[edit]
The Roman amphitheatre
Roman Corinium[edit]
Main article: Corinium Dobunnorum
Cirencester is known to have been an important early Roman area, along with St Albans and Colchester, and the town includes evidence of significant area roadworks. The Romans built a castra (fort) where the Fosse Way crossed the Churn, to hold two quingenary (i.e. 500 men) alae tasked with helping to defend the provincial frontier around AD 49, and native Dobunni were drawn from Bagendon, a settlement 3 miles (5 km) to the north, to create a civil settlement near the fort. When the frontier moved to the north after the conquest of Wales, this fort was closed and its fortifications levelled around the year 70, but the town persisted and flourished under the name Corinium.[citation needed]
Even in Roman times, there was a thriving wool trade and industry, which contributed to the growth of Corinium.[citation needed] A large forum and basilica were built over the site of the fort, and archaeological evidence shows signs of further civic growth. There are many Roman remains in the surrounding area, including several Roman villas near the villages of Chedworth and Withington. When a defensive wall was built around the Roman city in the late 2nd century, it enclosed 240 acres (1.0 km2), making Corinium the second-largest city by area in Roman Britain. The details of the provinces of Britain following the Diocletian Reforms around 296 remain unclear, but Corinium is now generally thought to have been the capital of Britannia Prima. Some historians[who?] would date to this period the pillar erected by the governor Lucius Septimus to the god Jupiter, a local sign of the pagan reaction against Christianity during the principate of Julian the Apostate.[citation needed]
Cirencester Amphitheatre still exists in an area known as the Querns to the south-west of the town, but has only been partially excavated.[citation needed] Investigations in the town show that it was fortified in the 5th or 6th centuries.[citation needed]
Post-Roman and Saxon[edit]
See also: Battle of Deorham
Linguist Andrew Breeze claims that Gildas received his later education in Cirencester in the early 6th century, showing that it was still able to provide an education in Latin rhetoric and law at that time. Possibly this was the palace of one of the British kings defeated by Ceawlin in 577.[citation needed]
In the 7th century, Cirencester was the site of the Battle of Cirencester, this time between the Mercian king Penda and the West Saxon kings Cynegils and Cwichelm in 628.
The minster church of Cirencester, founded in the 9th or 10th century, was probably a royal foundation.[citation needed] It was made over to Augustinian canons in the 12th century and replaced by the great abbey church.
Norman[edit]
At the Norman Conquest in 1066, the royal manor of Cirencester was granted to the Earl of Hereford, William Fitz-Osbern, but by 1075 it had reverted to the Crown.[citation needed] The manor was granted to Cirencester Abbey, founded by Henry I in 1117, and following half a century of building work during which the minster church was demolished, the abbey church was finally dedicated in 1176. The manor was granted to the Abbey in 1189, although a royal charter dated 1133 speaks of burgesses in the town.[citation needed] The abbots obtained charters in 1215 and 1253 for fairs during the octaves of All Saints and St Thomas the Martyr, and the significant wool trade gave these great importance.
The struggle of the townsmen to gain the rights and privileges of a borough for Cirencester probably began with the grant of 1189, when they were amerced for a false presentment, meaning that they had presented false information. Four inquisitions during the 13th century supported the abbot's claims, yet the townspeople remained unwavering in their quest for borough status: in 1342, they lodged a Bill of complaint in Chancery. Twenty townspeople were ordered to Westminster, where they declared under oath that successive abbots had bought up many burgage tenements, and made the borough into an appendage of the manor, depriving it of its separate court. They claimed that the royal charter that conferred on the men of Cirencester the liberties of Winchester had been destroyed 50 years earlier, when the abbot had bribed the burgess who held the charter to give it to him, whereupon the abbot had had it burned. In reply, the abbot refuted these claims, and the case passed on to the King's Bench. When ordered to produce the foundation charter of his abbey the abbot refused, apparently because that document would be fatal to his case, and instead played a winning card. In return for a fine of £300, he obtained a new royal charter confirming his privileges and a writ of supersedeas.
