Section 2 Hotley Bottom, Kiln Common, Honor End and west side of Prestwood Common to the Golden Ball

We return up Hotley Bottom lane to the eponymous Farm and then take the right-hand fork along Back Lane [Greenlands Lane], which comes down to the Farm from the south-west.  Again we find ourselves in an old sunken way between high banks that once held a regular stream, and the large loose flints composing the floor of the track show that winter rains still create a temporary stream most years.

 

Back Lane [Greenlands Lane 2011]

We are now following the west side of the former Kiln Common, but there is a large field of crops where the last remnant of the common was.  From the top of the road-bank we can also see westward across the fields of Hotley Bottom Farm to the ancient Priest’s Wood, which descends from the plateau to which we are ascending down to Hampden Bottom, and which gives Prestwood its name.  The wood is still bounded in parts by an old medieval ditch, embankment and a laid boundary hedge, once serving to keep stock out from the surrounding fields.  It is still actively managed for timber.  In spring wood-sorrel, violets, primroses and bluebells bloom among fresh green shoots already showing among the brown remains of last year’s heather along the rides, where bundles of coppiced hazel sticks lay around, for fencing or firewood.  In return for an annual payment of one shilling to the Hampden Estate, the cottagers of Prestwood are allowed to collect any fallen wood they wish for fuel etc, as long as they themselves are not the agents of its falling!  The ground at the top of the wood, undrained, is boggy with stands of rush, club-moss and downy birch, but further down the chalk slope it is drier with larger trees of beech and oak and a few wild service.

 

Priest's Wood (Lodge Wood) [winter 1991] looking across Hotley Bottom

Pepperboxes Lodge at the east end of The Glade

 

The Glade, looking west to Hampden House [2016]

 

It is also known as Lodge Wood, thisname coming from the house [Pepper Boxes] at its north-east corner, an entrance lodge for Hampden House.  This stands by the start of an avenue of lime, sweet chestnut and oak trees (The Glade) that provides an open view all the way to Hampden House, having been cut through the more extensive wood in Elizabethan times.  This avenue of trees dates back two hundred years and they are of an impressive size.  There is a carriageway along the middle of this ride, which is a couple of poles wide.  The Lodge was built in 1744 and the Hampdens’ gardener George Spittles (1816) lives here. In medieval times, before the lodge and the avenue of trees, this whole wood was the Prestes Wudu, or “the wood belong to the priest”.  Part of the Hampden Estate, it was provided as a benefice for the priest to the estate, out-posted by Missenden Abbey, who resided on the other side of the wood at Honor End (that we shall visit later).  The priest had rights to use of some of the wood from this land and to graze stock there, as at this time such priests had to be able to provide for themselves.

We climb up to the south-east corner of the wood where there is a path eastwards across the fields, leading back to Moat Farm.  Another lane [Kiln Road] starts near the pond opposite the farm, going south-westwards through the main part of the original Prestwood hamlet, referred to as Cabbage Row, probably because of all the little garden plots along here stocked with greens and peas and beans.  Some of these are more substantial cottages, like the first we pass, [now Carmel], the bakery and home of Jesse Redrup (1803), chief supplier of loaves for Prestwood, assisted by his wife Sarah and son Henry (1827).  Charles (1833) works as a carpenter, and there are three young children under eleven.  Jesse was born in Great Hampden and Sarah in High Wycombe.  They lived in Great Missenden until 1834 before moving here  Jesse’s father John owns some land at Heath End, but lives and works as a blacksmith at Great Hampden, although he is now 74 and a widower.

Behind the house are several pasture fields rented by John Olliffe, whom we met at Pankridge Farm.  These fields are owned by the Lady Bois Charity, established to support the "deserving poor" of Great Missenden parish, which also owns the next house, on the left, set back along a little lane.  This house, once known as Cats Croft, and now called Pankridges [Ladyboys], was once occupied by Olliffe, but Christopher Hester (1811), a master wheelwright from Monks Risborough, now lives there with his wife Hannah from Great Kimble, whom he married in 1839, and his widowed sister Elizabeth Haines (1808), a lace-maker, with her two children Edmund (1840), an errand boy, and Susan (1842) who attends school.  Her husband John, a carpenter, died in his thirties.  At that time they lived in anothercottage nearby on land taken from Prestwood Common.  Christopher’s father Giles, now retired from his trade as a wheelwright, still lives in Askett, Monks Risborough, with another son Giles Jr..  The rough tracks take their toll on the wooden carts and wheelwrights are always in demand.  Pankridges mostly dates back to the C17^th, but parts are believed to go back to the C15^th, the oldest house in Cabbage Row.  It is two-storeyed, basically timber-framed with brick.

