Thame, Oxfordshire Family History Guide
Thame is an Ancient Parish and a market town in the county of Oxfordshire.
Other places in the parish include: Thame Park, Priestend, Old Thame, North Weston, New Thame, and Moreton.
Alternative names:
Parish church:
Parish registers begin:
- Parish registers: 1601
- Bishop’s Transcripts: 1667
Nonconformists include: Baptist, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Independent Methodist, Independent/Congregational, Particular Baptist, Primitive Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Wesleyan Methodist.
Table of Contents
Adjacent Parishes
- Albury
- Tetsworth
- Attington
- Great Haseley
- Kingsey
- Haddenham, Buckinghamshire
- Sydenham
- Shabbington, Buckinghamshire
- Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire
- Towersey, Buckinghamshire
Parish History
The Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales 1870
THAME, a small town, a parish, a sub-district, a district, and a hundred, in Oxfordshire. The town stands on the river Thame, and on the Wycombe and Oxford railway, 13 miles E by S of Oxford.
It dates from the Roman times: was known to the Saxons as Thama; was the death-place of Archbishop Osketyl in 970; suffered devastation by the Danes in 1010; was given, at the Norman conquest, to the Bishops of Lincoln; acquired a Cistertian abbey in 1138; went, after the dissolution of monasteries, to successively the Protector Somerset, the Williamses, and the Berties; was the death-place of John Hampden in 1643, and still contains the house in which he died; was the scene of one or two skirmishes in 1644; numbers among its natives Chief Justice Holt, who died in 1709, the physician Etherydge, who lived in the time of Leland, and the swordsman Figg, who figures in a plate of the “Rake’s Progress;” had Dr. Fell, Antony Wood, Chief Justice Croke. John Wilkes, Ingoldsby, Bishop King, and the traveller Pococke as pupils at its grammar-school.
It consists chiefly of one long spacious street, with a market place in the centre; is a seat of county-courts; publishes a weekly newspaper; and has a head post-office, a r. station with telegraph, two banking offices, a hotel, a town hall and market house, a large cruciform early English church with massive central tower, remains of the old abbey buildings and of an old prebendal house, four dissenting chapels, a grammar-school founded in 1558, an endowed charity school with £35 a year, national and British schools, alms houses with £160 a year, a workhouse with capacity for 450 inmates, a weekly market on Tuesday, and three annual fairs. Pop. in 1861, 2,917. Houses, 517.
The parish includes the town-hamlets of Old T., New T., and Priestend, and the rural hamlets of T. Park, Moreton, and North Weston. Acres, 5,310. Real property, £14,211. Pop., 3,245. Houses, 656. T. Park is the seat of the Baroness Wenman. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford. Value, £260. Patrons, Trustees.
Source: The Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales [Wilson, John M]. A. Fullarton & Co. N. d. c. [1870-72].
Parish Records
FamilySearch
Maps
Old maps of Britain and Europe from A Vision of Britain Through Time
Administration
- County: Oxfordshire
- Civil Registration District: Thame
- Probate Court: Court of the Peculiar of Banbury, Court of the Peculiar of Aylesbury
- Diocese: Oxford
- Rural Deanery: Pre-1846 – None, Post-1845 – Aston
- Poor Law Union: Thame
- Hundred: Thame
- Province: Canterbury