Faringdon is a small market town by prescription, pleasantly situated on the west side of Faringdon Hill, about two miles from the Thames. It now gives name to a hundred, but was formerly in the hundred of Wifol. According to the returns made under the population act in 1801, Faringdon and its hamlets then contained 1916 inhabitants.

The market is held on Tuesday, and there are three annual fairs on the days mentioned in our list.

The town is governed by a bailiff and inferior officers.

Faringdon was part of the ancient demesne of the crown, and the Saxon kings had a palace here, in which Edward the elder died in the year 925.

Robert Earl of Gloucester built a castle here in the reign of King Stephen, against whom he fortified and defended it; but after a close siege of four days, it was taken and razed to the ground. The site of it, according to the chronicle of Waverley Abbey, quoted by Camden, was by King John, in the year 1202, "by divine admonition granted with all its appurtenances to build an abbey of the Cistertian order."

‘‘ These fruitful plains, in that unhappy hour

Of papal sway and sacerdotal power,

W ere doom’d the new-made abbey to maintain,

And distant Beaulieu ruled the fair domain."

Faringdon Hill.

After the dissolution of monasteries the manor of Faringdon, with the other possessions, of the Abbey of Beaulieu were granted to Thomas Lord Seymour, by Edward VI. but again vesting in the crown by the attainder and execution of this nobleman, it was granted, in the second year of Queen Mary to Sir Frederick Englefield, and again by Queen Elizabeth to Sir Henry Unton. The present proprietor is William Hallet, Esq.

The parish church of Faringdon is a handsome gothic structure of considerable dimensions. It is built in form of a cross, but with a double transept. Upon the low square tower there was originally a spire, which was destroyed during the Civil Wars. There are several ancient monuments in this church of the Purefoys of Wadley, and their ancestors, Sir Alexander, Sir Edward, Sir Thomas and Sir Henry Union. Upon that of Sir Alexander are figures in brass of himself, and his lady, inhabited in surcoats, with their arms blazoned. Sir Henry Unton, who resided at Wadley in this parish, was knighted for his bravery at the seige of Zutphen. He was twice ambassador from Queen Elizabeth to the court of France, where he distinguished himself by sending a remarkable challenge to the Duke of Guise, who had spoken disrespectfully of his mistress.

Sir Henry died during his second embassy in 1596. In the nave of the church is the tomb of Sir Marmaduke Raw don, governor of Faringdon, who successfully defended the garrison against the parliamentary forces. He died April 26, 1646.

In the year 1771, as some labourers were digging stones in a field called Lamb Close, in this parish, they discovered six human skeletons, lying there in a row; under the heads of two of them were found some pieces of silver coin of James I. and Charles L and one of the skulls appeared to have had a bullet gone quite through it. By the size of the bones and soundness of the teeth they were probably young men, and soldiers, slain in the reign of Charles I. during the civil wars.

At Radcot Bridge, situated at the extremity of the parish, a battle was fought between Robert Vere, Duke of Ireland, Richard the Second’s favourite, and the Earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV.) and other confederate lords. The duke was defeated, and escaped by crossing the river at the hazard of his life.

Faringdon House is an elegant modern edifice, built by Henry James Pye, Esq. the present poet laureate, and sold by him with the manor to William Hallet, Esq. the present proprietor.

The house stands in a small park; on the north side of the town. During the Civil Wars the ancient mansion was garrisoned for Charles I. and was one of the last places that surrendered. Cromwell himself made an unsuccessful attack upon this garrison, with 600 men from the garrison of Abingon; a second attack, with as little success was made the following year by Sir Robert Pye, the owner of the house: Sir George Lisle was then governor. In this attack the spire of Faringdon Church is said to have been beaten down.

In the immediate vicinity of the town is Faringdon Hill, an eminence gradually rising from the vale of White Horse, upon the summit of which is a small grove, which forms a kind of land mark for the surrounding counties, being seen at a great distance in every direction.

