II. Snapshot at the Birth of a Parish: 1851

 

4. The geographical and historical setting

 

The ceaseless stroke of the reaping-hook falls on the ranks of the corn: the corn yields, but only inch by inch.  …  The wheat is beautiful, but human life is labour.

Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) “Wheatfields”/“One of the new voters”

 

Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door

Pillow and bobbins all her little store;

Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay,

Shuffling her threads about the livelong day,

Just earns a scanty pittance; and at night

Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light;

She, for her humble sphere by nature fit,

Has little understanding, and no wit.

William Cowper (died 1800)

 

In 1851 Queen Victoria was in the fourteenth year of her reign.  William Wordsworth had died the year before and been succeeded by Alfred Tennyson as Poet Laureate.  The newly built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, was the setting for "The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations".  The British economy was burgeoning (railways, gas lighting, mechanical inventions) and the British Empire was at its height.  Despite revolutionary fervour in Europe, and the first publication of the Communist Manifesto in Britain in 1850, the Chartists had expended their last efforts in England and the trades unions were yet to become a political force.  It was a time of great poverty, urban degradation, and cholera epidemics, and yet also optimism in progress and gradual humanitarian reform, with the first Public Health and Factory Acts just passed.  The world still had much to reveal, with Arctic exploration proceeding, discovery of gold in Australia and David Livingstone planning his exploration of the Zambesi River.  The arts reflected this wider ferment, with the first performance of Verdi's Rigoletto controversially detailing the immorality and corruption of the ruling classes, the Grand Tour furnished by John Ruskin's architectural work on The Stones of Venice, Herman Melville's encyclopaedic Leviathan Moby Dick, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin foreshadowing the American Civil War.  While 1851 saw the publication of the eccentric George Borrow's Lavengro about the life of that most rural of cultures, that of the gypsies, the general tenor of the age was urban, industrial, scientific and metropolitan.  The need for systematic knowledge about the sociological state of the country gave rise to the first proper British census, trialled in 1841 and repeated, with improvements, in 1851.  It was a time of intellectual ferment at the same time as lingering primitive beliefs in patent medicines, herbal cure-alls, and the literal truth of Genesis.  But as we explore Prestwood Parish and its everyday concerns, we would be excused from thinking that this was all happening on another planet.  What did they think of these clerks fresh out from the town with their census forms and intrusive questions about age, family relations, and means of employment?

In 1849 a new C of E church, Holy Trinity, was built between Prestwood and Great Kingshill.  It served an area on the fringes of three parishes, Hughenden, Great Missenden and Stoke Mandeville. (The latter was a detached portion of the main parish near Aylesbury and a historical anachronism that came into being in Anglo-Saxon times when parishes on the plain included a portion of hill country to diversify their agricultural base.)  Growing populations in the Hughenden and Great Missenden parishes, plus the impossible distance from Stoke Mandeville parish church for an ambulatory population, had contributed to the pressure for an additional place of worship, but there was another motivation too. The Prestwood area had long been settled by Nonconformist sects like the Quakers and Baptists (roughly half the local population were Nonconformist at this time, according to Holmes 2010) and the new church was an attempt to wrest the initiative back from these groups by establishing a place of worship closer to the population there.  The church was accompanied by a new schoolhouse, and this was a particularly important part of the plan to recruit young people, whose educational opportunities until then were severely limited.  Like most isolated villages away from busy towns, the residents had an unjustified reputation for backwardness (popularly slandered as “Prestwood nitwits”) and close intermarriage (for which there is actually no evidence at all).  The project was particularly the brainchild of Thomas Evetts, a young ambitious minister fresh out of Oxford University, for which this new situation would suit his missionary zeal to encourage the residents of this poor bleak area into the fold of the mother church and raise their moral standards.  Evetts had his own private income and contributed £2,500 or more of his own money (worth something approaching a quarter of a million in today’s values) to build the church, schoolhouse and a grand rectory to house his own family in suitable style.  All this was gifted to the church, along with the large field to the west known as Prestwood Park.  He also bought up various other pieces of land in Prestwood.  He then rented these out, the rent including a proportion to go to the Bounty of Queen Anne, a national fund for the "maintenance of poor clergy" set up in 1704.  A condition on the sale of these lands was that the gift to the fund should continue and to this day rents on these lands include such contributions, which, since 1948, have been administered by the Church Commissioners.

