The Bequest

On 1 April 1591 Leafield chapel received an important endowment from Sir Henry Unton, then Deputy Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, who died in 1596 and is commemorated by a splendid monument in the Unton chapel at Faringdon church. Sir Henry gave to a committee of 6 Trustees the chapel and the churchyard (then very much smaller than it is now), together with other property in Leafield, the income from which was to be used to maintain the chapel.

The Trustees

The original Trustees were Giles Fitchet alias Toms, Lyonell Woddard, John Toms, James Cove, Richard Baskavile and William Hitchman. From time to time, when death had depleted the number of Trustees, replacements were appointed. They did not always have 6 members of the committee; in 1725 there were a total of 14 and in 1774, when of the Trustees only Solomon Goffe was still alive, 12 more were appointed.

The Unton cottages

The Unton Bequest included a pair of cottages standing to the south of the lower road round the Greens. By the nineteenth century the cottages had been allowed to fall into a very bad state of repair and by 1879 the Trustees found that they were having to pay out more on essential repairs ordered by the Rural Sanitary Authority than the entire income from the bequest. The Trustees therefore decided to sell the cottages, a decision which caused a major village scandal. The minutes of the relevant Vestry Meeting are unusually long and contain a very defensive justification of the action proposed. But when the auction took place, the optimistically high reserve price was not reached; the cottages remained unsold and eventually fell into ruins. There are now two twentieth century houses on the site.