A little lane south-west from here leads to West’s Farm [The Old Farm], also set back from the old common, the home of John West (1793), son of Thomas West from Princes Risborough who originally rented this house and the fields behind from Lord Carrington, for whom he was farm bailiff.  It is only a very small farm, but in 1841 John rented much more land on Denner Hill, where Edward Davis is now, and he still leases a lot of fields west of Prestwood, being the largest farmer within the boundaries of Prestwood parish, although not a landowner. He is assisted by his son Thomas. The house is late C17^th.

Beyond this farm is Glebe Cottage, a former farmhouse with a few fields behind rented from the Hampden Estate.  Josiah Thompson (see above) ran the small farm and worked as a blacksmith nearby ten years ago, but the house, part of the Glebelands of the new parish church purchased by the rector Thomas Evetts, now holds the family of John Harding, 21-year-old labourer and sawyer (we met his parents Thomas and Hannah earlier).  He lives with his wife Emma and new son, his wife’s mother, brother and uncle, plus a lodger.  Emma is the sister of Henry Moors above.  John works for William Reynolds of Hampden Farm who rents these fields.

Glebe Cottage [2018]

In front of these more substantial houses is a cluster of more humble cottages and smallholdings.  There is a smithy [Ivycroft] where Josiah Thompson worked along with Joseph Evans in the 1840s, and where William Walker (1814), originally from Great Hampden and brother of John at Hampden Bottom, works.  Labourer Edward Burnham (1790) and his family occupy a neighbouring cottage.  He is from Wendover and his wife Mary from The Lee. 

Just past here is a terraced row with a noggin path in front [Elizabeth Cottages] occupied by a number of labourers’ families in very crowded conditions, similar to Long Row.  For instance, George Nash (1791), who has lived here for over ten years with his family, has a household composed of wife, four unmarried daughters in their 20s and 30s, and another daughter with her husband and son.  He comes from The Lee and is the brother of James Nash, above.  Next to them, moreover, widow lace-maker Ann (Diana) Ayres (1806), whose sawyer husband Job died four years ago, lives with three working sons (sawyers and labourers), another son of five years, and two daughters of 11 and 13, while having her 83-year-old widowed father Joseph Atkins, a former blacksmith, to look after with two of his grandchildren aged 13 and 5, plus a lodger, a single 50-year-old sawyer - a total of eleven individuals in a one-up one-down!  (Joseph Atkins was the son of High Wycombe blacksmith Edward Atkins.)

 

Elizabeth Cottages

 

Five more families of labourers and lace-makers live in new cottages nearby, picturesque buildings of flint with pitched roofs:

- Anthony Climpson, who lived by Prestwood Common, having recently died, his wife went to act as housekeeper for Joseph Keen, a farmer at Potter's Row near Great Missenden.  Their daughters are left in Prestwood sharing a cottage here.  Ann (1828) has work as a lace-maker and Martha (1833) as a plaiter.  Their older brother William is married and works as a cordwainer (making leather shoes) in High Wycombe.

- James Essex (1791) and his wife Mary (1801) had previously tenanted a cottage in Moat Lane [Autumn Cottage], but are now here, where his father William had been a grocer many years ago.  We have already encountered one of his two younger brothers, Thomas at The George, while we shall meet Elisha at Greenlands Farm.

- William Penn (1823) is the brother of James Penn who lives near the Green Man (above). 

                   

- Daniel Free (1824) is the son of William who lives on the west side of Prestwood Common.  He has a brother at Stony Green. 

- Samuel Charge died at about the age of 45 in 1837, but his widow Ann (1792) heads a household of five children, including her married daughter Ellen Grimsdell (1825), who is living there in the temporary absence of her husband.  Sam’s brother John still lives by Prestwood Common.

