7. A Comprehensive Tour of the Parish of Prestwood, its Properties and Inhabitants, in 1851
[The following account is written from a contemporary perspective, using information that might have been available to a traveller of the time. More than one such traveller did in fact make a similar perambulation in 1851 - the census-takers working for the first full British census, and they would have had to visit each of the properties much as we do below. It was their information that largely informs this account, along with the brief census of 1841 and the records of land ownership and tenancy in the Tithe Apportionment of c.1837. Where it seemed helpful to provide some reference to later events or names, I have inserted these in square brackets. I have provided maps of each section to help follow the routes taken. These are based on the Glebeland Map of 1850 held by Holy Trinity parish church, which in turn was clearly based on the national series of Tithe Apportionment maps (copies of which can be viewed by appointment at the Buckinghamshire Records Centre, Aylesbury). I have had to add a number of buildings to the map that were built in the 1840s, although the glebe-land map had naturally added the new church buildings. One thing these maps make very clear, compared to the dense community that is Prestwood today, is how scattered all the properties were. Prestwood parish was predominantly open space, whether agricultural, common or wooded.
Dates appended to names are birth years. While some of these are accurate, where I have checked against birth records, in other cases they may be one year later than the true date because they were estimated from ages given in the 1851 census.
This chapter is dense and detailed, so that I have added an overview in the next chapter for those who want a quicker picture of Prestwood in 1851. The advantage of taking the house-by-house tour, however, is that it helps bring home more powerfully the nature of community life in those times. In particular it shows the dense interconnections between families, the constant small-scale movement resulting from changing circumstances, financially or as a result of ageing and the family cycle, and the marginal existence of many due to poverty.]
Section 1 (Martins End to Hotley Bottom, Spring 1851)
A main road from London to the Midlands passes through Great Missenden . This little village of about a hundred houses lies on the west side of the rich meadows bordering the River Misbourne, which runs down to the old Abbey at the south end of the village. The monks have long gone since the Dissolution, and the Abbey has been rebuilt as a gentleman’s residence, the current building in the "Regency Gothic" style being only about 50 years old and of no great architectural distinction. The grounds along the river are planted with trees as parkland and the old carp-ponds enlarged into scenic lakes, crossed by a new ironwork bridge. Here cows pasture, separated from the largehouse by a fashionable ha-ha, the stonework of which is hung with ferns. In this rich but rather plain establishment lives the current Lord of the Manor, George, Lord Carrington, gentleman-farmer with a domain of nearly 1,500 acres, and his eldest son George Jr., who runs the farm and employs 20 labourers.
Missenden Abbey and Park [2016; the building there in 1851 burned down in 1985 and this is a reconstruction)]
The coach arrives past the Abbey and up the High Street, where there are two public houses, The Plough and the White Lion, at the first of which we alight and obtain the services of a local carrier to take us on up the hill to Prestwood. There are a dozen shops along this street (bakers, butchers, grocers, draper, druggist and general dealers). Along here and along Church Street (the only other thoroughfare, leading to the church on the hill some way out of town) are the workshops of numerous trades-people, including 12 shoe- and boot-makers, 3 tailors, two blacksmiths, two wheelwrights, two sawyers, a metal worker (tinman and brazier), saddle- and harness-maker, chair-maker and twelve people in the building trades, including six bricklayers. This is the commercial centre for the surrounding rural areas, so here are also the professional services, such as Parish Clerk (Joseph Fassnidge), Registrar of Births and Deaths (John Coughtry), land agent and conveyancer, postmaster, doctor George Smeathman and the curate George Holloway. Most of these, like the landed gentry in the large houses with servants, are not local people, although the tradesmen and shopkeepers mainly are. Only 27% of households are those of labourers or gardeners, a small percentage compared to the outlying villages. The main occupations of women in the poorer cottages are plait- and lace-making, and there are both a plait merchant and a plait manufacturer living here.
High Street, Great Missenden [picture taken c.1908]
Thecarter lifts our baggage into the wooden cart, where we also sit, open to all weathers, and we set off behind the plodding horse, which knows how to pace itself up this steep slope. This is Martins End Lane, which used to be one of the main routes for the monks of Missenden Abbey to get to their land-holdings at the top of the hill, and is still a “parish road” maintained by Great Missenden parish, the lane is narrower and muddier than the London Road, hollows and ruts repaired from time to time with flints and rubble. High banks and hedges go by each side, the depth of this lane a sign of its use over many centuries.
Martins End Lane
We soon leave the village houses, which are concentrated along the main street, and lumber up the hill, with an orchard on our right and agricultural fields on our left, until we reach the large Angling Spring Wood to the left. Once the ground levels out we leave the wood and eventually reach a junction at Martin's End, with a track leading north through farmland and woods to Rignall Farm [Broombarn Lane] and south into Prestwood parish. [It has been suggested that "Martin" may have been one of the presiding monks here [Keen 1980], when it was farmed by Missenden Abbey, but it may have been the surname of a family that owned the farm after the Dissolution.]
