History of the Village (Part 1 of 6)...
Prehistory
As
it enters the new Millennium the village of Sutton Courtenay can look back at
the evidence left by many groups of people who have lived very differing lives
here over the past 8000 years. The Sutton area always provided favourable
conditions for settlement, with its position between the River Thames and the
Ridgeway, good drainage, readily available water at 6 to 10 feet, and the
fertilising bounty of alluvial soil regularly replenished by winter flooding. It
was also, at least for thousands of years from Stone Age times, an important
ceremonial site.
About 600 BC hunter-gathering tribes left behind many fragments of flint from
tool making, and some 2000 years later early Neolithic settlers developed an
important ceremonial site which was still being used for burial burrows and pits
by Bronze Age settlers about 1600 BC.
This site is located on the raised gravel terraces near the Drayton Road and its
intersection with the road to Milton, and was central to the wasp-waisted form
of Sutton settlement which was preserved in the village land boundaries down
through later centuries until very recent times.
The First Millennium
In Roman times an east-west track passed through the traditional ceremonial site
and a villa with hypocaust was built at Dropshort. Other Roman settlements may
have been located near the present Cross Trees Triangle where a barrow mound
marked the crossing of ancient tracks, and under the Abbey outbuildings nearby.
The Anglo-Saxons were already present before Roman legions left and their most
important enduring monument in Sutton was the massive causeway and weirs which
separate the millstream from Sutton Pools. The causeway was probably built by
Saxon serf labour.
Written records of Sutton's history began in AD 688 when Ine, King of Wessex,
endowed the new monastery at Abingdon with the manor of Sutton. In AD 801 Sutton
became a royal vill, with the monastery at Abingdon retaining the
church and
priest's house. It's is believed that that this was on the site of the Abbey in
Sutton Courtenay. Thus the two increasingly powerful institutions of
church and
Crown were both represented in the village from the beginning of the ninth
century.
