The Early Years
Some hundreds of years B.C. a race of people known as Silures came to Britain from the continent. They were a skilful race and, having worked their way across Britain and discovered the rich mineral deposits in the great forests of the west, decided to settle there. One of the colonies founded by the Silures was at Aricon, a place the British tribes had called Rose-town from the red sandstone rocks and soil. The Silures over-ran and intermarried with the existing British tribes, the earliest name of the tribe in this neighbourhood being Erching, which by corruption through the speech of the Silures became Aricon.
When the Romans conquered Britain they managed to capture Aricon and renamed it Ariconium. To the east of Ariconium the Romans built a small garrison which they named Estune or East-town. The Romans retained an uneasy occupation of Greater Britain for another 300 years but when finally they withdrew there was much fighting and jostling for kingships and territory. Ariconium was demolished and a new Rose-town or Ross was built nearer to the River Wye. Estune, however, remained and no doubt was a small village busy about its own business of wresting a living deep in what was then still the forest. In the Domesday Book Estune is described as consisting of two hides of land, which is somewhere around 240 acres.
Following the crowning of William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066 the land in Estune - now known as Eston – was given to Ansfid de Cormeiles and attached to the barony of Cormeiles for about a century. When the Cormeiles family could no longer bear the strain of heavy taxation and duty to supply men and materials to the King, Eston was sold to the Ingayns. This family, following a common practice, promptly added their name to Eston and so we have Eston Ingayn, or Aston Ingham as it finally became.
(Extracted from ‘The History of Aston Ingham’ by Margaret Watson and Peggy Laws)
