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Stonesfield is a village and civil parish about north of Witney in Oxfordshire, and about 10 miles (17 km) north-west of Oxford. The village is on the crest of an escarpment. The parish extends mostly north and north-east of the village, in which directions the land rises gently and then descends to the River Glyme at Glympton and Wootton about to the north-east. South of Stonesfield, below the escarpment, is the River Evenlode which touches the southern edge of the parish. At the centre of Stonesfield stands the 13th-century church of St James the Great as well as a Wesleyan chapel, Stonesfield Methodist Church, slightly further west. The village is known for Stonesfield slate, a form of Cotswold stone mined particularly as a roofing stone and also a rich source of fossils. The architecture in Stonesfield features many old Cotswold stone properties roofed with locally mined slate along with some late 20th-century buildings and several properties under construction. The 2011 Census recorded the parish's population as 1,527. [edit] History
For centuries the parish had one main open field for arable farming: Home Field, which was east of the village. Three others, Church Field, Callowe, and Jenner's Sarts, were much smaller, and an early 17th-century survey records that not every farmer had strips in Church Field. In 1232 the parish almost doubled in size by acquiring King's Wood, a nearby detached part of Bloxham parish. It was in this wood that people from Stonesfield created Callowe by clearing woodland, a process called assarting. By the time of the Hundred Rolls in the 1270s, every tenant in Stonesfield held assarted land. By the first decade of the 17th century Stonesfield had at least four fields. Church Field is taken to be ancient like Home Field,[1] but Jenner's Sarts was created by felling in Gerner's Wood.[1] It is not clear whether this field is the same as that called Gannett's Sarte in another source. By 1792 very little of Stonesfield's common land had been enclosed, and most of it was still worked by arable strip farming. By 1797 most of this had been enclosed and converted to pasture. Some common land remained in the parts of the parish closest to the village,[1] but this was enclosed in a land award of 1804. [edit] Research Tips
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