Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

A HISTORY OF ST MARY’S, THE PARISH CHURCH 118 This altar table dates from the reign of Charles II The Restoration of the Monarchy The monarchy was restored in 1660 and soon thereafter Charles II appointed his chaplain Robert Sanderson as Bishop of Lincoln. Sanderson, a most learned man, was the author of the Preface to the 1662 Prayer Book, and was a renowned preacher. The king commented, ‘I carry my ears to hear other preachers, but I carry my conscience to hear Dr Sanderson’. This pious bishop, another Buckden admirer, stated in his will that he was to be buried beneath the altar of Buckden church ‘without pomp or ceremony’. His wishes were carried out when he died in January 1663, and a fine black marble slab with his coat of arms marks his grave. Now that the bishops were in place again, they were able to repair the chancel, which they re-roofed, retaining the fifteenth century angels, in 1665. They inserted new roof bosses, several carved with mitres, and one of which is inscribed ‘R.W 1665’. The maintenance of the chancel was the responsibility of the bishops and their prebends, so it is likely that ‘R.W’ was on the bishop’s staff, perhaps as a prebend or treasurer. A halfpenny trade token in the Norris Museum, St Ives, has a similar design of ‘R.Wm’. It also bears the inscription, ‘William Reeve, his halfe penny, Bugden, 1667’. This reversal of his initials and the close dates, may point to William Reeve being the renovator of the chancel roof. Huntingdonshire was hard hit by the plague in 1665 and 1666; in July 1666 alone, fifty-two people were buried in Buckden. This was at a time when burials here averaged three or four a month. It is possible that they were buried in the churchyard, but more likely in a remote plague pit. The Restoration also brought commercial stability and in the 1670s, the Great North Road (the High Street as it runs through Buckden) was levelled, developed and turnpiked for commercial and coaching use. This was to be the beginning of Buckden’s heyday, which lasted until the coming of the railways in 1850. St Mary’s, in 1680, updated a very worthwhile facility for the entire village. They installed a new clock in the tower, and it is still keeping good time today. Thomas Powers of Wellingborough was paid £10 to build and fit the clock mechanism and its two dials facing south and west, and for an extra £14 he also supplied a set of chimes. He continued to maintain the clock until 1709. The dials have been repainted and re-gilded several times and the clock is now wound by an electric motor rather than by hand, but it happily ticks (more like, clunks) away in its large wood and iron skeleton frame. The ‘Bishop of Buckden’ and the half-a-bishop Thomas Barlow was another of those bishops who was very fond of Buckden. Shortly after his death it was recorded that from the time he was consecrated in 1675 until he died in 1692 he had rarely set foot in Lincoln but had stayed in Buckden throughout. He was, and still is, known as ‘The Bishop of Buckden’. As mentioned before, he stipulated that when the time came, parts of Bishop William Barlow’s wrecked tomb were to be reused in his own monument, which can be seen on the north wall of the chancel. Although not related to William, he no doubt felt that his predecessor had been greatly maligned by the Puritans, and in his epitaph he records that William’s tomb had been ‘destroyed by the madness of fanatics’; a plain-speaking man, for a bishop. The church has custody of a plain and very large chalice, hallmarked 1679, courtesy of another bishop. This prelate was at Lincoln and Buckden from 1705 until 1716 before attaining the highest position in the Church of England, when he was translated to Canterbury. Archbishop William Wake donated his own personal chalice and paten to Buckden church for the use of its congregation. The Churchwardens’ Accounts in May 1717 record that they had these silver items inscribed ‘for feare of being lost’. The engraving is delicate and superb and cost just 20 pence at the time. While on the subject of church silver, we must also mention Bishop Richard Reynolds and his generosity in 1744. In his will he left ‘five pounds for a silver plate or paten for the Communion Table of the Church at Bugden’. Five pounds bought a finely made paten with a pedestal having ‘IHS’ engraved within Bishop Thomas Barlow’s monument