Englefield

 

 

Although palaeolithic and neolithic implements have been found at Englefield, indicating very early settlement there, the first reference to Englefield is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which tells us that early in 871 the Danish army came and occupied Reading.  This was in fact just after Christmas and the Saxon new year started on 25th December so it would be late 870 according to our modern dating.  On 31st December, two Danish earls led a party towards the west, where they met and were defeated by the Saxons under their local leader Ethelwulf at a place the Chronicle calls Englafelda.  This translates literally as “fields of the English” since felda is the genitive plural form of feld, meaning a level piece of open land, as opposed to forest or hills.

 

Some sources interpret the name as a reference to the field of battle or victory, so dating the name to 870 or shortly after (the Chronicle was not compiled until 890) but this is probably not the case.  The Saxons had many different words for a field depending on what sort of field it was.  So a small field would be a croft, a field fenced to keep animals in was a fold and a cultivated field was an æcer.  Battlefield, however, was beaduwang and a field of victory was sigewang.

 

The same construction of ”-field” with a qualifying prefix is found in many other place names locally, such as Bradfield, Burghfield, Arborfield, Swallowfield, Heckfield and Shinfield, where there is no suggestion of a battle.  Englafelda, therefore, means the flat land of this particular part of the Kennet valley between two ridges of high ground, the prefix perhaps referring to a settlement of some Angles there in an area more generally inhabited by Romano-British people.  As such, it looks as though it pre-dates 870 and could be as early as the fifth or sixth century.

 

The site of the battle is believed to have been immediately to the north of where Englefield House now stands, on the rise overlooking “Wimbleton’s” and the approach from the direction of Reading, where there is an apparent earthwork along the crest.  This was the opening skirmish in the long war between Danes and Saxons that eventually saw Alfred established as king in Wessex.

 

An alternative derivation for the name Englefield is often given, though this is almost certainly wrong.  This seems to originate from a book, published between about 1770 and 1817, found in the library at Englefield House and reproduced in the parish magazine in 1907.  This gives the origin as “Inglefield” after the supposed Saxon word for a fire, suggesting that it stems from the fire beacons that were lighted on the hill to give warning of the approach of the Danes in 870.  However, “ingle” is not a Saxon word (their word for beacon was béacen and fire was fyr) and its first appearance in England, meaning a domestic fireplace (for which the Saxon word was heorþ), comes only in the 16th century, deriving from Scots Gaelic.

 

The name certainly was rendered in different forms over the centuries with Inglefelle in the Domesday Book, Englefeud in the 13th century and Inglefield in the 18th and 19th centuries, and even in the early 20th century.  So the Ingle version of the origin may well be a back-formation from the 18th century common form of the name.  Such unsound attributions about aspects of Englefield are legion, dating from the 18th and early 19th centuries and probably due to the lack of access to primary evidence at that time, but with a little unsound scholarship thrown in.  The few who have written about Englefield since then have largely repeated these canards without further investigation or comment.

 

Little is known about Englefield in the period between Domesday Book and the mid-18th century, though there was a skirmish nearby in September 1643 after the First Battle of Newbury when Royalists under Prince Rupert attacked the forces of the Earl of Essex as they returned towards Reading.  Sixty of the Royalists and eight Parliamentarians were killed and the lane where the skirmish took place has since been known as Deadman’s Lane.

 

In modern times Englefield village owes much of its attraction to the secluded location, not on the road to anywhere and surrounded by its own generous green belt of farm and woodland. This is a rare combination in the 21st century and we owe it to the ownership of all the land and property by a single, benevolently disposed, family. This control was only established in the second half of the 19th century for Enclosure began early in Englefield by private agreement and there were many farms under different ownership. Even in 1846 there were still some 13 other smaller landowners in the parish.

 

Although Englefield today is in a backwater with no through road this too was only achieved, after many years of trying, in 1855, when the road to Chalkpit Farm was extended on to Bradfield. Together with the road over Common Hill completed in the early years of the 19th century and the new turnpike from the Bath Road to Tidmarsh in the 1820s this meant that there were now satisfactory alternatives to the earlier roads that ran through Englefield and these were blocked up. Thus the village was able to withdraw into the background, relatively unaffected by the huge growth in traffic that took place in the 20th century.

 

The village itself was also transformed, with the houses being almost completely rebuilt in the 19th century. These new houses were not in the same place as the old ones and the village shifted to its current location along the long and somewhat straggling street.