Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

24 house, and seeing a fridge move several inches sideways. Perhaps the most worrying side-effect was the rapid col- lapse of the emergency services’ telephone system under the weight of anxious enquirers. One Buckden resident who would have enjoyed the experience (had he still been alive) was Thomas Tenison, Bishop of Lincoln from 1691 to 1694. In October 1692 he wrote rather wistfully to his friend the diarist John Evelyn about a recent earthquake that was ‘discerned in divers neighbouring towns’ though ‘none in Buckden were sensi- ble of it’. Edleston, Robert Holmes, FSA, FRGS, Baron de Montalbo (1868-1952), owned Buckden Towers from 1919 until his death. He was a wealthy and eccentric antiquary, a racehorse owner and breeder, a member of Buckden and Diddington Horticultural Society, and the Consul for the Republic of San Marino. He shared many of his antiquarian enthusiasms with his sister Alice, including the history of their native county, Durham, monumental brasses and inscriptions, Napoleon III, buying old property and acquiring manorial lordships. Following the premature death of his wife in 1915, he also developed a deep interest in the old Roman Catholic Church. Buckden provided him with a focus for many of these activities: as Lord of the Manor of Buckden Brittens, for example, he was able to preside over a customary court (see below), and as owner of the palace he was free to carry out an archaeological dig in its tennis courts. (The aim of the dig was to find the foundations of, and partially rebuild, the former chapel of the Bishops of Lincoln, who as Catholic prelates had been among the most powerful men in the realm.) The following notes relating to this engaging, eccentric and occasionally infuriating man, supplement the information in Chapter 4 Buckden Palace to Buckden Towers . 1. At a curious party held at the Towers in August 1922, one of the guests was a member of the Afghani nobility. Among the entertainments, the village band played for them. (See Photograph ) One of the visitors was invited to lay a brick in part of Mr Edleston’s reconstruction work. 2. The following quotation from ‘It’s a Don’s Life’ by Dr Frederick Brittain, published by Heinemann in 1972, may be of interest:- ‘I also did a little excavating with pick and shovel at Buckden Palace in Huntingdonshire, where Mr Edleston was busy digging up the tennis courts to discover the foundations of the former chapel of the Bishops of Lincoln. When he had done so, he rebuilt the walls with the old material to shoulder height. Inside them he erected the stone altar-tomb, with a high-sounding Latin epitaph, which Alan Hay had hesitated to allow him to place over Bishop Matthew’s grave at South Mimms until he had obtained the approval of his bishop. Mr Edleston had taken umbrage at this delay and had chosen to construe it as a refusal. As he never finished anything, the unfinished chapel was crowned with a hideous galvanised iron roof and left to be a nesting place for birds. It was still like that when he died thirty years later.’ 3. The Edlestons’ archives contain over a thousand records dealing with Buckden matters: among them plans, drawings, maps, posters, newspaper cuttings, details of property deals going back to the 18thC, the prospectus of Buckden Towers College, and photographs (including fifteen of the famous Pageant of the Centuries), Sadly for Buckden’s local historians, much of this documentation is deposited with the County Record Office in Durham. 4. In July 1923, Edleston, as Lord of the Manor of Buckden Brittens, called a meeting of the General Court Baron and Customary Court, apparently to record a change of copyhold tenancy. It made a very pleasant occasion it seems. He held other such meetings, the most notable being that of 30 December 1925, which attracted national press interest as the last of its kind: the Law of Property Act 1925 came into effect two days later and swept away these particular manorial courts. education in Buckden was well established two centuries before the Elementary Education Act of 1870 made its provision statutory. A prominent member of the community died in 1661 and in his will instructed his heirs ‘every yeare forever as long as the world indures’ to arrange for money to be provided for the appointment of a schoolmaster to teach English and religion to girls and boys whose parents could not afford to pay for their education. His example was followed by the 18thC Bishop John Green, who provided a house and garden for the schoolmaster, and in his will left the interest from a £200 trust fund to augment the teacher’s salary. By the 19thC, however, schooling was being provided only for boys. The lack of opportunity for girls was rectified in 1842 by the opening of a National School [MapRef 2] . Later in the century, the squire of Stirtloe enlarged the schoolhouse at his own expense, and a Miss Mason left the endowed boys £1. 9s. a year in her will (she may have been Sarah Mason who was herself a schoolteacher). Not everyone was in favour of compulsory education. Children, of course, could always find more exciting ways of passing the time – whatever the consequences: ‘Punished eight boys with one stroke of the rod for coming late to school. They stayed rat killing at Farmer Cranfield’s stacks in Silver Street’ (school log book, 1890) There were parents who needed their children to help out at home or go out to earn. And there were employers, the farmers in particular, who had no compunction about luring children away from school when they needed extra labour. But it was Henry, farmer Cranfield’s son (and heir to the family farming business), who held the most extreme views. In 1901 he told a visiting writer that the compulsory education of working class children ‘was doing a great deal of damage to England.’ He had, he said, every faith in education, but felt that how much of it a child should have David Thomas