Further alongare the brickyards, clay-diggings and brick-kilns that gave Kiln Common its name, the tall pug-mill visible beside the clay diggings, turned by a horse continually made to walk in circles.  Like all the workers here, the clay diggers turned out in caps, jackets and waistcoats, their trousers tied with string above their boots.  Here is Kiln House [Overholme], the residence (rented from John Charles Matthie) of the owner of the brickyards, William Avery (1785) and his wife Elizabeth, a dressmaker, who comes from Hampshire.  William’s father Thomas was similarly a brickmaker, first in Bledlow, then in the early part of the century close to Nanfan Farm, where his widow Martha lived until the late 1830s, although the yard was no longer operating by then and the buildings are now in ruins.  William’s brother Thomas (1779) lives in Bledlow Ridge and his sons John and Thomas are brickmakers in London, while other children live in nearby Radnage, except for two (Henry and James) who emigrated to America in 1835.  (John’s son John Jr. similarly emigrated and in a letter to Henry, John Sr. lamented that he had not heard from his son or from James.  The family owned a windmill in Radnage and were selling it, and John’s children had shares in it, but he could not get in touch.  He further remarked that the brick-making business is “brisk”, the price “as low as” three farthings, but provisions “very cheap” – “good bread 6d per loaf, beef and mutton 6d”.  In reality, however, Avery was getting old and the business starting to decline.)  Neighbouring Kiln House is a brick-worker’s cottage where Ephraim Briant (1821) resides.  When he first came from Hughenden with his older brother Henry to work for Avery around 1840, they lodged at The George, but Ephraim married soon after and settled here.  He now has four children.

After farming and timber, brick-making is the third largest activity in Prestwood.  The mixture of clays here, some quite sandy, provide a good ingredient for bricks, which bake red, yellow or grey according to the particular clay and how it is treated.

The final building here is Zion Baptist Chapel and its graveyard, built in 1824 (and hence the first ecclesiastical building in the area, the Quakers and Methodists at that time meeting in their own houses).  Many of the people nearby are Dissenters and this Kiln Common community is more or less self-sufficient, with all the basic services it needs, and distinct from the rest of the parish.  Many of the households migrated here from outside Prestwood with the enclosure of Kiln Common fifty years ago.  Most of the properties are also just over the boundary in the detached section of Stoke Mandeville civil parish and so were not attached to either the Great Missenden or the Hughenden church.

 

Zion Baptist churchyard [1995]

 

Past this cluster of buildings the track funnels into what little remains of Kiln Common, a triangular piece of rough grass, gorse and heather, with a couple of new garden enclosures on the left-hand side bordering one of Thomas West’s fields, known as Hearns Croft because it was rented by the Hearne family (John and Stephen Hearne were listed in 1784 on the Poll for the Knights of the Shire).  On the north side is Kiln Common Cottage [The Cottage], where Thomas West (1820) lives with his family, working on his father John West's farm.  Ten years before, the cottage had been occupied by 30-year-oldPenelope Thompson and her children, the widow of the former blacksmith at Kiln Common (son of Daniel above).  She shared it with a newly married couple, James and Maria Essex, who have since moved to the cottage near Moat Farm, while Penelope moved to Back Lane, Great Missenden and has been joined by her widowed mother Mary Lewis, who previously lived near her son Joseph by Prestwood Common.

On the far side of this strip of common are a couple of large ponds [Sheepwash] used for washing sheep, as the drove road from the Midlands towards London enters the common at its western corner and continues along the west side of Prestwood Common.  The sheep are cleaned up from all the dirt and grease of travel to be presentable for sale at nearby markets like High Wycombe, or before shearing in May and June.  One notable feature is its ‘C’ shape, the gap in the otherwise round pond being created by a wide causeway on which sheep are corralled so that they can be doused in the deeper central part of the pond.  They are held under briefly by men wielding long poles, while others standing in shallower parts guide the swimming sheep to shore, bleating loudly with annoyance at the indignity.

 

Sheepwash [in the 1930s, by which time it was no longer in use for washing sheep.  By this time, too,

the piece of common across the road had been enclosed and converted to the orchards glimpsed through the gate.

 

The arable field beyond the ponds is Tithe Field, owned by Lord Carrington and worked by John West.  This field is the northern tip of Hughenden Parish and of the area called Brand’s Fee.  This runs south from here between Prestwood Common and the valley to the west, down to Great Kingshill (see map on the following page).  In 1252 Sir Robert Brand had received a “knight’s fee” from Ingram de Fiennes, this being a tenancy where the tenant had to provide his lord with a knight and full equipment in time of war, or the equivalent amount of money in peacetime.  It was then part of the manor of Wendover, but later became part of Peterley Manor.  The name has persisted even though it is now really only of historical interest. [Keen, 1980]

