Charndon

Charndon is recorded in Domesday and was part of Bernwood Forest from before that date. Bernwood had been a hunting forest from the time of Edward the Confessor. It grew to its largest extent under Henry II. The whole area was not covered by woods; in the medieval period a forest was a place where deer roamed for hunting and so included open land, villages and fields. All those who lived in the forest were not allowed to hunt or even gather wood without a special licence from the king. Bernwood Forest was finally disafforested in the reign of James I in 1635, although it had been shrinking in size since the time of King John (1199-1216).

Some ridge-and-furrow from medieval farming survives around the village, and there are other possibly medieval earthworks too. The village was larger in the medieval period and around the present village there are the earthworks of house platforms, hollow-ways and paddocks for keeping animals. There is also a low earthwork on either side of a stream south of Sheephouse Wood and it was suggested it could have been the foundations for a small bridge, though the bridge didn’t survive. Unfortunately the earthwork was destroyed in clay quarrying. The field-name Windmill Hill suggests the presence of a windmill there in the medieval or post-medieval period.

A couple of excavations have given some evidence of what the area would have looked like in the 19^th century. The Roebuck Inn is recorded in a map of 1770 but was demolished in 1904 with no record. An excavation in 2001 recovered the demolition material of the pub in land around The Gables. An excavation at Hill Farm in 2006 found some 19^th century farmyard ponds and pits, probably for watering animals and burying rubbish or storing grain. A brickworks, the Calvert works, was opened in 1900 and finally shut in 1991. Pits were dug to supply the brickworks with clay.