This is a study that focuses on the people that lived in Weald in the long eighteenth century (from the last years of the seventeenth century through to the Census of 1841. It looks at the way in which the fortunes of the families of Weald varied and sets this against a background of the social conditions of the time.

Weald is closely linked to the town of Bampton, Oxfordshire. Today the Ordnance Survey maps show it as a small hamlet to the southwest of Bampton. In the eighteenth century however the name “Weald” – or sometimes “West Weald” – referred to a larger area. Bampton was for some purposes administered as two towns (or “liberties”) in the eighteenth century. According to the Victoria County History
“The boundary between Bampton and Weald ran in the 18th and 19th centuries up Cheapside from the Talbot Inn in the market place, along Church Street, and around the west side of the churchyard ….. Weald’s fields, north-west and south of the town, were separated from Bampton’s by Shill and Highmoor brooks and, further south, by a wedge of old inclosures, formerly part of Bampton moor.”
Bampton and Weald (and Haddon and Lew were sometimes explicitly included in the liberty with Weald) were administered by one vestry.