In 1512, shortly after his arrival in Somerton, William Fermor had attempted to enclose some of the open fields, but this was checked. While the Fermors still lived at Somerton there were no further efforts to enclose the fields. But in 1765, another William Fermor gained an Act of Parliament to enclose the open fields — a fairly simple matter, for except for the glebe land, he owned the whole parish.
Somerton was a small but comparatively prosperous village for much of its history. In the 1780s, the quiet life of Somerton must have been greatly affected by the construction of the Oxford Canal along the Cherwell Valley. The canal between Banbury and Tackley was completed in 1787. It runs along the Cherwell valley and at Somerton passes between the river and the village — threading through the landscape between the water meadows and the foot of the limestone escarpment on which the village stands. Somerton Deep Lock, Lock No. 34, was built just under a mile north of the village. With a rise of approximately twelve feet, it is one of the deepest “as-built” locks in England — sharing that distinction with Etruria Top Lock on the Trent and Mersey Canal. The deep single-gate design was used throughout the southern section of the Oxford Canal as a cost-saving measure when funds ran short during construction; Somerton’s lock is among the most notable results of that economy. For some years the canal was the main artery between London and the Midlands, until the Grand Union Canal was built. Even more traffic was taken from the canal by the construction of the railway in Victorian times — a village which had hitherto been relatively isolated even had its own railway station.
The speed of change increased through the twentieth century. Farming remained the main employment but fewer and fewer labourers were needed. The tied farm labourers' cottages were sold off or rented to RAF or US service personnel from the Upper Heyford base. Few families stayed in the village for more than one or two generations.
The Village Produce Association
During the Second World War, the Somerton Village Produce Association brought the community together around the collective growing and redistribution of food. The market stall became a symbol of village self-sufficiency. As one contemporary account describes it: "it is all so easy to stop and buy a punnet of blackberries or an armful of flowers, although the main aim is the re-distribution of local produce among the villagers, so that they are independent of the town markets."
The Station Master Giles was a keen gardener off duty, and played a part in a Cotswold Club film on local life, in which — in the words of the film — “his real-life role is of signal importance to the V.P.A.” The film, which documented Somerton’s wartime village produce work and survives on YouTube, provides a rare moving record of the village and its people at mid-century. The railway station and signal box, both long since gone, appear in it as they were.
Meanwhile, the advowson or patronage of the church had passed to the Barnes family. William Barnes of Great Duryard in Devon bought the patronage of the parish of Somerton and in 1875 nominated his son George Edward Barnes as Rector. What followed was the longest single incumbency in the modern record of the village. Barnes served for forty-eight years — from 1875 until 1923 — and his mark on Somerton is visible everywhere you look in the church and in the life of the village. He was no absentee. He lived in considerable style in what is now the Old Rectory and was entirely committed to the parish. Under his stimulus the Barnes family were generous in their support for the church, leaving evidence of his enthusiasm for the Arts and Crafts and Pre-Raphaelite movements that were then at their height. He commissioned the magnificent carved choir stalls in the chancel, working with the architect Henry Wilson. To commemorate his father, who had appointed him, he commissioned the window at the east end of the north aisle — the Whall window — which remains one of the finest pieces of Arts and Crafts stained glass in Oxfordshire. He introduced most of the pews in the nave, and the magnificently carved pews in the chancel. Beyond the church, it was Barnes who negotiated the land and drove the establishment of the Village Hall — the Barnes Memorial Hall was built in 1924, the year after he died, as a direct tribute to his forty-six years of effort for the community. The last wedding he officiated was that of Owen Charles Hind to Nancy Brown in September 1922. John Webb, who researched the Barnes family in detail for the Somerton Village History Project, concluded simply that he was the kind of rector — engaged, generous, long-serving — that transforms a parish. The village was fortunate to have him for as long as it did.
— Somerton Village History Project archive