A manor for sale
The 18th century turned the lordship of Wantage from a baronial inheritance into a property that could be bought and sold. Sir Bourchier Wrey sold it in 1707 to John Doyley, who fell into debt and mortgaged it heavily to Mary, Countess of Bradford. Her executors foreclosed in 1746 and in 1763 sold the manor to Thomas Giles, a Wantage man, from whom it passed to his relative Samuel Worthington. The smaller manor of Brians followed the same path. A Wantage grocer, Walter Graham, bought it in 1729, and in 1752 it passed to William Stirling, who built the house called Stirlings at the east end of Wallingford Street.
A Georgian town
The wealth of the town’s traders and professionals shows in its buildings. The Victoria County History singled out Wantage’s ‘numerous excellent examples’ of Queen Anne and Georgian work: a house east of the church dated 1708, the large mansion of Aldborough House, and The Ham, an early Georgian red-brick house in the meadows south-west of the town beside a watermill recorded in 1650. The Bear was given a new front, and a third school building went up in the churchyard in 1732. The parish church gained brass chandeliers in 1709 and 1711, a silver almsdish given by Madam Wilmot of Uplambourn in 1725, and a new bell in 1764. From 1774 the clockmaker William Wise ran the post office from the former Fleur de Lis inn in the Market Place.
Tanning, hemp and tallow
Industry shaped the town’s working life. There were thriving hemp and sacking works, three tallow chandlers making candles, and several tanneries. Around 1700 the tanneries moved from Tanner Street (now Priory Road), south-west of the church, to sites between Wallingford Street and Morris’s Lane, reportedly because of the smell and the prevailing wind. The old house of correction in Grove Street served for a time as an almshouse and then again as the parish workhouse.
How the town was run
Wantage was sometimes called a borough in this century, but it never had a charter or a corporation. The lord’s manor court appointed a chief constable and petty constables, and the lord was responsible for the roads ‘within the borough’. The antiquary Thomas Hearne noted in 1723 a new ‘Constable’s Fair’. Beside them, the Town Lands governors spent their income on schooling, the poor and the highways. Nobody had overall responsibility for paving, lighting or drainage, and by the end of the century the town had a poor reputation. It became known as ‘Black Wantage’, a place of dirt, drink and crime. Accounts differ on how early the name was used.
A famous son
Joseph Butler, born in Wantage in 1692, published his Analogy of Religion in 1736, became Bishop of Bristol in 1738 and Bishop of Durham in 1750, and died in 1752. He is remembered as one of the leading English moral philosophers of his age.
Around the town
In Grove, an early 18th-century Baptist chapel served the growing Nonconformist congregation. The open fields of Wantage and Grove were still farmed in strips as the century ended. Their enclosure, by an Act of 1803, would open the next chapter.