There is an unusual concentration in the village of sarsen stones, including a ring of twelve which form the foundations on which the towers of both the present church and of its medieval predecessor were built, and two close to the wooden bridge over the river at Berry Lane. According to local folklore, the twelve stones originally stood as an upright circle on a mound near the site of the church. A Charter granted in the year 972 AD, in the reign of King Edgar, refers to an 'Egsanmor' (slaughter stone) at Twyford. It is from bits of evidence such as these that the legend evolved of a Druidic religious site having existed in the village in pre-Roman times - perfectly plausible, given the proximity of Bronze Age (ca 1500 BC) and Iron Age (ca 1 AD) settlements on the hill later named after St Catherine and on Twyford Down.
Evidence of Roman occupation of Twyford around 2-3 AD emerged with the discovery at the end of the 19th Century of extensive remains of a Roman villa of that period when a Winchester solicitor, Edward Shenton, built a house at what is now the corner of Roman Road and Park Lane. The site was excavated in 1891 and again, by Martin Biddle, in 1958, and it appears to have been the residence of a fairly prosperous citizen, perhaps a Roman expatriate, perhaps a Romanized Briton.
References to Twyford in written records begin to appear in successive charters of Anglo-Saxon kings as they began to allocate manors to their favourites and to bishops. The origins of the manor seem to go back at least to the 7th Century, when Cynegils, King of Wessex, founded a monastery in Winchester which he endowed with lands he owned around the city, including Twyford. Those and other lands were later granted to the Bishop of Winchester by King Ethelwulf under a Charter of 854. From the middle of the 10th Century, the Manor of Twyford was joined to that of Lower Marwell, a couple of miles to the South, and confirmed as granted to the bishop by King Edred who reigned from 946 - 955, and again in AD 984, in a Charter of King Ethelred. In the Domesday Book a century later 'Tviforde' is recorded as having been always held by the Bishop of Winchester, with a Manor possessing a church, four mills and pasturage for fifteen swine, valued at £32, and another with 2 mills worth £15.
The two manors remained in the possession of the Bishops of Winchester until 1551, when Bishop Poynet surrendered them to King Edward VI in exchange for a fixed income of 2,000 marks. What induced the Bishop to part with them is not entirely clear, but shortly afterwards, the King bestowed the joint manors upon Sir Henry Seymour, who at that time already held a manor adjoining Lower Marwell called Marwell Woodlock. Sir Henry was the King's uncle, brother of both the King's Protector, the Duke of Somerset, and Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII and mother of Edward VI. It seems probable that Sir Henry had persuaded the young King to 'request' the Bishop's gift and then to hand it on to himself. Bishop Poynet could not very well refuse to take the Royal hint, because he owed his translation from the See of Rochester to Winchester in 1551 to his support for the Reformation of the Church of England which Edward VI was determined to press forward.
The Manors of Marwell and Twyford remained in the Seymour family until the middle of the 17th Century, when they passed into the possession of the Mildmays. Sir Henry Mildmay, a descendant of the founder of Emmanuel College (Sir Walter Mildmay) married Jane, daughter and heiress of Sir Leonard Holliday, Lord Mayor of the City of London, who had bequeathed a sum of money to be laid out on the purchase of land to be settled on his daughter and her heirs. With this money the estates of Twyford and Marwell were bought from the Seymours (who by then had fallen out of royal favour and been reduced to dire poverty). They remained in the possession of the Mildmay family until the end of the 19th Century when they passed to the Shipley family.
The Mildmays played a somewhat equivocal role in the Civil War in the days of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Sir Henry Mildmay had been a great friend of Charles I, who made him Master of his Jewels, but in 1641 he led a group of Twyford gentry in signing a Proclamation pledging support for Parliament and, when Charles was tried, Sir Henry was appointed one of his judges. However, he prudently managed to avoid being present at the sitting of the bench which condemned the King to be beheaded, and this undoubtedly saved his life. When the King's son was restored to the throne in 1660 as Charles II, all the judges who had condemned his father were executed, but Sir Henry's life was spared, though he was dragged on a sledge to the gallows at Tyburn with a rope round his neck, degraded from his title and expelled from the country. He died in exile at Antwerp. All his estates were confiscated except Twyford, which was exempted from forfeiture because it was settled on his wife.
For such a compact village, Twyford has a surprisingly large number of important houses. Soon after he inherited the estates from his mother, her son, another Henry Mildmay, undertook a major rebuilding of his Twyford Manor House in the 1660s, using material recovered from the demolition of two chantries at Marwell. It was this material - large stone blocks, flints and a complete Gothic arch - that gave the building the ecclesiastical appearance which it still retains. This is reflected in the name 'The Monastery' given to the older part of the present building when it was sold in two lots in the 1960s, leaving the name 'The Manor House' to the adjacent farm house, with its medieval cellars. There is some evidence that the Master of nearby St Cross sometimes asked the Mildmays to incarcerate recalcitrant monks in the cellars of the Manor House to do penance, and the ghost of one of them - a rather nice, friendly spirit - is reputed to roam the old building from time to time.
The very fine Shawford Park, also owes its origin to the same Sir Henry Mildmay who had rebuilt the Manor House. That rebuilding project involved a good deal of demolition of old buildings, and some of the recovered material was used in the construction of Shawford Park in 1684-5. The first, Jacobean, building at Shawford was embellished during the 18th Century, and a loggia and ballroom by the architect H H Jewell were added between 1912 and 1920.
