By 1086, Watlington - the parish in which the Watlington Hoard was found - was a substantial settlement of 54 households recorded in the Pyrton hundred across three lordships, including Robert d'Oilly's holding of 8 hides (3 of which were demesne/inland), demonstrating that the land around the hoard find-spot was already a well-organised, multi-owner estate landscape within two centuries of the hoard's burial. The Anglo-Saxon charter evidence goes back even further: a 9th-century grant by Æthelred of Mercia names Watlington explicitly, and a second charter (S 217) for adjacent Brightwell Baldwin records boundary features directly west of the hoard's location, placing the find area squarely within a documented pre-Conquest estate zone. The sub-settlement of Ingham, attested in two Anglo-Saxon charters and in Domesday Book (as Adingeham) within the ancient parish, and traditionally identified with Watcombe Manor - very close to the hoard's findspot - further anchors the immediate landscape in early medieval landholding records.

This passage, derived from the Victoria County History for Oxfordshire, documents the medieval ecclesiastical history of Watlington parish - the exact location where the Watlington Hoard was found in 2015. It reveals that the parish church of St Leonard was under the control of Oseney Abbey from at least 1129, that a rival Norman French abbey (Préaux) attempted to establish a competing chapel at Watcombe in the late 12th century to claim tithes from the Chiltern portion of the parish, and that the ancient parish (a vicarage in Aston Deanery) remained a single unit until Victorian boundary changes in 1854. This ecclesiastical framework - centred on a parish settled since at least the 6th century, in the hundred of Pirton - forms the direct historical context of the landscape in which the 9th-century hoard was deposited and later discovered.

This is the authoritative scholarly publication documenting the complete excavation, conservation, and archaeological analysis of the Watlington Hoard discovered in Oxfordshire in 2015. The work includes detailed chapters on the excavation methodology, the landscape archaeology of the Upper Thames Valley region where the hoard was found, and the historical context of 9th-century Oxfordshire, establishing the hoard's significance to understanding Anglo-Saxon and Viking activity in the county.