VCH Oxfordshire • Texts in Progress • Eye and Dunsden (Apr.. 2019) • © VCH Oxfordshire • Local Govt • p. 1

VCH Oxfordshire Texts in Progress

EYE AND DUNSDEN

Local Government

Manor Courts

In the 13th century the bishop of Salisbury, as lord of Dunsden and Sonning, exercised manorial jurisdiction, including view of frankpledge.1 Medieval court records have been lost, but manorial officers included a (otherwise bailiff or steward), hayward, and woodward,2 and in 1600 the profit of the manor court at Sonning Eye was typically 16s. 8d. a year.3 In the late 18th century the Sonning dealt with agricultural matters and road maintenance, but it struggled to enforce grazing stints, and in the 1780s could not prevent litigation between individual holders of common field land.4 No separate court for Hampstead manor is known. In the Middle Ages Sonning Eye (unlike the rest of the township) was part of the Berkshire hundred of Sonning,5 which was one of the seven hundreds of the bailiwick of Windsor.6 In 1274 the bishop of Salisbury, as lord of the hundred, claimed return of writs, although it is clear that his bailiff was subordinate to the chief bailiff of the seven hundreds in their execution.7 The bishop also had his own prison at Sonning,8 as well as view of frankpledge and hundred, assize of bread and ale, gallows, tumbrel, and pillory.9 In the 1460s the hundred court dealt with breaches of the assize of ale, pleas of debt, minor violence, maintenance of bridges and ditches, and agricultural regulation including illicit felling of underwood.10 From the early 16th century, however, Eye and Dunsden were united as a single township within Binfield hundred.11

1 Rot. Hund. II, 38. 2 Rich Jones, Vetus Registrum Sarisberiense, I, 285; Pearson, Memorials of Sonning, 181, 184, 191. For mid 17th-cent. court records: Bodl. MS Top. Berks. c 52. 3 Cal. Pat. 1599–1600, 253. 4 Berks. RO, D/EE/M9; Richens, ‘The Village that Never Was’, 4; above, econ. hist. 5 TNA, SC 2/154/86. Sonning Eye’s inclusion is not recognised in VCH Berks. III, 198–9 or Berks. Atlas, xiii. 6 T.M. Clanchy (ed.), The Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre of 1248 (Selden Soc. 90, 1973), xliii–xliv. 7 Wilts. and Swindon Archives, D1/1/5, ff. 119v.–20; Rot. Hund. I, 11; Cal. Chart. I, 24–5; Clanchy, The Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre, xliii–xliv; VCH Berks. III, 212. 8 Clanchy, The Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre, 368. 9 Wilts. and Swindon RO, D1/1/5, f. 120. 10 TNA, SC 2/154/86. 11 e.g. TNA, E 179/161/198; E 179/162/288, rot. 11. VCH Oxfordshire • Texts in Progress • Eye and Dunsden (Apr.. 2019) • © VCH Oxfordshire • Local Govt • p. 2

Parish and Vestry Government

The township had its own churchwarden by the 16th century and a constable and two overseers of the poor by 1642,12 when the constable was still elected by the manor court.13 Other officers mentioned in the 18th century included highway surveyors.14 In the 18th and 19th centuries (when appointments were made by the Sonning vestry) parish offices were occupied by the leading farmers, notably the Pottingers of Bishopsland.15 In 1894 Eye and Dunsden became part of the newly formed Henley Rural District, and a parish council was formed, the two bodies together taking over the vestry’s civil functions. The parish council was long dominated by Dunsden’s vicars and leading farmers, though by the 1970s its composition had altered and much of its attention was focused on Caversham Park Village,16 until the latter’s transfer to Reading borough. A police station was built at Sonning Common in the 1930s and continued in 2018 (staffed by volunteers and community support officers),17 while Sonning Common acquired its own parish council on becoming a separate in 1952.18

12 Wilts. and Swindon RO, D5/19/2, f. 37 v.; Prot. Retns, 40. 13 Bodl. MS Top. Berks. c 52, f. 1 (1649). 14 e.g. Berks. RO, D/P 113/26, p. 48. 15 Berks. RO, D/P 113/8/1–2; D/P 113/12/13; OHC, PAR91/2/A1/1; PAR91/5/A1/1; Law, Eye & Dunsden, 87. 16 Law, Eye & Dunsden, 92, 121. 17 Kelly’s Dir. Oxon. (1935); Sonning Common Neighbourhood Development Plan [c.2015], 17. 18 Youngs, Admin. Units, I, 405; Richens, ‘The Village that Never Was’, 122. For the parish’s bounds, Neighbourhood Development Plan, 9.