It had always been intended that the church would be at the centre of a new ecclesiastical parish comprising the detached portion of Stoke Mandeville and the nearest parts of the two other main parishes.  This was supported by the governing bodies of the churches at Stoke and Hughenden.  The latter’s chief spokesman was Benjamin Disraeli, recently become Lord of the Manor at Hughenden.  The governors of the Great Missenden church were, however, opposed to the loss of part of their parish and it was necessary to get up a petition to parliament to approve the change, and it was not until 1852 that Prestwood Parish finally came into existence officially, much to the disgruntlement of the Missenden objectors.  Certainly the weight of Disraeli’s support would have had something to do with the outcome, although he was apparently not all that keen on Evetts, as we shall see shortly.  The petition was reported in full in the London Gazette for 5 April 1852 and includes a complete description of the bounds of the new parish or "chapelry" as it is there termed (copied in full in Appendix I).  The new parish covered over 2,000 acres, comprising 1,000 acres from Great Missenden, 843 from Hughenden and 175 from Stoke Mandeville.

The boundary had been meticulously detailed along a route very close to ten miles in length, following the old boundaries of the Stoke portion, but creating new ones elsewhere by following field and estate boundaries so as to include the whole of the settlements at Prestwood, including Martin's End and houses surrounding the large Prestwood Common, outlying farms and small settlements at Heath End, Peterley, Stony Green, Denner Hill and Bryants Bottom, plus the northern part of Great Kingshill, where the community was bisected by an arbitrary line drawn straight across Kingshill Common excluding houses on its south side, presumably a compromise with the interests of Hughenden parish, but an unfortunate anomaly because the Kingshill community was more orientated in practice to Cryers Hill and Hughenden than it was to Prestwood, especially as it remained for civil administrative purposes in the parish of Hughenden.  (When a new school was built for Great Kingshill in 1874 it was located at Cryers Hill.)  Only slightly more than half the acreage came from Great Missenden, but this portion contained much more than half the population, so one can see that much of the objection from that parish came from the disproportionate loss to its congregation.

Although the area of the parish was quite compact, the artificial boundaries actually lumped together very disparate communities.  Prestwood Common was dominated by agricultural labourers, whereas Denner Hill was part of the stone-cutting region extending west from the parish, and Great Kingshill Common was dominated by woodworkers, farmers and artisans.  Only seven cottages at Kingshill belonged to farm labourers and three more to widowed lace-makers, while there were six farmers and 15 household heads involved in the timber industry.  The latter included five sawyers, four chair turners (bodgers), two carpenters, two saddle-tree makers, and a timber valuer.  The remaining occupations were almost all trades or commercial: two publicans, a grocer, a butcher, shoemaker, wheelwright, millwright, two blacksmiths, and finally one gardener.

The period 1849-52 is therefore a critical period in the social development of the area, the naissance of the concept of the Prestwood parish, and by chance it so happens that a number of sources of systematic information exist around this time, providing a detailed glimpse into the nature of the community existing then.  These are the Tithe Apportionment of 1837 (demanded by the Tithe Commutation Act 1836), mapping every piece of land and its ownership for taxation purposes (apart from the detached portion of Stoke Mandeville), the first trial national census of 1841, and the first census proper of 1851.  Before these there had only been the Bucks Posse Comitatus of 1798, listing all men of military age and ownership of horses and carts by parish, as a basis for summons to national military service and requisition of vital equipment in case of war.