Section 3 Golden Ball Public House to Holy Trinity Church, Peterley, and east side of Prestwood Common

 

Behind the Golden Ball and south from there is a large wheat-field cultivated by John West (rented from Lord Carrington).  Between this and the common lies the thatched Mill House, the home of more members of the Mason family - Joseph’s brother George (1808),labourer, with his wife Sophia from The Lee and daughter Mary.  George is Deacon of the Particular Baptist Church in Stoke Mandeville Parish.  Lodging with them is Sophia’s mother Sarah Slaughter (1772) who has no income of her own.  The Masons have an orchard and “Long Meadow”, an encroachment which runs down the edge of the common, behind which stands one last house [Mill Cottage], with more John West arable fields behind (Clover Meadow and Ten Acres).  This house, the property of Edmonds, is occupied by John Bowdrey’s brother Robert (1796), also from Radnage.   His wife Mary (1803), who was born locally, is a “parchment pricker” (copying patterns on to the templates used by lace-makers). Their  James (1831) was placed out at Joseph Mason’s holding as a farm servant when he was ten.  Two teenage daughters work as lace-makers and the youngest boy Robert (1843) is a “bird keeper”.  The "mill" is said to refer to an old windmill that burned down (as often happened with these wooden buildings) some fifty years ago, which was rebuilt in 1832, only to fall into disuse again.

 

Mill Cottage [in 1925 when it was occupied by Mrs Dorsett (pictured)]

 

We finally reach the south-west corner of Prestwood Common.  Here lies the 200-acre Collings Hanger Farm, home of farmer and timber dealer Joseph Biggs (1792) who also rents fields from other landowners, such as Jane Baker, Richard Davis and Lord Dormer.  His land includes Nives Farm, another old farmhouse a quarter of a mile south along the road to High Wycombe, Peterley Corner Farm a further quarter of a mile south, and cottages by Prestwood Lodge.  In 1841 Biggs was living at Nives Farm with his wife Elizabeth, four farm servants, and a grandson Thomas Ward.  He now lives at Collings Hanger, but still has Thomas (1828) with him as an assistant in his timber business, as well as three servants, and he employs five labourers.  Thomas’s mother and father Ann and William live on the east side of Prestwood Common (below).  Biggs was born in Dinton in the Aylesbury Vale, where his father William, an agricultural labourer from Waddesdon, and mother Hannah still live with one son.  He moved to this area about 1810.  Collings Hanger farmhouse was first built in 1756, a large square house, but was partly rebuilt last year in flint with brick piers and dressings and a hipped slate roof.  Biggs has occupied these farms since 1811, and a field at Peterley Corner became known as Biggs Field [now the site of Peterley Corner House].  Before Biggs the farmer here was Collins, whose name has since been enshrined in the that of the farm.

At the farm the main track south to High Wycombe begins, with a reedy pond for washing carts and watering stock on the side opposite the farm, just south of its large wooden barn built in 1836 – imposing new black weather-boarded walls on a brick-and-flint base with timber supports, and a tiled roof.  With seven bays, it has room for several carts, a stable and a granary, and shows the ambition of Joseph Biggs.

Collings Hanger Barn [in 2000, when much deteriorated]

 

Behind the pond lie the crops of Collins Hanger Field, with Prestwood Common on its north side fenced off by an old hedgerow.  The boundary between the Hughenden and Great Missenden parishes follows the road here, so the farmland spreads into both parishes, crop-fields like Collins Hanger and Seven Acres south of it being in the Missenden parish, while the bulk of the farm is in Hughenden, starting with Barn Meadow [now The Orchard], one of only two pastures on the farm, and running south from the barn.  Fields of crops extend west from here as far as the Hampden-Hughenden road, but the remaining woods on the slope (the “hangers”) are not managed by Biggs, remaining in the hands of their owners Jane Baker and Lord Carrington.

Fryer’s Field south of Barn Meadow is opposite a pine plantation (Lawrence Grove) belonging to Richard Davis.  (Incidentally, a Thomas Fryer and both John and Richard Lawrence, all of Great Missenden parish, appeared in 1784 on the list for the Poll of Knights of the Shire, so all this land may earlier have been in their hands, and the names survive from that time.)  The plantation is on the site of an old wood, although all the original trees have been felled.  Signs of the medieval bank and ditch surrounding it (the wood in medieval times was known as “Ditchet” Wood) still remain and the wood is still heathy with much gorse from when cattle had been pastured here.

We are now at Holy Trinity church on the west side (and thus in the old Hughenden Parish), built on three fields belonging to Knives Farm (Long & Little Fields, Barn Meadow) sold by Richard Davis to Thomas Evetts to create a churchyard and parsonage, along with two fields to the west of these called Roberts and Lawrence Close [Prestwood Park], which is now being left as a small estate of meadowland and newly planted trees.  Some of the trees are decorative, while others form coverts for woodcock, snipe etc, as Evetts is fond of hunting and the rest of the accoutrements of a country gentleman.  Beyond the fields and overlooking them stands a beech plantation belonging to Rev. Francis Cole [Lawrence Grove Wood].  The church has a decorative flint exterior and inside is lit by candles in iron and brass chandeliers.  It was consecrated in October 1849 by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, son of the slave-trade abolitionist and MP, William Wilberforce.

 

Hand-tinted photograph, c1920, of Prestwood Park, Lawrence Grove Wood in the background

Evetts is still young, just 30, a man of means who hails from Oxford and keen to carve out his own living as a curate.  The Parsonage, which Evetts freshly occupied in 1849, is large and holds fourteen residents.  If anything it is more imposing than the church itself, much chimneyed and gabled, with tall narrowly-arched windows in the Gothic style. It is built of rubble flint with sandstone corner-stones and ornamental limestone mouldings.  It has grounds of an acre and a half newly planted up with lawn, shrubs and flower borders.  The lawn has admirable views across the fields and woods to the west.  Apart from Evetts there are his wife (1825), also from Oxford, four very young children, the last two born here, being respectively one-year-old and new-born, his widowed mother (1788), and seven servants aged 16 to 30, all but one being women.  Only one of these servants was born locally (Elizabeth Redrup (1835) the daughter of Jesse Redrup, the baker at Carmel above), the rest coming from Oxford, Essex, Wantage, Andover and Reading.

