Finstock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Finstock is a village in Oxfordshire, England.
[edit] History
In 1135 the village of Finstock is referred to as Fynstoke. In this period, the village formed part of the manor and parish of Charlbury. Roman coins and Romano-British potsherds have been found in the village and it is thought that there was certainly a settlement of some kind here at the time of the Domesday survey of 1086 when it formed part of the 'hundred of Banbury' belonging to the Bishop of Lincoln. Finstock, together with its neighbours Charlbury, Fawler and Leafield, lay in a clearing of Wychwood Forest that used to stretch from Woodstock to Burford. Much of the forest land was cleared for growing arable crops and during the Middle Ages barley was the main crop in Finstock. Other land was used for sheep grazing and many of the people of Finstock were involved in the woollen industry - the carding being done by men and boys and the spinning by women.
In the early 1500s the manor of Charlbury and its land, including Finstock, was owned by Sir Thomas White, a London tailor who founded St John's College, Oxford in 1555. The manor was then included in the college's endowment. As the college lands were owned by an absentee landlord, the land was leased to many people including the Lee family of Ditchley Park[1](from 1592 to 1776). The college then resumed direct control until 1857, when the lordship of the manor passed to Francis Spencer, 2nd Lord Churchill of Wychwood, the owner of Cornbury Park [2]. It still remains in the possession of Cornbury Park today although most of the manorial rights have lapsed and much of the village of Finstock is now freehold.
Glove-making at the village hall site by the women, and agricultural labouring on nearby land by the men and boys, used to be the principal occupations of the people of Finstock during the earlier part of the 20th century - although now many inhabitants of Finstock commute by car and bus to Witney, Chipping Norton and Oxford. Finstock is now a separate civil and ecclesiastical parish [3], its population mostly living along the sides of a large triangle formed by the main Witney-Charlbury road (west to north), School Road (east) and Finstock High Street (south). Much in-filling with new buildings has further completed the triangle and four new estates were built during the 20th century. The farming now is mainly arable - barley, wheat and oilseed rape, although some mixed farming is still found.
T. S. Eliot came to Finstock to be received into the Church of England. William Force Stead was a fellow American and came to England as an American consul but soon found that his real bents in life were literature and religion. He was ordained, became chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford and after meeting Eliot in 1923 (with whom he shared a love of cats!) steadily drew him towards Anglicanism and agreed to baptise him. He was then living in "a fine seventeenth-century gabled house at Finstock" (Finstock Manor) [4] and invited Eliot to stay there to meet his godfathers, B. H. Streeter [5] and Vere Somerset [6], before his baptism at Finstock on June 29, 1927. From T. S. Eliot: a Memoir by Robert Sencourt (edited by Donald Adamson)
