From the medieval bakers to the Callows van
Somerton never had a market of its own. The Victoria County History found no record of one, and names Banbury as the nearest market town, with Bicester within reach too. So for most of its history the village has bought what it needed from a handful of local tradespeople, from carriers and from vans that came to the door. This page follows that story through the centuries, period by period, using the records and memories we have for each. It does not try to describe a single shopping day, because the evidence comes from very different times.
The trade directories and the 1919 estate sale are written records. The memories from the 1930s and 40s were shared by six former pupils of the village school in 2009, and those from the 1970s and 80s come from a villager who remembers them. We say which is which as we go.
The earliest trade on record is milling: in 1086 Domesday Book valued Somerton's mill at 20 shillings a year and 400 eels. In the sixteenth century two Somerton bakers and a butcher found their way into the records for cheating their customers. By the eighteenth century the village had a shop and a bakehouse, a butcher, a shoemaker, a blacksmith and a carpenter, and a licensed victualler from 1735.
Source: Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, vol. 6, Somerton.
The first Somerton shopkeeper we know by name is William Collingridge, who in April 1814 had to make over his estate for the benefit of his creditors. In June 1836 Mr J. Bonner, butcher, of Somerton married Mrs Hannah Petty, widow of the landlord of the Plough at Deddington. Joseph Bonner is the village butcher in the 1852 directory and may well be the same man.
Source: Jackson's Oxford Journal, 30 April 1814 and 25 June 1836, seen in transcriptions published by Deddington History; the original pages have not been seen.
From the 1850s the county directories list Somerton's tradespeople. In 1852 there was no post office, and letters came through Deddington. Hannah Hore was baker and shopkeeper, Joseph Bonner the butcher, Samuel Plumbe the blacksmith, Thomas Adams the shoemaker and Thomas Taylor the tailor, with a carpenter and a wheelwright.
By 1895 James Baldwin was baker and kept the post office, and Emanuel Moore had a shop. By 1911 Baldwin was shopkeeper and sub-postmaster, and Thomas Moore was the butcher. The 1910 valuation survey and the 1919 estate sale show where some of them were: the post office, shop and bakehouse opposite the church, Thomas Moore's house and buildings at the Hollow Way, and an estate timber yard and carpenter's shop at the Paddock. No forge appears in 1910, so the smithy had probably gone by then.
For anything the village could not supply there were the carriers. In 1911 Harry Mitchell of the Paddock went to Banbury on Thursdays, and two more carriers, from Caulcott and from Heyford, passed through on their way to Banbury on Mondays and Thursdays.
Sources: Gardner's Directory of Oxfordshire (1852); Kelly's Directory of Oxfordshire (1895 and 1911); the 1910 valuation survey; the 1919 estate sale. The full table of trades is on the Economic Life page.
When six former pupils met in 2009 to remember their schooldays, they described how the village shopped when they were growing up:
There was a children's clinic at the village hall, where Mrs Waddup stood outside "in her big white apron" with a big bottle of cod liver oil, and a doctor held a surgery once a week at the Old Post House in Church Street.
Source: School Days, notes of a meeting of former pupils in 2009. These are memories, written down some seventy years later.
A villager remembers the grocery van from Callows of Upper Heyford calling in the 1970s and 80s. It stopped by the bus stop below Adam's Cottages, and by the village hall. The same villager remembers the county library van, which Rosemary Arnold ran, stopping opposite the bus stop, facing towards Upper Heyford. We do not yet know when either service started or stopped.
Source: a villager's recollection, given in October 2026. Jack Callow's memoir of his family's shop, published in Linger a While (1989), describes the Callows' mobile shop visiting a dozen or more villages twice a week, but does not name Somerton.
There are big gaps in this story, especially between the 1940s and the 1970s. We would love to know:
Please use the form below or see Can you help?
See also Economic Life, Lost Somerton and Who Lived Here.
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.