CHANGE IN THE CHILTERNS
NATURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF A COUNTRY PARISH: PRESTWOOD
Locating Prestwood
Prestwood lies on the dip-slope of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire above the village of Great Missenden. It lies south of Aylesbury, north of High Wycombe and west of Amersham. It is 35 miles north-west of the centre of London and nearly 28 miles east of Oxford. Before the Parish of Prestwood was established around 1850, the area was partly in the Parish of Great Missenden, partly in the Parish of Hughenden, and partly in a detached section of the Parish of Stoke Mandeville (later, since c1885, part of the Parish of Great Hampden).
About this book
This book centres around 1851, not by any design of the author, but because that was the way it had to be.
Construction of the parish church of Prestwood was begun in 1849. Before then there was no Prestwood Parish. Of course, there were people and houses and farms here before 1851; they had been here a very long time, and Part I of this book is concerned with that time, from the geological origins of the soil and landscape through the first humans to the development of a proto-modern society. But only after 1851 can one see this area in an integrated way, instead of tiny settlements and isolated farms outlying the Hampden, Hughenden and Missenden estates, that impinged on, but were hardly part of the life of, this barren wind-swept hilltop.
1851, as it happens, also marks the coming of age of the Industrial Revolution that had begun, more or less, one hundred years before. This revolution had massive implications for society, individuals and nature, so great that many have postulated the start of a new geological age in 1750, replacing the most recent (until then) Holocene period with the Anthropocene, the age during which the activities of man were to become increasingly dominant in determining the future of the whole Earth and its eco-systems. We look at that a little more in the first chapter of Part II.
But most crucial of all, for the historian, is the first full modern census of the British people in 1851, now published and available to all. For the first time we get to see the full range and nature of the people inhabiting this parish, although the notes attached to the tithe maps of 1837 and thereabouts had given some precious details of how the land was occupied and owned, and the trial census of 1841 gave the first glimpse of the skeleton that was to have a little more flesh on it by 1851. This is why Part II of this book is wholly devoted to an account of the nature of the parish population at this time, its life and work and relationship to the land. The history of Prestwood in Part I is created from scraps of information that happened to come down to us. When we come to 1851 we can contemplate something much more systematic. This survey forms the base-line for Part III, which traces the subsequent development of the parish. The history in this part is fairly detailed up to 1911. Beyond that the relevant censuses have not been published and we must rely again thereafter on scraps of information, although some of these are at least within living memory of the oldest inhabitants of the parish. Chapters 7 and 9 contain many detailed family accounts, which may be difficult to read through in full, but I have included them because I know that many people, living in Prestwood today or now dispersed far away, will be interested to refer to their own family histories. There are summaries at the beginning and end of both Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 for those who want to make quicker progress, but it is only in wading through the details of actual lives that one gets a real sense of life at the time, so different from our experiences today.
It is no coincidence that these three major events occur together - the formation of the new parish and the start of the British national census were both part of the growth of large-scale society brought about by the industrial revolution. Paradoxically, the new "localism" that was Prestwood parish also represented the desire of wider institutions to infiltrate the life of every local area, to break down "localism" - the established Church concerned to combat the growth of Nonconformism and to bring universal education to the peasant masses, and the centralised State requiring precise information about its members for the purposes of planning national policies.
Part IV of this book takes an alternative look at this parish today - from the perspective less of the people than of natural history and the use and management of the land.
Part V, concerned with looking into the future, is necessarily short, for this is hardly the realm of the historian, concerned with facts and not speculation. We must hope, despite the environmental crisis foreshadowed in Part IV, that the future itself is not equally short.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
TS Eliot "Little Gidding"
Acknowledgements
While I take responsibility for the inaccuracies that will inevitably be found in this book (reconstructing the past from those scraps of information left to us inevitably involves making some assumptions), it could not have been produced without the help and advice of many others. It has been a learning experience for me to walk every little part of the parish that is publicly accessible (and much of the rest, with permission, that is private). It put me in touch with the immense accumulation of history that is represented in the idea, the feeling, of a “place”. Without that history place is a meaningless juxtaposition of random things. With it, place comes alive and one gains a sense of belonging. As a non-native (I arrived in 1982) I have been dependent on longer-term residents to get to know the “meaning” of Prestwood even more than on documents and records in museums and libraries.
