French prisoners of war in Odiham

A parole town

During the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793 to 1815), Britain held thousands of French prisoners. Ordinary soldiers and sailors went to prisons like Portchester Castle or the prison hulks in Portsmouth harbour. Officers could give their word of honour (their parole) not to escape, and in return were allowed to live in small towns, renting rooms or whole houses. Hampshire's parole towns included Alresford, Andover, Basingstoke, Bishop's Waltham, Hambledon, Petersfield and Odiham.

One local family-history site says Odiham was a parole depot from 1803 to 1812, and that the 1811 baptism register mentions 22 houses occupied by French prisoners. We haven't seen the register ourselves, but it fits everything else we've read.

Life on parole, in a prisoner's own words

The best source we've found is the memoir of Joseph de Bonnefoux, a young French naval officer captured when the frigate Belle-Poule was taken in 1806. He was moved to Odiham from Thame in September 1806, after a row with the agent there, and his memoirs (published in French and free on Project Gutenberg) describe the rules: officers had to stay within a mile of the town, be home by sunset, and report to the government agent twice a week. Britain paid each officer eighteen pence a day, whatever his rank.

He liked Odiham better than Thame. He found the locals more settled and less hostile, and the prisoners there cheerful and busy: they had set up a philharmonic society, a Masonic lodge and a theatre. The prisoners built and decorated the theatre themselves, wrote and arranged the plays, made the costumes and played in the orchestra. "Les Anglais en raffolaient," he says, the English loved it, and some came from London to see the shows. He joined the Masons too, but admits he found the ceremonies so boring that he never wanted to go to another lodge after Odiham.

His time here ended badly. After about a year he was ordered to the prison hulks at Chatham, slipped his guard by climbing out of a window at the George, and hid for three days in a small house rented by French prisoners. Later, after escaping from the hulks, he made his way back to Odiham, was caught in a house at the edge of town that had been built to let to the French, and was held in the town prison (very likely the Bridewell) in irons. It's a wonderful, slightly unreliable, first-person story, and it puts real people on Odiham's streets.

The Masonic lodges

Lists of French prisoner lodges include one called "Enfants de Mars et de Neptune" at Odiham in 1811. A recent article in the journal French History (vol. 40) also mentions a lodge at Odiham called the "Ordre du lion", whose rules made members swear hatred of the British, and notes that a Baron Simon, on parole in Odiham, was elected Grand Master of the Masons at Portchester Castle, forty miles away.

Frenchman's Oak

On the west side of London Road, about a mile from the centre, stood an old tree called Frenchman's Oak. It had fallen by January 2025, when the parish council agreed to back a project to replace it. The local story is that it marked the one-mile limit of the officers' parole. That fits the one-mile rule Bonnefoux describes, but both the parish council and the Odiham Society say "reputed", and we'd say the same.

See it

The French graves are on our Odiham heritage trail. The George, where Bonnefoux made his escape, is now Bel and the Dragon and is in our Odiham guide. Back to the Odiham history hub.

Walk there (Google Maps)All Saints' Church

Walk there (Google Maps)The George (Bel and the Dragon)