Medmenham

A number of prehistoric artefacts have been found in Medmenham parish. Many of them are not more securely located than at this parish level, such as the 18 flint cores, 48 flakes, a scraper and 4 burnt flints found on the ground surface somewhere. Thankfully others are better provenanced, the oldest being a Lower to Middle Palaeolithic axe found in a gravel pit at Medmenham Camp. Two Iron Age hillforts are known in Medmenham, both next to the Thames. One is Danesfield Camp which has a country house, now a hotel, inside it, and the other is Medmenham Camp or Bolebec’s Castle as it is also known. Neolithic flint tools have been found at both and Middle Iron Age features, including a ditch, pits and post-holes, were found in excavation at Danesfield. Various prehistoric artefacts have also been dredged from the stretch of the river that goes through this parish. The Roman period is only represented by finds of coins from the river. There is also a possible Bronze Age ring-ditch, the ploughed out remains of a barrow, near Medmenham Abbey.

Medmenham Abbey was set up in the 9th century AD and during digging to put heating in various foundations of ancillary buildings and a church were found. There was also a cemetery where some early cremation burials, 9th-10th century, had been buried where they were burnt. There were also some 11th to 12th century inhumations attached to the Abbey. The Abbey was dissolved in the sixteenth century and turned into a country house, reusing some of the medieval stonework. Domesday also records other things about the parish in the eleventh century AD, such as a weir and a fishery on the river and a farmstead at Danesfield. The church of St Peter and St Paul was built in the twelfth century and extended in the fifteenth, with a new chancel, tower and windows and also restored in the nineteenth century.

Other medieval records exist for Wittington Farm, which is recorded from the 14th to the 17th century AD, Medmenham Mill, which is recorded from the 12th to the 18th century, though the mill house is 18th to 19th century. Hollywick’s Farm was a grange (a farm attached to a monastery) for Medmenham Abbey in the medieval period and had its own chapel. The Manor House also dates back to the late medieval period, the 15th century, though it has been changed in the 17th and 19th centuries and had a 16th century dovecote, according to one historical source.

Some other houses in the village date back to the 16th century, such as Medmenham Gates, but most date to the 18th and 19th centuries, like Wittington or the Old Vicarage. The twentieth century has made its mark on Medmenham, in the form of First World War practice trenches in Pullingshill Wood. During the Second World War Danesfield House was reused as an RAF reconnaissance centre.