Faringdon Hill commands a rich and extensive, view over parts of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and

Wiltshire, in addition to the whole of the fertile vale beneath.

"Here lofty mountains lift their azure heads,

There its green lap the grassy meadow spreads:

Enclosures here the sylvan scene divide,

There plains extended spread their harvest wide.

Here oaks their massy limbs wide stretching meet,

And form impervious thickets at our feet.

Through aromatic heaps of rip'ning hay,

There silver Isis wins her winding way;

And many a bower, and many a spire between,

Shoots from the groves and cheers the rural scene."

Pye’s Faringdon Hill.

FARINGDON (or Great Faringdon, formerly Chipping Faringdon) is a well-built market and union town, head of a petty sessional division and county court district, and parish, with a station (on a branch of the Great Western railway from Uffington, opened in 1864), 70 miles from London, 14 west from Abingdon, 25 north-west from Newbury, 17 south-west from Oxford, 35 from Reading and 9 south-west from Wantage, in the northern division of the county, partly in the hundred of Faringdon and partly in that of Shrivenham rural deanery of the Vale of White Horse, archdeaconry of Berks and diocese of Oxford. The town, which is situate on an eminence, dates as far back as the 9th century. The Saxon kings had a palace here, in which Edward the Elder died in 925. In 1144 Robert, Earl of Gloucester, erected a castle, which after a short siege was demolished by the forces of King Stephen. During the civil wars Faringdon House was garrisoned for the King, Sir Marmaduke Rawdon kt. being governor; it was attacked in June 1645, and again in 1646; it was surrendered by Royal command to Sir Robert Pye kt. its owner, who was then in, command of the Parliamentary troops, considerable damage, however, being done both to the town and the church. The town is lighted with gas by a company formed in 1835. The church of All Saints is an ancient and interesting cruciform edifice of stone in the Norman and later styles, consisting of chancel, nave of 4 bays, aisles, double transepts and a central tower, containing 8 bells and a clock; the north door of the nave, now disused, is Early Norman; the nave and other portions of the church are in the Transition style, dated from about 1180, and including the south door, which retains some remarkably good Early English ironwork; the nave arches are semi-circular, supported by massive cylindrical piers with rich foliated capitals; the Early English tower, erected about 1200, is sustained by four great piers, lined with clusters of semi-cylindrical shafts, each furnished with a capital of an elegant and varied form; the chancel is also Early English, of about the same period, and is remarkable for its great length and extreme simplicity; there are canopied sedilia, with rich decorated work, dating from about 1300; the Unton chapel of the north transept is also Decorated, but later, and dates from about 1370; the window is remarkable as having a foliated canopy in, its splay; the windows of the north aisle of the nave are Perpendicular and were probably inserted about 1400; the west window of the nave is about a century later; the Pye chapel, attached to the chancel, was probably added soon after the Reformation; the east window and 6 others in the chancel, 4 in the Bouth transept, 3 in the aisle of the south transept and 2 in the south aisle of the nave, are stained; in the Unton chapel is an alabaster tomb, with recumbent effigies of Sir Thomas Unton, kt. of Wadley. and Elizabeth, his wife; adjoining is a monument to Sir Alexander Unton kt. ob. 1547, with effigy of himself in a tabard, and his two wives, Mary and Cecyll, in heraldic mantles, with ten children; on the west wall is a marble monument to Sir Edward Unton, made a knight of the Bath at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, who married Anne (Seymour), widow of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, daughter to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of England; on the east wall is a tablet to Sir Henry Unton, knighted in Holland in 1586, by Robert, Earl of Leicester, for his bravery at the siege of Zutphen; he was twice chosen ambassador to France, and died in, 1596, during the embassy; the monument was erected in 1606 by his widow, Dorothy, whose kneeling effigy formerly stood on a pedestal at the foot, but is now in the Pye chapel; in this chapel, on a buttress of the tower, is a mural monument to Lionel Rich, ob. 1742, who married, in 1734, Anne, daughter of Henry Pye esq.; against the north wall is a noble monument of white marble with blue columns supporting cherubs of alabaster, to Jane Pye, ob. 1706; another monument of variegated marble, supported by columns of the Tuscan order, is in memory of Ann Pye; there are many additional monuments and brasses to the Parker, Purefoy, Pleydell and other families, but