Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

THE PARISH COUNCIL: A HISTORY OF THE GOVERNANCE OF BUCKDEN VILLAGE 162 CHAPTER 11/ THE PARISH COUNCIL: A HISTORY OF THE GOVERNANCE OF BUCKDEN VILLAGE Terry Hayward, OBE The author, a past chairman and current member of Buckden Parish Council, outlines the way village affairs were managed up to the end of the nineteenth century, and looks at how far the council has fulfilled the expectations of the Advertiser’s optimistic correspondent. ‘With admirably drawn standing orders, a popular Chairman, and an able clerk, the Buckden Parish Council should get through their business very smoothly, with, let us hope credit to themselves and to the benefit of the ratepayers generally.’ St. Neots Advertiser , 9 February 1895 he parish council is a late arrival in the history of local government in England and Wales. Long before the Norman Conquest, the Saxons had a hierarchy of shire, hundred and tithing (a group of ten households) for administrative, military and judicial purposes. By 1066, local law and order was primarily maintained through the system of frithborh or frankpledge, under which each man in a tithing was responsible to the king for the good behaviour of every other member. The Normans adopted a modified form of frankpledge, introducing a manorial system of courts-baron (dispensing civil justice) and courts-leet (administrative bodies, which also dealt with petty offences). With the decline of feudalism, the functions of these courts gradually passed to county magistrates and parish vestries. 1 The vestries were not established by any act of parliament, nor were their powers and composition defined by any law; but by the end of the seventeenth century they and the magistrates had come to be the rulers of rural England. Vestries were responsible for the general wellbeing of the parish; they looked after the poor, the old and the sick; they maintained the church and churchyard and managed the village pound; they waged a constant but often losing battle against sparrows, foxes and hedgehogs. For these various purposes they nominated from among themselves the appropriate officials: overseers of the poor, surveyors of highways, churchwardens, keepers of the pound, parish clerks and, in many cases, constables. Many of those chosen actually paid others to complete their tasks because very often the post could result in considerable personal cost—even physical harm—for the holder. 2 The common, but not universal, custom was for substantial ratepayers of the village to meet once a month to deliberate on parish matters, perhaps in the church vestry but more often in an inn. Ale would be paid for out of parish rates! For the people in an eighteenth century village the real government was not parliament but the parish vestry. Perhaps it was almost inevitable that such a system sometimes led to accusations of corruption, especially where parishes were run by small executive committees known as a select vestries. These were generally self-elected and inevitably tended to grow autocratic and self-serving. In villages where the select vestry did not exist the management of village affairs was generally well- meaning but not terribly efficient. The Local Government Act 1894 changed all of this. Thus it was that on the cold, wet evening of Tuesday, 4 December 1894, about 150 electors met in the Girls’ School Room to elect Buckden’s first parish council. Twenty-five residents offered themselves for election to one of the thirteen places available. Voting was done by a show of hands; it was not until 1949 that full secret ballots were held for the election of parish councillors. Meetings were held quarterly, the first in the Girls’ School Room on 31 December 1894. Apart from considering the formalities of running the council, and electing a secretary, a treasurer and a 1 But see the A to Z entry for Robert Holmes Edleston , who held manorial courts in Buckden in the 1920s. 2 A transcript of the Buckden vestry book is held in the Huntingdonshire Archives, as is the churchwardens' accounts and memorandum book known as the Parish Book (1627-1774). For more on these accounts see the Appendix to Chapter 5 and the A to Z entry for vermin ; for examples of the perils of being a public official see the entries for Thomas Cope and pinders . T