Around this junction is a cluster of labourers’ cottages belonging to Joseph Honnor, just outside the Prestwood boundary. Only one of these families has been here more than ten years – that of William Wilkinson (1803), who has a son who is also a labourer, one daughter a lace-maker and another a straw plait-maker. An older daughter is married and an older son is now working outside the parish. William came here from Little Missenden in 1834 after marrying a Henley woman. More recent arrivals are the farm-worker families of Jesse Towns (1817) who moved to this cottage in 1846 when he married a local girl Eliza (we shall meet his father Joseph shortly); John Jennings (1823) who has just married Sarah Pearce, and comes from a long-standing Methodist family that lived in this area in the C17th (John plays violin at their meetings); and William Buckland (1818) recently settled here after marrying another local girl called Eliza. William’s widowed mother lives by Prestwood Common, near his brother Jabez. They come originally from an itinerant tinker family and their older brother Timothy is still a “travelling tinman”, currently living in an encampment on Bledlow Ridge with a large family that already amounts to eight children aged from a few months to seventeen years. Some of these children’s names reflect a predilection for the more exotic often found among such travellers – Jabez, Freedom, Liberty, and Tryphena.
We turn south and leave our cart at the Green Man , a public house that stands just within the boundary of the parish. (It is said to have been built on the original site of Martin's Farm that once belonged to Missenden Abbey). This is a relatively new (1820s) house in local yellow brick and flint. Here Charles Nash (1820) is the publican, replacing Isaac Rose, who had in turn succeeded Thomas Pedder here when he died. (Thomas Pedder's widow Sarah now lives in Great Missenden High Street with her son Charles and her sister Elizabeth and not far from her son John, a bricklayer. William Pedder of Great Missenden had been mentioned in 1784 on the list for the Poll for Knights of the Shire.) Nash supplements the limited earnings of the pub by growing and selling fruit in his own orchard and doing wood-cutting work.
The Green Man [taken in 2018; the building has been much altered, whitewashed, and enlarged since 1851].
Green Man Cottages start on the left-hand side.
Former sign [exhibited at Hildreths Garden Centre]
Charles is the son of the late John Nash, who made “hames”, part of the wooden collar of a draught horse, was the publican at the White Horse, Heath End in 1837, and also owned the Green Man and the group of cottages beside it before they were inherited by Charles's uncle James Nash (a 70-year-old farmer at Heath End whom we shall visit later). Charles’s grandfather John outlived his eldest son John, living well into his eighties in Great Kingshill until he died a few years ago. The family lived in the Monks Risborough area in the C18th, but now own various houses, fields and orchards here, particularly in the Heath End and Great Kingshill parts of the parish. Many of them are saddletree makers, that is they make the wooden frames for saddles and cart-seats from local timber. Nash is a common name around here and there are several different families. Many of them work in the timber business and this may have been their calling from the earliest times, as the surname is shortened from the Middle English, atten "at an" ash [tree], a name also used for many villages in forested areas.
Adjoining the public house on the west side is a terraced row of six cottages facing, like the beer-house itself, on to the common. These are also owned by James Nash. Five of these are occupied by farm labourers’ families.
Part of the row of Green Man Cottages [taken in 2000 before a modern extension was built on the left-hand side]
One of the labourer’s families that live in the Green Man Cottages , that of Ephraim Harding (1816), has been here for over ten years. They have four children at home, from 11-year-old Job who already works as a labourer and 10-year-old Mary Ann, who is a lace-maker, down to Ephraim James who is only two. Ephraim Sr. was born nearby at Crib Corner.
Also in the Green Man row is Mary Ann Clarke, a 37-year-old widow who makes a living from lace-making and has four children. She has been doubly unfortunate in marriage. Her first husband, a member of the Bignall family of Bryants Bottom, died young in 1842, after they had had three children, two of whom still live with her. She then married Thomas Clarke, from a branch of the family running Prestwood Common Farm, but he also died two years ago, leaving her with two more young children. Cholera has taken an awful toll here, as in the rest of the country, in the last twenty years, although not as rife as in London. The other families are of recently-arrived farm-workers: James Penn (1826) who had moved to Prestwood about 1835 with his mother Sophia and brother William, having lived five years in Great Missenden, coming originally from Saunderton; Daniel Saunders (1813) from Loosley Row; and Charles Wilkinson (1816) from Great Missenden. These cottages are workers' homes typical of those we see throughout the parish - two-up, two-down, with small dark rooms, their windows tiny with leaded lights. Oil lamps and candles provide limited light and business is regulated by the seasons, getting up with the sun and retiring with it. The cottages are little more than kitchens and dormitories, even large families coping with just two bedrooms.
