Welcome!
This site is centred on Rowland Parker’s book ‘The Common Stream’ first published in 1975. At face value, it was just another local history book, written by an enthusiastic amateur who had spent nearly thirteen years trawling though ancient documents, and poking around in local mud. But it became an international best seller and resource for historians all over the world. As this site develops we hope ‘The Common Stream’ will extend its reach both nationally and internationally to capture and share the tales of extraordinary people who one way or another left their mark. A key part of this project involves finding and sharing photographic images which provide some visual evidence of the fashion, culture, attitudes, and behaviors of people living in and around the village of Foxton. Positioning these old photographs using structures still visible today has been great fun, as has listening to the memories they trigger when people see them.
Potholes
We have already had evidence of the shocking and dangerous state of the roads in the village. The local inhabitants had no doubt become accustomed to it, but in 1542 it seems to have reached a pitch of discomfort and danger which even they could no longer tolerate or ignore. Either that, or some official edict (Cromwell’s Poor Law of 1536?) had decreed that some of the money which had previously flowed into the coffers of the Church should be diverted to public utilities. It did not work for long, and perhaps not very effectively, but at least a few people showed willing. Agnes Newman in 1542 left 3s 4d ‘towards the reperacions of hye wayes therwithin the saide parisshe’, and Thomas Flaxman left ‘the valewe of five quarters bareley’ to the same cause. Two years later William Styrmyn left twelve pence ‘to the repayering and mendyng of hye wayes in the said Towne betwixt Nicholas Bawdrix gate and Poorys Waye’ which, considering what William was worth, indicates either an extremely niggardly spirit or a reluctance to comply with an order.
Anyway, you might ask, how could a legacy of twelve pence, or even twelve pounds for that matter, make any difference to three-quarters of a mile of road? The answer, I think, is provided by the correctness of my guess that this is connected with the Poor Law, and a clause in Thomas Lavender’s will in 1556: ‘I will have carried forward the mending of the highe wayes x lodes of Stone.’ Someone had hit on a bright idea for killing three birds with one stone by paying the poor to pick up the stones which littered the fields and cart them into the highway to fill up the ruts and holes. How many loads of stones did Styrmyn’s twelve pence provide? How many poor people were relieved for how long by Lavender’s ten loads of stones? How long did a few loads of stones affect the condition of the road? Sorry, I cannot answer any of these questions. I can tell you that the same technique was still being used two hundred and thirty years later, when the price paid for a load of stones was 1s 6d. My guess is that the poor wretches who were driven by hunger to accept the job in 1544 did it for a penny or two pence a load.
Abbess of Chatteris
And that brings me to the Abbess of Chatteris, who will figure so prominently in the pages which follow that you will almost certainly be prompted to ask how it came about that the head of a small nunnery, isolated amid the watery wastes of the Fens, became the virtual ruler of a village thirty miles away. Her case is typical of many. All over England, abbots, priors and abbesses were acquiring estates, sometimes vast estates, made up entirely of gifts ‘for the good of my soul and the souls of my ancestors’.
Here are the facts about the Chatteris nunnery as near as I can ascertain them. Edgar, King of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria from 957 to 975, encouraged the foundation of monastic houses. His second wife was Aelfthryth (or Alfwen or Ailwen), widow of Aethelwold (or Aethelstan or Aethelwine), earl of East Anglia. She was also the sister of Ednoth (or however else he was called) the first Abbot of Ramsey. And it was she who – for reasons of pure piety, or as an insurance policy for the salvation of her soul, or because it was the fashionable thing to do – founded the Benedictine nunnery at Chatteris at some date between AD 970 and AD 980. The site was probably chosen for its isolation, or because of the proximity of the other foundations at Ely, Thorney and Ramsey. Isolation afforded no real protection, as the Danes had demonstrated all too drastically on several occasions, but in theory at least it encouraged a life of contemplation and detachment from the world, the flesh and the devil.
