Early History
East Garston History
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He
is also recorded as Ansgar or Esgar, and was said to be the "hero
of Hastings", where he was badly wounded defending the English
Standard on 14th October 1066. Asgar was a procurer of horses
for the king, and owned land in several counties. He witnessed
many of Edward the Confessor's charters, and also the queen mother's
will. He appears to have held all the cultivated land of the Lambourn
Hundred, which encompassed East Garston. East Garston or Esgareston
was held by Eva de Tracey in a number of documents dating from
the 1200s, including the "Testa de Neville". It was
known locally as Argason. The Victoria County History of Berkshire
records that the village was called Esegarestun in the twelfth
century, Hesegerton and Esegareston in thirteenth, Esgarston in
fourteenth and Argaston or Estgarston in sixteenth century. The
introduction of the "t" in the first syllable was an
early corruption, and not indicative of "east". |
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Front
Street showing East Garston House nearest - c1900 |
Opposing
view of Front Street in the mid 60s with Goldhill House nearest
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On
Saxton's map of 1574 it was Est Garston, whereas the Ilsleys were
E. Ilsley and W. Ilsley. In a document dated 1599, the parish is
called "Eastgarston alias Ergaston" and on maps of 1607,
the name was East Garston. Willis' 1768 map of 10 miles around Newbury
names the village Eastgarston, "vulgo Arguson", presumably
referring to the local pronunciation. The Rocque map of the same
period also mentions East Garston Down and East Garston Woodlands.
It is not difficult to see how, over a relatively short period of
time, the name of the village was transformed by writers and map-makers
who did not know the village, and assumed that it must be East Garston.
For many years in the early twentieth century there was debate about
whether to return the name to Esgarston. |
The
local vicar. Rev. John Tudor, supported by the Rev. F. T. Wethered,
argued against the debasement of the original name. In 1904 a petition
was presented to Berkshire County Council for the name to be changed
back to Esgarston. Eighteen landowners (mostly non-resident), 46
parishioners and 20 "friends and neighbours" signed. The
opposition was quick to mobilise with a counter-petition signed
by 152 people, almost all residents, claiming the change was unnecessary,
confusing and inconvenient. They prevailed, but the vicar continued
to use the name Esgarston. Notes in the Berkshire Archaeological and Architectural Journal of 1904, record: "It is unfortunate that the inhabitants of East Garston should have decided to cling to the corrupted form of the name of their village, in spite of all that has been done to restore the old and correct form of the word." |
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In
1759 East Garston had an estimated 100 households and 430 inhabitants.
In 1851 the population peaked at 623, but by 1891 it had dropped
to 436 Worse was to follow: the population reached a low 386 in
1931. Since then it has risen, and in the 1991census was recorded
at 543 people, occupying about 230 dwellings. |
Early
History |
East Garston and its surrounding
area have been inhabited since prehistoric times. Numerous local
sites bear witness to occupation in the form of manmade ponds,
field systems, earthworks, ditches and enclosures. Fragments of
pottery and metalwork suggest that this occupation was continuous
from the end of the last ice age through to Roman times. In these
early days, the area that is now East Garston was probably much
as it is today, an open, undulating landscape of shallow-soiled,
relatively dry downland. During Neolithic times, 5800-2300BC,
people lived in well-organised communities, built stone circles
and hill forts (of which there are a number in the area) cleared
forests and constructed earthworks to divide large tracts of land. |
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Linear
earthworks on the downs near East Garston - today's evidence of
Neolithic settlement (1999)
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Other finds include mollusc shells
from the type of snail that only lived on open grassland, demonstrating
that there have not been forests on the local downs since the
Neolithic clearances. A fair-sized rectangular enclosure at Winterdown
Bottom, to the south of the linear earthwork, is mentioned in
the Berkshire Archaeological Journal and recorded in an aerial
photo at the Ashmolean Museum. |
Romans, Saxons and Normans
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The Romans invaded in 43AD, and ruled Britain for 500 years. They gave us our first written historical descriptions of the locality. Such accounts and numerous remains indicate that not only did the Romans pass through the area, but that they also settled. No village or farm was more than seven miles from an engineered Roman road, and Ermine Street ran along the southern border of the parish at Woodland St. Mary, linking Silchester and Cirencester (Corinium), both important Roman regional capitals. Another Roman road ran from Speen (Spinae), one of the earliest and most important of the military roadside stations mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary. To the south, there
was a road to Mildenhall (Cunetio) just outside Marlborough. Some
researchers believe that there are traces of a military way across
the downs to the west of East Garston church, which could have linked
the Roman road near Baydon to the Roman road by Letcombe Castle
on the Ridgeway. The Roman policy was to absorb existing communities
into their empire, providing an infrastructure of agriculture, architecture,
road-building and military protection. Signs of this activity are
all around East Garston: remains of a Roman villa just outside Lamboum,
sandal-nails and boot protectors in the remains of a hut and mound
on Row Down, Lamboum, and others such as a Romano-British
cinerary urn found on East Garston Downs. Pottery found along
the downs includes 11 Roman and four prehistoric items at Crane's
Wood, 28 prehistoric and 84 Roman items on Eastbury Down and 46
Roman at Nut Wood. Local people report other Roman remains on East
Garston Downs, which were ploughed over in the 1960s. |
From
this period until the Norman conquest in 1066, the foundations of
England as we know it were laid ~ our language, the boundaries of
our shires and our |
In
1890, railway workmen building the Lamboum Valley railway found
a Saxon graveyard at East Shefford on a high rise of land on the
riverbank. Twenty-six graves containing men, women and children
with grave furniture, including a broad straight-bladed iron Saxon
sword, a necklet of amber beads, a glass vessel, spearheads and
knives were found. It is thought that these were Saxons who had
married local women, as they had adopted the local system of burying
the dead, not the Saxon method of burning. Saxon rule came to an
end in 1066, with the Norman invasion led by William the Conqueror.
The whole country suffered badly, and the Saxon landowners of the
Hundred of Lamboum, which included the lands of East Garston and
Lamboum, lost their lands. Land at East Garston, which had belonged
to Asgar, King Edward's staller, (provider of the king's horses)
was given to Geoffrey de Mandeville. |
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Cornbaggers,
a very old cottage on the River Lambourn. The name suggests that
it may once have been a mill, in which case the original could have been Saxon |
Lords
of the Manor |
(pictured right)... |
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East
Garston was passed down the family from William de London to his
son Maurice, to his son William, who was ordered to pay tithes to
Hurley Priory. A descendant of de London was ordered to pay a fine
in 1222 for marrying her daughter without a licence. In the taxation
made by the authority of Pope Nicholas IV around 1291, the rectory
was rated at £12, the vicarage at £4.36 and the interest
of the Prior of Hurley at Maidencoat at £1.50. In 1226, King
Henry III seized the whole hundred of Lambourn, including East Garston,
for the escape of a thief. |
Through
marriage, the manor of East Garston passed to the Chaworth family,
and in the late thirteenth century Maud, a descendant of de London,
married |
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This curious drawing, a photocopy of which was found in the files of the Newbury Weekly News, is possibly the earliest graphic record of East Garston. It shows the church and Manor Farm, which probably occupies the site of the medieval manor house. The diamond clock face on the church indicates that it was drawn prior to 1889. The inscription on the back claims the picture to be "3 or 4 hundred years old", but without provenance. There is a gravestone to the Palmer family in the churchyard. Thomas Palmer was the tenant farmer at Maidencourt in 1836, and two Palmers subsequently set up charities for the poor of the village. |
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