A church for a Norman abbey
Henry I (1100–1135) gave the church of Wantage to the abbey of Bec-Hellouin in Normandy, one of the leading monasteries of its day. Before the end of the century the Bishop of Salisbury allowed the abbey to ‘appropriate’ the church: Bec took the main income and appointed a vicar to serve the parish. Wantage was run from Bec’s English base at Ogbourne in Wiltshire. Some local accounts date the grant to Henry II and say the prior paid part of his dues in leather goods, an early hint of the tanning trade that later mattered so much to the town.
The land that went with the church became the small manor later called Prior’s Hold. In 1197 Baldwin de Béthune formally gave up any claim to one hide of it in favour of the abbot.
The Norman chapel
The oldest piece of decorated stonework in Wantage probably dates from this century. A Norman chapel of St Mary stood in the churchyard beside the parish church. The antiquary John Leland later noted the unusual sight of ‘two churches in one churchyard’. The chapel was later used as a school, and its doorway, with a row of beak-head carving and a thick cable moulding, was rebuilt into the new King Alfred’s Grammar School on the Portway in 1850. It was heavily restored at that time.
Grove and Bermondsey
In 1142, during the civil war between Stephen and Matilda, King Stephen granted Grove to the abbey of Bermondsey in Southwark. It is probably the outlying farm or ‘wick’ in Wantage that the abbey still held in the 1230s, but it does not appear among the abbey’s lands at the Dissolution and never became a manor in its own right.
A town appears
The first sign that Wantage was becoming more than a large village comes in 1177, when it was included in a royal list of the boroughs and towns of Berkshire. Its market was probably already running: the first definite record, in 1203–4, concerns moving an existing market to a different day.
The Crown lets Wantage go
Wantage stayed in royal hands until Richard I (1189–1199) granted it to Baldwin de Béthune, a Flemish knight who had been with him on crusade and who became Count of Aumale. The grant came with wide privileges: the right to hold his own court and take its profits, to hang thieves caught on his land, and freedom from attending the shire and hundred courts. King John confirmed the gift in 1199. It opened three centuries in which Wantage was held by great baronial families who seldom lived there.