The open land facing the Green Man Row is Martin's End Common, the north-east corner of the large Prestwood Common, around which the little village of Prestwood is mainly arrayed. This neck of furzy heath is known as Town Stile, probably from the stile for the footpath (known as "Straight Bit") crossing the east boundary into Town Meadow, outside the parish, the property of Joseph Honnor. (This footpath follows the bottom of valley through Angling Spring Wood mentioned above, all the way to Great Missenden, the “Town” in question.) This piece of common has a pond for the use of cottagers’ cows and goats (those able to afford them).
Having left the cart at the Green Man, we continue south by foot across the end of Martin's End Common to where a track bears left to Andlows (or Anlow’s) Farm, mixed crops and pasture. This farm, as well as Angling Spring Wood beyond it, is owned by Joseph Honnor (57) as part of the Missenden Abbey Estate. To the south we can see down to Atkins Wood, the start of John Edmunds’s farm, and to the east of it Hobbshill Wood, owned by Thomas Tyrwhitt-Drake of Shardeloes.
The farm dates back at least to the C15th, as we know that Richard Anlowe inherited it on 17 July 1488 from his father John. The buildings now, however, are of C17th-18th origin, of flint and brick on an earlier timber frame interior. The rooms still have old beams, mouldings, cornices and spandrels, as well as a large inglenook fireplace in the central room. There are two large C18th timber-framed, weather-boarded barns linked by a recently-constructed cowshed.
Andlows Farm [photo taken 2000]
Thehas been used recently for employees who manage the farm, and these frequently change. In 1841 this was the game-keeeper Henry Howes and his family, although part of the house was then lived in by a wealthy old lady, Martha James, and her servant, but she died several years ago. Isaac Aldridge managed the farm here until 1850, when he died, and his wife, now a pauper with young children but no financial support, has had to move out to a cottage in nearby Moat Lane, where her husband had maintained a small garden carved out of previous common land. Thomas West currently runs the farm. There is a fine orchard of apples, cherries and plums. Such orchards are normal for farms, being used not only for domestic consumption, as apples are also used to make cider to provide refreshment for the farm workers. The name Andlows derives from the Anlowe family name, and the wood used to be Anlowe’s Spring Wood, which has been corrupted to the jocular “Angling” Spring. Although there are springs, and the track through the centre of the wood at the bottom of the valley (the continuation of Straight Bit past Town Stile) is a quagmire much of the time, there are certainly no fish! This track through the wood is only used by the farmer and the bodgers who cut and work chair-legs for the chair-makers in Great Missenden. Red squirrels run up the beech, hazel and hornbeam trees in the wood, and woodpeckers rap them loudly with their beaks, but there are no deer here – they were hunted out long ago.
Returning to the start of the track to Andlows, a small lane [Green Lane] runs south through farmland to cottages further south on the east side of Prestwood Common. Just to the west of the junction there is a short track to the first of the southern row of habitations, a double cottage [“Old House”] rented from Joseph Honner. Labourer Thomas Wright, a widower, used to have one of these cottages. He died some years ago and his daughter-in-law Mary who lived with him has moved to another cottage towards the south of Prestwood Common. The sawyer/labourer John Rance (1811) has now moved here from Long Row with his family. Two teenage sons work as labourers and two daughters, 10 & 7, as plait-makers. Rance is from a Great Missenden family – there were two labourers of that name there in 1798. Two older brothers, both sawyers like John, still live nearby, Thomas by Prestwood Common and James in Back Lane, Great Missenden. John's widowed mother Martha, a nurse, lives with his younger sister Elizabeth nearby. Turners, more generally known locally as “bodgers”, and sawyers, working with larger timber, are frequent in this area. All the local woods have oval pits constructed for sawing timber after felling. The logs are laid across the pit and a large saw is used vertically, a man at each end, one in the pit underneath and the other on top of the log. With a burgeoning furniture industry in High Wycombe and plenty of other uses of wood for building, there is plenty of work for sawyers, of which there are many in Prestwood, the industry being second only to farming in its demand for labour. The next two cottages (owned by James Olliffe) are at the southern corner of Martins End Common where it widens out into Prestwood Common. The first [Lavender Cottage] is inhabited by labourer John Peedle who recently lived at a cottage at Nairdwood (below) with his widowedmother Rebecca and a younger brother William, and moved here with his wife Penelope and three childrenafter his mother’s recent death. Penelope’s father Joseph Birch (1775), who comes from The Lee and still works as a labourer, is living with them. John (1801) is the oldest in his family: brother William (1808) lives by the Common, while his sister Charlotte (1803) is married to Thomas Beeson and lives in the Gardener’s Cottage at Peterley Manor. The Peedles are Methodists and another long-standing local family who owned cottages beside Prestwood Common as far back as the C17th. Edward Peedle was born in Little Missenden in 1780 and married Rebecca Darvill, John’s mother, from the same village. Apart from William, John has a brother George and a sister Ann, both unmarried and living together in the High Street, Great Missenden, with their mother; another brother Daniel who is married and also lives in Great Missenden High Street; and a sister Alice who lives in Little Kingshill, married to a farmer’s son, James Tilbury.
