Theale
Theale is a village and civil parish in West Berkshire, England. It is southwest of Reading and 10 miles east of Thatcham. The compact parish is bounded to the south and south-east by the Kennet & Avon Canal, to the north by a golf course, to the east by the M4 motorway and to the west by the A340 road.
Toponymy
The name is thought to come from the Old English þelu meaning planks. As with the village of Theale in Somerset, this probably refers to planks used to create causeways on marshes or flood plains. A local legend suggests the name Theale refers to the village's coaching inns, and its position as the first staging post on the Bath Road out of Reading – literally calling the village The ale.History
Romans
The old significance of the position of Theale is that it lay at the junction of two ancient natural routes, one following the Kennet Valley from east to west and another which exploited the valley of the River Pang to run at a low level through the Chiltern Hills from north to south via the Goring Gap. This latter route was taken by a Roman road which ran from Calleva Atrebatum north to Dorchester on Thames. Extrapolation of the known alignment from Silchester to near Ufton Nervet indicates a crossing point of the River Kennet just east of Tylemill Bridge. This Roman road has its equivalent in the modern A340 from Theale to Pangbourne.Roman remains were uncovered during the excavation of the Theale Old Gravel Pit, at the end of St Ives Close, for ten years after 1887. The Kennet Valley route, later the Bath Road, only became important after the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon borough of Reading in the 8th century. The Anglo-Saxons had abandoned Calleva Atrebatum, but the north to south route remained important to them as connecting the royal capital of Winchester with the boroughs of Old Basing near Basingstoke and Wallingford.
Middle Ages
From the early Middle Ages to the 19th century, Theale was mostly part of Tilehurst parish. The old parish boundaries around here were complicated, and the village was a chapelry, comprising a western outlier of this large and irregularly shaped parish. The odd parish boundaries by the river indicates that the valley bottom had been converted from swamp forest to flood-meadows or reed-beds for thatching by the start of the second millennium. The portion belonging to Englefield lay between the main river and a branch, called Holy Brook, which left the main course at Sheffield Mill and rejoined it at Reading Abbey. The name was allegedly because the abbey used the brook to power its corn mill and flush its toilets, and so engineered its course to ensure a good head of water.From before 1241 until the 1800s, Theale, unusually, gave its name to the hundred containing the parishes of Aldermaston, Bradfield, Burghfield, Englefield, Padworth, Purley, Stratfield Mortimer, Sulham, Sulhamstead Bannister, Tidmarsh, Ufton Nervet and Woolhampton. The oddity of this was that the village was not in the hundred, because Tilehurst parish was in the Hundred of Reading. The manor and church of Tilehurst belonged to Reading Abbey in the Middle Ages. However, the chapel at Theale did not but was part of land-holdings in Theale held by the nunnery of Goring Priory by 1291. The nuns also held the neighbouring manor of Sulham, but the chapel had some connection with the church at Englefield.
There is circumstantial evidence of a readjustment of boundaries between Sulham, Englefield and Tilehurst parishes and the possible transfer of Theale in the earlier Middle Ages. In the later Middle Ages, the abbey leased out many of its properties to ensure a cash income at a time when the economy was becoming increasingly cash-driven. The large manor of Tilehurst was subdivided, and a "manor", not actually legally functioning as one, called Beansheaf was in existence by 1390. This was named after a family farming land in the parish in the 13th century. The territory included Theale, but the manor-house was to the east of the present village and the site is now east of the M4, at the north end of Bourne Close. A housing estate in Holybrook parish preserves the name.
Civil War
Theale saw action in the English Civil War,. On 22 September 1643, soon after the First Battle of Newbury, the village was the site of a skirmish between Prince Rupert's Royalist forces and the Earl of Essex's Parliamentarians. Rupert attacked the Earl's forces from the rear as they were returning to London. According to contemporary reports, the Earl's forces – led by Colonel Middleton – held strong; up to 800 Royalist musketeers and 60 horses were killed, and at least eight Parliamentarian units, a minimum of 800 men, were also killed, and were buried on the spot in Deadman's Lane. The Royalist forces retreated, and the Earl left Theale on the morning of 23 September, heading to Reading where his forces recovered from fatigue. Thomas Fairfax marched through Theale on 1 May 1645, en route from Windsor to Salisbury. Evidence for the encounter came to light in 1878, when a sword with the remains of an iron hilt was found near Deadman's Lane. A housing estate in the south-west quadrant of the village has the street names Cavalier Close and Roundhead Road in memory of this skirmish.Road transport
es began to run through from London to Bath and Bristol in the mid-17th century, soon after the civil war ended. In 1667, the first through coach was advertised as The Flying Machine in an advertising poster:All those desirous to pass from London to Bath, or any other place on their Road, let them repair to the Bell Savage Inn on Ludgate Hill in London and the White Lion Inn at Bath, at both which places they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which performs the whole journey in Three Days, and sets forth at five in the morning. Passengers to pay One Pound five Shillings each.In response to increased traffic, the first section of the Bath Road, between Reading and Theale, was made into a turnpike by Act of Parliament in 1714. The rest of the road from London to Bristol was to follow in the next four decades, leading to a golden age of coach travel.
