An Outline History of Stanford in the Vale By Teddy Cuff & James Brooks
Browse Chapters: Introduction Prehistory Romano-British Anglo-Saxon Domesday Stanford Medieval Stanford Reformation and Tudor Stanford	Civil War Stanford Early Modern Stanford 19th Century Stanford The Great War The Inter-War Years The Second World War Post-War Stanford
Church and Chapel Schools and Libraries Civic Administration Newsletters Health and Social Services, and Young People	Village Halls Fairs, Festivals and Fetes Clubs and Societies Businesses Acknowledgements & Further Reading

Anglo-Saxon

When the Roman Legions were withdrawn from Britain, Romano-British leaders appear to have invited Anglo-Saxon war bands in as mercenary troops. From the 5th to the 6th century A.D., the Anglo-Saxon invaders soon became settlers and farmers, and developed a farming system based on a manor and two or three open fields. The Anglo-Saxons were good water engineers, and knew how to grind corn with water mills; it was around the nucleus of manor, mills and later the church, that the Stanford that we know was formed. By the 8th-9th centuries the Vale was being run systematically by large estates granted by the Crown to nobles and the Church. The area was again threatened by war as Viking war bands raided further into Wessex, but towards the end of Alfred's reign (871-899) the position improved, and a peace of sorts returned to the Vale. Christianity had come to ther Upper Thames area in about 635, when St. Birinus became Bishop of Dorchester, and in Stanford, a simple Saxon church was built in 939, close to the early manor house.

The influence of Abingdon and Dorchester would have drawn traffic from Stanford, along the River Ock rather than across it towards the south and Wantage, particularly as a large swamp called Baccan Mor stretched from Charney Bassett to Woolstone. It has been suggested by Margaret Gelling that the 'stony ford' of Stanford may have been across the Frogmore Brook rather than across the Ock. The earliest reference to Stanford is as 'Sanfordinga', in a charter for Shellingford dated 931 and copied about 1200 by the monks of Abingdon Abbey, who may have been keen to establish ancient claims of tenure to our neighbouring parish. Whether this was simply a corrupted reference to 'Stanfordinga', or whether the crossing-place was known at one time as 'Sandford' and the name later changed by the monks of Abingdon Abbey to avoid confusion with the nearer Dry Sandford, an idea mooted by Clive Spinage, is unknown. Certainly, 'Stanford' with variant spellings was what the village became known as, and so appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, and in documents from 1174, 1184, 1237, 1248, 1253, 1254 and so on. The epithet 'in the Vale' appears in documents dating from 1496, i.e. comparitively late in Stanford's history.