Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN’S BUILDINGS 97 case the south aisle was constructed before the north aisle and the adjustment to the plan was made after this. It is interesting that in the eighteenth century buttresses were needed to support the north aisle walls so there was some justification in siting the nave and aisles away from the moat. The fine fifteenth century roofs were repaired in the seventeenth century, 1649 appears on a wall plate with the initials I.I.~C.P., and 1665 is carved on one boss with the initials R.W. Other restorations were carried out in the nineteenth century and later. The rebuilding of the nave and aisles took place possibly using much of the original building material of the earlier church, but the best quality material for the walls, that is the limestone rubble, was reserved for the chancel and the tower. The freestone for the tower and spire came from or near Barnack in Northamptonshire; some rubble stone may have come from the Lincolnshire limestone quarries. The cost of hauling the stone by bullock cart from the quarries to the river Nene, and then transporting it down the rivers Nene and Ouse must have been prodigious. The site of the hythe (riverside landing-place) for Buckden has not been established: it may have between what are now Buckden Marina and The Old Flour Mills, but the identification cannot be certain. The local cobbles for the walls of the aisles would originally have been gleaned from the boulder clay in the open fields, they were laid in courses and like the limestone rubble walls were packed with lime mortar; you may be able to see the ‘day-work’ levels in the exposed walls. Most building work was seasonal and in the autumn the walls would be protected by a thatched covering. The scaffold lifts can be seen marked on the walls by the putlog holes left by the scaffold poles; the holes were usually left after the work was completed, but those on the tower and spire have been carefully filled in with matching stone. The external and internal rubble and cobble walls would originally have been plastered and limewashed: the limewash sometimes can be seen on some of the window masonry. The master mason for the rebuilding of the church would have produced the plan and working drawings for the tower and spire, with all the architectural details. He would have had a team of layer masons constructing the walls, banker masons who cut the building stones for the walls, precisely to certain positions and marked with their individual mark, and carver masons who produced the mouldings from templates or ‘moulds’ which were made from his designs. It is possible that the carved window openings and tracery, and doorways and other details were produced near their quarry of origin, thus reducing the weight of the stone; this mason’s yard may have been in Lincolnshire where the best limestone was still being quarried. The banker masons would work somewhere on site in a purposely built open-sided shed or lodge. The master mason would use a tracing floor to prepare his plans and designs, which may have been in the old church on a specially laid surface of lime plaster that he would use rather like a drawing board. The plans were drawn to their natural size with compasses and the set square ad quadratum, drawings using the square and the diagonal and ad triangulatum the triangle with the circle. The master mason possibly finished the finer details using chalk or lamp black. These designs were copied onto parchment for use by the carver masons and may have been used several times by them (repeated for several windows). The scale and proportion of each element of the design for the church, tower and spire can be rediscovered today in reverse by using the same principles of geometry. The geometric patterns of the windows, arcades and doorways were then a developing tradition and details particularly of the window tracery and the proportions of the four-centred arches can be dated by comparison; the windows of St Mary the Virgin in Buckden are Perpendicular in style and beautifully proportioned. The church was meant to look like ‘paradise on earth’, and the crenellations of the parapets would inform passers-by that they had been granted by royal consent. The Bishop of Lincoln’s Palace The remains of the Bishop’s Palace occupy a large enclosure in Buckden on the east side of the Great North Road. This was the administrative centre of a large estate that included the manor of Spaldwick. The boundary walls survive with the gated entrance and inner gatehouse which is linked to the Great Tower by a curtain wall. The dates for these buildings are known and are recorded in the Victoria County History . Leyland, the Cambridge antiquarian, states that Bishop Scott, alias Rotherham (1472-80), built the new red brick tower, and Bishop Russell (1480-94) completed it and built the entrance gatehouse, enclosing all within a moat. In a survey of 1647, taken during the Commonwealth for the trustees of the sale of the bishop’s lands, all the buildings are described, including the great hall and chapel with kitchen enclosure walls, the gateways, and the Great Tower referred to as the King’s Lodging. Bishop Hacket, writing after the Restoration in 1660, describes the site: ‘what remains of all this cost and beauty? All is dissipated, defaced, plukt to pieces to pay the army.’ Many of the buildings had been pulled down during the Commonwealth