 

The Parsonage (2005)

 

The architect of these new buildings, and also of the associated one-storey schoolhouse and a two-storey cottage for the schoolmaster beside the road, was EB Lamb, introduced to Evetts by the then incumbents of Chequers, Sir Robert and Lady Frankland Russell.  The church and parsonage cost over £3,000, raised partly from private benefactors and subscriptions, but very largely by a contribution from Thomas Evetts himself.  The building, however, is not universally admired and has its eccentricities.  At the west end the porch coincides with the south aisle and leads into an extension of the nave, which also serves as baptistry.  The arcades of the nave are wide and squat, the eastern bays small, one leading to the pulpit.  The nave has an odd roof of closely-braced scissor trusses [cf. Pevsner (1994)].  The Correspondent to The Times in 1849 stated:

We are bound to say, that we concur with the majority of visitors on the day of consecration in protesting very strongly against the plan adopted, which, aiming solely at picturesque effect, in defiance of architectural precedent and ritual propriety, has resulted, we consider, in a complete failure even of the miserably low end proposed .

 

Lamb also designed the clerestory stained glass windows and the stone-and-timber, tiled-roof lychgate that provides entry to the churchyard and shelter for a wooden bench.  [See also Keen, 1976.]  Lamb is currently drawing up plans for another building, a two-storey house for a new assistant curate, to be built shortly on the north side of Prestwood Common.

 

Holy Trinity Church [2016]

 

The church claims an average attendance of 140 on a Sunday afternoon – fully a fifth of all residents of the parish apart from young children.  The figures are the estimate of Thomas Evetts himself, and perhaps he has a reason to present them in an optimistic light.  After all, the church is built to hold 250.  If they really are something like the truth, then considering that a good number of families in Prestwood are of other religious persuasions, one can conclude that the church is already a very active force in local village life, which, admittedly, has few other distractions from humdrum daily labour for most of the residents.  The schoolhouse, too, is much in demand.  Daily attendance is given as about 40 and this at least seems to be accurate.  This new facility has radically improved the educational opportunities of some of the local children, for before now the only instruction they received, except at Sunday School, was that necessary to learn a trade as an apprentice or directly “on the job”.  (It is said that nursery rhymes have their main function, recited in concert, as relief from boredom among little girls sat all day learning the intricacies of lace-making and straw-plaiting from their instructors.)  Now, for the first time, the majority of local children should gain the rudiments of literacy and numeracy.

                    Nives Farmhouse itself is just south of the church land.  It was built in the C17^th, but was recently cased with brick in a chequered pattern.  The tiled roof includes a large central brick chimney-stack.  It was presumably named after an earlier farmer named Knife or Nieve.  Here Biggs has since 1845 housed a farm bailiff, Daniel Statham, or Stadhams, (1810) – originally from Wendover - with his young wife Sophia (1823) and two young children.  One-year-old Mary Jane Statham was the first child to be baptised at Holy Trinity by Thomas Evetts.  Other farm staff include Dan’s mother-in-law Mary Tilbury (1794) who comes from Little Missenden and works asdomestic servant, and three teenage farm servants Edward Busby (whose family live in Great Kingshill), William Bowdrey (John Bowdrey’s son) and Alfred Mason (son of Joseph Mason).  Behind the farm is Biggs’s other pasture, Home Meadow.  Opposite the church the wide vergehas been enclosed and a house is being built here [The Hollies].

 

The Hollies, which was built in 1851 [as it appeared in 2000, with various obvious extensions]

Behind Hollies are more Biggs crops in Carthouse Field and, south of that, Polecat Field.  Between them runs a short track to another farm pond.  On the corner here stands a double cottage [Oak Beams] to which the garden strip belongs.  (These enclosures along the road, which are in the old Missenden Parish, result from the fact that these routes funnelling into the common were once extensions of the common.  Field enclosures either side left a wide road,necessary in its use as a drove road, providing grazing for flocks as they pass along, but tempting for those who needed a little extra land to grow vegetables.) 

 

Path to pond beside "Oak Beams" [planted snowdrops a modern touch]

"Oak Beams" [2000]

 

 

This cottage is Richard Davis property and Thomas Mason, a 40-year-old sawyer who works in Biggs's timber business, lives here with his family.  His wife and three daughters (7 to 16) all work as lace-makers and his son, also Thomas, is just four.  They livedCryers Hill before coming here.  We have already encountered his brothers Joseph and George.  The other cottage was rented by another sawyer, Edward Ward, in 1941, but he has moved to the edge of Kingshill Common, and his place taken by George Beeson (1827) a gardener, his wife Rose, and their two babies, having moved in when they married three years ago.  George’s father Thomas is the gardener at Peterley Manor (below).  Many of his brothers and sisters live in the vicinity.  The road here, once known as Knives or Knife's Lane after the farm, is now more often referred to as Polecat Lane, after the pub where we shall soon be arriving.

