In this Section

• Medieval Life
  • Hook Norton in the Domesday Book
  • Community Farming
  • Building the Parish Church

• • The Manors of Hook Norton
• The Secular Lords of the Manor
  • Barons Hooknorton-the D’Oilly Dynasty 1066-1253
  • The Decline of the Barony, 1253-1414
  • The Wars of the Roses, 1414-1553
• The Ecclesiastical Manor:
  • Oseney Abbey-the Richest House
  • The Fall of Oseney Abbey
• Table of Contents

Introduction

Little evidence survives of daily village life in the five centuries after the Norman Conquest. The residents of Hook Norton first gain flesh in the Domesday Book of 1086, but after that we have little detailed evidence of social life and how it was structured. We have indications of how the villagers fed themselves through a carefully arranged system of Community Farming.  And we know that the spiritual and cultural life of the village was organised through the parish church – nowadays called St Peter’s – which stands as an impressive physical record of the essentially religious focus of medieval life.  We look first at the Building the Parish Church and later at the parish’s Ecclesiastical Manor.  Most of what we know of the Middle Ages concerns the affairs of great men and institutions that influenced the parish, usually from a distance.

Medieval Hook Norton was ruled mainly through two large  Manors, divided between Church and State.  On the one hand, the King granted his manor to important favoured Secular Lords, from the Barons Hooknorton of Norman times  to the great Lancastrian, Yorkist and Tudor Lords of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but only a few of them (as far as we know) bothered to come here.  On the other hand, the almost equally great Ecclesiastical Manor was controlled by Oseney Abbey in Oxford for three hundred years, right up to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s.  These manors are central to understanding medieval Hook Norton.

© Donald Ratcliffe

March 2022