The history of Bicester
Bicester grew up around an early Christian cemetery, a Saxon church tower, and a medieval priory that drew pilgrims to a saint's relics and held a countess among its dead. Nearby, Roman Alchester and Akeman Street marked older passage, and a highwayman's ambush on the Bicester road in 1818 left its own grim record.
Bicester Village stands near the road between Bicester and Middleton where, on 25 April 1818, John Bradley beat Sergeant Thomas Hankinson and robbed him of banknotes and silver. Bradley was caught at Bicester, tried, and hanged at Oxford Castle on 2 August 1818 for the assault and robbery.
A highwayman ambushed a sergeant on the open road
On April 25, 1818, John Bradley attacked Sergeant Thomas Hankinson on the open road between Bicester and Middleton. Bradley beat him badly. Then he took his banknotes and his silver and left him there.
The road Hankinson walked ran close to this ground. Bradley used that emptiness.
He did not get far. Bradley was arrested at Bicester, tried, and sentenced to hang. On August 2, 1818, he was executed at Oxford Castle for the assault and robbery.
Twenty skeletons surfaced where the priory nave stood
Twenty skeletons came up out of the ground where Bicester Priory once stood, near Priory Lane and Palace Yard. Archaeologists found them in and around the old nave, laid out where monks had prayed for four centuries. A lead reliquary turned up nearby too, on the site of a house that once stood beside the priory. It held bones somebody had once thought worth keeping separate from the rest.
The priory itself had been founded in 1182 and pulled down in 1536, when King Henry VIII dissolved England's monasteries. Nothing above ground marked where its dead lay until a dig finally reached them, nearly five hundred years later.
A dead abbess drew pilgrims to this ground
The priory was built to hold something specific: the bones of Eadburh of Bicester, a nun and abbess who had died around 650. Her relics were carried to the new Augustinian priory and set inside a shrine, and pilgrims came to see them. A dead woman drew the living toward this ground for centuries, the same way the road later drew a robber toward a soldier's silver.
A hangar fire killed three near Bicester
A fire broke out at Hangar 79 on the Bicester Motion site, a few miles from where you stand. It killed two firefighters and a member of the public. Months later, nobody has named what started it.
A countess's wealth went into the ground with her
Philippa Basset was buried at Bicester in the 1200s. She had held the title countess of Warwick, and with it land and money across several counties. None of that weight survives here now beyond a name and two dates. Whatever she was worth when she died went into this ground with her, the same as the coins Bradley never got to keep.
The road out to Middleton still runs the way it did in 1818, quiet until it isn't.
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