Where the drove road (the lane to Honor End) enters the common from the north, stands a large house called Nanfans and its picturesque grounds of lawns, orchards and gardens [in 1862 JJ Sheahan would describe Nanfans as a " genteel residence, situated in pleasant grounds ”].  In 1841 the widow Mary Mayhew (then 58), lived here with her daughter Caroline (then 30) and two servants.  Thomas West from London has just taken over this house and its large estate of 306 acres.Living with him are his farm steward Fred Taylor (1832), the son of James Taylor at Pipers Corner Farm; housekeeper Elizabeth Hunt (1811) from London; and two 15-year-old servants, Louisa Bancroft and George Busby, the son of a wood-turner by Great Kingshill Common.  He is currently entertaining his solicitor Thomas Wormald from London.

Map of the Northern Boundary of Brand's Fee C18^th

 

Nanfans [1930s?]

 

Nanfans is named after a family that occupied it earlier, probably since it was built in its present form at the end of the C17^th.  Councillor Nanfan is mentioned as living here in 1766 and James Nanfan was buried with great ceremony in Great Missenden in 1806.  But there has been a habitation here from earliest times.  Old field hedgerows on the estate date back to Anglo-Saxon times and this may well have been the first farm to have been established in the Prestwood area, possibly as an outpost of the Hampden Estate.  Early medieval documents refer to various fields here.  It is possible that it was then simply known as "Prestwood Farm", which would explain why Prestwood Common Farm was so named to distinguish it.

Through the gardens on the south-east side sweeps a wide carriage-drive from “The Road”, a wide grassy track from the west entering the common here [Hangings Lane].  The field directly across The Road was rented out by Mayhew and used asa brickyard (it is still called Brick Kiln Yard ).  This was where William Avery (see above) started, working for his father, and his mother Martha lived at the small house here until her death a few years ago, although the brickworks had been abandoned by 1840.  The house and outbuildings are now derelict, and wild plants are taking over the old clay-pits and garden plots.  There may have been a brickworks here for several centuries.

 

The Road [Hangings, in 1930, looking east]. Gate on left in centre is entrance to Nanfans. Field on the right is Hay Pole.

 

On the west side of the disused brickyard is Hay Pole, which has long been a hay meadow.  The derivation of “pole” here is uncertain – it may have originally been a swampy undrained field (Anglo-Saxon pull or pōl, “pool”,sometimes used for marshy areas).  “Pole” as a land-area, a minute part of an acre, would have been inappropriate for a 6-acre field. To the west of this field is a pasture called Pond Close, a post-medieval name, “close” simply being an enclosed field.  The pond waterthe cattle pastured here.  The Road borders the northern side of these fields and then enters a scrubby area of heathland called Nanfans Green or the Hangings, where it is less welldefined, with arable fields on each side.  The scrub leads south into a large area of woodland, Nanfan Wood, which is divided into three sections.  The north-west section has always been wooded and is known as Clay Markins Wood. “Markin(g)s” probably refers to a more or less recent division of land here into separate enclosures, “mark” being a boundary.  Below the wood on the steep chalk slope to the west are sections (not part of Mayhew’s land) known as Long and Chalk Markins.

 

West edge of Nanfan Wood viewed across Clay Markins [2001]

 

Inside the older NW section of Nanfan Wood

 

The other two sections of Nanfan Wood are Middle Hill Furze and Stocklands Furze.  These are former agricultural lands that have been abandoned, allowed to scrub over (“furze” – an area with gorse) and have now become young woodland.  Middle Hill Furze had been ploughed at least up until 70 years ago, while Stocklands, the section nearest Stony Green, had, from the name, certainly been pasture, and had no trees as late as 1820.  This amount of scrub and expanding woodland on the farm, unusual for the area, where every little piece of land seems to be put to productive use and even common land is gradually being encroached upon, indicate a certain degree of neglect and under-use, perhaps reflecting the declining years of the late owner.  Two fields nearby are known as Great and Little Stocklands, but they are now both under corn, showing how the high price of grain has encouraged the ploughing up of many pasture-lands of late.  What the newcomer Thomas West will do with the farm remains to be seen, but one cannot imagine this area will suit one with metropolitan tastes.