The second cottage [Spindle Cottage] has only just been built at the end of a narrow strip of land known as Crib Corner, where there had been a small plantation before it was clear-felled by the owner James Olliffe. The name of Crib Corner perhaps comes from there having been a hut or stall for animals here (Old English cribb). Here live another labourer’s family, Thomas Harding (1795) with his son Charles’s (1829) young family (three children aged 1, 3 and 5). Charles works as a labourer and sawyer. Thomas came from Marlow in 1815 when he married local girl Hannah. Their sons John and Ephraim both live nearby.
Crossing Martins End Common from here, past the pond [Brickpits; this common is now entirely occupied by the houses along New Road and Salmons Lane], we reach the north side and the grocer’s shop [Honor Cottage] of John (1798) and Fanny Wright,with a strip of meadow next door. Behind them lie the fields of Rignall Farm north of the parish. On the west side of the grocer’s is a new house [next door to Oliver Wright’s House] on a piece of land recently enclosed from the common where the Wrights’ son Jabez lives as a sawyer with his lace-maker wife and 2-year-old daughter.
John and Fanny Wright's grocers [Honor Cottage, taken in 2018]
Cottage of Jabez Wright the sawyer [taken in 2018 - the porch is a modern addition, as well as neighbouring houses]
We now walk west again past the Wrights’ houses to where a narrow cobbled lane (Blind Lane) goes off towards Rignall, right in front of Long Row , six new terraced cottages built by George Boug in the 1820s to house some of his agricultural workers.The lane is a ‘noggin’ path of Denner Hill stone. (The term “nogging” was used, especially in the north of England, to refer to wooden bricks or brick structures built with a wooden frame, and this would seem to be an extension of that use, either replacing the wooden bricks with small stone slabs, or else because the paths were originally laid with timber margins.) These cottages are cramped and dingy. Each cottage is simply one-up and one-down – no other room not even a kitchen - and the entrance doors on each side give straight into the main room with an open staircase to the bedroom. There is little privacy; even the single outdoor privy is shared by them all; and each cottage holds a whole family. The six families here currently average six members each. They change fairly regularly according to seasonal vicissitudes in farming employment, but three of the families have been here ten years.
Long Row with the noggin path passing right by their doors [photo taken 2000]
Thomas Franklin moved in here during the 1830s. His wife Elizabeth, aged 37 and already widowed, was 14 years his junior. She has five children from 6 to 17 and also looks after her widowed mother Martha Rance (1788) who works as a nurse. (We just met her brother John, above.) Her eldest child, named after her mother, and the second eldest, Ann, both help their mother in lace-making, while the third eldest William does labouring jobs, but their income is not enough to support such a young family and they are adjudged to be “paupers”, being awarded some “relief” from the parish. Previously Elizabeth had also looked after her grandmother, Ann Nash, who is now dead. (Ann had lived in Wycombe Heath in the 1840s, but owned a cottage in Prestwood [now Autumn Cottage].)
Another of the cottages is occupied by a married couple in their late thirties, Elijah and Mary Peppett (or Peppiatt/Peppard). They never had any children. His uncle John was a farmer in Prestwood at the end of the C18th and used to live nearby in Moat Lane before he died, and his father Thomas (1781) still lives there.
The third long-standing family here us that of John Wilkins (1798), who moved here from Green Man cottages. He and his wife have five children at home, from 4 to 19, three girls working as lace-makers and one boy as a labourer. Their older children also live locally. Henry (1821) is in Polecat Lane (below). William (1827) and Jacob (1837) live along the lane between Ballinger and the Barley Mow, above Great Missenden on the other side of the Misbourne valley. Born locally, John's brother George is a small farmer on the far side of the common and his sister Sarah married William Groom (see later).
More recent arrivals are Norman Thomas Moore(s) (1822), carpenter, whose parents live by the common and his brother Daniel in Moat Lane; and Thomas Danvers (1821), whose mother is dead and father John is living in Little Kingshill with Thomas’s sister Sara (1834). John originally came from Oxfordshire, moving here when he married. The Danvers put up two lodgers who are farm labourers. One is Jonathan Ayres (1827), who lived in Long Row with his parents until his father died in 1847. His mother has moved to Kiln Common (see below). The other lodger is Daniel Tibbles (1818) descended from the old Prestwood brickmakers of that name. His father James was born in Prestwood but now lives at Littleworth in the Hughenden parish.
