After the Romans left Britain the fate of Clausentum becomes obscure. It has been suggested that the settlement with its stone walls was used as a burh, an Anglo-Saxon fortified settlement, but this would have been a late development triggered by the arrival of the Viking raiders.
During the Anglo-Saxon period, the land on the eastern side of the Itchen River including the area covered by Clausentum, became part of the lands of the Bishop of Winchester.
In the early medieval period, such productivity and benefits as could be obtained from all
the land from north of Woodmill to south of Netley had been given by
the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex to support successive Bishops of Winchester after
Wessex had been converted to Christianity.
Medieval Merry Oak
In his important book, A History of Southampton, the 19th century local historian J. Silvester Davies wrote ‘No particular attention seems to have been paid [to Clausentum] till the last century. In the 16th century the antiquarian John Leland noted its remains in his Itinerary, as did the 17th century historian William Camden, in his Britannia. Davies notes:
Other writers since have given a few words to Bittern [sic], but the place attracted no attention. It was well away from any public road; and … was only to be approached by a solitary farm road from Wood Mill, or by a footpath through woods and fields along the river bank from Itchen ferry, or by crossing the river in a boat.
Evidence of any activity around Merry Oak during the early medieval period after the withdrawal of the Romans is hard to find, and Davies’ comments indicate part of the reason. The Merry Oak valley lay behind the high ground above the river and this only had its meagre footpath through woods and fields, while the track from Woodmill served Bitterne Manor.
However, until the Roman Road fell into disuse and disappeared into the rough growth of the encroaching common land, it would have been possible to use it to access the high land and its hidden valley, when this was necessary. And as already noted above: it is likely that it was used during the Middle Ages as part of the route of royal and episcopal itineraries of King John and Peter de Roches, founder of Netley Abbey and Bishop of Winchester in 1208, when they were travelling between Bitterne and Titchfield/Farham/Portchester (The Pipe Roll of the Bishopric of Winchester, 1208-1209, ed. Hubert Hall (London: P. B. King & Son 1903), p. xl).
The area now known as Merry Oak did not exist separately but was part of the Bishop’s lands and these lands included not only Bitterne Manor with its extensive park. The Domesday Book shows these lands extending from Mansbridge to Woolston, and taken together all these lands are named in Domesday as South Stoneham, a name retained to designate all the high land to the east of the Itchen until the 19th century. Although the Bishops held Bitterne Manor, these lands of South Stoneham were specifically intended to provide clothing for the monks of Winchester (Domesday Hampshire, 3/16), an arrangement probably dating from the time of Bishop Ælfwine in about 1043 (Davies, A History of Southampton, p. 328).
In fact, the Mansbridge/South Stoneham lands of the Bishops were comprised of 5 hides in North Stoneham, held by the Abbey of St. Peter, Winchester (later Hyde Abbey); 7 hides in South Stoneham, 13 hides in Woolston, and 14 hides in Netley (Domesday Hampshire 26), which remained part of the estate until 1246, when a boundary was determined between the lands given to Netley Abbey from those still retained by the Bishops of Winchester.
The line of this boundary, which later became a parish boundary, is still marked by Sholing Road, confirming that the land that is now the Merry Oak estate was, though apparently unnamed, always in the possession of the Bishops of Winchester – before and after the Norman Conquest.
The bleakness of the lands to the east, across Bitterne and Netley Commons, through which the old Roman Road would have passed, is testified by a later record of the deaths of ‘Henry Dorset and his daughter Mary’ who were ‘found dead on the common between Itchen Ferry and Wildern (Hedge End) and were thought to have been killed by the extremity of the cold’ on the evening of 23rd December 1684, when a bitter easterly wind brought heavy snow (John Holt, A Bend in the River, rev. Anne Cole (Southampton: Bitterne Local History Society, 1973, rev. 1992), p. 19). The tragic pair had travelled up from Itchen Ferry and would have taken the track that is now Merry Oak Road, Deacon Road and Upper Deacon Road, which led up from the ferry and crossed the exposed heathland.
The bleakness of these high common lands even in the seventeenth century suggests that they had always been wild and inhospitable and perhaps explains why very little evidence is available of any medieval settlement on this eastern side of the Itchen, other than speculation that Clausentum was reused as a defensive burh during the time of the Viking raids on Hamwic. Archaeologists have also speculated that Roman coins found in excavations carried out in the Anglo-Saxon town may have come from Clausentum. Others have been found at Westwood, close to Weston Shore.
The land would, however, have provided grazing for the flocks of sheep belonging to the Bishop of Winchester’s Bitterne estate, which are accounted for in the records, as well as serving as hunting grounds. It is just possible that the grazing of sheep on the slopes and heights above the river are noticed in the story of Southampton’s own medieval hero, Sir Bevis, when the boy-hero has to spend time disguised as a shepherd and ‘looked towards the town that should have been his’.