these have been mostly mutilated or removed from their original positions; Richard Lenton, vicar, ob. 1410; Thomas Faryndon esq. ob. 1396, and Margaret, his wife, ob. 1402; and their daughter, Catherine Pynchepole, ob. 1443. The church was thoroughly restored in 1854; there are 1,000 sittings, 300 being free. The church is approached by a pleasant avenue of chestnut trees. The register dates from the year 1582. The living is a vicarage, with Little Coxwell annexed, net yearly value £220, including 78 acres of glebe, with residence, in the gift of Simeon’s trustees, and held since 1891 by the Rev. Charles Edward Welldon M.A. of Keble College, Oxford. The meeting house of the Society of Friends in Lechlade road is a building of stone with 150 sittings. The Baptist Chapel, Bromsgrove place, is of stone, and will seat 250 persons. The Congregational Chapel, Marlborough street, erected in 1840, has 300 sittings. The Primitive Methodist Chapel, Coxwell street, erected in 1851, will seat 180 persons. The Wesleyan Chapel, Gloucester street, erected in 1837, has 180 sittings. The cemetery of about 1 ½ acres, on the western side of the town, was opened for burials in 1865, but has no mortuary chapel; it is under the management of trustees. The Town Hall, an old building, the upper part of which is used as a coffee room, is situated in the centre of the town, from which the streets diverge. The Corn Exchange, situated in the corn market, and built in 1863, is an edifice of stone, in the Gothic style, and is partly occupied by reading rooms and offices and a lending library of 600 volumes. A market is held here every Tuesday and the great cattle market on the first Tuesday in every month, which is well supplied with cattle of every kind; there are statute fairs on the Tuesday before and the Tuesday after old Michaelmas day. The Police Station is in Coach lane, and the Fire Engine station in Church street. There is a brewery, a saw mill, and patent corn drill, and brick, tile and drain pipe manufactories, but the trade is chiefly local. The I Company, 1st Volunteer Battalion, Princess Charlotte of Wales’s (Royal Berkshire Regiment), have their armoury in Southampton street. Sir Henry Unton kt. left in 1591 £38 yearly derived from land, for apprentice fees and blankets for the benefit of the poor of the Port of Faringdon; a sum of £15 from Eleanor Goff’s charity, left in 1756, is for apprentice fees; Johanna Alford in 1721 gave £20 annually to ten poor families; there are several other charities for bread, coals and clothing, amounting to about £50 yearly, which amount is distributed by the trustees. The Faringdon Cottage Hospital, on the Coxwell road, was opened July 15th, 1892, both the site and building being the gift of W. Dundas esq. J.P. of the Elms. The building is of red brick and stone, from designs by Mr. John Luker, architect, of West Dulwich; there are at present eight beds and one cot. Faringdon Hill, east of the town, is an eminence of considerable height, crowned with a plantation of lofty firs; circular and transverse walks round and through the plantation form a favourite promenade, commanding beautiful and extensive views of the surrounding country, About 1 ½ miles north is Radcot Bridge, over the Isis, which separates this county from Oxon; this was the scene of a battle in 1387 between Robert de Vere, 9th Earl of Oxford and Duke of Ireland, a favourite of Richard II. and the forces of the disaffected nobles under Henry, Earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV.) and Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, when the troops of de Vere. numbering some 5,000, being surrounded, he secured his personal safety only by divesting himself of his armour and swimming down the river; 6 ½ miles south-east is the celebrated White Horse (from which the vale is named), rudely cut through the turf on the side of the chalk hill, and dating in all probability from the Saxon period. Faringdon House, re-erected in 1780 by Henry James Pye esq. M.P. for Berks and Poet-Laureate, is a building in the Italian style, situated on an eminence, with fine views of the counties of Oxford and Gloucester; Mr. Pye, who received from the University of Oxford the honorary degrees of M.A. in 1766 and D.C.L, in 1772, became poet-laureate in 1790, and in 1792 one of the police magistrates for Westminster; he was the author of a poem called “Faringdon Hill,” and other works, and died August 11, 1813. The Trustees of the late Daniel Bennett esq. are lords of the manor, a court leet is held annually at the Crown hotel. The principal landowners are Oriel College, Oxford, Lord Wantage V.C. K.C.B, the trustees of the late Daniel Bennett esq. Alexander Henderson esq. M.P. of Buscot, and W. Niven esq. F.S.A, of Carswell. The area is 5,886 acres of land and 31 of water; rateable value, including Littleworth, £13,929; the population in 1891 was 3,133, including 112 officers and inmates of the workhouse.

