Appropriately enough for a town once filled with shops owned by the Co-operative Society, (originally a coal supplier), Chipping Norton’s Museum occupies premises rented to it by today’s Co-op.

Up a flight of stairs opposite the Town Hall, and easily overlooked were it not for the window display, it’s a great introduction to everything that makes Chippy distinctive.

A helpfully organised records archive, including a name index, offers an excellent research tool for family historians, and those born and/or bred in the town will find the photographic postcards — many by the well-known Frank Packer — fascinating.

My guides to the collection were local history society chairman Alan Watkins, and fellow member David Nobbs, who describes himself as the museum’s general dogsbody, but is clearly a great deal more than that.

As often seems to be the case in small towns, the museum was founded through a chance donation. “In 1985” said David, “ a gentleman out at Chadlington — Tom Pitt — gave the local history society his family collection of farming implements (pictured), which were put on display in 1986 in the Baptist chapel schoolroom.”

You can see them all now in the present museum, including the “tweezers for removing chaff from beasts’ eyes”

(how on earth did they keep the ‘beast’ still?) and — look away now, dear reader, if you’re squeamish — the fleam for bleeding cattle.

“You’d choose the right size blade,” said David, “then line it up with a vein and tap it in using the special mallet.”

The museum is arranged in seven themed bays. As you come in, you learn about the town’s early history.

“The Romans didn’t have much to do with Chipping Norton,” David said. “Very little has been found — but we do have this stone head from Glyme Farm.”

In the Domesday Book the area is recorded as plain Norton — ‘town to the north’ — part of the manor of one Ernulf d’Hesdin. The ‘Chipping’ came a couple of centuries later from Old English ‘ceping’, a market.

A photograph shows the earthwork known as Castle Banks, which may date from this time, or slightly later, during the period of Stephen and Matilda.

“Nothing much is known about it,” said David. “Time Team has never been there! It is on private property near the church and whatever it was — possibly just a wooden palisade — it had gone before the end of the 16th century.”

Another illustration shows medieval burgage plots, stretching from High Street backwards to Albion Street (formerly Back Lane). The alley at the side of Gill’s ironmongery is an example of one of these long, thin cultivation strips.

Also medieval is the cellar underneath the Post Office, which can be seen through a panel in its floor. The photograph of it in the museum shows a vaulted stone ceiling and elaborately carved mullions.

“Again,” said David “nobody knows what it was for, though it looks monastic and was once thought to be so.”

The 18th century saw the beginnings of the industry for which the town has long been famous.

“The Blisses arrived and established a cottage industry in tweed in about 1755, using the abundance of wool, and water from the brook at the bottom of the town,” said Alan Watkins, whose own locally-made tweed suit, from 1967, is now a museum exhibit and looking as smart as the day it was made. “There’s nothing wrong with it at all,” he said, except that, unaccountably, the waistband appears to have shrunk.

“The Blisses gradually acquired looms and mills. The mill you see today was built in 1872 to replace one that burnt down.

“They made really good quality tweed.

A lot went to America for tilt cloth — the coverings for wagons — and it was used as blankets in railway carriages, which were unheated at that time.

“The mill’s best period came during the 1860s-70s, and it finally closed in 1980, which was a big loss to the town.”

Other displays in the section on industry are devoted to Hitchman’s Brewery on Albion Street, which stopped making beer in Chipping Norton in the 1930s, and to the Hub Iron Foundry, manufacturer of, among other things, the cast iron posts all over the town into which cattle fencing was slotted on market days. One of these can still be seen outside the Fox pub, near the museum.

Leisure pursuits are the focus of one of the bays, particularly baseball, which was hugely popular in the town for the first half of the last century, having been introduced by a colourful local character, Fred Lewis, as a game suitable for the scout pack he had formed. Adults took up the sport enthusiastically and in 1926, the town’s team beat the London Americans in a championship at Stamford Bridge.

A Friendly Society, the Old Elm Tree Lodge of the Oddfellows, also flourished, and is currently being revived: some examples of its regalia, velvet with gold thread, are on display. Its name came from the very large tree that was eventually felled to clear a site for the new Town Hall — a chiffonier made from its wood now stands in the museum.

The World Wars exhibit features a moving Book of Remembrance, with photos and biographical notes painstakingly researched by some of the volunteers on whom the museum relies for everything from staffing to furniture moving to fundraising.

In the same section is a photograph of George VI visiting the town in January 1940, to inspect the Durham Light Infantry, an occasion on which he was accompanied everywhere by the local scrap merchant’s black lurcher.

This dog took loyalty to the crown so seriously that when the king got into the car waiting to take him to his next engagement, it climbed in alongside him.

The hand-operated air raid siren will appeal particularly to children, as will the reconstruction of a kitchen from the early years of the 20th century — with plenty of intriguing domestic objects to examine — and the Victorian policeman’s truncheon that killed a man accidentally and set off a riot.

There is, of course, much else to be seen, and no more room to write about it — prospective visitors have two months before the museum goes into winter hibernation on the last Saturday of British Summer Time, October 25.

Chipping Norton Museum. Open Easter to the end of October, Tuesday–Saturday and Bank Holiday Mondays 2pm-4pm. Admission £1 (under-16s free; but must be accompanied by an adult)