The townspeople continued in their fight; in return for their aid to the Crown against the earls of Kent and Salisbury, Henry IV in 1403 gave the townsmen a Merchant's Guild, although two inquisitions reiterated the abbot's rights. The struggle between the abbot and the townspeople continued, with the abbot's privileges confirmed in 1408–1409 and 1413; in 1418 the abbot finally removed this thorn in his side when the guild merchant was annulled. In 1477, parliament declared that Cirencester was not corporate. After several unsuccessful attempts to re-establish the guild merchant, the government of the town was vested in the bailiff of the Lord of the manor in 1592.
Tudor[edit]
As part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, Henry VIII ordered the total demolition of the Abbey buildings. Today only the Norman Arch and parts of the precinct wall remain above ground, forming the perimeter of a public park in the middle of town. Despite this, the freedom of a borough continued to elude the townspeople, and they only saw the old lord of the manor replaced by a new lord of the manor as the king acquired the abbey's title. Cirencester became a parliamentary borough in 1572, returning two members, although this was deprived of representation in 1885.
Sheep rearing, wool sales, weaving and woollen broadcloth and cloth-making were the main strengths of England's trade in the Middle Ages, and not only the abbey but many of Cirencester's merchants[who?] and clothiers gained wealth and prosperity from the national and international trade.[citation needed] The tombs of these merchants[which?] can be seen in the parish church, while their fine houses of Cotswold stone still stand in and around Coxwell Street and Dollar Street. Their wealth funded the rebuilding of the nave of the parish church in 1515–1530, to create the large building sometimes referred to as the "Cathedral of the Cotswolds".[citation needed] Other wool churches can be seen in neighbouring Northleach and Chipping Campden.
Civil War[edit]
The Civil War came to Cirencester in February 1643 when Royalists and Parliamentarians came to blows in the streets. Over 300 were killed, and 1,200 prisoners were held captive in the church. The townsfolk supported the Parliamentarians but gentry and clergy were for the old order, so that when Charles I of England was executed in 1649 the minister, Alexander Gregory, wrote on behalf of the gentry in the parish register, "O England what did'st thou do, the 30th of this month".
At the end of the war, King Charles II spent the night of 11 September 1651 in Cirencester, during his escape after the Battle of Worcester on his way to France.
Modern history[edit]
Cotswold stone buildings in Castle Street
At the end of the 18th century, Cirencester was a thriving market town, at the centre of a network of turnpike roads with easy access to markets for its produce of grain and wool. From 1461, Cirencester Grammar School provided a grammar school education for those who could afford it, and businesses thrived in the town, which was the market town for the surrounding area.[citation needed]
In 1789, the opening of the Cirencester branch (or "arm") of the Thames and Severn Canal provided access to markets further afield, by way of a link through the River Thames. In 1841, a branch railway line was opened to Kemble to provide a link to the Great Western Railway at Swindon. The Midland and South Western Junction Railway opened a station at Watermoor in 1883. Cirencester thus was served by two railway lines until the 1960s.
The loss of the canal and the direct rail link encouraged dependency on road transport. An inner ring road system was completed in 1975, in an attempt to reduce congestion in the town centre, which has since been augmented by an outer bypass with the expansion of the A417 road. Coaches depart from London Road for Victoria Coach Station in central London and Heathrow Airport, taking advantage of the M4 Motorway. Kemble station, which lies to the west of the town, is served by fast trains from London Paddington via Swindon.
The passing of the Local Government Act 1894 at last brought into existence the town's first independent elected body, the Cirencester Urban District Council. A reorganisation of local government in 1974 replaced the Urban District Council with the present two-tiers of Cotswold District Council and Cirencester Town Council, sitting below Gloucestershire County Council.
Under the patronage of the Bathurst family, the Cirencester area, notably Sapperton, became a major centre for the Arts and Crafts movement in the Cotswolds. This was when the furniture designer and architect-craftsman Ernest Gimson opened workshops in the early 20th century, and Norman Jewson, his foremost student, practised in the town.[citation needed]
Archaeology[edit]
A 3,500-year-old Bronze Age spear was found in 2022 during landscaping at a Thames Water sewage works. Archaeologists also uncovered prehistoric pottery fragments, flint tools, and animal bones from the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Roman period.
