Introduction

For historians, the breakup of European Christendom in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century is the key turning-point in the transition from the Medieval to the Early Modern eras.  In Hook Norton, the official religion changed from Roman Catholicism to the new official Anglicanism, in the various forms defined from time to time by the nation’s rulers.  The rise of Puritanism within the Church in the early seventeenth century helped to produce the Great Civil War of 1642-1646, which resulted in the appearance in the village of two new religious sects, the Baptists and the Quakers.  Persecuted after 1660, these two dissenting sects won religious toleration, though not civic equality, in 1689 and brought an important social and cultural diversity to the parish.

In secular terms, the Reformation appeared to end the medieval division of the parish into two main manors, belonging respectively to Church and State.  At first, in the 1540s the tenancy of those both main manors (including the old Oseney Abbey lands, now belonging to the Bishopric), fell into the hands of the Croker family, enabling them to establish a position of considerable influence, both locally and beyond, that lasted safely into the seventeenth century.  After 1640, however, the close connection of Gerard Croker with Charles I’s cause proved politically disastrous and the Civil War shattered what remained of the family’s power.  They were to some extent able to restore their possessions during the 1650s, but the challenge of law cases, deteriorating finances and frequent deaths prevented them from re-establishing their earlier command, and by 1670 or so they had lost their possessions and position in this parish.

The eighteenth century would prove ever more conservative and elitist, but now aristocratic power operated in a very different world.  Hook Norton was unusual in that manorial power was once more divided between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, but the Bishop of Oxford now leased the Hook Norton estate to his own relations who operated it more on business lines.  That represented about one-third of all the land in the parish.  Much manorial land had been sold off and was now widely distributed among notable local families like the Lampetts and the Austins.  They constituted a wealthy local oligarchy that dominated the affairs of the parish church and through it much of the work of local government.  The lord of the secular manor held less land and exercised less local influence than he once had, but he could still be a personage of great public distinction.  Most impressively, in the mid-eighteenth century the Duke of Buccleuch held the manor, though his major interests lay elsewhere, especially in Scotland.  He too took part in the growing exploitation of Hook Norton for the advancement of the wealthy.

In many ways the revolution that affected most lives in the parish was not religious or political but agricultural.  Traditionally farming had operated on a communal basis that shared good land and bad land among the inhabitants.  As the eighteenth century advanced, the wealthier landowners wanted more control and a more productive system, and they gained their way with the passage of the Hook Norton Enclosure Act of 1773.  As this website’s articles in other sections make clear, this measure had a deleterious impact on the poorer people of the parish, heightening poverty, creating a crisis in poor relief, and leading to considerable emigration from the parish after 1800.  Not for the last time, communal facilities were destroyed in Hook Norton for the benefit of wealthy individuals.

The character of daily life in the parish is much better documented from the late seventeenth century onward than it had been earlier.  This has enabled some historians to make imaginative but well-informed attempts to recreate specific moments and specific episodes over the years that follow.  We take particular pleasure in reprinting here, under the title “Passages in Village Life, 1640-1820”, an impressive series of short articles published in the Hook Norton Newsletter in 1987-1989 under the pseudonym CANITIES.[1]  They include (on pages 13-18) a largely forgotten, imaginative piece by Margaret Dickins describing the village and parish on June 29^th, 1774, which adds to both entertainment and understanding.

© Donald Ratcliffe

September 2022

[1] The stories by Canities have now been published by the HNLHG under the title, Tales of Hook Norton: From Civil War to Poor Law (2019), and have been credited to their undoubted author, the late Rev. Ralph Mann.