Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

A HISTORY OF ST MARY’S, THE PARISH CHURCH 119 the sun in glory on the base, and a simple Latin inscription to the upper rim recording the donor, ‘Ric: Reynolds Episc: Lincoln’. From that same year, there remains an inscription of a very different type in the church; it reads, ‘St Neots 1744, Georg Rogers’ with a fleur-de-lis cipher and it can be found scratched in the easternmost window glass of the north aisle. It is the earliest of several graffiti, all in the easternmost of the north and south aisle windows, and like the others it probably represents occasions when repair work was being carried out (several also record the inscriber’s trade, ‘painter’ et al). The effort and time taken to etch the inscriptions makes it unlikely that they were the work of a few minutes’ idle time during a long sermon! But let us return to Bishop Reynolds. When giving tours of the church, this writer likes to amuse the sightseers by saying that the church has four-and-a-half bishops interred within… Bishop Reynolds is the half-a-bishop. Not that we have his top or bottom half here, but that we cannot be certain whether he’s here or not! He died on 15 January 1744 and although his previous will stated that he was to be buried in Lincoln Cathedral, where most of his predecessors lie, he made a codicil during his final illness wishing to be buried in ‘Buckden Domestick Chapel’. One might take that to mean the small chapel that was within the Palace, and indeed there is no memorial to him in Buckden church. The Palace chapel was demolished in 1872, and although the present St Claret Chapel was rebuilt in 1921, in a similar manner and on the same site, there are no monuments or remains of the original building extant. It is interesting to note however, that Reynolds’ wife, who predeceased him by four years, and his daughter (died 1737), as well as his niece and nephew, are all buried beneath the chancel of St Mary’s, and there are small oval brasses to commemorate them. It would be nice to think that he would want to spend eternity next to his family. Little did the bishop know that one of his minor curates would go on to great fame in their lifetime. In March 1737, Reynolds ordained in St Mary’s, a soldier’s son, Laurence Sterne, and the new curate assisted at Buckden throughout the following year. Many years later, Sterne was to publish a serial novel in nine volumes entitled The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman which gained him instant acclaim across Europe. Unlike Reynolds, Sterne used his wife very poorly, and she probably would not have wanted to spend eternity with him! A year after Reynolds’ death, the wardens were busy having the south porch repaired, and they subsequently inserted a stone, inscribed with the date 1745 and their initials, in the porch’s east wall. Perhaps the workmen stopped for a while to see George II’s son, Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, heading north in Mr Gale’s coach. Two hundred and sixty years later members of the Gale family are still Buckden residents. William was heading for Scotland to put down Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion, for which he was to be forever remembered as the ‘Butcher of Culloden’. The last bishop to be buried in the chancel was John Green in 1779 in the place he chose, the ‘south east corner opposite Bishop Barlow’s monument’ according to his will. He has a tasteful marble monument on the south wall. Nearby is the monument of his secretary, John Hodgson (died 1822), ‘who was upwards of fifty years secretary of three successive Bishops of Lincoln’. 1 The Pews throughout the Centuries In medieval times, most churches had no seating except for a ledge or bench running around the walls. This is where the expression ‘to go to the wall’ comes from, when referring to weak or ailing people, as this bench offered some comfort. There is no trace of a ledge in St Mary’s, which may mean that it had a wooden bench or some other form of seating. The floor would have been of compressed earth, strewn with straw. And as the nave also doubled as the equivalent of today’s village hall, it was used for all kinds of activities, meetings and even business; thus full seating was not really needed until late Elizabethan times, when benches were required to provide rest for all during the longer services. Our closest sister church, at Diddington, still retains its Elizabethan seats, quaintly carved and with holes drilled in the seat backs to hold lighted tapers for services during the hours of darkness. The first references to Buckden’s seating are in the Churchwardens’ Accounts in the 1640s, when repairs were carried out to the existing benches, which were possibly similar to those at Diddington. It would also appear that new pews were installed during the Commonwealth, with higher sides to cut down on draughts during the sermons - which could last three or four hours. In the extracts from the Churchwardens’ Accounts (in this chapter’s appendix), we note that in 1633 the bachelors’ seat was mended. And in 1711 ‘A new forme for the young women to sitt on in the Church’ was fabricated. Even into the Victorian era, the sexes were segregated with women on the left and men to the right of the central aisle. Single girls could not sit with married women and likewise single and married 1 There is a brief biography of Hodgson in the A to Z Section.