Home
Links
/ Recommended Reading
Henley Skirmish, 1643: Contemporary Account
---------
English
Civil War Society
The Sealed Knot
----------
It would be misleading
to title this page "Sonning Common during the English Civil Wars", as
not a fragment of the village we see today existed at the time. When war
broke out in the 1640s, the area, although known even then as "Sonning
Common", was an expanse of unenclosed waste land to the north of the ancient
parishes of Sonning and Caversham. Together with "Gallows Tree Common",
it formed a single large tract of country that stretched all the way from
Cane End to the settlements of Sonning and Caversham themselves. The land
was rough, and the chalky soil covered mainly with gorse, bracken and
bramble. When the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, the whole of Caversham
Parish had numbered only one hundred inhabitants; by the seventeenth century
the population around Kidmore End and Cane End (which were then the northern
boundaries of that parish) would still have been tiny. The Chilterns were
a hub for the English wool industry, and the only inhabitants of Sonning
Common in the 1640s would have been a few tenant farmers or perhaps squatters,
who grazed their sheep on the scattered patches of the commons where the
brambles gave way to turf.
The church of St John the Baptist at Kidmore End was not built until 1852,
and the ecclesiastical parish of Kidmore End did not exist until 1853.
The new parish was created from the northern extremities of Caversham,
Sonning (Eye and Dunsden) and Shiplake parishes. Until that time, inhabitants
in those outlying parochial areas would have had to travel up to six miles
towards the Thames in order to attend church at either Caversham, Sonning
or Shiplake.
Trade routes
ran to the north and west of the district. They were not the wide, well-made
roads we know today, but rough pack roads for the transport of goods over
the hills. The route to the west ran from the River Thames at Reading
up to Wallingford and Oxford via Cane End, and probably closely followed
the route of the modern A4074. Today the road is notorious for car accidents,
and was scarcely safer a few hundred years ago: any trade route was a
magnet for robbers, and the Rev Smith-Masters noted that "even after the
beginning of the 19th century it was not considered safe to cross the
commons and woods of Kidmore End by night unaccompanied."[1]
To compound the problem, the road that skirted the north of the commons
was also a trade route of ill-repute. It ran from Henley-on-Thames to
Goring-on-Thames via Peppard Common and Wyfold Grange, passing close to
Cane End, and was in later centuries known as the "Pack and Prime Road".
Pack, because packs of goods were unloaded from boats at Henley and
onto pack horses; and prime because the men accompanying the goods
had to prime their pistols as defence against the bandits who infested
the road. Demonstrably
this area of Oxfordshire was wild country, and as early as the medieval
period a special officer was appointed to keep peace in the district,
and to see that England's laws were not broken. The officer was called
"The Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds", and his jurisdiction included
the Hundred of Binfield, within which Sonning Common lay. In the sixteenth
century the entire Manor of Sonning passed into the possession of the
Crown, and in 1629 King Charles I awarded it to some of his subjects.
However, these changes of landlord would not have greatly affected the
character of this rough land immediately below the Chilterns.
Charles had come to
the throne at the death of his father, King James I, in 1625. He was a
second son, not groomed for the throne until his elder brother Henry died
in 1612. Charles encountered various political and religious troubles
throughout his reign, in Scotland and Ireland as well as England[2].
Much of it was due to his stubborn and autocratic style of rulership,
grounded in his firm faith in the "Divine Right of Kings": the belief
that as King he had been appointed by God, and was accountable to nobody
but God. Naturally this caused friction with the more radical elements
within the English Parliament, who desired that there be more accountability
to the people, and the Parliament began to refuse cooperation for various
of Charles's enterprises. In 1629 the King embarked on what is now known
as "The Personal Rule", a period during which he chose to run his various
kingdoms without parliamentary assistance. However by 1640 he needed money
to counter the increasing threat of an invasion from Scotland, and was
forced to recall his MPs. Although his intention in doing so was only
to discuss the present crisis, Parliament was determined to first obtain
satisfaction for existing grievances, and refused to vote him the money
he needed until he met its demands. Charles refused, and dissolved the
House again after less than a month in session. Finally, in 1642, the
situation in England disintegrated into open war, and by November of that
year the King had made a temporary headquarters at Oxford, whilst the
Parliament had begun to barricade London against the threat of a Royalist
attack[3].
In southern Oxfordshire
the market town of Henley remained stubbornly Parliamentarian in outlook,
and hosted Parliamentary soldiers.
Three hundred were based at Phyllis Court, which they fortified, keen
to keep Henley and its river crossing out of the King's hands[4].
The Royalists rapidly set up their own garrison at nearby Greenland House,
which remained in constant conflict with the enemy troops at Henley until
the house's capture in July 1644. The large number of musket balls still
to be found in certain parts of Shiplake (this author possesses one) testifies
to some sort of heavy action there, or possibly manned outworks to protect
Henley against cavalry raids from Reading.
Reading, strategically vital both as a major river crossing and as the "front line" between Royalist Oxford and Parliamentarian London, rapidly became a sorry pawn between the two sides. As the war commenced late in 1642 the town was garrisoned for the Parliament; however the Parliamentarian troops fled early in November, and King Charles himself was able to walk in with his own soldiers and take it. In April 1643 he reluctantly surrendered it back to the Parliamentarian Earl of Essex after a stiff siege; presumably the unfortunate party of Royalist officers captured at nearby Sonning the same month were either part of the King's unsuccessful relief force, or had been part of the defeated garrison itself, and had straggled dangerously behind it as it retreated to Oxford under truce. Reading changed hands for a third time in September 1643, when the Parliament abandoned it again and it was snatched back for the King by his nephew Prince Rupert; the next, and indeed last Royalist garrison to be installed there held out until late March 1644, when it was withdrawn for strategic reasons after a major Royalist defeat in Hampshire. Thereafter Reading remained in the Parliament's hands until the end of the war in 1646.
And so we find Sonning
Common in the 1640s: an untamed piece of land north of the river Thames,
inhabited mostly by sheep; surrounded on two sides by treacherous roads,
on the third by the battered town of Reading, and on the fourth by quarrelsome
Henley, which sat on the main upland route between Oxford and Reading
and became a natural focus for skirmishing between the two sides.
--------------
[1]
Smith-Masters, Rev.
J. E., The History Of Kidmore End Oxfordshire, 1933, p.39.
[2]
Both Scotland
and the whole of Ireland were at that time territories of the English
Crown. Politically, Wales had no recognised identity besides its language
and geography, and at that time it was considered to be little more than
an extension of English territory.
[3]
The events which led to the English Civil Wars are too complicated to
elaborate on further here, and readers are referred to the recommended
reading list.
[4]
Appropriately, the then Commons Speaker William Lenthall was born in Henley
in 1591. The house he was born in still stands. Known latterly as “The
Speaker’s House”, it stands on the left side of Hart Street (as viewed
from the bridge), opposite the churchyard. A wooden plaque on the wall
records the building’s significance.
© copyright S F Jones, 2005
