Berrick Salome

Berrick Salome
St. Helen's parish church
Berrick Salome  Berrick Salome shown within Oxfordshire
Population	325 (parish, including Berrick Prior, Roke and Rokemarsh) (2001 census)
OS grid reference	SU6293
Civil parish	Berrick Salome
District	South Oxfordshire
Shire county	Oxfordshire
Region	South East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	Wallingford
Postcode district	OX10
Dialling code	01865
Police	Thames Valley
Fire	Oxfordshire
Ambulance	South Central
EU Parliament	South East England
UK Parliament	Henley
Website	Berrick & Roke
List of places: UK • England • Oxfordshire

Berrick Salome ( /ˈbɛrɨk ˈsæləm/) is a village and civil parish in South Oxfordshire, England, about 3 miles (5 km) north of Wallingford. The parish includes the hamlets of Berrick Prior, Roke and Rokemarsh.

Toponym

Berewic is Old English for "corn farm" and "Salome" is a corruption of a family name. In the 13th century Aymar de Sulham held the manor; Sulham is a parish in Berkshire on the River Thames near Reading. Successive changes have been Berrick Sallome (1571), Berwick Sallome (1737, 1797) and finally, by the time of the 1863 Enclosure Act, Berrick Salome. Berrick Prior means the corn farm belonging to the Prior of Canterbury.

Geography

The site of Berrick Salome was determined in the earliest times by the accessibility of water. Except for a narrow strip of greensand on the upper edge of the parish, the subsoil nearly all consists of bluish-white gault, enclosing thin streaks of gravel. Close to the junction of gault and greensand are springs. The most important of these springs is that by Grove Barn that flows down Hollandtide Bottom. It ran past the village pond and the front of the Chequers Inn. Those households that did not have their own well depended upon this flow for their water.

Parish church

A church was established at Berrick long before the Norman conquest of England.^{[citation needed]} This supposition is likely because the church is dedicated to Saint Helen, who was the favourite saint of King Ethelbald of Mercia who took the Benson area from Wessex early in the 8th century. St. Helen's parish church is well outside the village, near Hollandtide Bottom – evidently a route since before the Romans came. An archaeological excavation northeast of the church on the other side of Hollandtide Bottom might possibly bring to light the remains of ancient buildings that were more than cottages.^{[citation needed]}

The church is about 65 feet (20 m) long including the bell tower, which has no access from the nave and rises only about three feet higher than the roof ridge. Part of the fabric has been claimed to be pre-Norman and so has the font, with its interlacing ornament introduced into Anglo-Saxon work from Northumbria in early missionary times. It is unlikely that the little building ever had much stained glass; all that exists is a single diamond-shaped pane, each side about 4 inches (100 mm) long, on which is shown a golden-yellow butterfly or moth.

In 1615 the roof of the nave was replaced by one of typical queen-post type with a complex timber truss. In 1676 accommodation was increased by erecting a simple wooden gallery at the west end of the nave, with a dormer window opening at each end of it in order to give it light.

St. Helen's is one of a number of Oxfordshire parish churches that has a timber-framed tower. A photograph taken just before the restoration in 1890 shows it had then merely been faced with simple weather-boarding carried nearly to the top, whereas now horizontal openings have been made to release the sound of the bells. The tower has a ring of six bells. Henry I Knight of Reading, Berkshire cast the second and fourth bells in 1621. Alexander Rigby of Stamford, Lincolnshire cast the third, fifth and tenor bells in 1692. W. & J. Taylor of Loughborough cast the treble bell in 1836, presumably at their then foundry in Oxford.

The architect A. Mardon Mowbray restored the church in 1890. The architectural historians Jennifer Sherwood and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner condemned this as "a hideous application of all the applications of fashionable late C 19 architecture to a church."

St. Helen's parish has long been linked with that of St. Mary's Chalgrove, and the two are now a single Benefice.

On Christmas Eve, Church Lane is lit by candles all along the side.^{[citation needed]} This is traditionally done by families living on the lane.

Economic and social history

Introduction

Berrick Salome's boundary was extended in 1993 to include the whole of Roke and Rokemarsh (previously largely in Benson parish) and Berrick Prior (previously part of the parish of Newington). The history that follows is largely about Berrick Salome itself.

Middle Ages

The Domesday Book of 1086 records that the parish was worth £5 a year, compared with £30 and £15 respectively for the neighbouring parishes of Bensingtone (Benson) and Neutone (Newington). Its population was 4 serfs, 10 villeins and 6 bordars who with their families would probably total more than 50.

The eastern boundary of the village follows the shallow valley of Hollandtide Bottom. Certain authors have identified this valley with the "Aculfes Dene" mentioned as a boundary in a land grant by Aethelred II in 996. The present boundary along the valley apparently follows that between two ancient pre-Norman manors. The northern of them fell into the hands of King Canute "through forfeiture of a certain thegn". It was begged of the King by his wife, Emma, who passed it to the monks of Canterbury. This transaction swelled the neighbouring parish of Newington which was a peculiar of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Berrick Prior thereafter acquired an administrative status quite different from that of Berrick Salome, for even in the present century directories referred to it as the "liberty of Berrick Prior" which reflected a sometime exemption from the jurisdiction of the Sheriff of Oxfordshire.

