Wilcote

Coordinates: 51°50′06″N 1°27′47″W / 51.835°N 1.463°W / 51.835; -1.463

Wilcote is a hamlet about 3 ¹⁄₂ miles (5.6 km) north of Witney in Oxfordshire, England.

Wilcote was a hamlet of Cogges from at least the Middle Ages until the middle of the 19th century. It was then made a separate civil parish — one of the smallest in England. In 1932 Wilcote civil parish was absorbed into that of North Leigh.

Archaeology

Akeman Street Roman road passes through the northern part of the former parish. A Roman villa at Shakenoak Farm was excavated in the 1960s. The villa was built late in the 1st century AD, enlarged more than once but remained smaller and less opulent than the nearby North Leigh Roman Villa. Shakenoak villa was occupied until the middle of the 3rd century, when it seems to have been succeeded by a small farmhouse nearby that was occupied until about AD 420, shortly after the Roman withdrawal from Britain. The site was then abandoned and left unoccupied for about two centuries.

The Roman site was reoccupied from the 7th century until the middle of the 8th century, when the bodies of several men were buried there and the site was abandoned again. A Saxon charter of AD 1044 referring to "Yccenes feld, where the cnihtas lie" implies that these burials were remembered locally three centuries later.Yccenes is an Old English form of "Itchen", implying contact between Romano-Britons and Anglo-Saxons, and cnihtas means "servants" or "soldiers".