Peasemore is a civil and ecclesiastical parish on the southern side of the Berkshire Downs, midway between Newbury and Wantage.
Local place names in the 1851 census include Rowdown, Dowses, Eastley End, Sheep Leaze and Wittenhams.
Farm names have included Priors, Widows, Gobley, Gidley and Princes.
Size
2,048 acres in 1870 (829 hectares)
Population
297 in 2001; 369 in 1851
Hundred
Faircross
Poor law union
Wantage
Registration district
Wantage
Present-day local authority
West Berkshire
Grid reference
SU 45 77
Adjoining parishes in 1851
Beedon, Boxford, Brightwalton, Catmore, Chieveley, Leckhampstead, Winterbourne
Genealogical resources
See Berks FHS Books for coverage of this parish in the society’s range of CDs.
See also Berkshire Record Office holdings.
West Berkshire Library holds typescript transcriptions of the registers of St Barnabas.
Links
Anglican church and parochial organisation
The living is a rectory in the archdeaconry of Berkshire, which transferred from Salisbury diocese to that of Oxford in 1836. The church of St Barnabas was rebuilt in 1842, but the tower is older.
Other churches
Peasemore’s first Primitive Methodist Chapel was built in 1809, was replaced in 1831 by a second, and in 1923 by a third. All have been demolished.
Schools
Peasemore had a National school, built in 1850, replacing an earlier school in what is now called Drakes Cottage. The village primary school closed in the 1905s.
Pubs
Fox and Hounds
Other local history
The original village was enclosed in a circular earthwork which may have been an Iron Age settlement. The village boundaries are delineated in a charter of 951 as part of Chieveley, and the village is specifically named in the Domesday Book.
Fire broke out on 27 July 1736, destroying the whole of the centre of the village.
Peasemore had two shops and a post office (in Hailey Lane) in the nineteenth century. The post office closed around 1980.
Noteworthy residents have included David Cameron as a child, and the novelist Miss Read, who was headmistress of the school for a short while.
