North Leigh, Oxfordshire

Historical Description

Leigh, North, a village and a parish in Oxfordshire. The village stands 1½ mile SE of Akeman Street, 3½ miles W by S of Handborough station on the G.W.R., and 3 NE by N of Witney. It has a post office under Witney; money order and telegraph office, Witney. The parish contains also the hamlets of Newyatt and East End. Acreage, 2423; population of the civil parish, 737; of the ecclesiastical, 748. The manor belongs to the Duke of Marl-borough. A Roman villa, 212 feet by 167, a tessellated pavement, a hypocaust, coins of Claudius, and other Roman relics, were found in the parish in 1813-16. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford; net value, £200 with residence. Patron, the Lord Chancellor. The church, a fragment of a larger building, is an ancient and interesting edifice of stone in the Norman, Early English, and Decorated styles, has a low square Norman tower, and contains a Norman font, a fine alabaster figured altar-tomb, and several other monuments. There are Primitive Methodist and Wes-leyan chapels. Osney Hill or Horse-on-the-Hill, formerly an extra-parochial tract here, is now a parish.

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 North Leigh from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Leigh, North (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 North Leigh 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.