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Domesday Book records two manors, Minstre and Parva Minstre (Little Minstre)
separated by the river Windrush, the connecting bridge once being a toll bridge.
In the first half of the 19th century the land on the higher ground towards
Brize Norton was chosen by the Chartist Land Company for one of its housing
allotment developments, and from the 1930s up to the present day the housing in
this area has increased.
In early days the sheltered valley, with the river Windrush for fish, marshland
for gamefowl and thatching reed, the Wychwood Forest for protection (villagers
often disappeared to live in the forest in troubled times), timber and fuel, and
plenty of quarriable stone, made it an obvious place for continuous habitation.
Roman Akeman Street passes through the north of the parish, there are names of
Celtic derivation and a jewelled brooch (thought to have come from the same
workshop as the Alfred Jewel) was found here. There have been at least two manor
houses on the same site and two churches, together with a chapel and an alien
cell, for the church and land in Minster was once given to the abbey of Ivry in
Normandy. The name Minster acknowledges the fact that the church here was of
some significance in this area.
St Kenelms church, named after the Cotswold prince, was completed in about 1450
and is very little changed except for the removal of the chancel screen and the
minstrels gallery. Cruciform in design and Perpendicular in style, it has an
unusual central crossing where minor arches support the tower, which is narrower
than the nave.
William Lovell, whose effigy is to be found in the church, rebuilt the manor
house and the church. The family came to full eminence with Williams grandson,
Francis, Viscount Lovell, who was Lord Chamberlain to Richard III, and Richard
is known to have stayed at Minster Hall, as did his successor Henry VII on three
occasions. After the death of Richard at Bosworth field, Francis supported the
pretender, Lambert Simnel, the Oxford bakers boy, and escaped again after
further defeat at the battle of Stoke to disappear, which was the occasion for
various legends, one being that he was incarcerated in a secret room at Minster
Hall where he perished. John Buchan makes use of the legend in his fine
historical novel The Blanket of the Dark. Later the house passed into the Coke
family, sometime Earls of Leicester, but they rarely lived here and Thomas Coke
dismantled much of the house to sell off the materials to raise money to build
his great house and museum at Holkham in Norfolk. The remaining romantic ruins
show what a fine house it must have been.
Little Minster manor became the home of the Heylyn family at the time of the
Commonwealth, when, after supporting King Charles in the Civil War, they were
forced to find a quiet country retreat. Peter Heylyn was one of the great
intellects of those times and in Minster he extended his great book on geography
into a Cosmography published in 1651. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The Chartists housing development, called Charterville, was designed to rehouse
city dwellers in the countryside, to make them more self-sufficient and to
qualify them for the vote through the ownership of land. The development of 78
bungalows, each with land of from two to four acres, a school and school house,
took only ten months to build in 1847, but the newcomers did not settle to the
rural life and soon most of the allotments were sold off. Although it could be
called a failed experiment, the bungalows remain a token to good craftsmanship.
At the turn of the 20th century Minster Lovell was famous for its rushes and
river crayfish. Rushes were used for caulking barrels and the rush cutter, Mr
Greengrow, who came every year from Kent, declared this rush to be the best in
the south of England.
The village once had three mills. There remains only one and this has been
converted into a beautiful conference centre. However, there are three pubs. The
Olde Swan is widely known and contains many features of its distant past. The
White Hart was once a busy coaching inn serving coaches on the
London-Gloucester-Cheltenham route. The New Inn, formerly called the
Garibaldi, was only licensed at the end of the 19th century and was formerly a
Charterville bungalow.
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