The lane north from Nanfans House is followed by the boundary between Great Missenden and Stoke Mandeville and therefore represents an ancient route, as would be so if Nanfans had been one of the earliest farms here.  On the west side are arable fields farmed by Thomas West (owned by Lord Carrington).  On the east side are the fields of Greenlands Farm, which lies between Priest’s Wood and Back Lane [Greenlands] along the west side of Kiln Common.  There are a just a few small fields, as the owner’s main income is from his grocery trade.  He is Elisha Essex (1793), who is assisted by his wife Hannah (1800) and two teenage daughters, Eliza and Ruth.  His father William had also been a grocer in Prestwood, and we have already met his brothers James and Thomas, the publican.  The house is quite old (C17^th, although there was an earlier house here built in the C15^th) and the yard is entered by an old wooden revolving lychgate with a tiled roof.  The house is one-storey, timber-framed with a coloured plaster infill.  It is only a quarter of a mile’s walk fromCabbage Row.  Less than another quarter of a mile further on is the C17 ^th Hampden Farm, tucked up close to Priest’s Wood, with an even smaller amount of land, three meadows comprising 16 acres.  Here is farmer William Reynolds (1807) and his wife Fanny (1804), a 12-year-old daughter Mary who is attending school, and Fanny’s widowed mother Pheobe Young (1773), who came recently from Little Hampden when she could no longer support herself.  Reynolds also rents three fields by Glebe Cottage (above).  He has succeeded his parents, Joseph and Mary, who died recently.  The farmhouse has an C18^th front and is of white-washed brick, the original part one-storey, but with two-storey additions to each side. 

 

Hampden Farm, Priest's Wood behind [2000, now with completed second storey]

 

Both Greenlands and Hampden Farms are part of the Hampden Estate and, like most of Cabbage Row, in the Stoke Mandeville section of Prestwood parish.  Across the road are the Gravel Pit Allotments owned by Stoke Mandeville parish and rented out to local householders.  Pebbles once extracted from the clay here were used as cobbles for building and road-making.

Gravel Pit Allotments [Greenlands Lane allotments 2008]

 

Returning to the lane north of Nanfans, we pass a short section of Priest’s Wood on our right, after which is Honor End Farm Cottage [Thatched Cottage].  This house is shared by John and Mary Adams (1775 and 1785) and their son Joseph (1804), a labourer, and his wife and six children, all of whom work on farms or at lace-making (even 6-year-old Emma).  A seventh child, William (1834), is a farm servant at Hampden Row outside the parish.  This is the same cottage where John was born, his father William living here before him.  Two of Reynold’s sons, John (1830) and William (1831), are lodging here, relieving space at Hampden Farm.  They work John Adams’s fields, as he used to farm the fields north of here, between the lane and Priest’s Wood, which are still partly divided into six old strip-fields that were created in the early Middle Ages, as they are separately named on an early document from Missenden Abbey.  The thatched two-up two-down building dates back to about 1700, made of a mixture of flint, Denner Hill stone and two types of brick, vitreous and red.   Inside are two large inglenook fireplaces and a bread oven.  A weather-boarded barn is attached, built in 1813.

 

Honor End Farm Cottage [1930s?]

 

There was probably a farm cottage here evenbefore 1700 as an outpost of the farm at Honor End, to which our lane is leading us, although it is just beyond the parish boundary.  It lies on the left-hand side and, while the present building is late C16^th, much rebuilt in the C18^th, it dates back to medieval times when the Hampden priest was provided this farm and rights in Priest’s Wood as his benefice.  You can see the original timber frame inside, but the outside is quite decorative: vitreous headers with red brick dressings, off-set plinth, moulded first floor band course and gauged brick window heads.  There is a young farmer here now, a newcomer, Thomas Eggleton (1825), who has 100 acres and employs four labourers.  Both he and his wife Mary (1823) hail from Monks Risborough.  His brother Joseph (1833), who was born in Ilmer in the Thame valley near the Oxfordshire boundary, works with him.  His father Henry lives at Whiteleaf, he has another brother George farming at Askett, and his sister Mary Ann (1828) lodges at the Hampden Rectory as the parish schoolmistress.  He has three teenage male servants coming from Great Hampden, Bledlow and The Lee.  This is all, again, Lord Hampden’s land and Honor End was probably an early outlying estate farm, many of the fields having ancient names and being mentioned in medieval documents, although the names such as “Pightle” and “Thistley Field”, are post-Conquest and not Anglo-Saxon.  Their current shape probably derives from a regularisation of earlier strip-farming, and “pightle” is often used for a small enclosure of land left over when boundaries were straightened from the early S-form resulting from the sweep of the plough turning at the headlands.

