History of the Village (Part 3 of 6)...
The Settled English Village 1500 - 1918
Sutton was spared most of the political and religious termoil of the following
centuries and was not involved in Civil War battles, although the Vicar
apparently stored arms and gunpowder in the church which accidently exploded one
night, destroying much of the East window. This clergyman was later dismissed
under provision for 'The Ejection of Scandalous Ministers'.
The village grew slowly with additional sizeable houses being built along the
High Street and Drayton Road. The changes brough about by the enclosure Acts of
1804 particularly benefited the wealthier landowners, who annexed parts of the
Green to their own properties. The importance of the river trade increased,
especially with the establishment of the paper mill which made paper for the
Bank of England banknotes. Gravel extraction was taking place as early as 1764
when digging on the Green was expressly forbidden. In 1807 the ferry to Culham
was replaced by a toll bridge, which did not become public until 1939.
In 1912 Sutton Courtenay returned to the national political limelight when the
Prime Minister, Herbery Asquith, chose The Wharf and Walton House for his
country home, using it rather as Chequers is used today, and signing here the
papers that took Britain into the First World War. He and his family remained in
the village after his resignation as Prime Minister, and he was buried in the
churcyard, as was Eric Blair (George Orwell) later in the century.
The Twentieth Century Transformation
It is only within this century that local government reorganisation has
completed and reduction of the ancient Sutton Courtenay parish lands by half.
The whole of Appleford and Sutton Wick have been lost to the parish, and also a
large area of Meadowlands extending northwest to the River Ock near the heart of
Abingdon (including the present Marina, Caldecott estate, and the land along the
Oct adjoining Abingdon Common and a short stretch of Marcham Common).
The author of the 1974 village survey recorded that : "People still living in
the village can remember the thriving occupations of ricking and thatching,
wheel and wagon making, mole catching and show repairing. For the women their
was a cottage industry based at Abingdon, where seamstresses were employed
sewing waistcoats in their own homes. By the mid-1930s, however, all these
occupations had ceased and, apart from increased gravel extraction and the
development of areas of market garden, no new industry appeared to keep the
villager occupied near his home."
Although this was the picture in the 1930s, from 1946 onwards new places of
employment started up in the neighbourhood - AERE Harwell, Esso Research, Culham
and Rutherford laboratories and JET. The numbers working at these establishments
have recently declined but Milton Park Trading Estate is now an expanding source
of local employment and lies partly within the boundaries of Sutton Courtenay.
More profound change has taken place more quickly in the present century than in
any previous period in the village history, as developments in transport,
communications, education and the national and world-wide economy have widened
horizons of the previous largely self-contained community and swept away many of
the traditional social, economic and family bonds.
