The Earls of Bath
Throughout the Tudor century the manor belonged to the Bourchier family. John Bourchier, Lord FitzWarin, was created Earl of Bath in 1536, and the title and manor passed down through his son to his grandson William in 1561. Like the FitzWarins before them, the earls lived elsewhere. Wantage was run by their bailiffs, who collected the market tolls and held the manor court.
The Reformation
The religious changes of the century reached Wantage in the usual ways. Parish registers begin in 1538, when Thomas Cromwell ordered every parish to keep them. The antiquary John Leland, travelling in the 1530s or 1540s, noted the unusual sight of ‘two churches in one churchyard’: the parish church and the old Norman chapel of St Mary, which he saw being used as a school.
Chantries, endowments for priests to say masses for the dead, were abolished under Edward VI. None at Wantage appears in the survey of 1546, but lands belonging to them came to light and were granted away in the 1580s, including land of ‘Isley’s chantry’. At Charlton, two small manors that had been given to a chantry at Fyfield were granted by Edward VI to George Owen. The oldest surviving piece of church plate, a cup made in London in 1571, dates from the settlement under Elizabeth I.
The market cross
In 1580 a market cross was put up in the Market Place. Its inscription asked passers-by to pray for ‘the good Earl of Bath’, for ‘Master Barnabe the builder’ and for William Lord FitzWarin. The cross was later broken, probably during the Civil War, and in the 1920s its remains stood in the garden of Winslow House in Newbury Street.
The Town Lands Act, 1597
The most lasting change came in 1597. An Act of Parliament vested the houses and lands given over the previous century and a half for charitable purposes in twelve people, incorporated with a common seal as ‘the Governors of the Town Lands of Wantage’. Their job was to relieve the poor, mend the highways and pay a schoolmaster to teach grammar. The Norman chapel of St Mary was fitted up as the ‘Latin School’. The governors had no power to run the town, which stayed in the hands of the lord’s officers, but they became the nearest thing Wantage had to a town council for more than two centuries.
Trade and daily life
The Aldworth family began tanning near the church in 1522, the start of an industry that would dominate the town for three centuries. The Bear in the Market Place is first mentioned in 1567. Brasses in the church record families like the Talbots (1522). The Wirdnam family of Charlton leased the church’s Prior’s Hold manor. By about 1600 Wantage was clearly a market town serving the vale villages, with inns, tradesmen and a school of its own.