Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

27 Falcon Yard, High Street, lay between the Old Falcon pub and Taylors Lane. By 1911, it was called Barthrams Yard, after the family of grocers who had settled there some years before (see under Barthram family) . family, keeping it in the, was a feature of some of the early horticultural society shows. For example, from 1898: Special Prizes Arrangement garden flowers (prizes by Mrs Linton) - 1st Miss L. Linton, 2nd Miss Linton Spray for a lady’s dress (prizes by Mr J. Linton) - 1st Miss Linton, 2nd Miss H. J. Linton, Highly Commended Miss L. Linton Six stocks (prizes by Mr J. Linton) - 2nd Miss O. H. Linton Six roses (prizes by Dr W. H. Hillyer) - 1st Dr W. H. Hillyer (!), 2nd Mrs Linton Six varieties cut flowers (prizes by Mrs Linton) - 1st Dr W. H. Hillyer Dr Hillyer later married a lady whose sister had married a Linton! Fawkes, Francis, MA (1720–1777) was a Yorkshire poet and clergyman. His works include an epistle to his wife, called ‘A Journey to Doncaster, or, a Curious Journal of Five Days wrote with a Pencil in a Chaise’. It includes the lines: ‘And shortly, o’er the rising steep, We saw the spire of Bugden peep : At breakfast near an hour we waste, ‘Twas coffee, grateful to the taste, With dulcet cream, and nut-brown toast ; Then bid a Valeas [farewell] to our host.’ He does not name the inn at which he stopped, but his praise of the cream suggests it was probably the George, – if the experience of John Byng (q.v.) is anything to go by. Feast or Festival Week has been celebrated in July for many years, but has been accompanied by some dispute about which is the correct week and by which name it should be known. The origin may well be found in the parish church’s annual celebration of the life of its patronal saint, Mary. It may be that the church was first dedicated to St Mary in July (which could explain why the chosen week was a popular one in which to have one’s children baptised); but if so, the actual date is lost in the mists of time. It may also be that July was, conveniently, a time of comparative quiet in the old farming year: not an idle month, for it was dominated by the hated daily grind of weeding, but one free of the frenzy of haymaking and harvest when all hands – men, women and children – were needed in the fields. With grain stocks at their lowest, July was also the hungry month, thus providing an opportunity for the better-off to exercise some Christian charity towards their poorer neighbours. Over the years, the secular side of the Week has become more prominent, with events such as dances, stage shows, competitions, raffles, fairs or fêtes, and exhibitions (including, on one occasion, an impromptu striptease – see under James Collins ). But a strong church connection is maintained, with St Mary’s being decorated with flowers for the Week and a Songs of Praise service held on the last Sunday. fiction, Buckden in. The village is mentioned, usually as a miserable, miasmic place of exile, in virtually every novel written about Anne Boleyn or Katherine of Aragon. But it appears in a handful of other works, of which Tobias Smollett’s story of an English Don Quixote, The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (published 1760-2), is possibly the only work of fiction by a major author to have a scene set in Buckden. It occurs in an inn; sadly, Smollett does not identify which one, though on his own travels on the Great North Road he must have stopped off in Buckden for refreshment or even to spend the night. Next came Emmeline; or The Orphan of the Castle (1788) by Charlotte Smith, a lesser-known 18thC novelist much enjoyed by the young Jane Austen. Emmeline’s aristocratic cousin Delamere wishes her to elope (‘Go with me to Scotland!’). Emmeline has other ideas (‘No! no! never! never!’) but is promptly carried off ‘with a sort of gentle violence’ in a chaise and four. Pursuing them up the Great North Road to Scotland, Delamere’s irate father stops in Buckden for refreshment. He asks for news of the runaways at all the inns and public houses. Everyone denies seeing them. This is not because the villagers are trying to live up to Buckden’s occasional reputation for being unhelpful: the young couple had never reached the village. They had left the north road at Stevenage and were safely hidden in Hertford; the elopement was over; they were on their way home. In Lauren Royal’s Restoration romance Emerald , the hero (a marquess pretending to be a commoner) and the eponymous heroine (a lovely, stubborn, independent Scots heiress whose real name is Caithren and whom the hero mistakenly believes to be a bounty hunter) are pursued down the Great North Road by murderous villains. Believing they have outpaced their pursuers, the pair stop off at the Lion for backgammon, beer, soup and Dutch pudding (a buttock of beef rubbed with brown sugar, salt and saltpetre, left for a fortnight, squeezed in a cheese- press for a day and a night, hung in the chimney to dry, boiled in a cloth and left to cool; it can then be cut out into shivers [i.e., flakes]). But they have underestimated their adversaries, and as Caithren steps out into the stable yard… . Roseanna, heroine of Victoria Henley’s erotic medieval romance The Raven and the Rose , is the love-child of Edward IV. During a frantic ride from Yorkshire to London to warn the queen that the king has been imprisoned by the Earl of Warwick, she stops the night in a Buckden inn. She awakens feeling so nauseous that she throws up twice (luckily the chamber-pot is to hand). No food, not even a Dutch pudding, is the cause, as she realises when sickness strikes again the next morning... . Field Close: see following entry. Field House, Silver Street [MapRef 48] , a Grade II listed mid-18thC red brick house of three storeys (including attics). Its striking front doorcase met with the approval of Nikolaus Pevsner (Buildings of England: Bedfordshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough , 1968). At the beginning of the 20thC it was the home of Edward Hunnybun (q.v.), a Huntingdon solicitor and distinguished botanical artist. Its gardens, extending over two acres, were a popular venue for fêtes and dances, but are now for the most part covered by Field Close, a 1970s residential housing development. A modern single-storey, flat-roofed annex that stands beside the house was built as a doctor’s surgery in 1969. It was superseded by a new surgery in Mayfield in 1993, and converted to offices. In 2008, planning permission was given for its return to medical use, this time to house a dental practice which opened in November 2009.