Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

A HISTORY OF ST MARY’S, THE PARISH CHURCH 110 Norman duke, William, became king. A year later, the new king rewarded one of his supporters, a Benedictine called Remigius of Fecamp, with the Dorchester bishopric. In 1072, the king ordered Dorchester to be abandoned and the seat of the diocese relocated to (and named for) Lincoln (a larger, wealthier, strategically important town). Remigius now became the first true bishop of Lincoln. The significance for Buckden was that Remigius and his successors, powerful men in the realm, now had to commute to London to attend the king, not from conveniently nearby Dorchester but all the way down the north road from Lincoln. Buckden was an ideal place to break the journey. By this time Buckden had a prebend (a senior priest appointed by the Bishop to attend to his duties locally). In 1067, Bishop Remigius nominated Psalm 101 to be sung daily at Buckden church and by Buckden’s prebend when seated in the choir of Lincoln Cathedral. Remigius allocated a different psalm to each of his prebends and canons ‘to ensure that the Lincoln Psalter is said daily for the souls of the living and the dead’. The church and its priest appear in Domesday Book , and Buckden manor was in the possession of the bishop of Lincoln, who had a manor house here, and it is reasonable to assume that the church and bishop’s palace still occupy their original sites. The village population was then around 125. 1 St Hugh of Lincoln (Bishop Hugh), renowned for the miracles he performed and usually portrayed with his devoted swan, often stayed at his manor house at Buckden and was popular with the villagers. He died in London in 1200 and on 12 November of that year his body lay ‘with great mourning’ in this church on its final journey to Lincoln. Now we come to the earliest visible remains in the church. King John, soon after his signing of Magna Carta in 1215, permitted Hugh de Wells (Bishop of Lincoln 1209-1235) to rebuild his palace here, to build a park for hunting and to rebuild the Saxon church. King John’s seemingly unusual generosity was in fact to compensate for the damages he had done both to Lincoln Cathedral and to Bishop Hugh himself. With funds from the Guild of St Mary, Hugh set to work on his new projects and by about 1230 his new church was in use. It was a large church for a small village, reflecting not only the more elaborate rituals recently introduced, but also the power and wealth of the bishop. Certainly, the present chancel walls are those built by Hugh in c. 1230, and it is conjectured that this late Norman or Early English church was rectangular and extended to approximately where the tower is now, the previous nave walls being where the arcades rise today. The earliest remaining feature from Hugh’s church is the south doorway, still the main entrance to the church. It was not uncommon for church doorways, signifying the entry into Christ’s kingdom, to be retained and reset in their rightful position when churches were remodelled. The wooden door was inserted in the 1430s, and while the bottom has rotted and been replaced, the top retains its early green paint in a stencilled pattern showing where the ornate wooden tracery once decorated this great portal. On close examination of the door face it is easy to find the carvings of initials, mainly dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If one looks either side of the door, particularly to the left above the stone bench, more initials are visible; these are mainly the work of schoolboys from the days when school was held in the porch, and no doubt when the master was not looking. Around 1285, in Bishop Oliver Sutton’s time, further improvements were made and we can still see his vestry door arch in the chancel, retaining faint traces of medieval paintwork. The piscina, where the holy vessels were washed (note that it drains within the wall into consecrated ground), and the simple yet stylish sedilia at the east end of the chancel both date to this era. The three stone seats show a deliberate pecking order: the priest on the highest, then the deacon and the lowest being the sub-deacon’s, while the bishop and prebend would have had thrones beside the altar. The priest’s doorway in the south chancel wall is of the late thirteenth century also. The lowest courses of the tower appear to be of the fourteenth century and they show the three feet (one metre) thickness of the thirteenth century south nave wall where it abutted them. 1 Extrapolated from Domesday. The sedilia