Thomas Tibballs, who was a Quaker, lived at Kiln Common in the C16th, and his son John, 1604-69, was recorded as a brickmaker there. At the time of John Tibballs's death in 1669 he left a wife Katherine, children Joseph (eldest son, born 1636, and executor of his will, who lived in Great Missenden), James (who had married Elizabeth Hill in 1663 and, after her death around 1670, re-married Sarah, and who lived in Prestwood), Daniel (youngest child, who died 1686), Thomas (second youngest who married Sarah Anthony in 1671 and lived on the west side of Prestwood Common), Mary (1631,second child), and Katherine (1632 third child, who married into the Chilton family), and five young grandchildren (Joseph's son John 1663, James's daughters Elizabeth 1665 and Mary 1666, and Katherine's sons Edward and John Chilton). The Kiln Common brickyards were continued by John's sons James and Thomas, who supplied bricks to Hampden House in 1683. They were succeeded by James's son Timothy (1675-1765) who married Elizabeth Winter of Hughenden in 1706, only for her to die in childbirth the next year. He then married Sarah Alice in 1712. He supplied Hampden House regularly from 1734 to 1762. In the later C18th the Kiln Common brickyards were occupied by Timothy's children Hannah (1715-93), Daniel (1713-69) and Ephraim (1724-1815), Ephraim's sons Timothy (1764) and Ephraim Jr. (1768), who married Elizabeth King of Monks Risborough in 1790. In 1797 the Kiln Common Enclosure Act granted land to these two youngest Tibballses to extend their brickyard, but all their holdings were sold in 1825 to John Matthie, the brickyard closed, and Ephraim's family moved to Great Hampden. Long Row lies at right angles to the edge of Prestwood Common, which here trends north-west past a row of three more labourers’ cottages built in the last few years. Here we find Jesse Aldridge (1818) and his wife Sophia, who already have five children, the latest born this year. The eldest, while only ten, works as a labourer like his father, as they need the extra income. Jesse’s father, Isaac, used to live in this cottage, but he died recently in his early fifties. Isaac had previously worked on Rignall and Andlow’s Farms. His widowed mother Elizabeth then moved to a cottage near Moat Farm, living on parish support and whatever her son can spare, as neither she nor her daughter Patience (1829) has paid work, Patience having a young baby, Jane, to look after. Her other son Joshua (1826) lives on Moat Farm as a farm servant and ploughman, while her daughter Sophia is married to John Bristow (see below).
One of Jesse’s neighbours is the widow Rebecca Clarke (1774), who used to live at Prestwood Common farm nearby, but now lives here with her son Alfred, who continues to work at the farm. The third cottage is shared by two couples from traveller families. Thomas Redding (1806), who is from Bristol, lives with his wife Ann, who was born locally, while Thomas Hearne (1819), born in Chesham, lives with his wife Louisa from Little Hampden. Hearne’s sister Maria (1814), born in Great Hampden, is the wife of the younger James Essex (below). His widowed mother Hannah (1784) lives with Maria.
Beyond these cottages lie a meadow and orchard belonging to Prestwood Common Farm. This old farm, built in 1605, lies behind the orchard and a large pond borders the farmyard opposite the house. John Clarke rented this land from Thomas Furnivall of Beamond End in the 1830s, but by 1841 it was being run by Rebecca, his then 67-year-old widow (who came originally from Haddenham), with help from her son Alfred (aged 20), while two older sons Henry and Joseph lived with them and brought in more money working as sawyers. Now it is in the hands of William Clarke (1787), John’s younger brother, and Rebecca has retired to a nearby cottage, as we have just seen. William married a St Albans woman, Elizabeth. It is a small farm of 40 acres employing just two labourers, mostly pasture apart from one field of crops. Such small farms these days are hardly sufficient to make a living and successful farmers are ones who have managed to increase their holdings, many of them currently having an eye on the large common as potential for new enclosures. Small farmers often have to supplement their incomes by doing some work for other farmers or in the timber industry. Next we pass an even smaller farm of just ten acres - several small pastures and an orchard. This is Pankridge Farm, the property of James Olliffe, who lives at Dutchlands Farm, between Great Missenden and Wendover. It is occupied by his brother John (1783) who runs a bakery here with his wife Esther. They are currently looking after a 12-year-old grand-daughter, as is common when cottages are small and families large, out-placed to provide both help to the grandparents and more room for the rest of her family. They have a married son James (1815) farming at Wendover Dean, just beyond Dutchlands, and an unmarried son William (1824) who runs Town Farm in Little Missenden. The family has been involved with farming in this area since at least the mid-C18th (William Olliffe of Great Missenden was a Knight of the Shire in 1784). The name of the farm is perhaps from the surname of a previous owner. It dates back to the C17th and is timber-framed, cased later on in brick and flint, with a large central brick chimney stack. Inside the original timbers are visible and there are large inglenook fireplaces beneath the central chimney, where the bread was baked.
