Up until recently I have known Cromwell’s House only as the lovely old stone building with its grey panelled door and mullioned windows that you pass on your way to the Victoria Arms in Old Marston. There’s a blue plaque on the outside, for this was famously where negotiations for the treaty that ended the siege of Oxford were conducted in June 1646, in effect handing what had been a Royalist stronghold over to the Parliamentary forces of Oliver Cromwell.
But today I am visiting for another reason. For while over the years since the Civil War, the place has housed amongst others, prisoners of war, six pauper families and the renowned Irish classicist Eric Dodds who used it to conduct research into the paranormal alongside his wife Bet, and their pet parrot William, these days it plays host to something very different. Here you will find a small bakery called Paindemain, run single handedly by Catherine Paxton from a high-ceilinged space with exposed rafters at the back, built originally as a library for the medieval historian, George Clark.
“I sometimes think about baking as a second chapter activity” smiles Catherine in reference to what would have once been book lined shelves now crammed with mixing bowls, wooden boards and state of the art steel baking tins. Apt for someone who studied medieval history herself before entering the world of senior management first for the NHS and then the University. Like so many it was during the pandemic that she decided to reevaluate her life. Signing up to do a six-month residential diploma in baking at The School of Artisan Food in North Nottinghamshire, followed by a year of running a bake-shop out of a horse lorry at Sandy Lane Organic Farm near Thame, before fitting out this small room at the back of her home.
It’s here that I join her in the early hours of a cold December morning as she prepares her weekly orders, the comforting aroma of freshly baked bread today laced with the sweetness of festive spices for Christmas buns and biscuits seeping through the cracks and crevices, permeating every nook and cranny of the old dwelling. Sending out her menu to subscribers on a Sunday, prepping essential ingredients like cinnamon butter and frangipane on Wednesday, dough making on a Thursday. All baking takes place on the Friday, ready to be collected from the back door all neatly packed in paper bags from midmorning onwards.
There’s a real physicality to Catherine’s work, all that lifting, and mixing, rolling and cutting alongside the heat of the oven; there’s a dexterity of hand that’s needed and an understanding of the inherent quality and character of the ingredients she is shaping. And although she insists she is still learning this age-old profession, I have only to taste the results of this morning’s output, a slice of seeded sourdough slathered with butter and homemade strawberry jam to know that Catherine is a master baker.
But she also has a trump card.
For with every menu comes a piece of writing – a preamble if you like to the day’s offering. She might tell you for instance how she came about the name Paindemain. “It a medieval English name for bread,” she says. ‘White was his face as payndemayn’, wrote Chaucer to describe Sir Thopas in his Canterbury Tales, the word a mix of French and Latin. Pain (bread) and of the domain – the finest white flour made from the crops belonging to the Lord of the Manor. “Flour is linked to the flower of the grain like chivalry,” explains Catherine. “And it would have been leavened by the yeasts skimmed off after brewing. This is called barm, and its unpredictability gives us the word barmy.”
Or she might tell you about the origins of The Banbury cake, what caused the Oxford bread riots or that the word ‘company’ means ‘with bread’. They give context, a grounding in time and place if you like. And so I am delighted to publish three of these preambles, the third accompanying the Christmas menu she has posted today. A brilliant way of conversing with her online customers as well as channelling her inner historian. They are all equally delicious.
It seems a happy coincidence that my microbakery is in Mill Lane. The Hundred Rolls reveal that in 1279 one Hugh de Molendino held a mill at Marston. If you mentally extend the current Mill Lane on a map in the direction of Elsfield, you come to Sescut Farm where a water mill (presumably Hugh’s), powered by the Cherwell, was milling flour at least into the fifteenth century. All traces of the mill were obliterated by dredging to drain Otmoor in the two world wars. The ubiquity of my street name hints at the thousands of mills we have lost. You can find maps depicting the 186 attested wind and water mills of Oxfordshire in a wonderful resource prepared by Combe Mill. And there are chances to see the gloriously restored Wheatley Mill in action during the summer months.
