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Chipping Norton is a small, hilltop market town as compact as a village;
everybody meets in the High Street. It is built mostly of hard, grey limestone,
has no urban sprawl and is picturesque enough to be under several conservation
orders. It is still a working agricultural community with whiffs of pig manure
and bedding straw. Even the dozen antiques shops don’t affect its everyday rural
busyness.
Approach roads are lined with trees, and the High Street manages to be both cosy
and spacious; cosy because it is completely enclosed by 18th century stone
frontages, spacious enough to hold the September Mop Fair with its swings,
roundabouts and flying boats.
It has nurtured only two nationally famous figures, and is rather shy about both
of them. One was Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish politician who came unstuck
politically over his relationship with Mrs O’Shea. He went to the vicar’s school
down Church Street. The other was Charlie Hind, as notorious a highwayman as
Dick Turpin. After his hanging, his head was stuck on the Bridge Gate in
Worcester. He was a High Street butcher’s boy. Another poor boy, Henry Parish,
found himself pressed into the Oxfordshire Militia during the Napoleonic wars.
He was shot on Brighton downs for stealing flour, which he wanted to eat and the
army wanted to use to whiten his pigtails. The scandal led to army dress reform.
Some of the clergy were as forthright as the townfolk. One was sentenced to be
hanged from the church tower for refusing to use Cranmer’s new prayer book. A
cherished item in the town’s museum, run by members of the Local History
Society, is a school register of the 19th century. Against one of the names the
headmaster has written ‘kidnapped by the curate’, an echo of the friction
between the Church and National schools. The National school, at the top of New
Street, is now a recording studio.
Travellers westward along the Worcester road never fail to notice in the valley
the palatial stone building with its great Tuscan-style chimney piece. It is
Bliss Mill, where at one time hundreds of Chippy people worked producing its
famous tough tweeds. It is now being converted into luxury flats with views over
the old weaving shed. Not everyone who once worked there was sorry at its
demise. There was often ‘trouble at t’mill’ and during the great strike of 1913
there was a huge gathering on the town hall steps addressed by students from
Oxford and much ill feeling about ‘scabs’ who had to be escorted home by the
police.
Chippy claims fame for the discovery of aspirin as a pain killer. In the middle
of the 19th century a clergyman living in the town, Rev Edward Stone, followed
up a local story that the bark of the willow trees which line the banks of the
Common brook yielded a juice that eased rheumatics and fevers. He tested it and
confirmed the countrymen’s remedy. Much later pharmaceutical chemists followed
up the clues and in 1899 marketed aspirin to their great profit.
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