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Brize Norton may be a small village but its name is known throughout the world.
The RAF base which is called after it and carries servicemen and women to
theatres of conflict and overseas postings, was officially opened on 13th August
1937. At that time it was home to No 2 Flying Training School, but with the
start of the Second World War it became operational. The Resistance movements in
occupied Europe received personnel and supplies through RAF Brize Norton and in
June 1944 it was the base for parachute and glider operations over Normandy.
After the war the USAF came in with their B36 and B47 bombers, but in 1965 Brize
Norton returned to RAF control and became the Transport Command station which it
still is today. RAF Brize Norton is now one of the largest operational stations
in the RAF.
The station enjoyed a moment in the national headlines in 1987 when it provided
an historic meeting place for Mrs Thatcher and Mr Gorbachev during the first
visit to this country by a Soviet leader for 31 years. The red carpet was
literally unrolled for the occasion — and a rare policeman was spotted walking
the village street to maintain order and prevent sabotage!
This may be the Brize Norton that the world knows. But to those who live here it
is their home village, and the glamour of faraway places and international
statesmen has little effect on their lives. It is true they hear the planes
taking off, but very few service personnel live in the village and local
concerns are the same as those of any other community.
Parochial questions have probably concerned the inhabitants of Brize Norton
since there was first a settlement here to the north of Bampton, or Nortone,
before the Norman Conquest. In the 13th century a Brun or Brown was added to the
name and that in turn changed to the Brize of today. The church, dedicated to
the unusual St Britius, dates from the 12th century and contains an effigy dated
1346 of Sir John Daubyngy. Another person of note who is buried in the church
was Thomas Greenwood, said to be descended from a daughter of Henry Viii’s
Chancellor, Sir Thomas More. The Greenwoods, who were connected with the Manor
of Brize Norton for some 300 years, remained Catholics throughout the 17th
century, but one member of the family was nominally Church of England to avoid
paying the taxes imposed on Catholics at that time. One wonders what the ‘man
for all seasons’ would have thought of such behaviour.
Most of the inhabitants of the village were not famous and little record remains
of individuals. But Brize Norton does have in its past a curious story which
centres on an area to the west of the village called Stonelands.
In the 17th century there was a house called ‘Sworn Layes Great House’ in this
area, which through ecclesiastical oversight was not designated as belonging to
any particular parish. This meant that people living there could get away with
activities that would not have been tolerated by the clergy within a parish. As
a consequence, when King Charles I and his court were at Oxford from 1642 to
1646 it appears that Sworn Layes was used by the ladies of the court for the
delivery of illegitimate children.
This custom continued certainly into the 18th century when there were references
to ‘Sworn Lanes, commonly called the Bastard School’ and Shilton church records
payments to ‘poor afflicted lying in women’ at Stonelands. The reputation of the
place was notorious as late as 1778, for Jackson’s Oxford Journal in that year
reported of one couple that ‘the groom eloped shortly after the marriage
observing that if his wife had married to obtain a settlement, she was bilked,
for he was born at Sworn Lanes near Burford, an extra parochial place where many
unmarried ladies resort upon particular occasions.
By 1801 these matters were obviously more acceptable and could be referred to
more directly. An advertisement in the Journal reads: ‘Private lying in notice
is hereby given, that Sworn Lays in the County of Oxford is a house belonging to
no parish, well situated to receive lying in women privately, and such may be
treated with on reasonable terms by applying to James Hart, at Sworn Lays Great
House, near Burford, Oxfordshire’. The children born here were, if lucky,
trained for service or labouring but local tradition has it that many were
killed in infancy and buried in the grounds. There was reputed to be the ghost
of ‘a horrible old woman carrying a screaming naked baby’.
Sworn Lays was in the news in the same century when it was also serving as a
public house, at that time called the Lamb. The landlord, John Packer, and his
wife Ann were committed to Oxford Castle in 1775 accused of murder only to be
acquitted when the person who informed on them confessed to the crime.
The lying-in ceased around 1836 as the new Poor Law came into effect and the
workhouses began to look after such activities. Sworn Lays, which had also
served as a pest house during outbreaks of the plague, lost the advantage that
its geographical position had given it and by 1906 it was a ruin. Today no trace
of it is left.
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