Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

THE HISTORY OF BUCKDEN 85 operated, on North Field, West Field, South Field and Mill Field, with the lord of the manor and the villagers all ploughing strips of land in each field. And what about the people who lived in Buckden during these centuries? Almost all of their names are lost, and even when known by name, their activities are forgotten (see Chapter 20 ). Famous visiting bishops included St Hugh and Bishop Grosseteste. The inhabitants of the manor house can be traced from Nicholas de Stukely who leased it in 1380 from the bishop – the Victoria County History lists his successors. But the manorial records, which could have given details of the day-to-day management of village affairs, survive only from the end of the middle ages (and are kept in Lincoln). That being so the only individuals whose deeds live after them are the outstanding miscreants who got their names into the national archives. One such was an outstanding debtor – no less than the vicar of Buckden, Simon, who on 17 July 1337 admitted that he owed a London hosier, Robert son of Wiillam de Taverner, £24 10s. 0d. If he could not pay, the sum would be levied from his lands and chattels. How Simon incurred such an enormous debt we cannot tell but there must (surely!) have been more to it than buying hose ‘on tick’. Rather later a Buckden butcher, William Mariot, was convicted of theft. In the spring of 1406 he stole a mare from its owner at Sibthorpe. To evade capture he fled to Offord church hoping to claim sanctuary, but this did not succeed and he was forced to admit his theft, worth 10 shillings, before the coroner. He was pardoned after two years, on 23 May 1408. Alice Govy’s case seems to have been more complicated. She was a Buckden housewife who appears to have fallen foul of some of her fellow villagers. In 1439 she was accused of stealing two kerchiefs and three skeins of yarn, worth two shillings, belonging to John Falconer and John Attwood, both inhabitants of Buckden. At her trial the jury found her guilty and she would probably have been put to death – had it not been discovered that she was pregnant. Alice then used her initiative to improve on the situation and petitioned Henry VI for mercy. She claimed that all her sufferings were undeserved and due solely to ‘the envy and malice of enemies’. Her plea was successful and on 15 December 1439 she received a royal pardon. Whether she returned home to Buckden and outfaced her malicious neighbours we cannot tell. Of other villagers we know even less. Robert Boteler and Geoffrey Burgeys were listed in 1372 because they were slow to pay their share towards the upkeep of the bridge at Huntingdon. An alien is listed in 1436: John Wynge of Eylan in Prussia, but how and why he landed up in this part of the country is anybody’s guess. Tudor Buckden The sixteenth century saw one of the most dramatic episodes in Buckden’s history. In July 1533, after the annulment of their marriage, Henry VIII sent Katherine of Aragon to reside in Buckden Palace, ‘in a wild and sparsely populated country on the edge of the great fens’, as Katherine’s biographer puts it . The discarded queen was well loved by the common people of England, who thought her very ill used by Henry. She was touched when the villagers came to the gates of the palace, not asking for alms, but offering gifts of food. This local sympathy was a contributory factor to Henry’s decision to move Katherine, and in December 1533 he sent the duke of Suffolk to organize this. However, the queen and her attendants resisted the attempt to force her to move, and at the same time the villagers showed their support by gathering outside the gates, not creating any disturbance, but carrying choppers and bill-hooks and looking so threatening that Suffolk did not persist for long. After a few days he returned to London and Katherine was safe for a little longer, until in May 1534 she was moved to Kimbolton. Buckden’s anonymous villagers played a small part in national politics. It is, in fact, in the sixteenth century that Buckden’s inhabitants begin to emerge from anonymity. One of the wealthier was William Burberry who by his will, dated 18 March 1558, devised the rent of his lands to the poor of Buckden, to be administered ‘whilst the world should endure’. This was the first of several generous charities which have made Buckden an unusually well endowed parish. From the following year (1559) we are also able to trace the lives of humbler parishioners since, in accordance with Thomas Cromwell’s Act of twenty years before, the Church began to keep a systematic record of baptisms, marriages and burials. That is, the parish registers are systematic in intention, but not always in execution. In actual fact there are gaps in the first century of their keeping caused by lost pages, holes and tears in the parchment and, one suspects, clerical carelessness. Nevertheless they offer the first real opportunity of examining properly the structure of village life. By careful study we can make some realistic estimates of population figures in the days before censuses, and by painstaking work reconstruct individual families. Work that has been done along these lines suggests a population of approximately 600 at the end of the Tudor period in 1603.