William, the last of the direct male line of the Fermors, sold Somerton to the Earl of Jersey in 1815 for £90,000. By then the Manor House in Somerton was a ruin, with much of the stone having been taken for building at the Fermors' home at Tusmore. Glass in the windows of the manor house was still recorded in 1660, and the future James II of England slept there a little later, but it fell into ruin from the late seventeenth century. The remarkable timber frame granary cum dovecote at Tusmore is thought to have been brought from Somerton and reconstructed — quite a normal procedure when timber was so valuable.
The Jerseys in turn sold the estate in 1919 to several different farmers. The sale, conducted at the Red Lion Hotel in Banbury on Thursday 19th June 1919, offered approximately 1,700 acres of freehold land, free of Tithe Rent Charge. The estate was offered in twenty lots:
Lot 1 — Village Farm: 475 acres, let to Mr Charles Brown at £435 per annum.
Lot 2 — Manor Farm: 448 acres, the greater part let to Mr T. E. Emberlin at £482 per annum.
Lot 3 — Troy Farm: 633 acres, in the occupation of Mrs Godwin, with the gardens noted for containing "a Maze of 480 yards, which has more than a local reputation."
Lot 4 — Mill Farm: 87 acres, including the water mill on four floors, served by windlass and chain.
Lot 5 — The Railway Inn, Wharf, and Pastures: 39 acres, let to Mrs M. A. Walton at £110 per annum.
The remaining lots comprised the post office, cottages, small holdings, allotment gardens and other village properties. Tenants included Mrs J. Baldwin at the post office, and families named Brown, Emberlin, Walton, Moore, Andrews, Bayliss, Danbury, Plumb, Cato, Gibbard, Golder, Green, Mitchell, Stevens, and Cross.
The Sale offers an excellent opportunity of acquiring agricultural freeholds of a convenient size. The farms are particularly well served with hard roads, are in a good state of cultivation, and in the Village is a never failing supply of water.
Sale particulars, Ferris & Puckridge, auctioneers — June 1919
The largest part of the Jersey lands in Somerton were sold to Thomas Edwin Emberlin, who became lord of the manor. The Emberlins built themselves a new Manor House to the west of the Heyford Road. In her will, Miss Sybil Emberlin, the last of the family, left half the proceeds of the sale of this house to the church when she died in 2006. This made possible the major programme to restore the church and conserve its monuments.
In 1973, when mains drainage was installed in Somerton, the pipe-work was taken across Rectory Close to join other pipe-work at the pumping station at the bottom of Water Street. Two members of the Oxfordshire Archaeological Unit came to record any findings from the trenches being dug, and to reappraise the Castle Yard area.
Somerton was considerably larger in the Middle Ages than it is today, and Rectory Close is the site of a deserted part of the medieval village and the remains of medieval fishponds. A little further to the north is the area known as Castle Yard. It would seem that any Somerton castle, probably dating from the 11th to 13th centuries, was probably a simple walled or stockaded enclosure, perhaps beginning with a small motte, subsidiary to the major castle at Deddington.
The most interesting finds during the 1973 excavations were made in the trench crossing the grounds of the Old School House, in Castle Yard. Substantial evidence of human burials was found — the graves varied from shallow to deep inhumations, and at least some were in wooden coffins. Many can be related to the 16th-century Roman Catholic chapel. Fragments of pottery dating to the 11th to 13th centuries were also found. In the 19th century, several graves had been found beneath a floor of the school building, together with a silver cross which is now lost. A further 12 shallow graves were discovered in the Castle Yard cemetery in 1953 and 1969. Some of these had a slab of limestone covering the skull, suggesting they were Anglo-Saxon or early medieval burials — pointing to the existence of a settlement at Somerton before the Norman Conquest.
— R.A. Chambers, Oxfordshire Archaeological Unit, 1973
Did you grow up in Somerton, or does this article bring back a memory? Do you spot something that needs correcting or adding? Rosemary Arnold and Della Paviour would love to hear from you.