18th and 19th centuries

Berrick occupies no strategic position and there is no indication that it ever housed a person or building of great importance aside from the ancient church. The rector reported to his bishop in 1738, "there is no family of note".^{[citation needed]}

There were five licenced premises in the parish. The Chequers in Berrick Prior, the Home Sweet Home in Roke and the Horse and Harrow in Rokemarsh were all public houses, while the Plough and Harrow in Berrick Salome, now Plough Cottage, and The Welcome in Roke were off-licences. Only the first two survive today. There were several shops and post offices and a petrol pump at Woodbine Cottage in Roke.^{[citation needed]} All are now closed. It also appears that there was once an infant school at Roke, which had already closed by 1884, but within living memory infant classes were held in the Band Hut.^{[citation needed]}

Until the Enclosure Act of 1863, most of Berrick Salome was farmed on an open field system and field enclosures were few. Nevertheless, village life was apparently not affected badly by the disruption. The probable reason for this is that the proportion of common land abolished was so small, only one ninth of the parish. But the Berrick Salome Inclosure Award did establish two things that were of great importance to the local people. Firstly, 3 acres (1.2 ha), 2 rods and 25 poles were allotted "unto the Churchwardens and Overseers of the poor" of Berrick Salome "to be held by them and their successors in trust as a place for exercise and recreation for the inhabitants".^{[citation needed]} To this day the annual cricket match is held there, but it was of more importance in the 19th century and early 20th century when every Saturday afternoon during the cricket season there was a match and Berrick Salome "never got beat".^{[citation needed]}

The Enclosure Award also resulted in the allocation of another 2 acres (0.8 ha) and 10 perches of land to "the Churchwardens and Overseers of the poor" of Berrick Salome "to be held by them and their successors in trust as an allotment for the labouring poor of the said parish". All the Berrick plots were eagerly taken up in those days, for the cottager's bulwarks against privation were his pig, his garden and his allotment. Over many centuries in Berrick there was virtually no alternative to working on the land.^{[citation needed]}

Rev. Robert French Laurence (1807–85), who was vicar of Chalgrove and Berrick Salome for the last 53 years of his life, was secretary of the local agricultural workers' trades union. He was a social reformer who campaigned for better housing for agricultural workers and had new thatched cottages built for them in the parish.

By the end of the 19th century someof the parish's roads were in poor condition. In 1894 a woman was killed in the parish when her tricycle hit part of a defective road.^{[citation needed]}

20th century

At Berrick around 1900 the wages for a full-time adult worker were about 12 shillings per week (60p), a figure that had not increased by much for a long time.^{[citation needed]} However, the rapid spread of mechanisation, beginning with the appearance of the first tractors shortly before the First World War, brought about a steady decline in the number of farm labourers. The first combine harvester was imported from the United States in 1928. Two more came in 1930 and one of these was based in Shillingford.^{[citation needed]} As farms became more mechanised, young men sought other employment. In the 1930s, many young men in Berrick got jobs at Morris Motors' car factory at Cowley^{[citation needed]} where they earned three times as much as a farm labourer. They went to work on motorcycles and bought their petrol from the shop next to the Chequers which at that time met most of the needs of the villagers.^{[citation needed]} After the Second World War, indoor plumbing was first introduced.^{[citation needed]}

The village is surrounded by the land of peripheral farms but there is now only one working farm left in Berrick - Manor Farm - and that is run by the farmer and his wife. Today the cottages of Berrick Salome are more likely to be owned and inhabited by bankers or businessmen.^{[citation needed]}

Berrick Salome's population increased in the 20th century. In 1900 the population was 104; in 1991 it was 162.^{[citation needed]} Between 1971 and 1981 the number of households increased from 35 to 53.^{[citation needed]} There is a likely correlation between the increase and the building of the M40 motorway in 1974. Thereafter, London was roughly an hour's journey away because of the highway.

Village events and activities have become popular, particularly those centred around the Berrick Church Restoration fund. These include a Fête in June held in the garden of the Malthouse, and the Village Show (which alternates with the Fête) held on the recreation ground in September and jovially rounded off with a barbecue and dance in the evening. The Village Hall, built in 1979 on the edge of the recreation ground, is always the venue for the cricket tea after the annual match between Berrick Salome and Berrick Prior in September. There is also the Progressive Dinner, an opportunity for entertainment and fund-raising.

See also

• Britwell Salome

Sources and further reading

• Miller, G.M. (1971). BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 14. ISBN 0192111868. 
• Moreau, R.E. (1968). The Departed Village: Berrick Salome at the Turn of the Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192111868. 
• Oxfordshire Within Living Memory. Tackley: Oxfordshire Federation of Women's Institutes. 
• Sherwood, Jennifer; Pevsner, Nikolaus (1974). Oxfordshire. The Buildings of England. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. p. 452. ISBN 0 14 071045 0. 
• Soper, Mike (1995). Years of Change. Ipswich: Farming Press Ltd. ISBN 0852363133. 
• Tiller, Liam (2011). "The Restoration of Berrick Salome Church". Oxoniensia (Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society) LXXVI: 81–94. ISSN 0308-5562. 
• Whittle, Chris; Whittle, Mary. Mrs. Irene Franklin. 

External links

• Pictures of St. Helen's parish church on West Gallery Churches website