Page 7 - Oundle Life

Oundle, has been occupied continuously since the Iron Age. In Roman times there was an extensive settlement at Ashton, near to Oundle’s old Railway Station. The first written reference to Oundle occurs in Saxon times: the Venerable Bede writing in the eighth century states that Saint Wilfrid died ‘in his monastery in the region of Oundle’. This suggests that Oundle was already a place of some importance.
The 1565 survey by Thomas Austell, which lists street by street all the properties in the town, shows that the layout of Oundle has changed little over the last 400 years. Some street names have changed, but others – such as Mill Road and Jericho – have not. The site
of the Jesus Church was known as Chapel End, after the chapel of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, which had stood there in medieval times. The survey also contains an interesting reference to the hall of the pre-Reformation guild of Our
Lady of Oundle, which had been purchased by “Mr Laxton somtyme maior of London”.
Before the Reformation there had already been a modest guild school, held in part of Oundle Parish church, but Sir William Laxton, in the codicil to his will of 1556, instructed that the former guild house be acquired and used
as a grammar school with accommodation for ‘seven poor honest men’. The guild house stood in the churchyard on the site of the present Laxton School. Double foundations of this
kind were not uncommon at the time. Oundle possesses another example in Latham’s Hospital in North Street. In 1611 Nicholas Latham founded an almshouse for women and a school in these premises. Latham’s Hospital still fulfils its original purpose of providing a home for elderly ladies, but his Bluecoat school merged with Oundle Church of England School at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Story of
OUNDLE’S HISTORY