Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

THE HISTORY OF BUCKDEN 83 CHAPTER 2/ THE HISTORY OF BUCKDEN Susan B. Edgington The first chairman of Buckden Local History Society brings her popular Buckden: A Short History and Plan (1980) into the twenty-first century. here are no written documents to give us clues as to just why the village we call Buckden is situated in this spot. We can only make guesses about when it was first settled. The oldest relic of human activity found within the parish bounds is an Acheulean axe, that is, a flint tool of the early Stone Age period. However this one survival is not very helpful: it might have been used here by Palaeolithic humans – or it might have been brought here by the movements of ice or water in the last of the ice ages. 1 Later traces of human occupation in prehistoric times are ‘indistinct rectilinear enclosures’ which have been distinguished in the river gravels by aerial survey and are interpreted as ancient workings: Iron Age relics have been recovered from the gravel pits. Roman Britain Traces of Roman settlement have been found all over Buckden: pottery has been dug up during gravel extraction, in the garden of the Red House (in 1934), and in Perry Road when the High Street bypass was built. There are rumours that during the building of houses in the area of the village called the Hoo (an Anglo-Saxon word for burial ground) cremation burials were discovered, which would argue for a substantial settlement. A formal excavation just east of Stirtloe was carried out in 1941, and finds included bones, pottery sherds, a corroded spearhead, millstone fragments, and an elephant tooth (a souvenir?). The conclusion was that there had been a settlement there, probably as early as the second century AD . Forty years later, in the summer of 1982, a dig was carried out east of the Towers, following some surface finds, and it yielded unmistakable evidence of a Roman villa right in the middle of the (later) village: tesserae from a floor mosaic; fragments of a hypocaust tile (a hollow brick for underfloor central heating); a scatter of plaster from the walls, plus the usual pottery sherds and part of a quern for grinding corn. The site was too small to gain any impression of size, but it was certainly the property of a wealthy person, most likely a farm house managing an estate which may well have had the same boundaries as the later parish. It may have been occupied through to the end of the period of Roman settlement in 410 AD . Anglo-Saxon Buckden What happened in Buckden between the departure of the Romans early in the fifth century and the first written record of the village in 1086 is a mixture of deduction and speculation. The first clue to the village’s pre-Conquest history is its name. The English Place-names Society lists sixteen variants or spellings: in fact the present version, Buckden, though recorded as early as 1279, only recently became the accepted one. Older people still refer to the village less elegantly as ‘Bugden’. Whatever its spelling, the origin of the name is reasonably certain. ‘Dene’ is the Old English word for valley, and ‘Bucge’ the name of a person: so ‘Bucge’s valley’. An interesting point is that Bucge is only known as a feminine name, so we are probably looking at a settlement established by a female tribal leader. From the place-name, and others nearby, it is probable that this area of Huntingdonshire was settled early in the post-Roman period by the Angles, a Germanic tribe who penetrated eastern England by way of the rivers: in early times it was much easier to get about by water than overland. Disembarking on the west bank of the Ouse, somewhere near the present river crossing, the invaders would see that the land nearby was low-lying and liable to flood, but there was higher ground beyond, rising to about 150 feet, which offered the two necessities for settlement: fresh water and plentiful timber. It was also good agricultural land, for both plough and pasture. It had been farmed by the Romans, but whether there were still native Britons in the area is unknown: if there were, they were either displaced or assimilated without 1 For more about the axe see entry on Acheulian hand axes in the A to Z Section T