As the Bath Road thus became an established trade route and turnpike between the south-west and south-east of England, Theale became a staging post and as such was known for its numerous coaching inns. A stage was the distance a coach would run before changing horses, and the staging post was where the horses were rested and refreshed before doing the stage again in the opposite direction. A stage was usually seven to fifteen miles long, depending on topography, so Reading to Theale, at five miles, was a short stage and would have taken an hour. The 18th century highwayman, Dick Turpin, is said to have hidden in a secret room in The Old Lamb inn on Church Street on numerous occasions. In 1802, topographer James Baker chronicled the village, en route from Reading to Newbury, and described it as "inconsiderable". However, the wealth engendered by a continued growth in road traffic meant that the village entered its most prosperous era, expanding substantially in the earlier 19th century before the arrival of the railway. The growth of the village led to the creation of a separate ecclesiastical parish and the consecration of a new church in 1832.
The road came back to life with the invention of the motor car, and the new status of the Bath Road as London's highway to Bristol was demonstrated on 23 April 1900, when the Automobile Club held a motor car reliability demonstration involving a cavalcade from London to Calcot Park, the home of Alfred Harmsworth who sponsored the event. Calcot Park was then just north of Theale parish. For the next seventy years, all the motor traffic between London, Reading and Bristol passed along Theale High Street. The development response was slow, however, and only two small housing estates were developed in the inter-war period. The first was Lambfields west of the church, and the second comprised Blossom Avenue and The Crescent in the north. Lambfields was named after the Old Lamb inn.
Canal
The Kennet Navigation opened in 1723 from Reading to Newbury. The Kennet and Avon Canal, extending from Newbury to Bath, was opened in 1810. Theale had its wharf at a location called Sheffield, in Burghfield parish and next to Sheffield Lock. Here, the road to Burghfield village crosses the canal by a single-lane swing bridge, now controlled by traffic lights. The canal was locally re-opened from the Thames at Reading to Hungerford wharf in July 1974. However, full restoration of the entire length to Bath was only completed in 2004. In 1983, West Berkshire Council declared the Sheffield Bridge Conservation Area to protect the swing bridge, Sheffield Lock and Sheffield Mill. In 2000, the canal towpath became part of National Cycle Route 4. It has the legal status of a cruiseway, a waterway devoted to recreational boat traffic, since 2011.Railway
On 21 December 1847, the Great Western Railway opened railway station on the northern branch of the Berks and Hants Railway, from to. This immediately halted the coach traffic and the turnpike road company's income, and crippled the canal company which had to slash rates and be henceforth content with limited local traffic. The canal sold out to the railway in 1852, which maintained it in operation until 1951. Then, a collapsed aqueduct closed it as a through route, although it was never formally abandoned. The railway line was extended to in 1864, and became part of a new direct GWR main line to Devon and Cornwall in 1906. Theale would have been one of the towns and villages dependent on the coaching trade, for which the arrival of a railway was a disaster. This is shown by successive editions of the Ordnance Survey, which show that the village entered stasis and did not grow until the 20th century.From 1847 to the early years of the 20th century, the village had to make do economically with local farming, a brewery and gravel extraction. The last named was, however, greatly facilitated by the railway and a large pit near the village, Theale Old Gravel Pit, opened in 1887 with its own railway siding. The 1898 Ordnance Survey map also shows a small gasworks next to the station, and a ropewalk off Station Road near its junction with the High Street. There is evidence that local farmers were growing hemp to make into rope. The railway to Devizes was closed in 1963, and Theale lost its local service to that town.