A Camp in the Valley

Come at Chipping Campden from the Oxford side and the road drops off the wold and lays the whole town out below you, long and golden in the valley. That is the town in its name. "Campden" comes down from the Old English: campas, the cultivated enclosures or fields, and denu, a valley - the valley of the enclosures. The "Chipping" came later, and is a different story, of markets, told on the next page.

People worked this ground long before there was a town. The high Cotswold above the valley carries the marks of prehistoric and Romano-British farming, and Roman roads and villas lie across this corner of Gloucestershire. The settlement that became Campden grew where it made sense to grow: sheltered in the valley, on good land, with water and a route through.

It enters the written record at the Domesday survey of 1086 as Campedene - already a substantial manor of seventy-three recorded households, with land for many ploughs, a mill, and a population working the fields and the first flocks. Before the Norman Conquest the manor had belonged to Earl Harold, the future king who fell at Hastings; by 1086 it had passed, like so much of England, to one of the Conqueror's greatest men - Hugh of Avranches, Earl of Chester - who held it directly among his scatter of midland estates.

None of this yet is the Campden a visitor would recognise. There is no High Street of honey-coloured houses, no Market Hall, no great church tower. But the shape of the thing is set: a working valley, a manor of weight, and - already - sheep on the hills. The sheep would make everything that followed.