Local History

Iron Age dwellings have been excavated in Lechlade, four miles to the east, and there is an Iron Age hill fort at Ranbury, near Poulton, four miles to the west. It is likely that the river was being forded in those times and there may have been some residents guarding the ford.

Fairford is nine miles east of Cirencester, which is the site of the Roman town of Corinium. After London, Corinium was the largest civilian town in Roman Britain. Ongoing excavations on the west of the town have revealed an ancient field system with pre-Roman, Roman and Saxon drainage, access and field use. No significant buildings have been discovered so far, but it indicates occupation of the area from early times. The work continues.

The earliest record in which Fairford is named is dated AD850, when two hides of land were transferred to the Abbess of the Church of Gloucester. By 1066 it was an established Anglo-Saxon manor with the nobleman Brittric as its lord. He had spurned Matilda the wife of William the Conqueror, and after the invasion she demanded all his lands, and Fairford fell into her ownership. The Domesday Book of 1088 noted that there were 21 hides of land with 56 villeins, 9 bordars with 30 plow-tillages, a priest and three mills. Speculation continues today as to the location of these mills.

A market was started in Fairford in 1135. A corn market was well established by 1260 and by 1287 there were three annual fairs. Charles II granted a revised charter in 1671. In the early years of the 20th century the cattle market was large, filling the Market Place and the High Street, further animals being penned in a nearby street called The Croft. However, by the mid 1930s it had declined and came to an end. Today there is a weekly traders' market, restarted in 1986.

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Photo courtesy of Alan Wheeler.

By the fifteenth century the Manor was held by the Earls of Warwick. In 1430, or thereabouts, Richard Beauchamp, known as the Great Earl of Warwick, built a church where there had long been a church building. Richard Neville, 'Warwick the Kingmaker', was killed at the Battle of Barnet in 1471 and in 1478 the Warwick lands, including Fairford, came to the king, Edward IV. In the next year he gave custody of the Manor to John Twynyho and his son-in-law John Tame, both being wealthy wool and cloth merchants of Cirencester. By the mid 1480s, John Tame had come to live in Fairford and in 1491 permission was applied for, and given, to rebuild the church.

John Tame, and later his son Edmund, retained the tower of the Warwick church up to the level of the roof of the present nave, but replaced the upper part of the tower, and the whole of the nave and chancel. Each of the 28 windows are in stained glass installed in the first quarter of the 16th century, and form a complete picture bible. Obviously, individual pieces of glass have been broken, damaged or lost, and required replacement, but the windows have survived the Reformation of the 1540s, the Civil War of the 1650s, and World War II. They were removed to a safe place during World War II, but probably remained in place for the earlier periods of danger, escaping attention by being white-washed over and cleaned up when more favourable times returned.

Parties can be given conducted tours of the Church and its windows by a request to the Parish Office (01285-712611). The guides are all retired volunteers, so please give them plenty of advance warning - you know how busy retirement can be.

The railway eventually came to Fairford on 15th January 1873, linking the town to Witney in Oxfordshire. There had been an earlier attempt to create a direct line from Cheltenham to London which was to have come through Fairford. The station was a mile from the centre of the town, but people who wanted to use it were quite happy to walk that distance. On Saturday 16th June 1962 the last train ran from Fairford, the line being a victim of Dr Beeching's axe. In its time the line had brought coal for the Fairford Gas and Coke Company, formed in 1852, one of the first in the country. The company stopped local production in 1936. Today, Retort House marks the former site

Besides the Church, Fairford may well be known to aviation enthusiasts. In the 1940s, an airfield was built to the South of the town which was to be a place for launching tugs and gliders to be used on D day and later incursions into occupied Europe. After the War, the Ministry of Defence retained the airfield and did not return it to other uses as it did with many other war-time airfields in the area. In the early 1970s, because of its long surfaced runway, it was used for the air-testing of Concorde and the training of the first batch of British Airways pilots. It returned to military use during the 1980s, when NATO stationed air-refuelling tankers at Fairford, which were used in several long distance air strikes. With the end of the Cold War, the tankers were withdrawn and the airfield is used occasionally for NATO exercises. When Greenham Common, near Newbury in Berkshire, was closed, the Royal International Air Tattoo transferred to Fairford and the skies around Fairford are filled every July with impressive flying displays, including the famous Red Arrows.

Source: Don Cobbett, Fairford & District U3A member

Lechlade on Thames

(© Lechlade History Society; please do not copy photos without prior permission.. Further information  from: 01367 252457)

There is ample archaeological evidence of human settlement for the last 4,000 years, on the dry gravel terraces beside the river at Lechlade; the confluence of the Coln (just upstream) and the Leach (just downstream) with the Thames has much to do with the growth of the town and the prosperity of its people. Fresh water fish abounded, and it was easy both to cross the river and to embark upon it at this point; thus trade with other people down the river, to London and beyond to the Continent, has always played a part in the local history. Prehistoric stone tools and ritual burial sites can be seen from the air or found in the fields, and where modern industries have excavated sand and gravel, there has been evidence of bronze age, iron-age, Romano-British and Saxon dwellings and workshops and agriculture. One has to visit museums in Cirencester and Oxford to see the astonishingly rich finds from these periods, but evidence of an ancient trading town with an active inland port remains all around us today.

In 1859 Louisa Wheeler, daughter of a Lechlade blacksmith, painted the scene from the towpath on the south bank as she saw it;  St Lawrence Church was rebuilt partly with money from wool merchants (who dedicated a chapel to St Blaize, patron saint of wool-combers) in the 1470s; surely its elegant spire (which  was added a little later) was what was referred to by the 16^th century travel-writer, Leyland, as a “pretty pyramid of stone” in the market place. To the left of her picture is a wharf with coal stacked high, and buildings that date from before the elegant toll bridge was opened in 1792. The inland port was here in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, when commercial competition with other wharves (downstream towards Buscot) was fierce, and large quantities of salt, cheese, and sometimes stone and wool were shipped down to Oxford and London.

Lechlade was also then a staging post on the London-Faringdon-Cirencester-Gloucester coach route, and local farmers and merchants were building and rebuilding their houses. The local builder and architect Richard Pace left a splendid legacy of Georgian buildings, around the town – look for the distinctive fan-lights over many of the front doors.