The Beginnings of Harwell

Like other villages lying on the springline at the foot of the Downs, Harwell may have been inhabited for many centuries of prehistory. No one knows who first lived by the spring at Wellshead. Several Roman coins have been found at different places on the land now known as Harwell Parish, enough to make it probable that by Roman times there was a settlement here. The site of a Roman well on the Downs is now under the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, adjacent to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment.

The first positive evidence that people lived and died in Harwell dates from about A.D. 500. By this time the people were Saxons, who buried their dead, in pagan fashion, outside the village. Their cemetery, on the edge of the Holloway, was found about thirty years ago when foundations for a house were being dug. The dead were buried with a few belongings – perhaps a brooch or an urn. Only one man, buried with his sword, seems to have been grander than the rest. Some of these remains may be seen at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

These inhabitants seem to have been simple people, only interested in surviving until the next harvest, but one grave, some distance from the rest, showed that life could be fiercer still. The grave held the skeleton of a young man with the head of a spear still lodged in between his ribs. Was he a raider killed by the natives defending their own? We shall never know, but he provides the only evidence that there was any excitement in the lives of our forbears.

In these early days Harwell was part of the kingdom of Wessex. In about A.D. 635 St. Birinus came to Wessex and converted the royal family to Christianity. The people presumably followed suit some years later, and no longer used their old cemetery, but buried their dead in the churchyard. We know nothing of Harwell for several hundred years after this. The rising power of the kingdom of Mercia to the north forced the removal of the Wessex capital from Dorchester to Winchester, and during the eighth and early ninth centuries the Thames remained a debatable border between the two kingdoms.

By the time we hear of the village again, it is A.D. 956. Round about this time King Edgar gave Harwell to a man called Aelfstan, in a charter witnessed by an imposing array of bishops, including St Dunstan. A few years later the village was given to Aelfric, and then in A.D. 985 Ethelred the Unready gave it to Aethelric. The charters for these three transactions all survive, and are accompanied by descriptions of the boundaries of the land. These descriptions are very interesting, for they show that a thousand years ago the parish had very much the same shape as it has now. The two earlier descriptions are much the same. The boundary is described as one would walk round it, with landmarks such as elder stumps, streams and pathways. The elder trees have gone, of course, but some of the paths and streams can be recognised. The old main road that runs past the Atomic Energy Research Establishment was a main road even then, referred to as the “herepath”, which means literally the “army path”, or the “raider’s path”, which was probably how the villagers thought of it.

The Icknield Way is also mentioned, and another name that survived until fairly recently was Humbercombe, which is mentioned as Humberdene in the eighteenth century. Many of the other names have disappeared – Crane Brook and Hazel Lea Brook lay on the Milton boundary (hazel trees still grew there before the second world war), and a mysterious name – flegges gore – describes the junction of the Chilton and Hendred boundaries. The southern part of the boundary can be followed fairly easily on the map, although some parts of it have disappeared under the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, but the northern part is something of a puzzle. In the two earlier charters, the lowest lying part of the parish, which formed the watermeadow, was treated as an extra piece of land, not part of the village proper. This part is quite unrecognisable now, as it lies under part of the Power Station and part of the road linking Didcot with the Abingdon bypass.

However, in Anglo-Saxon times it was thought right that each village should have everything it needed, such as meadow-grazing and wood supply, and by the time we reach the next charter, in A.D. 985, the meadow has been included in the village. The description of the boundaries in this charter is very different from the others, although it is still recognisably the same village. Again we have a mixture of known and unknown names: Horn Down Way for the “herepath”, the Sutton stream, Cylm’s combe which is the land that lies between Chilton and Hagbourne Hill, and several unidentifiable streams down in the valley.

Up to the time of the Norman Conquest, the largest part of the village belonged to Stigand, Bishop of Winchester, (and Archbishop of Canterbury); two other smaller pieces belonged to men called Ulric and Achi. We know nothing of these two, but Stigand was an important figure in the last years of Anglo-Saxon England. He was more of a politician than a churchman; his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury was regarded by the reformers in Rome as uncanonical, and even Englishmen were somewhat uneasy about his position. After King Harold’s death at Hastings, Stigand was the leader of the party which put forward the young prince Edgar as king. However, they were demoralised by William’s rapid movements, and by the time he had advanced to Wallingford Stigand was ready to surrender. He was left in office for a time, but was deposed by the Pope in A.D. 1070. He was left in possession of at least one manor until his death two years later, but he probably lost Harwell, and the village passed into Norman ownership.