Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

THE HISTORY OF BUCKDEN 88 to the Freeholders of the County of Huntingdon’ in which he defended himself eloquently and set forth the electors’ right ‘ . . . to maintain for themselves and to transmit to their children the inestimable privilege of a free and unbiased suffrage ...’ These are good fighting words but we should be wary of seeing the vicar as any sort of champion of electoral reform. It seems he was as unscrupulous in his support of his own favoured candidate as were his opposition, and it has to be remembered that before 1832 the entire electoral system was very inequitable and corrupt. Moule’s Huntingdonshire of 1815 gives population figures of 184 households and 973 inhabitants for Buckden, yet in the election of 1818 the Poll Book shows that only 13 freeholders voted. Politics were a pastime for the rich. Meanwhile, how did the rest of the population live? In 1811 Parkinson’s General view of the Agriculture of the County of Huntingdonshire appeared. It gives a great deal of information about the major landowners, of course, but also gives very interesting details about the rest of the village. The wages for an agricultural labourer were in fact below the county average: 10s. a week in winter (against 11s. 3d.) and 12s. in summer (13s. 8d.). Although prices were correspondingly low (beef at 8d. a pound for instance!) it was no easy life: ‘They work from light to dark in winter, and from six to six in the spring and summer months (except harvest where they work from light till dark). The poor in general have dwellings suited to their station; and as almost every one of them grow his own potatoes and have constant employment if he pleases, they are naturally as little disposed to emigrate from Huntingdonshire, as from any other county.’ Buckdeners may in some ways have been better cared for than many others, in fact. We do not always appreciate the strength of community care in the days before the Welfare State. In the eighteenth century the gentry felt a paternalistic responsibility towards the lower orders. One intriguing example of this is the case of the Taylors. John and Mary Taylor had married in September 1717 and had four children: Mary in July 1718, but she died in infancy; Thomas in January 1720; another Mary in September 1721; and John in 1727. The three surviving children were orphaned when John and Mary died in 1729, presumably in some unusual way because they were buried on the same day, 13 April, and the parish took charge of their affairs in an extraordinary manner. The Taylors’ possessions were sold and the long list of purchasers and high prices (in the Churchwarden’s Account Book) suggests that most of the village turned out and bid what they could out of charity, raising between them £94 10s. 11d. The list of disbursements is equally detailed and even longer. It includes nursing, laying-out, coffins and graves for the dead, also board for the children and an apprenticeship for the girl. In all it runs to four pages. The whole record is a most unusual one, and it is intriguing to wonder what occasioned it. More straightforward was George Swan’s gift in 1766 which provided £80 to set up a workhouse. The site of this building was in Mill Road, opposite what is now Crown Cottage. It is important not to be misled, by memories of Oliver Twist for instance, into thinking Swan was anything but philanthropic. The repressive system Charles Dickens wrote about was the result of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (after which Buckden paupers were catered for by the Union Workhouse in St. Neots). In the eighteenth century individual parishes oversaw their own paupers in ‘poor-houses’ and judging from the records that survive Buckden was conscientious in this. Another fascinating scrap of evidence for this care is to be found in the Parish Register: ‘In April the 11th. 12th &c 1771 were inocculated for the Small Pox by Lewis Richardson of Brampton 289 Poor and 132 others of the Parish of Buckden, in all 421 of whom 5 only died 2 of them upwards of 80 years old & 3 Infants born with the Small Pox upon them. For the Poor was paid Mr. Richardson twenty one Pounds. H. Wakeman Vicar.’ That charity did not stop at home is proved by the ‘Briefs’ which are also noted in the Registers. These were collections taken for aid and assistance to outsiders. Several which raised particularly high sums show lists of contributors. In 1709 an eloquent appeal was made on behalf of ‘the Poor Distressed Palatines (near the Rhine in Germany) more Especially the Protestants, who have sustained and layn under for several years past by the frequent Invasions of the ffrench, Whereby more than two thousand of their greatest City or Market Towns & Villages have been burnt down to the Ground so that Severall Thousands of them have been forced to leave their Native Country & seek refuge in other Nations, and of them near Eight Thousand Men Women and Children are come in and near the City of London in a poor and Miserable Condition &c.’ This raised £2 10s. 8d. Like other concerns which we may have thought peculiar to the twentieth century, the refugee problem is nothing new. It seems, however, that villagers felt better able to identify with disasters nearer home, for they raised £6 18s. 8d. in September 1722 ‘for the Inundation in Lancashire’. The long list of names was headed by ‘Edmund Lord Bishop of Lincoln £1. 1s. 0d.’ and ‘His Lady 10s. 6d.’ and worked down to ‘B. Brown £0. 0s. 2d.’ Great things were happening in the rest of England. The industrial and agricultural revolutions were changing the landscape and causing considerable distress. But here in Buckden all the evidence suggests a