Great Milton, Oxfordshire

Historical Description

Milton, Great, a village, a township, and a parish in Oxfordshire. The village stands on an eminence 1 mile E of the river Thame, 2 miles SW from Tiddington station on the Wycombe, Thame, and Oxford section of the G.W.R., 5¾ WSW of Thame, and 8 SE from Oxford; was known at Domesday as Midelton, and has a post, money order, and telegraph office under Tetsworth. The township includes the village, and extends into the country. Area of the township, 1444 acres; population, 547. The parish contains also the ecclesiastical parish and township of Little Milton, and the townships of Ascot and Chilworth. Acreage, 5455; population of the civil parish, 1002; of the ecclesiastical, 633. The parish is represented by six parish councillors and one district councillor. Milton House is the seat of the Sheppard family. A house said to have belonged to the ancestors of the poet Milton stands opposite the village well, and has a gabled structure and mullioned windows. A priory, a cell to Abingdon Abbey, stood in the parish, and was given at the dissolution to Richard de Louches. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford; gross value, £300 with residence. Patron, the Bishop of Oxford. The church, which is a veryfine example of 14th century architecture, is a building of stone in the Decorated style, with traces of an earlier structure, and consists of chancel, nave, N and S aisles, S porch with parvis over, and a well-proportioned tower at the W end of the nave. It was thoroughly restored in 1851 under the direction of the late Sir G. Gilbert Scott, R.A.; contains a very handsome marble monument of 1618 to the Dormer family, and an interesting tomb of Mrs Wilkinson of 1654;was till about 1852 a peculiar of the Bishop of Lincoln; and furnished two prebends, called Milton Ecclesia and Milton Manor, to Lincoln Cathedral. There is a Wesleyan chapel. Milton House, the seat of the Fitzwilliam family, inCastor parish, Northamptonshire, 2½ miles WNW of Peterborough. It was built in the time of Elizabeth, succeeded a mansion of the abbots of Medenhamstcad, gives the title of Viscount Milton to Earl Fitzwilliam, has some stained glass brought from Fotheringhay Castle, contains portraits of Mary Queen of Scots and her son James I., given by her to Sir W. Fitzwilliam on the day of her execution, and stands in a well-wooded park of 600 acres, stocked with deer.

Administration

The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.

Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.

Church Records

Ancestry.co.uk, in association with Oxfordshire Family History Society and Oxfordshire History Centre, have images of the Parish Registers for Oxfordshire online.

Civil Registration

For general information about Civil Registration (births, marriages and deaths) see the Civil Registration page.

Directories & Gazetteers

We have transcribed the entry for Great Milton from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Milton, Great (St. Mary))

Land and Property

A full transcript of the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Oxfordshire is available online

Maps

Online maps of Great Milton are available from a number of sites:

• Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• Google Streetview.
• National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
• OpenStreetMap.
• old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
• Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)

Newspapers and Periodicals

The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Oxfordshire newspapers online:

• Oxford Journal
• Banbury Advertiser
• Banbury Guardian
• Oxford University and City Herald
• Oxford Chronicle and Reading Gazette
• Faringdon Advertiser and Vale of the White Horse Gazette
• Oxford Times
• Banbury Beacon
• Ossett Observer

Visitations Heraldic

The Visitations of Oxfordshire, 1566, 1574 &1634 are available on the Heraldry page.