Back in royal hands
Alfred’s widow Ealhswith died in 902, and Wantage seems to have returned to the Crown after her. It stayed a royal manor for the rest of the Anglo-Saxon period and beyond, which is why it paid no tax in Domesday Book. For most of the century there is no record of events in the town itself. It was one of many royal estates the kings of Wessex, and then of England, used to supply their households and reward their followers.
Charters for Charlton
Land in the neighbourhood did change hands, and some of the grants were written down. In 956 King Eadwig granted five hides at a place called Ceorlatun to his minister Wulfric. A later chronicler at Abingdon Abbey claimed that Wulfric passed the land to the abbey, but there is no evidence that he did. In 982 King Æthelred granted the same five hides to a man named Ælfgar. The Victoria County History notes that it is not certain this Ceorlatun is the Charlton next to Wantage, although it is the likeliest candidate. Grants like these show royal land around Wantage being carved up into the smaller estates that became the manors of the Middle Ages.
The council of 997
Wantage’s most important moment in this century came near its end. King Æthelred, later known as ‘the Unready’, held a meeting of his councillors, the witan, at the royal manor of Wantage. The date is usually given as 997; some local accounts say 995. The laws agreed there survive as the code historians call III Æthelred, or the Wantage Code.
The code is largely about keeping the peace and running courts. It sets fines for breaking the peace, regulates trial by ordeal and deals with suspected thieves. Much of it confirms local custom in the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw, the Danish-settled East Midlands. One clause required the twelve leading thegns in each district to swear on relics that they would neither accuse an innocent man nor protect a guilty one. Historians often point to this as an early forerunner of the jury.
The church and the town
No part of the church building survives from this period, but the fragment of a carved Anglo-Saxon cross shaft now kept in the church suggests a stone monument stood here before the Norman Conquest. By 1066 the church held a large endowment of land, which fits the idea that it was an old mother church serving a wide district. There is no sign yet of a market or a town in the later sense. Wantage was a royal farm and meeting place for its district.