A Pretty Village in the Heart of England's Thames Valley...
and welcome to Sutton Courtenay,
Abingdon, Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom.
Sutton means “South Town (i.e. Farm)”: south of the town of Abingdon that is.
The village is unusual in that it is the home of three very historic domestic
buildings. George Orwell (author of 1984) and Herbert Asquith (Prime Minister
1908-1916) are also buried in the local Churchyard.
The ancient Manor House is at the focus of the old Saxon manor which was the
site of a Royal palace like that excavated at Cheddar (Somerset). The Witan met
there in 1042. Most of the present building dates from the 14th & 16th
centuries. However, one wing dates mostly from the 13th century and part of it,
including a vaulted undercroft, from the 11th! ie. the period of Royal
residence. Matilda, Queen of King Henry I came to live here, near her
gynaecologist, the Abbot of Abingdon, for the birth of her first child in 1101.
Sadly, the baby died, but she stayed on, and it is now generally believed that
her second child, the Empress Matilda was also born here a year later, probably
in the room above the undercroft.
The village name of Courtenay derives from the family of that name who took on
the manor in about 1177. Sutton was originally one of their major estates, but
they inherited important lands in the West Country and their Berkshire home
became less significant. They are now the Earls of Devon, and live at Powderham
Castle (Dev). It was Reginald de Courtenay, a landless young man from a well
known family, who first became Lord of Sutton. He had attached himself to Henry
of Anjou (later Henry II) and helped negotiate this young man’s way to the
English throne which his mother had lost. As a reward, he was given the
birthplace of this very woman. She was the Empress Matilda, mentioned
previously. It was Reginald’s younger son, Robert, who expanded on the buildings
at Sutton by erecting the house known today as “Norman Hall” in about 1192. It
may originally have been a chapel. It was certainly part of the same complex as
the manor house until about 1306. After the family’s move to Devon, they
apparently rarely stayed at Sutton and the manor house was acquired around this
time by the Brunce family, one of whom became Bishop of Norwich. They, naturally
enough, named it “Brunce’s Court”. It is a very attractive building today,
notable for its vine-covered east wing (c.1500) with Ipswich windows that,
presumably, explain why the building is painted pink in the East Anglian style.
The
third great house of the parish was the Rectory House, now called “The Abbey”,
built mostly between 1284 & 1290 and incorporating some of an earlier
dilapidated Parsonage that had been used as a Grange for Abingdon Abbey. The
Courtenays had managed to wrestle the building away from the Abbot during an,
apparently rigged, court case! The great timber hall, that survives to full
height today, was later (c.1330) clad in great blocks of stone when it began to
lean. As an elegant stone mansion, “The Abbey” made the living at Sutton a very
attractive one, luring such men as the chaplains of the Black Prince and John of
Gaunt, the doctor of Henry V and the secretary of King Henry VI: Thomas
Bekington, who later became Bishop of Bath & Wells. Unfortunately, many of these
men were so caught up with affairs of state that they rarely visited Sutton,
leaving the running of the parish Church to various underlings.