The idea for the book arose out of a collective endeavour – the making of the parish map, now on permanent display at Prestwood Village Hall. (For an account of the map see Appendix II.) It was the Prestwood Society that supported this idea and provided direct assistance in seeing it through to the end, particularly the then chairman Jim Davidson, Anne Bowring (who did the final artwork on the map), Mike Cobley and Jenny Yarrow.
These and many others contributed to this history in major and minor ways. I therefore extend my gratitude to the very many residents of the parish who supplied information about particular features, most of whom cannot be named here simply for reasons of space. For particularly large contributions I am indebted to Sue Davis (Denner Hill), Virginia Deradour and her late uncle Rex Davis of Wren Davis Ltd, John Garner (Andlows Farm), John Priest (Ninneywood Farm), Ron Hatt, Rosemary Holloway (Hotley Bottom), Richard Jones (Michaelmas Farm), Mr & Mrs Mike Scott (Idaho Farm), David Page and others at Holy Trinity Church, and Desmond Keen. Desmond was of inestimable help with his unrivalled knowledge of Prestwood’s past and its surviving architecture, along with his all-too-brief Prestwood Historical Guide , published by the Prestwood Society in 1980, and numerous articles in the local Trinity Herald. I am also grateful to Derek Sadler for permission to extract extensively from his thoroughly researched paper on the “Twin Wellington collision over Prestwood 1944”, to Margaret Crone and Mrs Watson for allowing me to use their aunt Winifred Peedle’s essay on Prestwood in the 1930s, and to Pierre Coulon for sight of his paper “Peterley and the Dormers” containing some original material. Margaret Crone, who now lives in Aylesbury, but spent, she tells me, “a very happy childhood” in Prestwood, provided me with a history of the Peedle family and an account of the first century of the Methodist Chapel. Some older residents were interviewed by Marilyn Fletcher, who kindly provided me with her notes.
I did original research on old documents and tythe maps held by the Buckinghamshire Records Office, whose staff provided willing and invaluable assistance. Other essential data came from the Bucks Posse Comitatus (1798); National Census Records for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871. 1881, 1891 and 1901; the Pigots Directory for Bucks 1823; Kelly's Directory for Bucks 1907; and the Cartulary Of Missenden Abbey (Jenkins 1938). Historical maps were provided by Great Missenden Parish Council, Mike Cobley, Marilyn Fletcher, and Max Watters. Other publications with historical information on the parish included: Bennett (2004), Clarke (n.d.), Coleman (2012), Doel (2000), Hammond (2001), Holmes (2010, 2011), Howard (2000), and Pike (1995). On the wider Chilterns context, Hepple and Doggett (1994) is essential. Robinson (1993) on the neighbouring parish of North Dean was also very useful, as was Veysey (2000) on Hughenden.
I was helped carrying out ancient hedge and tree surveys for the parish by Val Marshall, and with pond surveys by Eric Hollowday (particularly microscopic life) and Holly Bennett (particularly amphibians). The late Ted Byrne shared plant and bird records from the 1960s, while Mike Collard, John Emsley, John Obee and the late Graeme Taylor provided series of bird records. Druce (1926) contains important historical records of our flora. I am grateful to members of Prestwood Nature who have helped build an unrivalled database of natural history observations, supplementing many intensive surveys carried out by myself, or with the assistance of Val Marshall, Roy Maycock, Andy McVeigh, Alan Showler and a series of county Wildlife Sites Survey Officers. The County Museum allowed me access to the insect specimens in the collection of Horace J Quilter, a former Prestwood resident. Bucks and Milton Keynes Environmental Records Centre has always been very helpful in providing their records for Prestwood and the surrounding district.