Petty Sessions are held at the court house. Coach lane, every Tuesday at 11 a.m. The following places are included in the Petty Sessional division:-Ashbury, Baulking, Bourton, Buckland, Buscot, Charney, Coleshill, Compton Beauchamp, Coxwell (Great & Little), Eaton Hastings, Faringdon, Fernham, Hatford, Hinton, Kingston Lisle, Longcot, Longworth, Pusey, Shellingford, Shrivenham, Stanford, Uffington, Watchfield & Woolstone.

FARINGDON UNION

Board day, Tuesday, at 10.30 a.m. at the Workhouse.

The Union comprises the following parishes:-Ashbury with Idstone, Odstone & Kingston Winslow, Baulking, Bourton, Buckland, Buscot, Charney, Coleshill, Compton Beauchamp, Eaton Hastings, Fernham, Gafton (Oxford), Great Coxwell, Great Faringdon with Little-worth, Hatford, Hinton Waldrist, Kelmscot (Oxford), Kingston Lisle with Fawler, Langford (Oxford), Lechlade (Gloucestershire), Little Coxwell, Little Faringdon (Oxford), Longcot, Longworth, Pusey, Radcot (Oxford), Shellingford, Shrivenham with Beckett, Stanford-in-the-Vale, Uffington, Watchfield, Woolstone. The population of the union in 1891 was 13,544; rateable value in 1899, £102,910.

The Workhouse, a stone building in Union street, will hold 450 inmates.

PLACES OF WORSHIP, with times of services

All Saints’ Church, Rev. Charles Edward Welldon M.A. vicar; Rev. Arthur Faussett Alston, curate; 11 a.m. & 6.30 p.m.; Wed. 7.30 p.m.; saints days, 12 noon.

Baptist, Bromsgrove place. Rev Henry Smith; 10.45 a.m. & 6 p.m.; Mon. & Thur. 7 p.m.

Congregational, Marlborough street; Rev. Jasper J. Frewing, 11 a.m. & 6.30 p.m.; Mon. & Thur. 7 p.m.

Friends' Meeting House, Lechlade road; services occasionally.

Primitive Methodist, Coxwell street, Rev. George Hull; 2.30 & 6 p.m.; Tue. 7.30 p.m.

Wesleyan, Gloucester street, Rev. Ebenezer Wilson; 10.30 a.m. & 6 p.m.; Wed. 7 p.m.

SCHOOLS

National (boys), Stanford road, erected in 1825, for 204 children; average attendance, 131.

National (girls), London road, erected in 1833, for 150 children; average attendance, 120.

National (infants), Station road, erected about 1856, for 130 children; average attendance, 100.

British (mixed), Lechlade road, erected in 1872, for 140 children; average attendance, 110.