Next door to the above cottage is a smithy and the cottage and garden where the blacksmith William Hildreth (1809), his wife, and children live.  Their oldest son George (1830) is married and a blacksmith in Amersham, but Benjamin (1833) and Reuben (1836) both help their father in the smithy.  Before they were old enough he kept two apprentices.  A fourth son, Simeon, is just ten and attends the new school nearby, while there are two younger daughters.  William comes from High Wycombe and his wife from Great Hampden, where they lived after they married in 1830, later moving to the smithy at Little Hampden before coming to Prestwood in the late 1830s.  The family are Methodists and active in that church.  The Bucks Posse Comitatus for 1798 contains no-one with that family name in the county, this name normally being associated with the north of England.  The only blacksmith family of similar sound is “Eldridge”, of which 11 different individuals are recorded as blacksmiths in 1798, all in the Princes Risborough to Aylesbury area.  A number of Eldridge marriages are recorded in the Hughenden-Missenden area in the C18^th.        The next cottages are on the other side of the road (back in the Hughenden Parish), two placed at right angles to the road with a cobbled path in front [October Cottage].  This is the home of Free Turner (1795), a woodman employed by Biggs in Nanfan Wood, his wife Phoebe (1793) and their daughter Elizabeth (1824), with the latter's husband Henry Wilkins, a farm labourer, and their three daughters.  The Turners moved in here about 1840 (when the house was first built), including Henry and Elizabeth.  “Turner” is an appropriate name for a woodman and one might expect Free to have come from a long line of woodworkers, perhaps in the Speen area, where he was born. Currently in Speen there are sawyers named William (1817) and John Turner (1826), and hurdle-makers James (1806) and John Turner (1826), who may all be related.  Henry is the son of John and Sarah Wilkins whom we met at Long Row.

Next door is labourer Samuel Allnutt (1819), wife Sarah and two sons, plus his widowed 64-year-old father Joseph who also does farm work.  Samuel was born here but his father came from Wendover originally.

The above cottages are all owned by Richard Davis, but we now reach The Polecat Inn, owned by the brewers Wellers of Amersham, along with three grass plots around it (Little Platt, Great Meadow and Long Meadow).  William Weller had started brewing in Amersham in 1775, having begun in Wycombe, and proceeded to buy up a series of pubs in the region to sell his malt beer.  He was succeeded in the business by his sons John and William who extended the range of tied pubs, including the Chequers in Prestwood, the White Lion in Great Missenden (1822), and others, even beyond Aylesbury and into Hertfordshire.  They both died in 1843 and were succeeded by John’s son Edward and William’s son William, although Edward died just last year.  Currently the brewery employs 45 brewers and a dozen draymen, for whom William is organising a works outing to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, appropriately celebrating his own success in the context of that national symbol of British entrepreneurship.

The new licensee here, is Isaac Timpson, just 25, from Clifton Reynes.  His wife Elizabeth (1823) is from London.  They have a new-born son Walter and a servant Margaret Wells (1837) born in Great Kingshill (where we shall meet her mother Mary later).  Elizabeth does lace-making to make extra money and Isaac himself also needs to supplement income from the pub by taking on carpentry jobs.  Before Isaac the licensees were James and Rebecca Watson.  James was from London and dealt in various other goods as well as drink.  His parents James and Deborah lodged with them, James being a cordwainer or shoemaker.  The Watsons have since returned to London.

 

The Polecat [at the height of its popularity in 2011]

 

The Polecat orchard 2000

The Polecat Inn is one where the drovers put up when they pass through the village and therefore has a long history.  The current building is C17^th, although there may have been an earlier one, and it was faced with brick a hundred years ago.  The original owners were named Pollikat or Polyket, and this was the origin of its name, rather than a reference to the vermin hated by the gamekeepers of local landed estates, who have successfully trapped them out of existence locally, although weasels and stoats are still common enough.  In 1722 the inn was recorded as having been bought by Richard Sydenham from Mary Franklin (widow of Edward Franklin), at which time the tenant was Richard Kimberley.              The other road verge enclosure is owned by John Pewsey (Pusey), who also owns a double cottage opposite, almost adjoining yet another pub, the King’s Head.  (The frequency of pubs we have passed since we left Kiln Common – Chequers, Golden Ball, Polecat, and now the King’s Head, all in hardly more than a mile – reflects, as does the Sheepwash not far from the Chequers, the importance of this route for the drovers and their sheep travelling between the Midlands and London – dusty andthirsty work for both man and animal.)  Pewsey is an agricultural worker in his sixties who lives here with just his lace-maker wife.  Two of their children were still living with them in 1841 – Rebecca (1822), a lace-maker, who has since married Edward Smith and moved to Widmer End; and James (1823), a farm labourer, who was at that time described as a “manure gatherer”.  That such anoccupation was regularly required again reflects the drove-road, with its frequent passing flocks of animals; it also reflects the careful economy of the times, in which nothing could be afforded to go to  waste.  James is now married and living in Hazlemere.  John Pewsey’s brother Charles once lived in the adjoining cottage and his widow Mary (1803), another lace-maker, was still there with five children in 1841.  Now newcomer William Higgs (1819), a sawyer recently arrived from Chesham, having married a lace-maker from The Lee, lives here with their young son William.

A new cottage [Rose Cottage] was built next to these last two only two years ago and its first occupant was Prestwood’s first schoolmistress, Sarah Cowdrey, began teaching at the new schoolhouse by the church in 1849.  The cottage was purpose-built by the licensee of the pub next door in connection with the establishment of the new school.  Now her daughter Mary (1832) lodges here, having taken over from her mother Sarah as teacher.  The Cowdreys were recruited by Thomas Evetts from his home town, perhaps because of a lack of qualifications among the local population.

The Kings Head is another tied pub, owned by the Wheeler and Company brewery in Easton Street, High Wycombe, a company dating back to the late C18^th, when it was "Biddle and King".  Their pubs are numerous and widespread.  As well as the Kings Head they include The Harrow at Hughenden (1810), White Hart and Barley Mow at Great Missenden, the Rising Sun at Great Kingshill (below) and the George at Kiln Common (above).  The pub was founded in the reign of King George III (reigned 1760-1820), as reflected in the inn-sign.  It is made in brick with some flint, with a tiled roof and large projecting chimney-stacks.  The licenseeis John Janes (1785) who has recently lost his wife Martha and works as a wheelwright as well as selling ale and cider.  His unmarried daughter Martha (1818) keeps house for him with her daughter Ann (1834), who also takes in needlework.  Janes keeps some animals on two small meadows (Home and Further Meadow) behind the pub that are part of the Wheeler property.  His father was a local farmer at Upper Warren Farm (below), currently run by John’s brother James.  After spells at Great Kingshill and Princes Risborough he came to the Kings Head in 1832.  His sons still live locally: William (1812) is a wheelwright in Great Kingshill (below), Jacob (1822) a turner and cabinet-maker at Tylers Green, Alfred (1825) a farm servant at Collings Hanger Farm, and Joseph (1837) a farm servant at Newhouse Farm (below).  His other daughter Emma (1832) is a dressmaker and lodges with Mary Cowdrey next door as a companion, being of the same age.