Pankridge (taken 2019)
We then pass by pastures belonging to Elisha Essex’s farm, approaching another major entrance to the common at its northernmost tip. Elisha rents three fields next to the common from George Cross, but the larger ones beyond, which are ploughed, he rents from George Hampden, whose huge estate stretches from here to beyond Great Hampden. Elisha’s former residence [White Cottage, demolished] stands in front of the second pasture, but he recently moved to the large house at Greenlands Farm, and a young sawyer from West Wycombe, Richard Blackwell (1821) and his family now live here. Their two eldest sons, 11 and 9, work as labourers. There are many woodworking families of this name in West Wycombe.
The next-door double cottage [The Cottage, Moat Lane, now demolished] was once shared by Essex’s older cousin Elijah, but he too has moved, to the east side of the common, the cottage now being occupied by the 70-year-old former labourer Thomas Peppett (see son Elijah above), who is looked after by two spinster daughters in their thirties, Ann and Hannah, earning money from lace-making, while his wife Hester (1883) still works as a live-in housekeeper at Moat Farm, 200 yards further on along our route. He owns a neighbouring field, which people call Peppett's Meadow. Thomas’s brother John was a small farmer in Prestwood in the early part of the century, although in 1841 he was working as a labourer at Rignall Farm.
The other family there at the same time as Essex, that of Joseph Towns, has moved to a nearby cottage and we shall meet them soon. A widow with three children has moved in now, Martha Heath, who was a lace-maker but is currently unemployed, her two eldest boys, 13 and 11, bringing in their only money from farm work. Her former husband had been a postman in Great Missenden and seems to have been descended from Thomas Heath (1756-1837), who was born in Prestwood and became the much-valued bailiff and gamekeeper on the Missenden Abbey estate. The Carringtons erected a sumptuous grave for him in Great Missenden churchyard.
Looking south from here we can see a small enclosure out in the common by the open track that goes from east to west from Martins End. There have recently been a number of pieces of land occupied by fencing off parts of the common, mostly near the edge, usually to provide allotments. These encroachments are not “legal” (essentially stealing communally-owned land) but appear not be challenged, as the local population expands and requires more land for housing and growing vegetables or keeping animals and poultry. In this case three cottages have recently been built in the usual flint style. The first [Old Flint Cottage], with a garden and meadow attached, is owned by James Olliffe and was first occupied by James Croft, who has since died. It is now held by James Nash (1808), a labourer from Wendover, and his wife Sophia (1801) from Saunderton. James’s widowed mother Rebecca lives with his brother William at Thimble Farm cottage and another brother George lives in Kiln Common. The cottage is shared by the Penns, aged 5 to 20, children of Sophia Nash by a previous marriage to John Penn, who died four years after they moved to Great Missenden in 1831. James’s father Charles was a farmer at Hunts Green near The Lee.
Old Flint Cottage [taken 2018; the porch is modern - so is the car!]
Just to the west is a cottage [behind what is now The Roses] rented by John Essex (1783) an army pensioner, with his wife Mary (1805), the infant John Essex, his brother Elijah’s son, and a “servant” James Rodwell (1828), a journeyman carpenter. Elijah lives further south by Prestwood Common.
John Essex's cottage [taken 2000 after enlargement]
On the north side of a little pasture behind this cottage is one with a garden built by Joseph Moors, occupied by him and his family in1841 and, since his death, by the family of his son Henry (1817), a farm labourer like his father. The widow Mary (1785) moved to her daughter Emma’s family just on the north side of the common with her son William (1830), a sawyer. Emma’s husband is John Harding (see below). Henry Moors, who was married five years ago, has two children with the original names of Amos Jesse and General David. Norman Moors (above) is his cousin.
Returning to where we temporarily left the edge of the common we find a track going north towards the little farm settlement of Hotley Bottom. This is Moat Lane. We now leave the rough land behind and pass among small paddocks on each side. On the left we pass more recent enclosures, the start of Prestwood proper, asthe community bordering the main common is known as "Prestwood Common". A double cottage bordering the common houses two families. John Smith, 49-year-old journeyman carpenter, lives with his wife and daughter Frances (1831) who makes lace. They have been here ten years or so. His father was born in the area in 1798 and lived at Rignall. The Bucklands live next door. Both his late father and his grandfather lived in Prestwood, and Jabez (1823) continues here as a sawyer, with his wife and four young children, the latest Mary only just born.