It’s 1800 and the Gentleman’s Magazine carries a profile of Marston. The village is untroubled by gentrification, with no person resident above the rank of a yeoman. ‘Luxury has not yet extended to Marston’ reflects the author of the article, noting that even the leading families – the Simses, the Loders and the Bleays – live frugally. Yet perhaps it depends on how you define luxury and what you take to constitute the good life. Mr Joseph Bleay of the White Hart combines his farming with running both an alehouse and bakery. A solitary fisherman living in a hut by the banks of the Cherwell can catch pike, perch, chubb, eels, and a prized sort of roach called a ‘finscale’, with delicious meat. In Oxford, one hundred Marston crayfish retail for three shillings. Marston’s numerous orchards yield ‘a great variety of good fruit’ and the fertile fields produce cereals and pulses, with the beans singled out for special commendation. There are ‘house lambs’ aplenty, mostly Berkshires, but the premium meat product is the locally cured bacon which is copious, excellent quality and, like the crayfish, greatly appreciated in Oxford where it is not just the scholars’ minds which are hungry. It all sounds vastly more alluring than the offerings of the Croft Road Co-op.
The lawyer Unton Croke started building his house in Mill Lane, Marston in the first half of the 1620s. So, it would still have been a new build when General Fairfax made it his headquarters during the 1645 Siege of Oxford. As one of its current occupants, I wish his name had attached to the house instead of that of his deputy and the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Fairfax was a poet, soldier, and Yorkshireman and, moreover, the owner of the horse ridden by Charles II to his coronation. However, Cromwell gets the nod here. He certainly visited on 22 May 1645 and for a spell in May-June 1646 when the Treaty of Oxford was being negotiated. In the year we moved in, I turned forty and among my birthday gifts was a reproduction of the slightly warty Gaspar de Crayer portrait of Cromwell. Over the years we have enjoyed placing a jaunty sprig of evergreen over him, as revenge for his well-known banning of Christmas. Deeper research, however, reveals this to be fake news: while his religious sentiments mean he probably supported the successive moves from 1644 onwards to curb the traditionally boisterous celebration of Christmas, he left no recorded comment on them and was certainly not their active proponent. Puritans considered the Anglican Christmas rituals papist, decried the decking of halls with holly and ivy, and frowned upon the drinking, gaming, and joyful misrule which characterised the Twelve Days of Christmas. They attempted to make Christmas a season of fasting rather than feasting and in 1647 soldiers in the capital confiscated any celebratory foodstuffs they could lay hands upon.
Be thankful, therefore, that you can enjoy a Paindemain mince pie this week, free from fear of military intervention. Mine is vegetarian-friendly, unlike its meaty seventeenth-century predecessor. Lady Elinor Fetiplace of Appleton Manor in Oxfordshire documented her ‘receipt’ which combined dried fruit, spice, sugar, orange peel and rosewater with finely chopped mutton and beef suet, a rather Moroccan-sounding melange. I can imagine such a pie nicely filling the not-really-hungry-gap on Christmas Day Evening and if you would like to try your hand at them, you will find instructions here.
You can subscribe to Paindemain by visiting the website
Main picture: Catherine outside the bakery in the early hours.
Catherine with a batch of wholemeal.
New York Deli rye, scored to control the way the dough expands in the oven.
Making focaccia – the word derived from the Latin meaning ‘hearth’.
Today it is flavoured with potato, caramelised onion, and topped with cheese and nigella seeds.
Fresh out of the oven.
These are called Brotforms, ecological beds from Germany made from wood pulp, used to help shape the sourdough overnight.
Glazing the Christmas cinnamon knots
Speculaas, from the Dutch word meaning ‘desire’ or ‘pleasure’ – a biscuit baked with cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger and cardamom.
Cromwell’s House
