Before the Conquest
On the eve of 1066 Wantage belonged to King Edward the Confessor. Its church was unusual. Two-thirds of it, with the land attached, were held by a royal clerk called Peter as his personal property. Peter later became Bishop of Lichfield. Because the church was his and not the bishopric’s, it passed to the king after the Conquest. The remaining third was held from the king in 1086 by William the Deacon.
Wantage in Domesday Book
William the Conqueror’s survey of 1086 gives the first detailed picture of the place. Wantage was a royal manor assessed at four hides, but the entry notes that it had never paid the land tax called geld, a privilege typical of ancient royal estates. The survey lists 37 villagers, 47 cottagers and 5 slaves: 89 households in all, which put Wantage among the largest fifth of places in the survey. There was land for 23 ploughs, with 6 teams on the lord’s farm and 19 belonging to the villagers, 12 acres of meadow and a watermill worth 8 shillings and 2 pence a year. One church is recorded.
The manor’s value had risen. The Victoria County History gives it as £61 in 1086; Open Domesday, which adds the separate entries together, gives £59 5s in 1066 and £66 10s in 1086. Either way, if Wantage had suffered in earlier wars, it had recovered.
The Domesday hundred was called ‘Wanetinz’ after the town. In King Edward’s day it was assessed at 224 hides and covered most of the later Wantage hundred: Ardington, Childrey, Denchworth, Hanney, the Hendreds, the Lockinges and Sparsholt as well as Wantage itself.
Charlton and the neighbours
Charlton, just east of the town, was divided four ways in 1086. The king held eight hides that had once belonged to a freeman named Elmer and then to Peter the clerk. Henry de Ferrers and William son of Corbucion each held two and a half hides. Ralph de Tosny held land assessed at seven hides, which a man named Dru held from him. These holdings became the several small manors of Charlton that the later records trace.
How people lived
Eighty-nine households suggests a population of a few hundred. Almost everyone worked the land. Villagers held strips in the open fields and owed labour on the king’s farm. Cottagers had little land and worked for others. The five slaves were probably ploughmen. Domesday records no burgesses and no market, so Wantage was still a large agricultural village and royal centre, not yet a town. Soon after the survey part of the royal land here was probably granted to Robert d’Oilly of Wallingford, and it became the manor later called Brians.