Swyncombe intro - Victoria County History

VCH Oxfordshire • Texts in Progress • Swyncombe (Apr. 2012) • © University of London • p. 2
From there the boundary with Ewelme crossed the downs to rejoin Icknield Way,
leaving the foothills (Ewelme Downs) within Ewelme parish.
The northern and eastern boundaries coincided with those of the hundred,
which were established before the Norman Conquest and possibly by the 9th or 10th
century. 7 Elsewhere, the boundaries presumably derived from the estates created in
the area before and after the Conquest, as the vast Benson estate became
fragmented. A 2½-hide holding at Swyncombe existed by 1086, although parts of the
later parish may have still been included within Benson, or in one of the four large
Ewelme manors recorded in Domesday. 8 A church was built on Swyncombe manor
in the late 11th century, however, and by the 12th or 13th century it seems likely that
the later parish bounadries were broadly established. 9 Even so the Ewelme manors
retained some property in Swyncombe, notably at Cookley Green, while woodland on
Swyncombe’s south-east edge remained a detached part of Ewelme parish. 10
Swyncombe
ancient parish
and its
surroundings:
from An
Historical
Atlas of
Oxfordshire,
ed. K. Tiller
and G. Darke
(ORS 67,
2010), 3.
7 M. Hammond, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Estate of Readonora and the Manor of Pyrton,
Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia 63 (1998), 23–42; L.W. Hepple and A.M. Doggett, ‘Stonor: a
Chilterns Landscape’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), Rural England (2000), 266–9; VCH Oxon. VIII, 1–3,
128–30; XVI, 197; above, vol. intro.
8 e.g. the 2½-hide Peverel fee (above, Ewelme, manors); firm evidence is lacking, however.
9 Below, relig. hist. The whole parish was titheable to Swyncombe church, and no evidence
has been found of late medieval boundary changes.
10 Above, Ewelme, par. intro. (par. bdies); manors.