Past the pub Biggs’s crops continue at Five Acres, and also across the road in the large Corner Field, named after Peterley Corner , where the old lane of Peterley joins Polecat Lane from the east and continues west as a small track which once led to Sister’s (or variously Citer’s, Siter’s or Setter’s) Farm, which was near the north corner of Longfield Wood.  There is nothing left of it now, although it was there in about 1820.  It would seem to have been built in the late C18^th and, although it did not last very long, it has given its name to several fields and woods in the vicinity which show that most of its land was just south of Peterley Corner, both sides of the Wycombe road.  One of Biggs’s fields on the north side of Sister’s Farm is still called Knives Wood [now part of Hockey Field], despite being cultivated, and the vanished farm may have cleared woodland that once connected Longfield Wood to the beech-hangers west of Collings Hanger Farm, shown as continuously wooded in Jeffreys’s map of 1776.  There seems to be no trace of this family now.

At Peterley Corner is another farmhouse leased by Biggs from Lord Dormer.  This was once the bailiff's cottage for Peterley Manor.  It is split into two households.  One is that of Biggs’s parents, 84-year-old bricklayer John from West Wycombe, and 70-year-old Elizabeth from Princes Risborough, a couple of exceptional age.  John is still actively working.  The farm here, however, is being run for Biggs by an unmarried daughter of local farmer Joseph Stevens (1801) at Wycombe Heath, just south of the parish.  Georgeanna (1824) is assisted by her brothers Cornelius (1834) and Edwin (1839).  Their father was born in Chalfont St Giles, where only his brother William now remains as a chair-maker.  Joseph runs his own farm with the help of his sons William (1822), Arthur (1826) and Alfred (1832).  Georgeanna and the younger brothers manage an orchard by Peterley Corner house and a few arable fields.  The field west of the house, running beside the track towards the defunct Sisters Farm, is called New Road Field, sothe track was probably created at the same time as the farm.

We have now reached the end of Biggs’s farm at an L-shaped wood called Great and Little Sisters [Citers Wood], which is Dormer land, and south of the "new road".  But at the corner we turn east instead, along Peterley Lane, back once again in the Missenden part of the parish.  “Peterley” is the name given to this route by the monks of Missenden Abbey in early medieval times when they created the farm around what is now Peterley Manor.  It may be from the Latin prefix petro- (rock) and the Anglo-Saxon leah (meadow), thus meaning “stony meadow” [Keen, 1980], that would certainly have been an apt description: the soil round here is full of stones, as the monks would have discovered once they tried to clear the land.  Indeed, just outside the parish a large pit still exists beside the track, where the monks, and others since, excavated hard chalk-rock for building.

This pit was called “Groynesdene” in one medieval document from 1277-79 recording a grant from Hugh de Plessis of Missenden to the monks of: “ a piece of land situate on the south, next to Nairdwood, for the purpose of making a dyke between the said wood and the fields adjoining Peterley from the great marl-pit at Groynesdene up to the piece of ground before the gate of Peterley ” (Jenkins 1938 xxxij).  “Marl” here refers to chalk.  Apart from the use of chalk-rock for building, the softer sediments were also crushed and used for fertilising arable fields. The road is referred to in ancient documents as “Piterleistan”, possibly referring to the boundary marker stone (Anglo-Saxon stan) that can still be seen near where Nairdwood Farm is now (it is marked on an C18^th map of the bounds of Peterley Manor and is an important landmark).  [There is now unfortunately no longer any sign of such a marker stone, which may have been destroyed by C20^th road engineering.]

On our left we pass Biggs’s Corner Field, at the end of which is a small fir plantation.  This adjoins the western “arm” of Peterley Wood, which lies mainly further north but encloses the lands of Peterley House with two narrow extensions.  We are now entering the estate of Lord Dormer, who owns the manorial name, the manor house and land from Peterley Wood south to Wycombe Heath.  The manor house, land around it within the wood and two fields along the other side of the lane, were, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, leased by the Reverend Francis Cole.

 

Peterley House [in 1913]

The area around Peterley House seems to have been the core of the outlying Missenden Abbey farm.  Other such outlying farms included Martin’s End, Grange Farm near Holmer Green, and Ashwell Farm, Little Kingshill.  It would seem to have been first cleared of forest in Anglo-Saxon times, because C12^th documents refer to “ the whole land of Peterley which they [ie the monks] have enclosed by dyke and hedge … which formerly had always lain waste, uncultivated and without return .” [Missenden Abbey Cartulary.]  So the monks did not have to clear the original woodland to establish their first fields, but just had to clear scrub, dig drainage ditches and plant boundary hedges.  It probably consisted largely of the area around the present house.  The original grant in 1161 was from Hugh de Nuiers (Noers) who gifted  (in return for an annual rent) “a virgate [c.30 acres] of land in Peterley with the addition of woodland, offered on the altar by token of a box-wood rod ” (Jenkins 1938 v), land that had previously been held by a blacksmith.  (Box-wood is very hard and durable, and probably symbolised a long-lasting pledge.  It grows in chalk woodlands nearby.)