It is certainly the case that the rough heathlands provided a harvest of their own as the Bishopric’s accounts for ‘heath’ sold in 1301-2 amounted to 2/- (2 shillings). This heath is differentiated from that growing in the ‘quagmire’, of which there was none harvested in that year. As the records also differentiate harvests of all kinds from ‘the park’, that cannot be not where the heath was gathered, so the rough exposed lands are likely to have provided an ample supply, used for fires, bedding for animals, and even as mattress material for impoverished tenants.
A later record from 1409-10 is more specific about distinguishing where heath was harvested when it was not in the quagmire - stating that there was 'nothing from the sale of heath in the common of Bitterne this year from a want of buyers.' This is an early reference to Bitterne common, out of which the Merry Oak estate would be later be enclosed, when the lands of the bishopric where sold off in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
As early as the late 11th century, Bishop Walkelin had been granted ‘his warren from the place where the water of Winchester falls into the sea, to the road, so that none shall hunt there without the Bishop’s license’ (Holt, Bend in the River, p. 12). The 'warren' in this case refers to hunting rights, and the road is probably the remains of the Roman Road. It is unlikely that the hunting ground would have been included within the bounds of the manor’s park, it is more likely that it included the wilder lands above the river and to the south of the road.
Where the slopes and heights were more heavily wooded, particularly with oaks, pigs belonging to the bishops and their tenants were turned out to benefit from rights of pannage among the trees in autumn. In 1301-2 payments for this right amounted to 10/- (10 shillings).
In spite of its bleak, exposed position, and rough, wooded, and hilly topography, the high lands above the river were undoubtedly productive in their own way for the medieval Bishops and their tenants, but although the Pipe Rolls preserve many names, none can be certainly linked to the area of Merry Oak at this time.
Successive Bishops of Winchester held the whole of the South Stoneham lands during the Middle Ages and the extensive records of the Bishopric detail the administration of the Bitterne estate which, after the Norman Conquest, had been granted to the incumbent Bishop in 1284. Much more work needs to be done on these records, held in the Hampshire Records Office in Winchester, because few of them have been edited and/or translated, and although they are technically available in photocopy form upon application to the HRC, they require paleographical skills and a knowledge of medieval Latin in order to expand the research. Nevertheless, the Victoria County History Hampshire vol 3, records that Bitterne was held by the bishops of Winchester until 1869. However, the Bishop’s more extensive holdings in South Stoneham were slowly eroded prior to that. They included the lands which would become Merry Oak.
Before that erosion gained pace, the intervening centuries brought about change in the religious orientation of the bishops’ lands of South Stoneham and records of this indicate an expansion of the population, which itself suggests that these exposed lands had not been extensively settled during the Middle Ages.
Although the Bishop’s Manor of Bitterne had its own medieval chapel, the spiritual needs and obligations of the few inhabitants of the lands above the ‘bend in the river’ were likely to have been served by the monks of Netley Abbey until the 16th century Reformation with the consequent Dissolution of the Monasteries. This disrupted the relationship, and William Paulet acquired the monastery.
It was after the Norman Conquest that the records of the lands that include Merry Oak take on greater detail. This estate of the Bishop of Winchester extended from South Stoneham but in the thirteenth century its southern part was assigned instead to the newly founded Netley Abbey, and the modern Sholing Road, one of the boundary markers of the Merry Oak estate, marked the medieval boundary between the estates of the Abbot of Netley and those of the Bishop of Winchester.
With the change of religion and loss of local access to worship and the care of souls, the inhabitants of the area formerly served by Netley Abbey’s monks, had to take the ferry to St Mary’s, the mother church of Southampton, on the opposite bank of the perilous river, This situation became a matter of concern and discontent among the population who had to face the river crossing in all weathers, not only for weekly church services, but for weddings, funerals and baptisms (Gerald Mornington, Southampton’s Marquis and other mariners, 1984, p. 22).
Eventually in 1620 land on Ridgeway Heath was enclosed to accommodate Jesus Chapel, built to serve the expanding population of Peartree, who were already discovering the pleasures of moving out of the town and onto the higher lands above the river, but objected to the need to use the ferry. Situated within the new daughter parish of St Mary Extra, , this new chapel was, nevertheless, not provided by the diocese of Winchester, but by a private philanthropist. The chapel did not lead to the recognition of a new parish but remained within the parish of St Mary Extra.
Merry Oak does not feature by name in this chain of events in the 16th and 17th centuries, but the new Jesus Chapel was built, and still stands, close to the southern boundary of the Merry Oak estate, so that the existing inhabitants of the surrounding lands had most convenient access to a new place of worship. However, the reference to the enclosing of part of Ridgeway Heath for the chapel, offers a reminder of the rough and uncultivated state of the surrounding land at that time.
We may remember at this point that several centuries would elapse before the Victorians built their large church to serve the new Bitterne Village further to the north.