Schools in the churchyard
The Town Lands governors created by the Act of 1597 soon built on their new powers. Between 1604 and 1619 a second school building, the ‘English School’, went up in the churchyard beside the Latin School in the old Norman chapel. Until the mid-19th century all of the town’s schools stood around the church. New charitable gifts, from Thomas Aldworth (about 1604), Alexander Carter (1608) and Robert Payne (1617), added to the governors’ lands.
The town’s buildings
Several of Wantage’s older buildings date from this century. The Bear, on the south side of the Market Place, was rebuilt in the early 1600s; its landlord issued his own trade tokens in 1653. Falcon House, a timber-framed building behind the later town hall, carries a date of 1646 that the Victoria County History thought about right. A town hall where the manor courts met is recorded in 1654, probably the building that stood in the middle of the Market Place until 1835. In Charlton and Grove, many of the brick and timber farmhouses and cottages that give the hamlets their character date from the 17th and early 18th centuries.
The Civil War
During the Civil War of the 1640s Wantage lay between the King’s headquarters at Oxford and his garrison at Wallingford on one side, and Parliament’s forces to the south and west on the other. Royalist troops were quartered in the town as an outpost. In 1644 Richard Symonds, a royalist trooper marching with Charles I’s army, passed through and copied down the inscription on the market cross. The cross itself seems to have been broken during the war and was never replaced; by 1796 it had been gone for more than a century.
Faith and dissent
The upheavals of the war years allowed new congregations to form. In 1653 the Baptists were meeting in the town hall. They later built a chapel in Mill Street, and an early 18th-century Baptist chapel still stands at Grove. The parish church acquired a new bell in 1669, the oldest of the present ring.
A failing trade and the poor
The cloth industry was declining. In 1668 the governors handed their ‘new almshouses’ to Robert Burchall, a clothworker, as a house of correction where the poor could be set to work, ‘for the better employing of the poor people of Wantage’. In 1665 plague in London led to a royal proclamation halting fairs to stop it spreading. Tanning grew as cloth declined.
A lasting gift came from Robert Stiles, a Wantage man who became a merchant in Amsterdam and died in 1680. He founded the almshouses in Newbury Street: twelve single-storey dwellings round a courtyard, under a deep overhanging roof that forms a covered walk. The courtyard is paved with knucklebones, a reminder of the tanning trade.
The manor and a famous son
The Bourchier line ended with the death of Edward, Earl of Bath, in 1637, and the manor was divided between his daughters. After a settlement in 1685 it went to Sir Bourchier Wrey. In 1692 Joseph Butler, son of a Presbyterian linen draper, was born in Wantage. He became Bishop of Durham and one of the most influential English moral philosophers of the 18th century.