Time Team - Islip, Oxfordshire - Archaeological Evaluation and Assessment of Results

Wessex Archaeology

The primary aim of the evaluation was to test the assertion that a chapel dedicated to the first Patron Saint of England, Edward the Confessor, and a Saxon palace or a Royal hunting lodge of his father Æthelred ‘Unræd’, were located within the village. Edward himself is believed to have been born in the village. The chapel was recorded as having been converted into a barn sometime before 1718 and subsequently used as farm buildings. The project also aimed to confirm that the area of the earthworks to the east of the village are the remains of the moated Manor house of the 14th century Abbot of Westminster, William de Curtlington.

A series of 15 trenches was excavated within the village and around the moated site east of the village, to evaluate the location, extent, character, date, and significance of any underlying archaeology. The archaeological evaluation did not find any evidence which could be definitively associated with either a Royal residence or the chapel of Edward the Confessor. No evidence of the Chapel structure itself was located, but a compact farmyard surface, most probably associated with the conversion of the Chapel to a barn was identified. Although no evidence of the medieval building was identified, evidence of the later use of the building was revealed.

The evaluation identified within the car park of the Red Lion pub a ditch dated to the late Saxon/early medieval period. This ditch may well have been a boundary ditch from an early period of land division, or possibly a ditch surrounding a complex of buildings dated to the 11th to 13th centuries. The evaluation also confirmed that the moated earthworks to the east of the village formed part of a high status site dated to the 13th to 14th centuries and therefore is almost certainly the site of the residence of the Abbot of Westminster, although there may have been high status occupation there prior to William de Curtlington’s Manor.