Returning south down the lane, on the west side one sees almost all arable fields, except for a small wood of Lord Carrington’s, House Close Wood, but out of sight on the steep slope down to the Hampden road is almost continuous woodland, from Eldridge Grove here via Nanfan Wood (which descends to the road much of the way) south to Stony Green, where it continues on the upper slope as Stonygreen and Meadsgarden woods.  These woods on the slope, even more extensive until just recently, are called “hangings” and thus gave the alternative name for Nanfans Green above.  All the fields here, as well as the woodlands, are Carrington land farmed by John West.

Re-entering Kiln Common, following the drove road past the Sheepwash, we enter the large Prestwood Common, which is a half-mile across and more or less the same from north to south (excluding the south-eastern extension called Peterley Common).  This is grass heath with much bracken, clumps of gorse and patches of heather, scattered birch trees, and rowans with their orange berries good for making tonics, with blue harebells and violets, both the purple dog violet and the bluer heath violet, yellow tormentil and mouse-ear hawkweed, and little white stars of heath bedstraw.  Surrounding cottagersuse the common for keeping the odd cow, pig or goat – there are various ponds dug by them at some time or another for watering the animals, and the white-flowered buttercup, crowfoot, forms mats in the water of its thread-like leaves, while yellow iris and rushes grow where there is cover from trampling.  Villagers collect dry bracken for bedding and cut birch saplings and gorse for firewood.  The tuber-like roots of pignut provide a nutty-tasting snack if the pigs do not excavate them first.  ild mushrooms grow here, and other edibletoadstools, to augment a limited diet where protein is scarce.

With all land beside the common in the ownership of someone, those who seek to acquire plots for gardens or paddocks and lack the capital to buy or rent, often settle on parts of the common and enclose them.  Although such occupation occurred informally at first, eventually such “encroachments” were enshrined in law by a series of Acts to become legally-recognised private land.  So various bits of the common are gradually being enclosed, especially around the edges.

To the east there is a wide track leading back to Martins End, which passes on the left Hearns Croft and another meadow, the first Thomas West land rented from Lord Carrington.  Where the common extends northwards after these we encounter a small enclosure containing various arable and grass plots and a cottage [behind what is now Melbourne Cottages] built in the last 20 years, one of the above encroachments.  Here John Bryant (1795), farm labourer, and his family moved in from a rented cottage on the west side of the common,after the death of his widowed mother Sarah, who used to live here, taking inlodgers.  In 1841 the latter were Samuel and Sarah Allnutt, then in their early twenties with a young baby, who have now moved to a cottage in Polecat Lane (below). Apart from children still at home, the Bryants have a married son James who lives by Prestwood Common (below) and an unmarried daughter Millicent (1818) who lives with a family in Chesham as their servant.  Another smallholding here is the property of Elizabeth Haines (see above). 

Just north of this enclosure there is a pub called “The Chequers”, the house, two orchards and a meadow belonging to the brewing firm John and William Weller.  The current licensee is Joseph Parsons (1801) from Great Hampden.  He also works as a bricklayer, the income from these small rural inns being insufficiently reliable to maintain a family.  He is a widower, but his son William (1831) helps run the pub, Thomas (1833) is an apprentice bricklayer, Abel (1835) is a brickie’s labourer, and there are three younger children, with a live-in housekeeper to help.  An older son John is a servant at Prestwood Lodge.  Before Parsons, William Babb and his family ran this pub.  An older house was rebuilt in the C18^th from flint, brick and local Denner Hill stone, replacing a C16^th structure.  The tile roof was “hipped” – sloping at the ends as well as the sides.  It was of two storeys with, of course, a large cellar, and was presumably purpose-built as a public house, as the first licence to sell beer was issued in 1752.

 

The Chequers [2011 - now a private house, but the windowed beer-cellar can just be glimpsed at ground level]

 

The boundary between Hughenden and Great Missenden parishes follows the west side of the common, so the houses here are in the former (part of the old Brand’s Fee), but extensions in the form of enclosures of land on the common are in Missenden.  These enclosures are mostly grass for hay or pasture, but there are some garden plots and one orchard.  The houses along here mostly belong to the artisanal class, individuals who have been able to put by capital to buy their own pieces of land.