The next plot of land was until a couple of years ago a meadow used by James Haines, rented from Robert Douglas, from whom he also rented the C17th cottage beside it. There is a house now built on this meadowland called Mount Pleasant [Whiteacre Cottage]. (Although there is no actual hill it is just about at the highest point of the Prestwood plateau. The name was a common one in C18-19th, in Britain and the colonies, usually applied ironically to land that was formerly used as a rubbish dump, which is quite possibly the case here, as the older community of Kiln Common to the west would have needed somewhere to deposit waste and this may have been as good as anywhere, on the edge of the common.) Three families live here. The first is Thomas Babb, 27-year-old master carpenter, his wife Hannah and three young children. [The lane in which this cottage now stands was named Babb's Lane after this family.] Thomas’s grandfather William was the farmer at Great Hampden Farm in the last century, and his own father, also William, farmed at Little Hampden before taking over as the publican at the Chequers in Prestwood in the 1830s, where he also kept a small farm. He is now farming at Heath End (see below). Thomas has a brother Benjamin who works as a farm labourer at Piggott’s, west of Prestwood. The other two households are of 65-year-old labourer Joseph Towns and his wife, and their son George (1815) with his wife and three young daughters. We have already met George’s brother Jesse. The family have lived in the area for several generations. Ten years ago, when still single, Georgelodged at Sedges Farm as one of their farm labourers. Many young people, before they marry, lodge out in this way, relieving their families of the burden of support and the chronic overcrowding of large families in tiny cottages, and providing all-hours support for their employers in return for board and lodging and a small wage. It also gives them a chance to meet others of similar age, as there will usually be several such “farm-servants”, and many a marriage has issued from such encounters.
The cottage north of Mount Pleasant used to be occupied by James Haines, who died shortly after 1840 (although only in his thirties) and his widow Elizabeth and children moved to another house nearby (see below). They were replaced by another member of the Peedle family (we met John above), labourer William (1808). The couple have five children at home, aged 5 to 14, the three older boys (10 to 14) all working as labourers, and 7-year-old Martha as a lace-maker. They lived on the east side of Prestwood Common in 1841. The Peedles, being Methodists, have no local place of worship and attend meetings in each other's homes.
In an adjoining cottage lives Daniel Moors (1824), brother of Norman above. He works as a carter and labourer, and also cuts brushwood to sell as firewood. His wife Mary Ann (1814) was the daughter of Thomas Chilton of Great Missenden, and her sister Martha Heath, two years younger, but already a widow, lives a little further in our direction. Mary Ann looks after Martha’s son from before her marriage, James Chilton (1838), who works as a farm labourer.
Returning to Moat Lane we continue north to the Moat Farm that gave it is name, not an old medieval moated settlement, but built in the C15th, when moats were a fashionable rather than a functional accessory. It is mostly a dry ditch now, and the lane crosses it, but a circle of disconnected ponds still survives around the farm. One pond [Kiln Corner Pond] lies in the orchard across the lane from the farm, in what they calla “pightle”, or small croft, which has a little pine plantation the other side of it. Fields nearest the farmhouse are pasture and those further away devoted to crops, as usual. The building is two-storey and partly quite ancient, with many later alterations. On a basic T-plan, it is timber-framed with later bricking and a thatched roof. Other walls are flint and brick, and there is a weather-boarded outbuilding. Inside, the rear wing contains the arch braced roof of a late medieval hall, floored in the C17th with oak beams, probably when the current fireplace was built in 1687. The whole farm is rented from the Hampden estate by Elisha Essex, who also lived here in the 1830s. He left his labourer Thomas Peppett, a widower with two unmarried daughters, to look after the farm, and Thomas got re-married, to Elisha’s cousin Hester (1783). In 1841 she was caring for her old mother Hannah Essex, then in her nineties, at the nearby cottage where Thomas’s son Elijah now lives (see above). When Thomas became too old, and moved to another cottage with his daughters, Hester remained here as housekeeper with two farm servants, ploughman Joshua Aldridge (1826) and his assistant ploughboy Samuel Sinfield (1836).
Moat Farm [2000: the thatched roof is long gone and the porch is new]
An unenclosed track continues north along a shallow valley with the Prestwood parish boundary running nearby to the east. This is also the Great Missenden/Stoke Mandeville civil parish boundary, as the land to our left is a detached part of distant Stoke Mandeville parish near Aylesbury. This land was onceKiln Common, enclosed in 1798 when Prestwood began to grow (as it is now encroaching, too, on the larger Prestwood Common). On our right, in fact, are a number of smallholdings that were some of the first enclosures on Kiln Common. The first one, and the cottage beside it [Autumn Cottage], built only a few years ago, were originally owned by Ebenezer Benham and rented by an old widow lace-maker Mary Lewis, later acquired by Ann Nash, and now belonging to a labourer at Moat Farm, James Essex (1812) (whose parents live on the east side of the common) and his family are in residence. (John above is his uncle. James's employer Elisha Essex is the son of his grandfather's brother. They also look after his wife Maria’s mother, Hannah Hearne, a 77-year-old former lace-maker. A series of garden plots beyond the cottage are owned by various people and at the back of them is the large Wibner Pond, right on the boundary of the parish, with crops in Widmere Field beyond. (“Wibner” is a corruption of wid mere or “large pond”, as many of the larger pools seem to have been named in Anglo-Saxon times. It is an old stock-watering hole.)
