New lords: the Marshals and the FitzWarins
Baldwin de Béthune’s daughter Alice married William Marshal the younger, later Earl of Pembroke, and brought Wantage with her as part of her dowry. The Marshals had estates all over England and Wales. Some time before 1224 (by some accounts before 1219) they granted Wantage to Fulk FitzWarin of Whittington in Shropshire. Fulk had once been an outlaw, and within a generation of his death his adventures were being told in a French romance. His family held Wantage for most of the next two centuries, with the Earls Marshal, and after 1306 the Crown, as overlords.
Their hold was challenged. In 1237–8 Henry III claimed Wantage as land that had belonged to the Flemings, meaning Baldwin’s heirs, and Baldwin’s nephew Robert de Béthune claimed it again in 1241. Both claims failed. The FitzWarins also took over the hundred courts of Wantage and Ganfield and claimed the right to a gallows, a pillory and trial by ordeal.
Market and fairs
Market and fairs are the business of this century. In 1203–4 King John allowed the Count of Aumale to move Wantage’s weekly market from Sunday to Monday, which shows that a market was already established. A fair on St Faith’s day (6 October) is recorded from 1212. It suffered competition from Abingdon Abbey’s fair at Shellingford, until in 1224 Fulk made an agreement with the abbot that closed the Shellingford fair. On 30 May 1246 Henry III granted Fulk a second fair, on the feast of the Translation of St Thomas Becket (7 July). Some modern accounts describe the 1246 grant as the town’s market charter. The contemporary record shows it was a fair, and the market was already older. In 1276 a later Fulk was accused of forcing people to attend his fair.
The shape of the town
The layout of Wantage suggests it grew around its market: a large open Market Place with streets running out from it, now Wallingford Street to the east (part of the Portway), Newbury Street to the south, Grove Street to the north and Mill Street to the north-west. The Market Place itself is first mentioned in 1284, when the king’s justices ordered the removal of stalls that had so narrowed the space and the road that carts could not get through. Fulk was given permission to put them back the following year. Permanent stalls turning into buildings is how many market places filled in; at Wantage the space stayed largely open.
A new church
This is also when the parish church of St Peter and St Paul took its basic form. A large cross-shaped church with an aisled nave, transepts and a central tower was built. The tower still stands on four tall pointed arches, and finely carved ‘stiff-leaf’ capitals survive in the north transept. Almost nothing earlier survives in the building.
Manors around the town
Smaller estates were also changing hands. Brians manor passed to William Brian before 1230 and gave its name to the family’s holding. In Charlton the Earley family held the principal manor, and the de la Wyk family held land that later became the manor of Weeks. Fulk FitzWarin gave rents at Furzwick, south of the town, to William de Rivers when he married Fulk’s daughter Eleanor.