Going south from the Sheepwash on this side of the common used to be the cottage of Joseph Chilton, but this has been demolished and his widow and children have moved further south by the Golden Ball, so we first meet a row of four C18-19^th terraced cottages (Clarendon Cottages) which crosses the Hughenden/Missenden boundary, so that the easternmost cottage is in the latter and the rest in the former.  They are owned by John Charles Matthie.  The eastern (Missenden) cottage is that of William Groom (1802), master shoemaker, wife Sarah (née Wilkins) (1801) sons Arthur (1830) and Solomon (1835) – both working as farm labourers, and daughter Sarah (1833), a straw plaiter.  He has a garden, orchard and a small meadow, all as tenant of John Matthie, who does not live locally, having houses in High Wycombe and London.  Groom is also one of those with a garden plot on the common, which he inherited from his father Philip, who lived by the common until his death in 1849 aged 81.  Philip was similarly a “cordwainer” or leather-worker, primarily a shoe- and boot-maker; he had been born locally and married Elizabeth Ann Knapp in 1793.  The Grooms are members of the Zion Baptist sect, of which a number have settled locally.  Shoemaking is a common occupation among Nonconformists.

The first Hughenden cottage is that William Chapman (1794), a carrier from Ellesborough (whose forebears may also have been pedlars, as the surname means “itinerant dealer”), with his wife and three grown-up children in their 20s and 30s. A daughter Eliza (1826) is living in Widmer End, having just married William Beeson, a nephew of Thomas Beeson (see below).  Chapman settled in this area in 1817 when he married a woman from Prestwood.  Like Groom he has one of the nearby encroachments and rents a small meadow from Matthie to keep his horse. 

The second cottage, added in 1817,  is occupied by lone widow Sarah Nash (1775), lace-maker, the mother of Charles Nash at the Green Man above.  The Nash family have lived here since it was built and used to occupy some of the neighbouring houses too.

The third cottage was added about 1820.  Here resides, recently replacing John Bryant (see above), the bricklayer Henry Lacey (1817) from Hampden Row, with his wife Catherine, a 10-year-old girl and new-born baby, and his wife’s father John Cook (1783), originally from Little Missenden, who runs a smallholding on the common.  Henry’s father Benjamin was also a bricklayer and was actually born in the Great Missenden parish, like his father of the same name before him, who was a higgler (or haggler), an itinerant dealer.  Henry’s older brother Benjamin is a “timber dealer” in Lacey Green, but his younger brothers Thomas, Charles and George are all bricklayers, the first also living by Prestwood Common (below), the others in Hampden Row.  He has an uncle Henry who is a bricklayer at Piggotts Common.

Nearby is Claremont House [later Clarendon House Farm] occupied by George Wilkins (1801), who rents it from John Matthie, along with two neighbouring meadows from Sam Eedle.  He is a grocer, small farmer and woodman and lives with just his wife Charlotte (1797).  We met his brother John near the Green Man, where both used to live, as George owned these properties, while his sister Sarah married William Groom in 1824, and another sister Elizabeth is the widow of Isaac Aldridge.  A brother Daniel is a labourer living between Ballinger and the Barley Mow.  Their father, also Daniel, was a local-born labourer, who was still working at the age of 78 in 1841, and he lived here with his daughter Elizabeth and her husband.  The house, built in the C18^th, is of brick and flint with a slate roof, with farm buildings and farmyard nearby, surrounded by 12 acres of meadow and orchard.

Just to the south are two cottages on land belonging to Samuel Eedle [Michaelmas Farm].  One is occupied by farm labourer William West (1828) from Great Hampden with his wife Rebecca from Dunstable and new-born daughter, and a young lodger, also a labourer.  The Wests moved in after the death of the shoemaker Philip Groom.  Opposite this farm is an enclosure on the common [Giles Gate] with a meadow, house and garden, owned by the Carringtons, and tenanted by labourer Joseph Lewis (1813) and his family.  His mother Mary, who was born in Amersham, also lived here before she moved to be with her daughter Penelope Thompson (see above). This house was built for the brickmaking family Tibballs in the C17^th.  It was first occupied by John Tibballs who died in 1671, when it was inherited by his son Joseph and his descendants John Sr. and the latter's son John Jr., who was described as a farmer here until his death in 1792.  The farm then went to John's nephew William Hatch, although Ephraim Tibballs remained as the tenant.  It was sold to John Clarke Sr. the baker in 1800 and acquired by Samuel Eedle in 1838.The land at this time included an arable field, orchards and "woodground" amounting to 8 acres, reaching west as far as the strip of woodland (called "Honnor Wood") marking the Hughenden Parish boundary running down to Nanfan Wood.

