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Odiham history

Early Odiham: before the castle

Odiham sits where the chalk hills to the south meet the clay of the Whitewater valley. Where those two meet you get springs, and the High Street runs along that spring line. That's probably why people settled here in the first place, and why the street is long and straight rather than clustered round a green.

The oldest finds

The archaeologists who wrote up the castle excavations pulled together the earlier finds from Hampshire's Historic Environment Record and museum collections, and it's a surprising list.

  • A mammoth tusk, found 3 metres down at Lodge Farm, north-east of the castle, in 1973.
  • Mesolithic flint tools from around Ford Farm and Bidden Pond, about 2 km south of the castle.
  • Neolithic and Bronze Age flints and pottery, including a beaker and two cremation urns, plus metalwork: a piece of gold "ring money", a bronze socketed axe, and socketed spearheads from Scotland Farm and from the castle site itself.
  • A trapezoidal enclosure and fields on the slope about half a kilometre south of Odiham, dated to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age when it was dug ahead of an oil-exploration borehole, with a roundhouse that was probably in use at the same time.

None of this is on show in the village, but it tells you this patch of Hampshire has been lived in, on and off, for a very long time.

The Roman house at Lodge Farm

In the late 1920s the farmer at Lodge Farm, North Warnborough, was planting young fruit trees when he turned up bits of tile and pottery that didn't look right. He sent them to a Basingstoke collector, who confirmed they were Roman. Dorothy Liddell dug the site in 1929 and 1930 for the Hampshire Field Club.

She found a small house that was later turned into a set of baths, with a hypocaust (underfloor heating) and a plunge bath, and a larger courtyard-type building to the south. Seventy-one coins came out of the main building, nearly all of them dating between AD 306 and 381, so the place was mainly in use in the 4th century. The castle report also mentions a second Roman villa about 2 km south, near Hillside Farm, and Romano-British burials near the borehole site.

There's nothing to see at Lodge Farm today, and it's private land, so please don't go looking.

The name

Nobody is completely sure what "Odiham" means. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls it "Wudiham" in 1116, and one reading, from Eilert Ekwall, is "wooded enclosure" (wudiga hamm), with the W dropped under Norman influence. Another idea links the first part to a personal name, Hod, as in nearby Hoddington. The castle report sets out both and concludes no firm answer is possible, so we're not going to pretend otherwise.

A royal estate before 1066

Before the Norman Conquest, Odiham was held by Earl Harold, the Harold who became king in 1066 and died at Hastings. After the Conquest it passed to William the Conqueror and stayed with the Crown for more than 500 years.

In Domesday Book (1086) Odiham is the first entry for Hampshire, listed under the king's own lands. Open Domesday's summary records 248 households (138 villagers, 60 smallholders and 50 slaves), land for 56 ploughs, 8 mills, woodland for 160 pigs, and churches. That's in the largest fifth of all the places in Domesday. The Victoria County History reads the size and wealth of the estate as a sign there was already a royal residence here, and Henry I seems to have used one: he was at Odiham in 1116, and repairs were made to a royal house here in 1130.

Where was that early royal house? Nobody knows for certain. Hart District Council's conservation area appraisal reports a suggestion that an Early Saxon palace in the Bury was replaced by a Late Saxon one north of the High Street, on the land later used for Odiham Place. Treat that as an informed theory, not a fact.

The minster question

Domesday mentions more than one church at Odiham. Open Domesday and the Victoria County History count two. The 2010 castle report, quoting an earlier historian, says four. Either way, more than one church on a single estate often points to an old minster, a mother church that served a wide area, and both Hart's appraisal and the castle report think All Saints probably stands on its site. No Saxon stonework has been found in the church, though, so this is a likely theory rather than proven.

Where to go next

Sources