Mickleton is a village in the North Cotswolds in the county of Gloucestershire. A village in England is traditionally described as a group of houses and associated buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, with a population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand, has a church, no market, and is situated in a rural area in the countryside. All of these criteria can be said to apply to Mickleton, making it by definition a typical English village.
Mickleton also had other attributes that could be said to typify an English village, at least in the Cotswolds, in that there was a Manor, a Parish church and nearby vicarage, and public houses, although it does not have a village green or pond. In England and the Cotswolds the Lord of the Manor, the clergy and church, and hostelries have been central to village life throughout much of history, Mickleton included. However, times have changed for Mickleton. The Lord of the Manor is no more, the influence and role of the established church is not what it was, there is now no vicarage and there are fewer pubs. At least the pubs that remain retain a similar role in village life albeit in a different context.
Mickleton has a long history. It is in the Saxon period that the area in which we now know as Mickleton was probably first peopled as a distinct settlement. These Anglo Saxon settlers were farmers who divided the land into ”villages” which belonged to a single or related family group, and who jealously guarded their boundaries. These settlements, in part at least, formed the basis of the parishes we know today. The Saxon period lasted for 600 years existing from the 5th to the 11th centuries from the end of Roman Britain until the Norman conquest in 1066. It consisted of various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms until 927 when it was united as the Kingdom of England by King Athelstan who reigned from 927 to 939.
Prior to the Saxons there were undoubtedly people in the Mickleton area. In the Cotswolds there is evidence of Neolithic burial chambers on Cotswold Edge, such as Belas Knap a chambered long barrow situated near Winchcombe, and there are remains of Bronze and Iron Age forts. The earliest occupiers of the land around Mickleton may have been either hunter gatherers or pastoral farmers. It would have been later that the people worked the land and grew crops, which would have necessitated a more settled existence. It was in the Iron Age that there is the first hint that the area we know as Mickleton was settled. There was a significant Iron Age settlement nearby on Meon Hill and its sphere of influence must have included the Mickleton area.
Similarly, after the Iron Age during the period of Roman occupation there would have been people in the area although there is little evidence of substantive Roman communities in the locality unlike other parts of the Cotswolds such as at Chedworth Villa. Indeed, Cirencester to the South was an important Roman area and town called Corinium. A Roman road called the Fosse Way, which linked Exeter with Lincoln and went via Cirencester, also ran nearby. It is today the A429 which runs between Illmington and Shipston-on-Stour. For the first few decades after the Roman invasion of Britain the Fosse Way marked the western frontier of Roman rule in Iron Age Britain. It may have originally been a Celtic path that was adopted by the Romans. The word Fosse is from the Latin fossa meaning ditch, and it presumably only became a paved road later on. The area around Mickleton was, therefore, on the frontier between the Romans and the indigenous peoples, and would only come under Roman rule some years after the invasion.
In the Saxon system of local government settlements were grouped into “hundreds” each with its “Hundred Court”. The parish of Mickleton was in the hundred of Kiftsgate, which was in turn cut into two divisions, upper and lower. Mickleton was in Upper Kiftsgate, which was approximately the administrative area surrounding Chipping Campden. The main function of the hundred was originally the administration of the law and the keeping of the peace. A Hundred Court consisted of five men from each village, although for minor affairs twelve men only were selected - the forerunner of modern juries. At the end of the Saxon period there were thirty-nine Hundreds in what was to become Gloucestershire. As the united kingdom of England came into being a new system of government was required. For this purpose, England was divided into “shires”. Each Shire had a representative of the king, or shire-reeve (sheriff) at its head. Thus, about 1000 the county of Gloucestershire was formed very much as it is known today.
The Hundred was superseded by the introduction of the District - as in Cotswold District Council today - as an administrative area in the late nineteenth century. The origin of the term hundred is obscure; a number of suggestions have been made ranging from the area covered by a 100 hides - a unit of land measurement originally intended to represent the amount of land sufficient to support a household - to an area that could muster a 100 men at arms. Today the Kiftsgate Hundred stone, where the elders originally met to administer justice, stands in Weston Park Wood above Chipping Campden. It can be accessed from the road between Kingcombe and Three Mile Drive.