Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

76 There followed a long-drawn out examination of the conflicting claims. This involved sundry aged Buckden residents – yeomen, labourers, ‘gents’ and craftsmen – trying to recall what had happened in the preceding thirty- five years. From them we learn that ‘Le Hyne’ was indeed an inn called the Vine, and that even before 1613 it had been ‘very old and ruinous’, the owners at the time having cut down all the trees in its orchard, demolished a barn and a hovel [a framework for a corn-stack], and left the rest of the property to decay. Repair and restoration had cost William Clement and his successors dear. Nobody could remember the existence of a mortgage, nor was there a record of it in the court rolls. One witness claimed Elizabeth Kirby’s father had ‘confessed’ to having sold all his estate in Buckden, i.e. outright, without mortgage or other encumbrance. ‘Confessed’ suggests he had not told his family of this. Fascinating as it is to hear across the centuries the actual words of long-dead ancestors, the papers are frustratingly silent on the outcome of the proceedings. All that one can say is that the incomplete evidence we have is more favourable to Thomas Jackson’s cause than Elizabeth Kirby’s. (One of the yeomen witnesses was a Robert Raymont; he is probably the Robert Rayment who at his death in 1661 left money for the employment of a schoolmaster to teach poor children – see under charities ). The southern end of the rebuilt Vine of the 18thC incorporated a stable with a hayloft over. The dividing line between stable and inn remains clear even now: the inn walls are rendered, but the stable is only painted, with the outlines of its brickwork showing through. The Vine was also a brewery. vineyards. According to a correspondent in Notes & Queries, Vol. 2 (57) 30/11/ 1850 p. 446 ‘In the fields between Buckden and Diddington, in the county of Huntingdon, there is what is called ‘the Vineyard’ at the present day; and connected therewith is what is called, and evidently from the shape has been, a fish pond….there is no doubt but what the above was, in olden times, belonging to a religious house in that part.’ In the Middle Ages viticulture was practised over a large part of England, including the north, and was almost always associated with monasteries and other religious foundations. The Domesday Book does not mention vineyards in its description of Buckden, but they are likely to have been introduced once the Palace became the principal residence of the Bishop of Lincoln in the mid 13thC. The leasing of ‘closes and vineyards’ by the queen (Elizabeth I) to the bishop of the day is referred to in 1558/9. There were several acres of vines, known as the great and the little vineyards, and as the name of the modern road Vineyard Way suggests, they were situated in the area of what is now the recreation ground. Thanks to the enterprise of members of the Wine and Beermakers Society, vine-growing has returned to Buckden in recent years, though not as yet on a commercial scale. The Claret Centre at Buckden Towers is not, to the disappointment of some visitors to Buckden, the Society’s headquarters. W Wallace, Robert Allez [sometimes Allen or Aller] Rotherham was one of Buckden’s more colourful doctors – see Chapter 14 Medical Practice in Buckden . Wallage, John (c. 1854-1939). The Cambridgeshire- born son of a woodsman, he was Buckden’s resident policeman from 1887 until his retirement in 1900 on a pension of £47.13s a year. He married Sarah Smith (1853- 1911) in 1883. They lived in the Buckden police house, which was then at the southern end of the village. After nearly twenty-eight years on the force he retired to Little Paxton. The St. Neots Advertiser praised the way he had ‘discharged his important and oft-times unpleasant duties with zeal, conscientiousness and tact, and gained the esteem of all classes.’ In line with his image as a ‘proper’ village bobby, he played in the village cricket team and won prizes for gooseberries, blackcurrants and roses at the Buckden Horticultural Society’s first annual flower show in 1893. He was succeeded by Pc John Purser. Waller, Henry MRCS LSA (1787-1873) was one of Buckden’s earliest recorded resident physicians – see Chapter 14 Medical Services in Buckden . Walpole, Horatio ( aka Horace), 4th earl of Orford (1717–1797) was the son of Britain’s first prime minister (although the post at the time was usually referred to simply as ‘the minister’). His interests included gardening, history, politics, and the arts. He wrote that the first sight of Buckden Palace in 1756 ‘surprised one prettily in a little village’. In 1772 he was shown round the palace by a housemaid (the Bishop, John Green, was probably absent: he preferred living in one of his London houses). A portrait of a Mrs Newcome, who had been the mistress of his father’s main political opponent, so tickledWalpole’s fancy that he prevailed upon a clergyman friend to get him a print of it. He was less impressed by some of the other pictures, including one of ‘some lads’. war memorials. Buckden has remembered its dead of two world wars in a surprising number of ways. There is the memorial at the front of St Mary’s churchyard, erected in 1920 and realigned in 1947 when the names of the Second World War dead were added; the Green memorial stone in the High Street; also in the High Street, a memo- rial in the old Baptist Chapel (but now at Perry Baptist Church) dedicated to four of the congregation who died in the First World War; a memorial in the Methodist Chapel; the Memorial Playing Field off Burberry Road; and a framed First World War roll of honour that once hung on a wall in the High Street, was lost for over twenty years but is now in St Mary’s Church. water supply. Settlements appear where there is a supply of water. Before the installation of a piped supply Buckden’s inhabitants obtained most of their water from wells, most of them private ones. The Board of Agriculture’s Great Britain Agricultural Survey of 1811 recorded that most places in Huntingdonshire were watered by ponds, but that Buckden was supplied by ‘good springs’. More than 150 of them were known when the piped supply was begun. Bishop Williams’s fishpond in the grounds of the Towers is still fed by one, for example, and old OS maps show a distinct line of springs or spring-fed