In this Section
Introduction
The extensive periods of the past for which no written records exist remain Hook Norton’s prehistoric Dark Ages. We must therefore rely on other sources of knowledge to know what happened, essentially before 1066.
The geological record explains the physical context in which human life has developed in the parish. Our Geological Foundations have produced a soil that is fertile but lacks some important minerals, and possesses an ironstone rock that provided not only a building material but also, for sixty years, the basis for heavy industry. They also reveal that animal life existed here long before humans, most dramatically Hooky’s Dinosaur, which left its remains in the parish about 175 million years ago.
The archaeological record shows that human beings lived in this locality in the Bronze and Iron Ages and even before, leaving evidence of the burial mounds, the roads, forts and settlements they built in the two thousand years before Christ. The PDF on Ancient Britons and Romans reveals that the area was populated by scattered primitive settlements before the Roman conquest of 43 A.D., but the evidence is rapidly growing to show that, thereafter, economic and cultural life developed as Roman villas and other settlements sprang up and grew well into the fifth century. Some of these revelations are coming to light because of the mandatory archaeological work done in preparing for our new housing estates, as revealed in the suggestive entry on New Light on Roman Hook Norton.
Sometime after the Anglo-Saxon incursions began about 450 A.D. – possibly even two or three centuries after – a defined village developed with an Anglo-Saxon name, Hocneratune, though we still do not know exactly Where was the original Hook Norton? In time, the behaviour of these settlers begins to become visible to us as they responded to challenges from competing invaders. The first brief written record tells of war and death in 913 A.D. and our parish church probably had its origins sometime thereafter, but sadly lack of evidence still makes that world appear “dark” to us, even though we appreciate that the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings developed considerable civilisations of their own. Only with the last wave of these Invaders of the Dark Ages – the Normans – does a fuller record begin to make possible the writing of the fuller histories of Hook Norton that may be found in the next section, entitled The Middle Ages.
© Donald Ratcliffe
17/09/22
