Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Description
Winchcombe, a small market-town, the head of a poor-law union, petty sessional division, and county court district, and a parish in Gloucestershire. The town stands on the Isborne, amid the Cotswolds, 6 1/4 miles NE of Cheltenham. It was known at Domesday as Wincelcombe. A nunnery was founded by King Offa in 787, and a Benedictine Abbey was founded on its site in 798 by King Renulph. The latter was destroyed by the Danes, and rebuilt in 985 by Bishop Oswald. Winchcombe was formerly a borough by prescription, with two bailiffs and ten burgesses, but the corporation was extinguished in 1883. The town consists of one long principal street, and contains a post, money order, and telegraph office (R.S.O.), a modern town-hall, a reading-room and library, a large swimming bath, a cottage hospital, two banks, a police station, almshouses, and a workhouse. The church is a fine Perpendicular edifice, consisting of chancel, clerestoried nave of eight bays, aisles, S porch, and pinnacled tower. It was restored in 1872. There are Baptist, Congregational, and Wesleyan chapels, and three cemeteries. The grammar school was founded and endowed in 1621 by Lady Frances Chandos. Markets are held on Saturdays horse fairs on the last Saturday in March and 28 July, and hiring fairs on the Saturday before and the Saturday after old Michaelmas Day. The parish includes the hamlets of Greet, Gretton, Postlip, Naunton, Framton, Abbey Demesnes, Coates, Cockbury, Corndean, and Langley. Acreage, 6720; population of the civil parish, 2864; of the ecclesiastical, 2868. There is a parish council consisting of seven members. Postlip Hall and Corndean Hall are chief residences. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Gloucester and Bristol; gross value, £198. A chapel of ease and a Wesleyan chapel are at Gretton; a Norman chapel at Postlip, formerly in ruins, has been restored, and is now used as a Roman Catholic chapel.