The Bartholomew Room stands in the Market Square at the heart of Eynsham and has been a focal point at every season of the year for centuries, presiding over a calendar that includes Eynsham Morris dance on May Day, Eynsham Artweeks, Eynsham Carnival and Flower Festival, Remembrance Sunday and the Christmas lights.
The building was bought for the people of Eynsham with money raised to mark the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1977. Jubilee Chairman Don Chapman recounts a year that lasted almost five.
The scene above with a market in the foreground dates from the early 1980s - the old market cross was replaced in February 1991 - but would have changed little in living memory.
History of the Bartholomew Room
Extract from the Eynsham Record No 2 (1986) pp 16-19 by William Bainbridge
The Eynsham Market House, rather unfairly known as ‘The Bartholomew Room’ was, according to the Trustees of the Bartholomew School, ‘..originally built by public subscription upon land granted by the Lord of the Manor in 1701.’ (Information supplied by the Ministry of Education). The earliest ‘Charity Board’ preserved in the upstairs room is dated 1703 and records the various benefactors and their gifts, among them being John Bartholomew, who presented a mere £3. The misnomer came about in the reading of his will of 1700; Bartholomew, who died in 1724, aged 52, left £350 to educate ten boys, who wore as a distinguishing mark an armband with a brass “B”. He thus was responsible for the education and not for the building, although according to another board he also donated ‘2/6 per week for tenn poor widdowers and widdows for ever’.
Originally the room upstairs was supported on pillars, free standing, as in other market houses, such as Market Harborough (1614), Tetbury (1655), Wallingford (1670), Wootton Bassett (1700), etc., the spaces beneath providing an open-air shelter for the market folk. A late 18th century drawing of the Market Cross in the Oxford Central Library reveals in the background part of the House in its original state, showing pillars slender enough to have been made of wood, as were the former stone-built Assembly Rooms at Barnet, although the closest surviving equivalent at Faringdon has pillars of stone.
When accommodation was needed in 1814 to house the new-acquired fire engine (its machinery is dated 1843 however), the failing wooden pillars were presumably replaced by seven stout open arches of stone, which appear in the 1826 drawing entitled ‘Market House at Eynsham, Oxfordshire’ by JC Buckler (1793-1894) in the Bodleian Library, and reproduced in the Eynsham Record, No.1, p.20. The two building periods are even now denoted by the quality of the stone courses, the original and upper ones being better laid (in ‘coursed rubble’) and the later added ones below (in ‘random rubble’), the division being a horizontal band of stone. Later, when the market decayed, the arches were filled in, apart from the doorway and the five lunettes; it will be noted that the north-west arch is wider than the others, and this marks the position of the fire-engine house, requiring large wooden doors, visible in old postcards of the High Street. In 1826 the roof sported a decorative finial and weathervane which unfortunately have not survived.
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