Victoria County History of Oxford, vol. XVIII: Benson, Ewelme, and the Chilterns (Ewelme Hundred)

摘要

This is an excellent VCH Red Book covering a fascinating area of the Chilterns. Ewelme hundred is distinctive in many ways: royal ownership of the Benson estate enhanced the status of the area until the seventeenth century, partly by attracting magnates, courtiers and royal servants. The Chaucers and de la Poles hosted royal visitors at Ewelme. All the 14 rural parishes are sited on either the attractive chalk uplands, well-suited to sheep-corn husbandry and endowed with surviving polite and vernacular buildings; or the clay vale beneath the Chiltern scarp, with its intensive agriculture. Fragmentation of the royal estate created the pattern of manors and parishes in this volume, which were grouped into a hundred, initially called Benson, but from the thirteenth century known as Ewelme. The hundred is bounded by the towns of Dorchester, Thame, Watlington, Henley on Thames (to the southeast) and Wallingford. The road from Oxford to Henley and London crossed the west of the hundred and goods were transported on the river Thames from Benson's wharfs to London from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, while overland trade with Henley also prospered. The introductions to each parish convey character and context, while each parish is also depicted on clear and very informative parish maps.