Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

CONEYGARTHS 144 CHAPTER 8/ CONEYGARTHS David Thomas Coneygarths stands out among its neighbours on the High Street by virtue of not being built in red brick. In telling its history, parts of this chapter draw on a paper written by the late Dr Horace Miles, with some editing to preserve continuity. His widow, Mrs Janet Miles, has kindly given her permission for it to be used. The name n its own, the word coney is a late form of cony , which comes via the Old French conil from cuniculus, the Latin for both a rabbit and its burrow; but in the term coney-garth it derives from a variant Anglo-French form, coning , which came into Middle English as conyng. It was attached to the Old English word erthe , meaning earth ( i.e., the home of a burrowing animal) to describe what we now call a rabbit-warren. Over time, however, people assumed that the word (which virtually nobody would ever have seen written down) was not conyng-erthe but cony-garth . The mistake is understandable, since garth was a common term for a yard or enclosed place , and medieval rabbit-warrens, even when not physically enclosed, were definitely private property. Rabbits 1 were introduced into Britain in the eleventh or twelfth century to be farmed for their meat and skins. On the Buckden enclosure award map of 1813, a parcel of approximately 22 acres called ‘Coneygarths’ is assigned to the bishop of Lincoln, and it seems reasonable to assume that for hundreds of years the rabbits reared there had been destined for the palace kitchens just across the road. Coneygarths (the house) has sometimes been known as Coneygarth or The Coneygarth, but the plural form is the correct one, since it stood next to two warrens, Upper Coneygarth and Lower Coneygarth (at some time before the 1850s, part of George Lane was absorbed into the lower coneygarth). How long the house has borne its present name is not known. According to a 1912 issue of the magazine Northants and Hunts 2 , the house was once an inn called the Mitre, and was connected with the palace. Certainly, the present house, which dates from the seventeenth century, has a large cellar. If this was the site of the Mitre, the inn may well have followed the example of many other Buckden properties over the centuries, and burnt down. Given its surroundings, Coneygarths would have been a natural name to attach itself to the new house. What is certain, is that until the nineteenth century the pronunciation of the first part of the name would have followed its spelling, and rhymed with money. This would have been unacceptable to the Victorians, more alert than their predecessors to the lurking horrors of unintended obscenity; genteel lips would have framed the word to rhyme, as it still does today, with phoney. 3 The property An early photograph of Coneygarth [sic] in the Norris Museum collection is catalogued as showing a two- storey house with glasshouse attached, shuttered ground floor windows, and with a low wall and grass in the foreground. A fuller description of the house can be obtained from a 1983 publication in the Huntingdonshire Archives 4 . In essence it is an L-shaped seventeenth-century house, largely timber framed. It has two storeys with attics. Brick chimneys have been added, one of which has a plaque dated 1735. A fine 1 Strictly speaking, they were re -introduced after a gap of half-a-million years, their predecessors having been wiped out by the last ice age. They may also have been temporarily present during the Roman occupation. 2 Full title: Northants and Huntingdonshire in the 20 th Century: contemporary biographies” W.T.Pike 1912. 3 Much to the amusement, probably, of some of Buckden’s less sensitive residents 4 “List of buildings of special architectural or historic interest : District of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire : 6 (parishes of Buckden, Diddington, Great Paxton, Hail Weston, Little Paxton, Offord Cluny, Offord D'arcy, Southoe and Midloe )” Department of the Environment, 1983. O