Steventon is a small quiet village in the Hampshire borough of Basingstoke and Deane, surrounded by farms and woodland. It lies between the villages of Oakley to the east, Overton to the west, Ashe to the North and North Waltham to the south.
Steventon is recorded as a manor in the Domesday Book (1086), and there was certainly a manor here in Saxon times, which may have been in existence for several hundred years. At the time of Doomsday there is no mention of a church at Steventon although churches were recorded at the nearby villages of Ashe and Deane. It is possible that there was a Saxon church at Steventon, but we have no record of it. Alternatively there may instead have been a Saxon cross, around which the villagers would have buried their dead and travelling priests would have held religious services for the villagers.
Jane Austen was born in Steventon on the 16th December 1775. Steventon was her home for the first 25 years of her life providing inspiration for her novels “Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey” were penned here.