DRAWING THE BOUNDARIES

Bampton and Enclosure

The many early enclosures around the historic core of Bampton were post-medieval or earlier. Much of this enclosure was associated with the arrangement of the three principal manors of Bampton.

Before the late Saxon period Bampton was a single large Royal manor. It became divided in the course of the 10th and 11th centuries to become three manors. The first was Bampton Earls (also known as King’s Bampton, or Bampton Talbot after the family who held it from the 14th century onwards and who became the Earls of Shrewsbury).

The next was Bampton Deanery, a division made by King Eadwig in his grant to Bampton minster between 955 and 957, and so named because it was after the Norman conquest transferred to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter Cathedral. Finally there was Bampton D’Oilly, held by the family of the same name.

Over time these manors were each divided into either moieties (from the Latin mediatus, meaning half) or let out in various parcels of land that resulted in each manor forming a number of distinct estates. The process was complex.

The best surviving example is a survey made for the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1789. This was created to ‘sort out’ once and for all the problem of Shrewsbury and his neighbour at Ham Court, a Mr. Coventry, delineating their holdings. On the ground their respective holdings which had been separated around a 100 years previously in a “most injudicious manner that the estates are most intermixed and interfere with each other in a most inconvenient manner which might have been prevented if it had been carried out by men of judgment”.