A large field opposite the House across Peterley Lane called “Cow Pasture” is another part of this holding.  To the west of that lies a large arable field of the Dormer estate called “Crooks Wood”, a name which has obviously survived a long time because the field was already cleared in the C18^th.  This appears to be the monks’ “Kokkes Wude”, named after the then tenant William Coch [Vollans, 1959], of which there only survives a narrow western boundary strip to this day (known as Crooks Wood), left to define the boundary of their holding.  Reference to this is made in a grant of 1190 from Hugh the Younger of “ all the woodland to the north of their land in Peterley ” [ie Peterley Wood], “ a certain portion of land which belonged to Rodulfus, the priest ”, and “ the land between Hugh’s wood near Peterley and the Abbey’s wood, called Kokkes Wude, 12 acres of land and 7 perches ” (Jenkins 1938 iij).  It is likely that “Hugh’s Wood” was an extended version of the present-day Sandwich Wood (just south of Peterley from the large chalk-pit) and the land in between granted to the monks would have been Cow Pasture field.

Remains of laid wood-edge, Crooks Wood, survival of a medieval boundary

 

In 1841 Mary Hatt (1821) was tenant at Peterley House with 2 young children.  She was said to be of “independent means”.  During 1847-1850 Lieutenant-Colonel Nathaniel Alves (now in his sixties) resided there with five indoor servants including a children's governess and a gardener.  This is recorded as his address in the list of Royal Asiatic Society members.  From 1828 to 1834 and 1834 to 1839 he was Political Agent respectively in Bhopal and then to the Governor General in Rajputana, engaged in treaties with various native rulers, while a member of the Madras Army, i.e. a civil post for which he was not qualified to continue receiving his military pay.  For this reason the government had to claw back military pay from such civil appointees, putting some in financial difficulties.  Alves is mentioned in this connection in a letter from the famous liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill to William Cabell in 1837.   In 1839, in Rondebosch, South Africa, Alves married Emily Elizabeth Eleanor Greaves, daughter of a surgeon, recently deceased, in the same army.  In 1840 he was back with his regiment in India, as he is recorded as being moved from the 42^nd to the 22^nd Infantry.  His home address in 1841 was Kensington in London, and soon after that he presumably retired from active service.  In 1847 he was made a Deputy Lieutenant of Bucks, but a few years later he left to reside in St Helier, Jersey.

There is no tenant at the House currently, and it is maintained on behalf of the Dormers by a small resident staff, although the Dormers rarely use it, commanding grander properties elsewhere in more fashionable parts of the county.  In 1841 one of the servants’ cottages (all in brick and flint) held two older men with two younger maidservants in their thirties, Susannah Stevens and Lydia How.  Another cottage was occupied by 17-year-old nursemaid Ann Beeson.  The third housed farm worker James Jenkins (1820) and his family, a wife and four children.  Only one of the servants’ cottages (Gardener’s Cottage) is currently occupied by Ann’s father Thomas Beeson (1803) and his family.  With his son, Thomas Jr. (1839) he maintains the extensive grounds.  His wife Charlotte, 48, is a lace-maker, and the other child with them is 8-year-old Job, who is not yet employed and attends the new school by the church.  Ann is now married to the licensee of the Rising Sun in Great Kingshill (see below) and her sister Eliza (1823), who is still single and was formerly a servant at Sedges Farm, is lodging there with her.  Another daughter Elizabeth lives next door to Ann, married to William Tucker.

 

"Coachman's cottage" at Peterley House [2000]

 

Servants' cottage at Peterley House [2000]

 

Ten years ago Thomas Beeson worked as a farm labourer and lived at Stonyrock, only a hundred yards down the road (outside Prestwood parish), where his parents Thomas and Elizabeth lived in the 1830s.  Thomas Sr. was born in Little Missenden to Richard and Catharine Beeson.  Richard was a shoemaker who later lived in Great Kingshill and owned some land in Little Missenden.  Thomas Jr.’s elder brother William (1793) makes an honest living as a cordwainer in Little Kingshill, but three younger brothers, James, Samuel and Charles were habitual poachers and petty criminals, for which they were all deported to Australia, Sam drowning en voyage.  Sam was on the George III, a convict ship built in 1810.  It set sail in December 1834 for Hobart, Tasmania, with 308 people on board, including 220 convicts.  A fire that occurred near the equator in January 1835 destroyed part of the food stores and everyone had to be put on reduced rations, resulting in 14 convicts dying of scurvy before they came in sight of their destination in March.  In order to avoid delay because of offshore winds the captain chose to navigate a dangerous strait that was inadequately mapped and the ship hit a rock and broke up in a heavy swell.  The convicts were kept below decks while the guards, crew and their families were safely evacuated, some convicts being shot while trying to escape.  Many, like Sam, drowned in the ship, as did 114 other convicts, while only five other people lost their lives.  The disaster was a major news item and an inaccurate painting purporting to show the incident was made by HE Dawes, a lithograph of which was widely circulated.  Titled “The Power of Maternal Affection” it showed a soldier’s wife Mrs Martin who, the subscription goes, “ contrived to secure herself on the forechannel of the ship among the Laniards and although the sea ran mountains high with frost and rain the poor creature was exposed for 48 hours to the weather with two babes suckling at her bosoms and her elder child held between her knees ”.  Actually it was only eight hours, if one wants to quibble, but that was ordeal enough.  [See Michael Roe 2006.]

 

"The Power of Maternal Affection" by HE Dawes

 

Peterley House has a circular drive entered from Peterley Lane and is surrounded by 30 acres of lawns, a large lake, gardens, groves of spruce, pine and broadleaf trees, a large kitchen garden, two deep wells, coach-house, cottages for servants, and 30 acres of park-like meadow land well stocked with partridges [Keen (2000)].  The kitchen garden is protected from the elements by a three-metre high brick wall and includes a large lean-to greenhouse producing grapes, peaches, melons etc [Coulon (2000)].  The house itself, while not architecturally impressive, is at least imposing in size compared to other buildings in the parish.  The west wing is the servants’ quarters and the only structure surviving from the earlier 17^th century house, with

"deep window sills and roof timbers shaped with an adze within a brick and flint façade, ledged and braced doors etc.

