The Ascott Martyrs were 16 women from the village of Ascott-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, England who were imprisoned in 1873 for their role in founding a branch of the National Union of Agricultural Workers.
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The rest of the women’s children were cared for by neighbours and the Milton-under-Wychwood branch of the Union, while the women were imprisoned.
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Mr Hambridge of Crown Farm, Ascott sacked his men who had joined the union and employed men from the neighbouring village of Ramsden as strikebreakers.
In the early 16th century the abbey (along with the manor of Wing) was seized by the Crown and given to Cardinal Wolsey, however not long after it was seized once again in the Dissolution of the Monasteries and given to Lord Dormer.
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The former abbey, now a house, itself once featured additions that were attributed to Inigo Jones.
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In the late 19th century members of the Rothschild banking family began to acquire estates in the area, including Ascott.
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In 1873 a farm house in the parish known as Ascott Hall was bought by Baron Mayer de Rothschild he gave it to his nephew Leopold de Rothschild who employed the architect George Devey to enlarge the property into a substantial country house.
Shipton-under-Wychwood is on the Oxfordshire Way footpath, which can be used to walk north-westwards up the Evenlode Valley to Bruern Abbey and Bledington, or eastwards down the valley to Charlbury.
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William Langland, the conjectured author of Piers Plowman, is known to have been a tenant in Shipton-under-Wychwood where he died.
As early as the 7th century there was an abbey near the village at Ascott, that had been built by an unknown member of the House of Wessex royal family and given to a Benedictine convent in Angers.
The region was then still a rural region on the edge of the city, and Matthews planned out a bucolic community and named it after Wychwood in his native Oxfordshire.
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It is considered part of the overall Wychwood official neighbourhood as designated by the City of Toronto.