THERE has been a farm at Oxlease for centuries and it is only recently that other houses have been built nearby.

During the Middle Ages, Oxlease had been part of the Abbey’s Romsey estate and after the abbey closed, it was acquired by John Foster, along with much else of the convent’s Romsey lands. John’s holdings passed to his son Andrew, and as late as 1806, the relevant deeds were still in the hands of a Romsey solicitor.

In 1547 various men were required to dig a ditch between Le Oxlez and the Fysshlet, but the much later construction of the canal means that the route of this waterway is not apparent.

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(Image: Romsey Local History Society) Later in the 16th century, during the reign of Elizabeth I, William Smith and his wife were lessees of a barn and lands at Oxlease. They had paid their rent to a group of four men who claimed to be Foster’s heirs. Then two other men appeared and said they were the heirs of Foster and demanded that the rent be paid to them. Mr and Mrs Smith asked if they could pay their rent into court while its destination was being sorted out., Unfortunately no record of the outcome of this problem seems to exist.

In 1779 Oxlease and a number of other lands were held by Mr Tarver, one of Romsey’s brewers.

By 1845, Oxlease Farm was owned by John Fleming Esq. of South Stoneham whose tenant was George Smith. I wonder if he were descendent of the Elizabethan William Smith. George’s holding consisted of 51 ha (about 129 acres) and was made up of a mixture of land types, described as arable, meadow and pasture, and woodland. There is no mention of the wetland that is characteristic of much of modern day Fishlake Meadows so perhaps this was not then part of the holding.

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A century later, during World War 2, Mr A. R. Wills, Romsey’s nurseryman and tomato grower, acquired the farm which included Fishlake Meadows. The wet land was drained by Dutch engineers and the reeds replaced by potatoes. The pumps broke down in the 1980s and the land was flooded again. It had been rumoured that Hilliers had been thinking of buying the land and using it as a tree nursery, but this never came about.

Now the lowest part of the site is natural wetland, and the River Test has somewhere to store millions of gallons of water when it is in flood and gradually the land above the valley floor is being built over as Romsey town increases in size.