Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

MEDIEVAL BUCKDEN: THREE GLIMPSES 211 CHAPTER 20/ MEDIEVAL BUCKDEN: THREE GLIMPSES Barry Jobling, David Thomas Buckden is fortunate in having a set of parish registers that began four hundred and fifty years ago. There are missing and damaged pages and other omissions from the first hundred years, but the information that remains is invaluable to those researching almost any aspect of the village’s history—not least in tracing the changing fortunes of individual families and in the constant movement of people in and out of the village, leaving or arriving to look for work, getting married, or taking advantage of improvements in transport. Such research is much harder in the centuries preceding the registers, but there are some sources for the lives and occupations of earlier residents. Church historian Barry Jobling gives us a glimpse of both familiar and unfamiliar names from 1485, and David Thomas introduces us to some Buckden taxpayers from an even earlier time. Buckden inhabitants in the fifteenth century.... rom the accounts of the Parish Reeve, John Clerk, we have a list of the local men who repaired the Buckden water mill in 1485. This list of early parishioners includes a few names still present in the village today. The reeve records: Steven Wive, Wm Brawne, John Wright, Wm Herby, Will Bacon, John Maddox, William Spalding (filling up the well), John Bylby, Bernard Here, Thomas Haynes, Edmond Blys, Wm Spanby, John Serle, Wm Fox and Thomas Parys (for making of the mill wheel, cogs and spindles). ...and in the fourteenth century Buckden is fortunate enough to have two lists of taxpayers (technically subsidy rolls) dating from the fourteenth century. Moreover, as the two lists are five years apart, 1327 and 1332, many of the same names occur in both—or seem to occur: spelling was not standardized at the time (or for a very long time afterwards), so that what appears to be a repeated name may in fact be two different names. Conversely, what appear to be different names may in fact be the same one. In addition, clerks are human: ignorance or a wandering mind mean that mistakes have almost certainly occurred when the lists were copied. The taxpayers were almost all male: a woman at that time could own property only as a widow, or very occasionally as a single woman who was able to make a living in her own right. First names The forenames on the lists are almost all in use today: the woman’s name Amicia is perhaps the one that has least established itself as an indigenous choice. For men, John was by far the most popular name: there are twenty-five. Other given names represented more than once are William, Godfrey, Walter, Robert, Hugh and Nicholas. All the rest have one each. Surnames Because some names were so common it was necessary to distinguish between people of the same first name by some additional descriptive name; by the fourteenth century surnames were well developed. Some surnames tell us where villagers, or their ancestors, came from. The first surname on both lists is Gunild or Gyunyld, and another name on both lists is Gonild, almost certainly representing two individuals with the same surname. It comes from a female given name, the Viking Gunhildr. So for possibly three or four hundred years there had been a family with the name carried down on the female side until John or one of his male predecessors was named after his widowed mother, or single mother. It is still in use today as Gunnell, as in Sally Gunnell 1 whose family lived in St Ives. It is unlikely that she was descended from the 1 Motivational speaker and former Olympic and world gold medallist (400 metres). F