Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), p. 151

County record societies, of which there are a declining number, perform a great service to researchers in transcribing and making more widely available varied and often hard to access sources, setting them in their context, and presenting them in annotated, indexed volumes available in print or online. Buckinghamshire Record Society has been regularly producing volumes such as the one under review since 1937, covering many aspects of the county’s history, from charters to minute books of Friends and descriptions of Lord Cobham’s gardens at Stowe. Many of the earlier volumes are freely available online via the Society’s website. This latest volume is well produced, with an introduction, explanation of methodology, glossary of unusual words, alphabetical list of testators, and indexes of names, places and subjects.

It was decided to include only the wills and inventories of those who lived in Stoke Mandeville, with the exception of one case, Robert Buckmaster of Wing, who only held land in the parish. This decision keeps the volume to a manageable size. In total 134 wills and inventories (although only one inventory survives post-1650) covering a 300-year period, were transcribed by the editor and a team of five members of the Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society’s palaeography group. The original material is held in a variety of locations: The National Archives, the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Oxfordshire History Centre, and Lincoln Archives. Only material held at TNA is online, so consequently the bringing together of papers from these diverse sources saves the researcher a lot of time and legwork. It could be argued that the volume’s introduction could have been more analytical, but that does not detract from the very real benefits the publication brings, giving easy access to disparately placed primary material.

The volume has a particular poignancy about it since the original church of St Mary’s and its graveyard, probably dating back to the Norman period was demolished in 1966, while the graveyard, left to the wiles of nature, is soon to be buried under the HS2 railway development. As Lewington writes in the introduction, ‘the building of an essential HS2 works depot will … obliterate the whole site which encompasses the old church, its graveyard, any bumps and lumps of the old village and the traces of the mill leet courses’. Thus, documentary evidence will soon be the only source for ‘the old churchyard and the buried remains of possibly at least 2,600 people’. The volume’s useful appendix details the remains of the old gravestones from a survey carried out in the 1970s and 80s. These graveyard records, added to the incomplete parish registers and the wills and inventories included in the volume, help to preserve for the future at least some aspects of the lives of some of those interred.

The wills and inventories come from a wide variety of backgrounds, although nearly all included in the volume had something to do with agriculture, as would be expected of such a rural county. Interestingly there are only seven named farmers leaving wills, the earliest being in 1775, with yeoman being the most common term for a farmer before that date. There are 14 named husbandmen, some of whom left possessions totalling over £200, and 13 named labourers. However, as Lewington points out, the occupations stated are sometimes done so loosely. Most notably, perhaps, is the will and inventory of John Ledgingham who died in 1616 and is described as a labourer. Ledgingham’s possessions were valued at £27 5s. 4d. He left cows and a bullock, sheep, pigs, corn in barn, wheat in fields and hens, capons and chickens. He was also owed money to the sum of £5. Ledgingham’s wife Sybill, who died in 1619, took over the farm upon her husband’s death but is described as widow rather than labourer. Women are represented by 17 per cent of the wills in the volume though none are described by their occupation.

Only around seven per cent of the population left wills, so it could be said that the volume is not typically representative of Stoke Mandeville’s small population (in 1801 it totalled 248 persons) Familiar family names appear again and again throughout the centuries: the Browns, a yeoman family, are recorded over 200 years from the mid-sixteenth century, and the Hoare family for 200 from the mid-seventeenth century; the Clark family has 41 entries, while the Brudenell family of landowners, has 34. The Brudenells had held the manors of Oldbury and Newbury with the manor of Stoke Mandeville from the beginning of the fifteenth century, although they had disappeared from the Stoke Mandeville record by 1642. Their impressive late sixteenth-century monument was later removed from the old church and placed in the new Victorian edifice.

A lot of effort went into producing this volume, and the Record Society should be commended for continuing to produce such items, adding greatly to the history of the county, as well, in this case to ensuring an ancient site is not wholly buried in the name of ‘progress’. The volume is a pleasure to use.