Attached is the magnificent music room [early C19th] with decorative plasterwork and a dome … The fire surround has the Dormer coat of arms and motto surrounded by flowers, forming a delicate tracery carved into the centre.  The motto reads: CIO CHE DIO VUOLE IO VOGLIO (what God wills I will).  Over the motto, two hawks with spread wings support a shield of ten billets and a lion. The centre section of the house [contains] the colonnaded entrance porch and lofty hall, complete with pillars and arcaded screen.  High up to the right are some elegant murals, and leading from the staircase to the first floor apartments is a staircase and galleried landing that looks down on the handsome hallway.

T he east side of the house includes the … sitting room with a tracery of grapes on the chequered ceiling and a magnificent fire surround in an exotic wood, carved with strange animals and figures together with two coats of arms from different branches of the Dormer family.  The surround is possibly from an earlier house, perhaps from Eythrope, another Dormer mansion … " [Coulon (2000)].

[There are many versions of the Dormer arms for different branches of the family. That shown here lacks one of the hawks.]

The house has a view south straight along a specially constructed avenue of trees [Peterley Avenue] providing access for riders, being grassed, not metalled.  Carriages come along the lane from the Wycombe Road, or up from Nags Head beershop on the London Road just out of Great Missenden.  Fifty years ago there was a similar scenic ride created through Peterley Wood on the other side of the manor, but this has now been allowed to become wooded over again – perhaps it funnelled the cold north winds towards the house.  The only fields that comprise part of the lease of the manor’s grounds are two immediately behind the house, between it and Peterley Wood, Barn Field, down to crops, and Pump Meadow, to grass; and the two fields across Peterley Lane of Cow Pasture and Crooks.  These are the fields that Thomas Beeson maintains on top of the domestic gardens.  Peterley Wood and its extensions to Peterley Lane on each side of the manor house grounds (the eastern arm is called Shrubbery Wood) are all Dormer property.

Carrying on along Peterley past Shrubbery Wood the lane becomes an undefined track across the southern end of Peterley Common, an extension of Prestwood Common from its south-east corner.  To our right, after Cow Pasture, is George Carrington land, a small triangular wood known as Little Wood, and then Neardwood Farm.

 

Neardwood Farmhouse and barns [as they were in 2013]

 

In the 1830s this was the home of farmer Thomas Ives, who moved just after this into Atkins Farm.  His widow Elizabeth (1793) has moved into a house at the SE corner of Prestwood Common, which we shall visit shortly.  The farm is currently run by the Ives’s principal labourer, William Saunders (1818) who has moved with his family into the farmhouse from Stonyrock Cottage just along the lane.  (About the same time his brother Thomas (1819), also a farm labourer, moved from Stonyrock to Harbours Hole, Great Missenden.) HoileHHoleHolr His wife Sophia is a straw-plaiter and they have five children, the eldest nine and the youngest a new-born baby.  Their four-year-old daughter already works at plaiting straw to help her mother.  His family have lived in the Great Missenden area for several generations.  His father William Sr. lives at Bury Green near Great Missenden, while his brothers in addition to are John at Wycombe Heath nearby, Jesse (a carpenter) at Lee Common, and Reuben (a ploughman) at Cobblershill.  The fields around the farmhouse, Goose Green, Home Field and the narrow strip of Homestead Yard and Meadow beside Peterley, are all leased from Carrington, but the bulk of the late Ives’s farmland lay north, on the east side of the commons, and all this he had owned himself, along with many other distant fields at the south end of Denner Hill, altogether an extensive, if dispersed, estate.  Neardwood Farm is a new house - all the fields on this side of Peterley Lane were wooded only fifty years ago, hence its name, a corruption of “near the wood”.

Having crossed Peterley Common we reach a fork in the tracks (and the boundary of Prestwood Parish).  One track, on the right, continues downhill, via the Nags Head, to the mill at Great Missenden and is therefore an important agricultural route for taking grain to be ground. It goes past Saintfoin Field (another part of the Ives lease) on the left, another recent clearance of woodland.  It is named after the plant sainfoin grown here every few years as a resting crop to put nitrogen back into the soil.  Among the spikes of pink flowers grows an unusual grass “interrupted brome” [now extinct in the wild].

 

Sainfoin

Interrupted brome

 

After this field is Stony Rock Plantation, former farmland recently planted to broadleaved trees (so the uses of most lands around here change frequently over time, between woods and farmland, between crops and pasture, and so on).  It is named after Stonyrock Pit in Saintfoin Field, close to the trackside (the medieval Groynesdene described above).

 

Stoney Rock Plantation

 

T are two cottages adjoining the wood at the near corner (more Carrington property).  One of these cottages, we have seen, was in 1841 the home of William and Thomas Saunders.  The other had been the home of Thomas Beeson (also mentioned above).  Beeson’s brother John (1793) currently works as a cordwainer here, helped by his apprentice son Samuel (1824).  The other cottage currently houses Mary Pearce (1789) the widow of Thomas Pearce, member of another long-standing local family.  Thomas had a lease on the pub in Little Kingshill and it is now sublet.

 

Sandwich Wood.  Right hand picture shows a large old pit where chalk rock had once been dug.

 

Across the lane to the south is Sandwich Wood, another part of Lord Dormer’s land and, beyond that, Little Kingshill.  In this village George Boug Jr. (1823) has a 200 acre farm and employs eight men.  The pub is named after the owners of Peterley House, being the Dormer Arms.  It is run by Levi Chilton (1818) from Princes Risborough, his young wife Elizabeth (1829) who does plaiting work, and her brother William Randle (1830), a farm labourer.

Above Stonyrock Plantation is Sedges Farm,the former home of farmer John EdmundsSedges is currently looked after by his chief labourer William Tuffney (1803) and his family, who live there now, having moved from a cottage further north by the common.  He originally came from Chesham,married a girl from Princes Risborough and lived there before moving to Prestwood.  His two sons William (1839) and George (1842) help with the farm work.  Two older sons live elsewhere as farm servants, both for branches of the Boug family, Henry (1833) at Bloomfield Farm, and John (1835) in Little Kingshill.

