Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

LIVING OFF THE LAND 149 coppiced much of the surrounding area to provide grazing and cover for deer—see under deer park in the A to Z Section. The Great Park, as it was known, was an example of sustainable multiple land use, with meat, leather and timber the by-products of a superficially unproductive recreational activity (hunting). The bishops of Lincoln were also responsible for introducing wine-growing to the parish. This must have been some time after the late eleventh century, since the Domesday Survey of 1086 does not list Buckden among the 40 to 50 vineyard sites in southern England. Being Normans (the descendants of social-climbing Vikings who abandoned ale for wine), the early bishops would have enjoyed supplying themselves and their rich and powerful visitors with a locally-produced vintage. Today’s Vineyard Way marks one of the areas where they planted their grapes; a much larger one took up the whole of what are now the memorial playing fields, then an ideal spot for growing grapes as it sloped gently and faced roughly south. At some point, production ceased in Buckden, as it did almost everywhere else in Britain. The decline of British vineyards used to be regarded as a reliable indicator of a cooling climate, but other factors are now thought to have played a part, not least easier access and distribution for superior wines from the continent (of which Buckden, on the great north-south highway and near the river, would have been well- placed to take advantage). Hunting and wine-growing are not the only activities associated with this or earlier periods to leave their mark on village place-names: Hardwick , for example, would have been where a herd of either sheep or cattle was looked after in a small settlement (wick ) dependent on a nearby town or village—in this case Buckden. The road which is now Silver Street is marked on some maps as Hoo Baulk; 1 there are still a few older inhabitants who call it the Baulk. A baulk was a green lane between two pieces of plough land, or a green strip leading to fields. In the case of the Hoo Baulk the fields would have been part of the land that became Park Farm, with the baulk probably connecting them to an estate granary on Hoo Farm. Little remains of this farmstead, except a barn and an old, substantial wall facing on to Church Street and School Lane. We know of no determined objectors in 1330 to the continued extension of the Great Park by enclosure. But three hundred years later, the villagers were vociferous in their opposition when a bishop enclosed the Little Park—the land closest to the palace. They wanted access to the park for their cattle. For the outcome, see the A to Z entry for riots and tumult in 1641. Woodland was always important to parish inhabitants both for recreation and to supply wood for various purposes. The main woods were managed on the ‘coppice with standards’ system: some trees (the standards) were left to grow into maturity before being felled for timber, while the rest—the coppice or underwood—was cut down on a short rotation for fencing and firewood. Often the peasants had right to collect underwood and fallen timber to meet their essential needs: as, for example, to repair fences ( hedgebote ) or for fuel ( firebote ). The latter was particularly important. An agricultural report from 1808 paints a grim picture of how the poor heated their homes: In the county of Huntingdon coal is principally burnt in the better kind of houses, but common faggots, black oak, turf, &c. and turf and wood, in most farmer's kitchens and offices, and in cottages among the lower classes, stubble, bean straw, reed, dried dung, &c was more common. By about 1900, however, more of the lower classes could afford coal, and Buckden’s woodland had shrunk to a small wood on the way to Perry and another on the Brampton Road. The Silver Street house called The Spinney is a reminder that there were trees there, too, until fairly recent times. Where did the bricks come from to make the inner and outer walls and the tower of the bishops’ palace? It would have cost too much to cart stone from one of the quarries near Peterborough, or to import bricks. 2 Bricks were a new and prestigious building material, and would probably been made locally. Buckden had all the necessary ingredients: clay, water, and wood for baking them. Possible worked-out clay pits are the canal in the grounds of The Towers and the lake by the playing field (The Valley). There were also pits in the fields to the west of the village but their dates are not known; some leases to dig for brick and tile clay were granted in the seventeenth century. They may have been used later for the Georgian houses that characterise Buckden’s street scene. Of the ingredients needed for mortar, sand was available from nearer the river on the flood plain, but the relatively small quantities of lime required would have had to be brought in, either by river or road (if by road, as much as possible in the summer, because there were no metalled tracks between towns and villages until the use of wheeled carriages became more common). 1 Hoo itself is a variation of hoe or ho , a piece of land slightly higher than its surrounds. 2 Although by the 1840s, the costs of manufacture and transport had fallen enough to allow the bricks for South’s Almshouses to be brought in by river.