 

Honnor Wood at the western boundary of the Michaelmas Farm land

 

Next comes Prestwood Cottage [later replaced by Idaho Farm], built 1663, house of Joseph Mason (1806), who inherited it from his grandfather John who ran a shop, planted an orchard and kept cows on two meadows in front of the house bordering the common.  Joseph mainly does farm work for others, however, as do three sons living at home aged 11 to 20.  His daughter Sarah (1827) is currently a servant in Boss Lane, but engaged to marry Thomas Hawkes, a Great Missenden blacksmith.  His grandfather was a grocer in Kingshill, and his cousin Benjamin carries on that trade there (see below).  They are members of the large Mason family, all prominent in the Baptist Church, that are involved with Fry’s, Hatches and Hoppers Farms.

Prestwood Cottage orchard with the house glimpsed behind

 

[Idaho Farm as it was in 2001]

 

[Idaho Farm meadow in 2001]

A row of three cottages is next.  One is the home of labourer John Bowdrey (1799) from Radnage and his wife Martha (1804) from Saunderton.  He and his brothers Robert (1796) and Thomas (1798) moved to this area around 1825 when Robert married a local girl.  We shall meet Robert shortly, but Thomas, who used to live and work at Broomfield Farm, died a little while ago.  John’s son James (1826) worked at Knives Farm when he was 15, where his brother William (1833) now works, and their daughter Esther is a lace-maker lodging at William Groom’s.

The second of the three cottages contains John Sawyer (1805), widower with two teenage sons, all labourers.  A third son aged 21 is a farm servant at Collings Hanger Farm.  He moved in after the Allnutts moved to Peterley Corner. 

The third cottage is occupied by Mary Chilton (1811), a widow lace-maker since the early death of her husband Thomas, who died this year at the age of 44.  His birth family have lived in Little Hampden since the C17^th.  Chilton had been a stonecutter, working Denner Hill stone, a process that creates a fine dust, prolonged exposure to which leads to a disease similar to pneumoconiosis and causes many early deaths among stone workers.  Like most stone-workers, the Chiltons moved around the area a great deal, at one stage having one of the cottages beside the Green Man.  Mary, born in Wendover, is left with three children at home, two of whom work as labourer and lace-maker respectively, with a fourth on the way.  She has already had nine children in 20 years, one of whom died just after he was born.  Three children are lodging locally, two in Prestwood and one in Great Kingshill.  One of Robert Bowdrey’s daughters, Mary (1836), also a lace-maker,lodges with them.

We then pass a farmhouse [Chestnut Farm], with two orchards, pond and meadow, once Mayhew property, where the tenant in 1837 was Samuel Lines, and in 1841 chair turner Robert Busby with four young children, the youngest just 2 months (see below).  Now James Watson (1806), a spirit merchant, is the tenant here, although he is currently away at his London house.  The house dates back to the C17^th and has associations with Oliver Cromwell.  

Another hundred yards further, by the centre of this side of Prestwood Common, stands the Golden Ball beer-shop, former Edmonds property now belonging to the Marlow-based beer company Wethereds. David Joseph Brackley (1816) has been tenant for the last couple of years, replacing Robert Harper who worked as a carpenter as well as publican.  Brackley was born in High Wycombe and his wife in Berkshire, and they lived in various places in Essex and London before coming here.  The building is two stories in the usual brick and flint, and is named after the famous golden ball set on top of the church at West Wycombe by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1763, shortly before this pub was built.

There are several cottages annexed to the beer-shop, with Martha Robinson (1819), single lace-maker from North Dean with her son James (1844) born in Slough; the family of Edwin Anderson (1814), a farm labourer from Speen; and labourer William Free (1781), a widower living alone.  The latter is the father of Daniel (1824) (above), Francis (1817) at Stony Green (below), William (1811), gardener at Wycombe Lodge, Hughenden, Mary (1813), wife of James Lacey at Kingshill Common (below), and the late Sarah (1803), former wife of Steven Ives at High Wycombe.  The family has a long history in the Princes Risborough and Hughenden parishes.

These residences, with their meadows and gardens, front the common, while behind them is a narrow band of orchards making altogether an agreeable sight, especially when the fruit-trees are flowering.  Beyond the orchards to the west are, at the northern end, four arable fields farmed by George Wilkins, rented from Sam Eedle, and to the south pastures variously owned by the Masons, Eedle, Edmonds and formerly the Mayhews, some of them farmed by Joseph Biggs.

 

Golden Ball, West Wycombe (download from britainexpress.com)