The left hand fork before Stonyrock Plantation is a less-used track north (Hobbshill Lane) to Hobbshill and Atkins Woods, the former, east of the track, owned by Thomas Tyrwhitt-Drake and the latter, to the west, recently purchased by Miss Ann Daniels.  The land between this track and Prestwood Common is all part of the same farm.  Not connecting any communities, it is a track for farm traffic and for extracting timber from the woods, but Hobbshill Lane was used to define the parish boundary.  It is an ancient track, being sunk well down between the bordering embankments, and no doubt formed a route in medieval times for the Abbey monks to pass from their farms at Peterley and Little Kingshill to the one at Martins End.

 

South end of Hobbshill Lane from Nag's Head Lane.  The sinuous margin on the left-hand side is the result of medieval strip farming, which left rounded headlands where the plough was turned.

At this same fork we can take a rough path along the east side of Peterley Common, the crops of Neard Wood Close on our right.  The common gradually widens as one approaches Atkins Farm, past Little Meadow pasture, an extension of the common funnelling right up to the farmyard.  This farm, with its large C18^th house, barns built in 1807, orchard and gardens, is the home of John Edmunds (1800) who farms nearly 400 acres and employs 22 labourers.  He runs both Atkins and the adjoining Sedges Farm, the latter being just outside the Prestwood parish boundary.  The oldest boys, John (1831) and Evan (1832), work for their father, while five younger children, 17 down to 8 years, are all still in education.  Edmunds, who was born in Hertfordshire and lived in Chesham before coming here, is quite wealthy.  He has four servants aged 17 to 22, from Great Missenden, Great Hampden, Wendover and Hughenden.  Eliza Beeson used to be a servant for Edmonds in 1841 at Sedges Farm, when she was 18.

 

Atkins Farm [2000]

 

Continuing along the side of the common we pass Common Platt, one of Edmunds’s arable fields, and the narrow Long Meadow pasture, extending a long way back from the common.  At the front of this meadow are three adjoining C17^th cottages [Nairdwood Cottages], part of the former Thomas Ives estate. 

Nairdwood Cottages (2018)

 

This is where Tuffney used to live, and also John Peedle who is now at Martins End, but now Mary Wright has movedhere with her son Robert from near Martins End.  Although only 39 she was widowed in her twenties, not long after marrying Thomas Wright, and supports herself lace-making.  A labourer’s wage is hardly sufficient to support a family, so most women are forced to supplement household incomes, although the work is long and hard and pays even more poorly than labouring, although it is more reliable.  Robert also brings in money as a farm labourer for Joseph Honner.  Mary’s mother, Ann Palmer (1791), also a widow, has moved in, along with her with three unmarried children, two boys (21 and 16) who do labouring work, and a daughter who is a straw-plaiter.  Ann herself isa lace-maker.  The other cottages house the families of labourers John Mason (1796), a cousin of Joseph Mason above, and James Bryant (1822), whose father John we encountered earlier.

There is a narrow piece of enclosed land jutting from the common with a pair of cottages set back [Cedars].  William Slaughter used to live here with his family and old widowed mother, but she has gone to live with her niece Sophia Mason (above) and the family have moved to Denner Hill (see later), being replaced by his brother James (1798), his wife Ann and one 20-year-old daughter, Rebecca, left at home.  He is a worker on Atkins Farm.  Their late father Richard was a farmer at Great Hampden.  The adjoining cottage houses fellow farm-worker William Charge (1820), his wife Ann and three young children, who used to live on Denner Hill, plus his parents John (1884), also a farm labourer, and Sarah (1883).  His grandfather John Charge was once a farmer in the area. A line of narrow pasture-fields, recent encroachments on the common, continue north, dividing Edmunds’s fields of crops from the common.  So far Peterley Wood has bordered this neck of the common on the west side, but ithas now come to an end, and a path goes west along the north edgeto the new church [Church Path].  The path passessouth of an arable field (Heathy Field), part of the Biggs farm rented from Richard Davis.

Church Path under snow [2009]

 

This fieldis separated from the common on its east side by a narrow encroachment owned by Rev. William Forster Lloyd (1795), at the north end of which he built a gentleman's residence, called Prestwood Lodge, in about 1840.  This is flint-built in the Regency style.  The grounds have been planted with trees and flower-gardens and there is a small ornamental lake developed from an old Prestwood Common pond.  Lloyd lives here only part of the time, with two servants, his main role is as a lecturer in mathematics and economics at Oxford University.  He was once the owner of Clarendon Cottages (1821-25).  He is not in Prestwood on our visit, and the only people here are his housekeeper Susan Channor (1791) from Wendover, who has been here since the building of the house, and servant John Parsons (1830), whose father runs the Chequers pub (see above).

William Lloyd is the son of Rev. Thomas Lloyd, rector of Aston-sub-Edge in Gloucestershire.  Thomas lived at various villages in the West Wycombe area, before becoming a private tutor at Peterley Manor, where in the first years of the C19^th he established a small school attracting pupils from various local well-off families in the absence of any nearby public schools.  William attended Westminster School at this time (being a brilliant student and becoming captain of the school in 1811).  He then went up to Christ Church College, Oxford, graduating in 1815 with first-class Maths and second-class Greek degrees, and receiving his MA in 1818.  His elder brother Charles (1784) was tutor in mathematics in the same college at this time, eventually becoming Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon at the college in 1822, and Bishop of Oxford in 1829.  He lives in retirement at the old Rectory near Great Hampden.  It was his connection with Prestwood that persuaded Thomas Evetts to form the new parish here.  William Lloyd also advised Sir Robert Peel, the future Prime Minister, one of his pupils at Oxford.  He became Reader in Greek in 1823, Drummond Professor of Political Economy in 1832, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1834.  He published papers based on his lectures bearing on such issues as population growth and the Poor Laws.  He was influential in the debate about the value of common land, arguing that common rights led to over-grazing and lack of good husbandry, an argument, which became dubbed “The Tragedy of the Commons”, and was used to support enclosure.  With his house on the edge of Prestwood Common, his main home when not at his rooms in college, he was well placed to observe at first hand how the common land was used, but as a member of the landowner class he had his own slant on matters.

" Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted?  Why is the common itself so bareworn and cropped so differently from the adjoining enclosures?  If a person puts more cattle into his own field, the amount of the subsistence which they consume is all deducted from that which was at the command of his original stock; and if, before, there was no more than a sufficiency of pasture, he reaps no benefit from the additional cattle, what is gained one way, being lost in another.  But if he puts more cattle on a common, the food which they consume forms a deduction which is shared between all the cattle, as well that of others as his own, and only a small part of it is taken from his own cattle " he wrote in 1833.

Just north of the house are two cottages which also encroach on the common.  They are owned by Joseph Biggs.  The larger one has been the home of carpenter William Ward (1807) and his wife Ann (Biggs’s daughter) for at least 15 years.  Son George (1832) is a sawyer, three teenage daughters Caroline, Charlotte and Isabella, are all lace-makers, and there are two younger daughters.  We met their son Thomas as Collings Hanger Farm, where he works for his grandfather.  William’s father and grandfather were both carpenters. 

The other cottage is divided between two households.  One contains a sawyer, Thomas Rance (1805) who just has a young son of 9 years.  We met his brother John and sister Elizabeth earlier. The other houses two lace-makers in their fifties.  Mary Moores lost her husband John, who rented a nearby meadow and garden plot and owned six cottages called "Brummagin" [which name survives, for the older residents who still remember it, as the neighbouring path going from the High Street past Chequers allotments].  His brother Thomas also died quite young and his widow, also called Mary, we met in Prestwood north of the common.  Mary's unmarried sister Sophia Wright lodges with her.  Both these ladies are very poor with no other support than the meagre earnings of their lace-making.  In the census they are referred to as paupers.

Coming back to the east side of the common land, which has now widened out considerably and become the main Prestwood Common, we pass on the right a small meadow and then more cottages.  The first cottage used to be that of William Peedle (see above), and he also farmed the meadow next door.  He has been replaced by timber dealer and haggle carter, Elijah Essex (1786) and his wife Ann.  He is helped by his 33-year-old unmarried son Elisha who lives with them. Their only other child still at home is 7-year-old Ruth, although they have a 65-year-old lodger, sawyer Aaron Hussey, who is a sawyer and helps with the timber business.  He is a widower and Ann’s brother.  The Husseys come from Little Hampden.  We met another of Elijah’s sons, James, in Moat Lane.  Elijah’s father Richard was similarly a “haggle carter” who lived in Prestwood and owned five horses, a wagon and a cart at the end of the C18^th.  (A haggle carter distributes cut wood for fuel - “haggle” from the old country dialect word hag, to cut, whence also our modern term “hack”.  The Anglo-Saxon haga meant a “hedge”, ie trees that are cut back, and gave rise to the word “hawthorn”, ie “the hedge-thorn”.)  Elisha Essex at Moat Farm is Elijah's cousin.

Three cottages [Cedar Cottages] in a terrace shortly after this are owned by Rev. Lloyd.  Here live Thomas and Sarah Groves.  She was born locally but Thomas (1801) is a labourer from Marlow.

 

Cedar Cottages [2013]

 

The remaining encroachments are a couple of meadows, one belonging to Rev. Lloyd, and two adjoining cottages [Cherry Cottage], all backed by Great Barn Field, part of Atkins Farm. The cottages and adjacent meadow are leased from John Scott’s Trustees.  The Hardings lived here before the new house was built at Crib Corner.  The old C16^th house is currently occupied by master carpenter William Nicholls (1817), who moved to this area from Little Missenden when he married Jane, a local girl.  He was publican at the White Horse in Heath End before moving here last year.  They have six children, from 11-year-old Maria to new-born Job.  His brother James is a butcher in Little Missenden, where their father Job has a grocer’s shop and their sister Maria (1812) is schoolmistress.  Job’s own father Richard used to be a baker in Marlow, beyond High Wycombe.

Beside this cottage Green Lane leaves the common eastwards between pasture and arable fields, bending northwards when it reaches two adjoining Thimble Cottages, the property of Ann Daniel after she purchased the Ives land. 

 

Thimble Cottages [2000]

 

In one lives a widower William Nash (1799), born in Wendover, who lives with his 81-year-old mother Rebecca and sister Elizabeth’s son James Pearce (1832), whose parents live by Kingshill Common (below).  While Rebecca still does lace-making, William and James are both farm-workers.  William, however, has a distinctiveside-job making beehives and he keeps bees himself.  We have already met his brothers George and William.  He has been here twenty years or so, as has his neighbour and brother-in-law Samuel Green (1794), who is married to Nash’s sister Sarah (1796).  He is a labourer, as are two sons who live at home, aged 28 and 16.  Green was originally from Princes Risborough, so neither family has very local roots.  The cottages were built about 1760 in typical flint and brick with a hipped tile roof and leaded windows.   At the bend in the road is a tiny fir plantation, after which the lane goes north through Honnor fields, leading to Martins End and Andlows Farm, where we first entered the parish. 

Returning to the edge of the common, across Green Lane from the Nicholls’s house stands a large C17^th house Prestwood Hall [White House] which Thomas Ives owned and where he lived before Atkins Farm.  In 1841 it was rented by two ladies of “independent means”, Sarah Slater (1786) and Sophie Scott (1819), of whom we know nothing more.  It has now returned to the Ives, however, as Thomas’s widow Elizabeth (1793), who is also quite well-off, now lives here with two unmarried daughters in their twenties.  She has succeeded to her late husband's position as one of the fund-holders for the Ladyboys charity, but all the farmland has been sold off to the Honnors.  Two narrow meadows that border the common north of Prestwood Hall are the last part of the former Ives farm holdings, and they lead up to Crib Corner where we were much earlier.