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Thame Local History
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Thame Park - The Mists of Time
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Alexander de Blois, Bishop of Lincoln, and lord of the manor of Thame,
is known to have been planning to use Thame Park as his private deer
hunting park in the 1130's. Certain references to a Thame Abbey in the year 971 have arisen from the fact that the Archbishop of York, accompanied by an Abbot, died at Thame in that year. There is however no record of any abbey or any building at all at Thame Park before the twelfth century. The abbot who was with the Archbishop of York at Thame was the Abbot of Bedford and the Archbishop would almost certainly have been residing on the site of St Mary's Church or the Prebendal House. There is no historical record of any King or Bishop, Anglo Saxon or Norman, enclosing land at Thame Park and driving off the inhabitants, as happened in later centuries for sheep farming in other places. At some point in the mists of time an area of land between Thame and Sydenham was enclosed. The size of the park grew in later centuries, and even swallowed up the old Thame to Sydenham road in the thirteenth century, but the original stretch of enclosed parkland defies any attempt to date its origins. |