828. In practice, though, they were for more than two centuries the main body looking after the town’s schools, poor and roads.
A lasting legacy
The governors’ lands grew with later gifts and changed with enclosure. By the early 20th century they included the King Alfred’s Head and the Shears inns and about 144 acres in Wantage and nearby parishes. The income paid £200 a year to King Alfred’s Grammar School and supported almshouses in Eagles Close (1867) and Mill Street (about 1870). The Town Lands governors still exist as a local charity.