Cirencester ( , ) is a market town and civil parish in the Cotswold District of Gloucestershire, England. It lies on the River Churn, a tributary of the Thames. Cirencester is the eighth largest settlement in Gloucestershire and the largest town within the Cotswolds. It is the home of the Royal Agricultural University, the oldest agricultural college in the English-speaking world, founded in 1840. The town had a population of 20,229 in 2021. The town is north-west of Swindon, south-east of Gloucester, west of Oxford and north-east of Bristol.
The Roman name for the town was Corinium, which is thought to have been associated with the ancient British tribe of the Dobunni, having the same root word as the River Churn. The earliest known reference to the town was by Ptolemy in AD 150. The town's Corinium Museum has an extensive Roman collection.
Etymology
Cirencester's name is first attested by Ptolemy in around 150 AD, though the earliest surviving manuscripts are from the thirteenth century. These give various slightly different spellings, of which the original seems to have been (). The etymology of this name is, however, unknown.The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society, ed. by Victor Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), s.v. CORINIUM; . The same name is found in the River Churn, which passes through the town (and which, with the addition of the Old English word ('river') in turn gave its name to North Cerney, South Cerney, and Cerney Wick).The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society, ed. by Victor Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), s.v. CIRENCESTER; .
Corinum may have persisted as Caer Cori in Brittonic as stated by Asser. Later it was known in the form of Cair Ceri in writings of Nennius and Cirenceaster in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a text which took its present form in the later ninth century). Other Old English forms include Cirrenceaster, Cirneceaster or Cyrneceaster (dative Cirrenceastre, Cirneceastre, Cyrneceastre), where ceaster means "fort" or "fortress". (In Latin: Cirrenceastre adiit, qui Britannice Cairceri nominatur, quae est in meridiana parte Huicciorum.) The Old English c was pronounced . The Normans mispronounced the sound as , resulting in the modern name Cirencester (). The form , spelled Cirencester or Ciceter, was once used locally. This pronunciation is humorously highlighted in a 1928 limerick from Punch:
These forms are now very rarely used, while many local people abbreviate the name to Ciren ().. Today, it is usually (as it is spelt) or , although occasionally it is , or .
History
Roman Corinium
Cirencester is known to have been an important early Roman area, along with St Albans and Colchester, and the town includes evidence of significant area roadworks. The Romans built a castra (fort) where the Fosse Way crossed the Churn, to hold two quingenary (i.e. 500 men) alae tasked with helping to defend the provincial frontier around AD 49, and native Dobunni were drawn from Bagendon, a settlement to the north, to create a civil settlement near the fort. When the frontier moved to the north after the conquest of Wales, this fort was closed and its fortifications levelled around the year 70, but the town persisted and flourished under the name Corinium.
Even in Roman times, there was a thriving wool trade and industry, which contributed to the growth of Corinium. A large forum and basilica were built over the site of the fort, and archaeological evidence shows signs of further civic growth. There are many Roman remains in the surrounding area, including several Roman villas near the villages of Chedworth and Withington. When a defensive wall was built around the Roman city in the late 2nd century, it enclosed , making Corinium the second-largest city by area in Roman Britain. The details of the provinces of Britain following the Diocletian Reforms around 296 remain unclear, but Corinium is now generally thought to have been the capital of Britannia Prima. Some historians would date to this period the pillar erected by the governor Lucius Septimus to the god Jupiter, a local sign of the pagan reaction against Christianity during the principate of Julian the Apostate.
Cirencester Amphitheatre still exists in an area known as the Querns to the south-west of the town, but has only been partially excavated. Investigations in the town show that it was fortified in the 5th or 6th centuries.
Post-Roman and Saxon
Linguist Andrew Breeze claims that Gildas received his later education in Cirencester in the early 6th century, showing that it was still able to provide an education in Latin rhetoric and law at that time.Andrew Breeze, 'Gildas and the Schools of Cirencester', The Antiquaries Journal, 90 (2010), p. 135 Possibly this was the palace of one of the British kings defeated by Ceawlin in 577.
In the 7th century, Cirencester was the site of the Battle of Cirencester, this time between the Mercian king Penda and the West Saxon kings Cynegils and Cwichelm in 628.Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sub anno 628.
The minster church of Cirencester, founded in the 9th or 10th century, was probably a royal foundation. It was made over to Augustinian canons in the 12th century and replaced by the great abbey church.
Norman At the Norman Conquest in 1066, the royal manor of Cirencester was granted to the Earl of Hereford, William Fitz-Osbern, but by 1075 it had reverted to the Crown. The manor was granted to Cirencester Abbey, founded by Henry I in 1117, and following half a century of building work during which the minster church was demolished, the abbey church was finally dedicated in 1176. The manor was granted to the Abbey in 1189, although a royal charter dated 1133 speaks of burgesses in the town. The abbots obtained charters in 1215 and 1253 for fairs during the octaves of All Saints and St Thomas the Martyr, and the significant wool trade gave these great importance.
