Photograph of brass plaque for Frederick John Staples Browne

St Beornwald of Bampton by John Blair 1984 He was an Anglo Saxon Saint and Bampton Church was originally called St Beornwald's
Bampton parish church was an Anglo-Saxon ‘old minster’. Scattered references show that St. Beornwald, described variously as ‘confessor’ and ‘priest and martyr’, was enshrined there from the mid 950s or earlier until the Reformation, and that the feast of his ‘deposition’ was celebrated on 21 December. A 14th-century gabled recess in the north transept may be part of his shrine; a monumental brass showing an ecclesiastic holding a crozier was possibly added in the early 15th century. It is suggested that Beornwald, who must have died between the mid 7th and mid 10th century, may have been head or founder of the minster community