Twyford House is steeped in history. In the 18th Century a William and Grace Davies lived there. A tablet in the Vestry records their deaths, in 1764 and 1765. It was Mr Davies who, riding across Twyford Down one 7th October in a thick fog, was in danger of falling into the chalk pit at the corner of the turning to St Cross, and saved himself by hearing the Twyford bells, and so realising his position and danger. In gratitude for his escape, in his will of 1754 he left instructions for a guinea to be paid to each bellringer who rang a peal, morning and evening, every 7th October. Ever since, the bells have been rung on that day, and even during the Great War, when bells were silenced, the Authorities allowed them to be rung so as to preserve the money left by Mr Davies, which was in danger of being lost under the conditions of the will if the bells were silent on 7th October. In 1765, the house was inherited by a London stationer, Jonathan Shipley, who had married William Davies's sister Martha. It was through his son, also Jonathan, that the house entered into national and international history. Young Jonathan, after serving as Chaplain-General to the Army at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, was appointed Bishop of St Asaph in Wales. He was fervently pro-American in the days of the American Revolution and a close friend of the American patriot Benjamin Franklin; and it was at Twyford House that Franklin wrote part of his autobiography. The Shipleys were a talented family. His eldest daughter Anna Maria, a talented artist taught by Sir Joshua Reynolds, married Sir William Jones, an outstanding jurist and linguist, who developed the judicial system of Bengal. His fourth daughter, Georgiana, was a great favourite of Benjamin Franklin, who gave her a grey squirrel (no doubt an ancestor of the thousands of squirrels that decimate the walnut trees of Twyford in the 21st Century). Jonathan's brother, William, was a founder member in 1754 of the scientific institution which developed into what is now the Royal Society of Arts, to which Benjamin Franklin contributed a number of scientific papers.
Two miles south of the village is Brambridge House, historically important for its association with the Welles family who owned it for more than 300 years. In the 17th Century they were resolute recusants (people who refused to accept the Reformation, but remained true to the Roman Church). One of them, Swithun Welles, was hanged for his faith, and there are many entries in the registers of St Mary's Church of recusants from Brambridge being buried in the churchyard clandestinely at night because they were denied the right to a normal burial. Another historical connection with Brambridge concerns Mrs Fitzherbert - the daughter of Walter Smythe, who inherited the estate from the Welles family. She married the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, though she was never crowned Queen. The original house, dating from the early 16th Century, was destroyed by fire in 1872, and the present house which replaced it is of no great architectural merit. It is, however, gracefully set at the end of a fine avenue of four rows of limes, now slowly recovering from the severe damage they suffered in the hurricane of October 1987.
Other houses of historical interest in the village are Twyford Lodge of the late 18th Century; Mildmay House (the former Vicarage) , a mainly 18th Century building which, however, incorporates part of a much older building, possibly the original 14th Century vicarage; and the Old Rectory, once a parsonage provided by the Brethren of St Cross who, from early times, had the right to appoint a Rector for Twyford, though they later leased the benefice to the Lord of the Manor, with a share of the tithes and the right to appoint a Vicar to look after the parish, with a separate Vicarage.
Down the centuries, the life of Twyford has revolved around its agriculture and the Church. Farming still thrives in and around the village, and of special interest is a complex water meadow system served by the River Itchen which has recently been acquired and partially restored to working order by the Parish Council.
An early, probably the first, Saxon church in Twyford was mentioned in the Domesday Book in AD 1088. This was replaced by a Norman church in the 12th Century, extensively rebuilt in 1402, although the basic structure of the Norman church remained in place. It is quite possible that the renowned conical yew was planted at about this time, as in 1988 the Yew Tree Conservation Foundation judged it to be 450 years old. By the early 1870s the old church was no longer able to accommodate everyone who wanted to attend services, and a replacement building in the Gothic style by the famous Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse was opened in 1878. The ancient columns of the Norman building and some features of the 1402 building were incorporated in the new building - the East window (now in the Lady Chapel), the clerestory windows which were re-used, and the priest's entrance on the North side of the Vestry. The beautiful square-headed perpendicular window now in the East wall of the Vestry is thought to date from a later embellishment carried out in about 1520. The Vicar, the Revd Roger Buston, appointed in 1849, had devoted a lot of effort to making his services more attractive, building upon the musical tradition of the church with great success. It was on his initiative that a new pipe organ built by J W Walker of London had been installed in 1867, replacing a barrel organ of 1838. This organ was reinstalled in the new church. Few changes have been made since 1878. A new Lady Chapel, at the South East corner of the church, was presented in 1924 by the Revd Smith-Dampier, in memory of his parents who had lived at Twyford House. In 1965, the original tinted glass of the West window was replaced by a beautiful, predominantly blue stained glass design by Miss Moira Forsyth. Two meeting rooms, a small kitchen and toilet facilities were built within the West end of the church in 1995, with a new gallery above the meeting rooms.
Publications:
- Twyford 1878 - Graham J H Hill (Twyford Local History Committee, 1978)
- Twyford - Ringing The Changes - Doreen Pearce & Stanley Crooks (George
Mann Publications, 2000) ISBN 0-9524424-3-4
- Twyford 20th Century Chronicles - Editor, Stanley Crooks (George Mann
Publications, 2001) ISBN 0-9524424-9-3
- Alfred Waterhouse in Twyford - Stanley Crooks (George Mann
Publications, 2003) ISBN 0-9541634-4-3
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