The struggle of the townsmen to gain the rights and privileges of a borough for Cirencester probably began with the grant of 1189, when they were amerced for a false presentment, meaning that they had presented false information. Four inquisitions during the 13th century supported the abbot's claims, yet the townspeople remained unwavering in their quest for borough status: in 1342, they lodged a Bill of complaint in Chancery. Twenty townspeople were ordered to Westminster, where they declared under oath that successive abbots had bought up many burgage tenements, and made the borough into an appendage of the manor, depriving it of its separate court. They claimed that the royal charter that conferred on the men of Cirencester the liberties of Winchester had been destroyed 50 years earlier, when the abbot had bribed the burgess who held the charter to give it to him, whereupon the abbot had had it burned. In reply, the abbot refuted these claims, and the case passed on to the King's Bench. When ordered to produce the foundation charter of his abbey the abbot refused, apparently because that document would be fatal to his case, and instead played a winning card. In return for a fine of £300, he obtained a new royal charter confirming his privileges and a writ of supersedeas.
The townspeople continued in their fight; in return for their aid to the Crown against the earls of Kent and Salisbury, Henry IV in 1403 gave the townsmen a Merchant's Guild, although two inquisitions reiterated the abbot's rights. The struggle between the abbot and the townspeople continued, with the abbot's privileges confirmed in 1408–1409 and 1413; in 1418 the abbot finally removed this thorn in his side when the guild merchant was annulled. In 1477, parliament declared that Cirencester was not corporate. After several unsuccessful attempts to re-establish the guild merchant, the government of the town was vested in the bailiff of the Lord of the manor in 1592.
Tudor As part of the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, Henry VIII ordered the total demolition of the Abbey buildings. Today only the Norman Arch and parts of the precinct wall remain above ground, forming the perimeter of a public park in the middle of town. Despite this, the freedom of a borough continued to elude the townspeople, and they only saw the old lord of the manor replaced by a new lord of the manor as the king acquired the abbey's title. Cirencester became a parliamentary borough in 1572, returning two members, although this was deprived of representation in 1885.
Sheep rearing, wool sales, weaving and woollen broadcloth and cloth-making were the main strengths of England's trade in the Middle Ages, and not only the abbey but many of Cirencester's merchants and clothiers gained wealth and prosperity from the national and international trade. The tombs of these merchants can be seen in the parish church, while their fine houses of Cotswold stone still stand in and around Coxwell Street and Dollar Street. Their wealth funded the rebuilding of the nave of the parish church in 1515–1530, to create the large building sometimes referred to as the "Cathedral of the Cotswolds". Other wool churches can be seen in neighbouring Northleach and Chipping Campden.
Civil War The Civil War came to Cirencester in February 1643 when Royalists and Parliamentarians came to blows in the streets. Over 300 were killed, and 1,200 prisoners were held captive in the church. The townsfolk supported the Parliamentarians but gentry and clergy were for the old order, so that when Charles I of England was executed in 1649 the minister, Alexander Gregory, wrote on behalf of the gentry in the parish register, "O England what did'st thou do, the 30th of this month".
At the end of the war, King Charles II spent the night of 11 September 1651 in Cirencester, during his escape after the Battle of Worcester on his way to France.
Modern history
At the end of the 18th century, Cirencester was a thriving market town, at the centre of a network of turnpike roads with easy access to markets for its produce of grain and wool. From 1461, Cirencester Grammar School provided a grammar school education for those who could afford it, and businesses thrived in the town, which was the market town for the surrounding area.
In 1789, the opening of the Cirencester branch (or "arm") of the Thames and Severn Canal provided access to markets further afield, by way of a link through the River Thames. In 1841, a branch railway line was opened to Kemble to provide a link to the Great Western Railway at Swindon. The Midland and South Western Junction Railway opened a station at Watermoor in 1883. Cirencester thus was served by two railway lines until the 1960s.
The loss of the canal and the direct rail link encouraged dependency on road transport. An inner ring road system was completed in 1975, in an attempt to reduce congestion in the town centre, which has since been augmented by an outer bypass with the expansion of the A417 road. Coaches depart from London Road for Victoria Coach Station in central London and Heathrow Airport, taking advantage of the M4 Motorway. Kemble station, which lies to the west of the town, is served by fast trains from via .
The passing of the Local Government Act 1894 at last brought into existence the town's first independent elected body, the Cirencester Urban District Council. A reorganisation of local government in 1974 replaced the Urban District Council with the present two-tiers of Cotswold District Council and Cirencester Town Council, sitting below Gloucestershire County Council.