Wibner Pond [in 2000 - much overgrown and shaded compared to how it once was]
On the left hand side we come to an isolated public house and coach-house, on the crest of the hill, called The George after King George III who acceded in 1760, during the early part of whose reign the house was built. Thomas Essex (1795) serves here with his wife Martha (1799), as they have been doing for over ten years. His brother Elisha is a grocer at Kiln Common as their father was also. They keep one 15-year-old servant, errand boy Charles Gater (1836), who is not from around here.
About a furlong after here, past a large chalk-pit on the right, we come to Hotley Bottom Farm, at the junction with Back Lane [Greenlands Lane], along a steeper-sided valley coming in from the left. Just before this lane are two cottages (owned by Samuel Olliffe), home to workers on the farm. One is Solomon Nash (1822), single. He is another one of the extensive Nash family. We shall meet his father George shortly, while James, above, is an uncle. In the adjoining cottage is lace-maker Martha Pearce (1793) with her labourer son Charles (1823), daughter Jane (1830), also a lace-maker, and her youngest son George (1840). When her husband Philip was alive they lived beside Prestwood Common. His family came here from The Lee towards the end of the C18th and he had a lot of relatives in the region, with brothers at The Lee, Hunts Green, Little Missenden, Kingshill, and Spurlands End.
Hotley Bottom Farm Cottages [2000]
Hotley Bottom Farm [2000]
At the farm itself is young Jabez Taylor (1822), with his wife and three little children, the eldest only four, and his servant and shepherd Thomas Edmunds (1832), the son of the farmer at Sedges Farm. Jabez was born in Little Missenden, where his father James, who owns this farm and another at Holmer Green, still works as a miller, corn-dealer and butcher. The farm is 93 acres and Jabez employs four men. The chalk slope, running along to Lodge Wood, makes good sheep country. The bleating of the lambs is drowned intermittently by the metallic percussion emanating from the smithy of Josiah Thompson (1804), who lives with his wife in a cottage by the farm. His late father John was blacksmith here ten years ago, while his brother James is the blacksmith at Hunt's Green. As there is only employment for a limited number of blacksmiths in any one place, blacksmith families tend to get very dispersed, and there are Thompsons performing this role at Ellesborough, Chalfont, and Amersham. Even so, the Thompsons have long been associated with Prestwood, as William Thompson was a blacksmith at Martins End in the early C17th (Holmes 2011). Josiah's uncle Daniel, before he died, was a blacksmith and small farmer at Kiln Common, along with a son who died around 1840 (we meet his widow Penelope later). Josiah worked there before taking over at Hotley Bottom.
There was once a little cottage opposite the farm where John Peppett, labourer at Rignall Farm, lived in the 1830s, but it has been pulled down to make a stable. This is all the little community at Hotley Bottom, probably much as it was centuries ago, as the name of this place is Anglo-Saxon and it must have been here in medieval times. Leah “woodland clearing” implies that it had just been created as farmland from surrounding woods at the time it was named, while botm usually refers to a river valley. Certainly a steep valley runs north from here – the old lane descends between steep banks – and this would probably have held a stream long ago, a tributary of that running along Rignall Road until recent times, and the existence of this stream would have provided vital water for the original settlers, explaining why the farm was sited here. As for the first syllable, this may have referred to a man called Hod, a not uncommon name in those times, presumably he who cleared the fields.
At the bottom of the hill and half a mile to the west, along Rignall Road from Great Missenden to Princes Risborough, are a couple of cottages, known as Hampden Bottom, just outside the Prestwood boundary and belonging to the Great and Little Hampden parish. One is another smithy, that of John Walker (1810), who was born at Great Hampden, is unmarried and looks after his widowed mother Sarah (1775). His brother William also works as a blacksmith at Kiln Common (below). The other family here is that of farm labourer Abel Ausden (1801), who comes from Princes Risborough. Hampden Bottom Farm lies another good mile to the west along this road. Here William Ives farms over 250 acres and employs nine labourers. He and his wife are local and part of the large Ives family of landowning farmers (see Thomas above). They keep one domestic servant and four farm servants. The latter include William Bignell (1833) and his cousin Thomas (1837), the sons of two brothers who live at Bryants Bottom, whom we shall meet later on.