Detachment from the world did not preclude the Abbess from ownership of land. The nunnery could not very well be endowed with much land in its immediate neighbourhood. That which the royal foundress granted to it was nearly all situated in southern Cambridgeshire – 640 acres in Foxton, 240 in Barrington, 165 in Shepreth, 420 in Barley, 120 in Over. Enough to guarantee an income in rents sufficient to maintain a household of a dozen nuns – the number never rose above fifteen – at a standard of living not wholly in accord with the vow of poverty. This land must previously have been held by the King, or the Queen, or the Earl of East Anglia. Now it was held by the Abbess – for ever. Once bestowed, it was never taken away – not for the next five hundred and fifty years, anyway -though parcels of it were sometimes in dispute, for there were some people who rated the possession of land above the salvation of their souls.
Community Spirit – I Doubt it Exists
For that reason alone I have doubts about the existence of a community spirit. It is an elusive and complicated thing. The more one thinks about it, the more elusive and complicated it seems, though I am fairly clear in my mind on two points: firstly that a community spirit cannot exist without real community of interest; secondly that it cannot manifest itself except under compulsion. There was, I am sure, a community spirit in the sixth century, or whenever it was, when the village was newly and permanently established by the digging of the Town Brook; when any potential breakaway minority group would be rapidly converted to the majority view by sheer necessity and the prospect of starvation or slavery. There must have been a community spirit when the threat of Mercian cattle-raiders or Danish pillagers rendered the life of all precarious and the death of stray individuals certain. There was a community spirit in the thirteenth century, imposed by the manorial system which kept, or tried fairly successfully to keep, Foxtonians in Foxton and all outsiders out. It was a community akin to a prison. There was a community spirit in the later sixteenth century, when everyone in the village was striving to better himself and his family by his own efforts, and thereby bettered the whole village; but again it was subject to restrictions and prohibitions at village level which forced the individual to conform to a pattern. There was a community spirit right through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the compulsive element steadily diminishing but the common interest as strong as ever, for every person in the village looked to the land for his livelihood; the same situation still holds in many a Welsh mining village.
Yeomen – Our Common Men
Yes, yeomen. Whatever the title may have meant originally, it now meant ‘ farmer’, one who cultivated his own land, as distinct from’ labourer’, who mainly cultivated someone else’s land and was paid for doing so. Farming was still the be-all and end-all of village life, and village life was still the life of the vast majority of English people. It is true that in the village there were butchers and bakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, bricklayers and shoemakers. But those men lived by serving and supplying the farmers; not only that, most of the small tradesmen and craftsmen were also farmers, even if they only had three or four acres. To what extent had the farming pattern changed in the past hundred years or so? Very little indeed. There was, as I have already said, a relaxation in the rigidity of control, and a man could grow pretty well what he chose to grow, within limits. He could not grow clover, turnips, kale, lucerne, sugar-beet, make, potatoes -because he did not know of such crops. And if he had known he could still not have grown them because the age-old three-fold rotation system was still in operation: winter-sown crop one year, spring-sown crop the next, fallow the third. This still applied even where there were four fields, or only two, for the divisions between fields was quite arbitrary. Much of the waste and woodland had disappeared. Most of the marshy patches were brought under cultivation, thanks to extensive draining and ditching. By the end of the seventeenth century only the names remained to serve as a reminder that what was now good arable land had once been swamp and mere, and those who mowed hay in Oslock soon forgot that it had been a ‘ muddy lake’, whilst those who ploughed in Flag Pightle no longer thought of digging turves of peat there.
Foxton Bury
Sir Richard Warren probably only once saw his coat of arms, moulded in plaster on the chimney-breast of his new manor-house of Foxton Bury, before he died. He left the manor to his sister Joan, already married to Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrooke. Their son Oliver Cromwell (not the Oliver Cromwell but his great-uncle) inherited it in 1597. Sir Oliver Williams, alias Cromwell, when his first wife died, married the widow of the famous Sir Horatio Palavicine of Babraham. Henry Palavicine married Catherine Williams, his stepsister; Toby Palavicine married Jane Williams, his stepsister; Baptina Palavicine married Henry Cromwell alias Williams, her stepbrother. The net result of this multiple family link-up, as far as we are concerned, was that Toby Palavicine inherited the Foxton manor in 1615, along with a goodly share of a fortune which was, or had been, reckoned as somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand pounds. But even that, apparently, was insufficient for the needs and tastes of Sir Toby. Within fifteen years it had all gone. So had his mansion of Babraham Hall; so had the Foxton manor; so had Sir Toby. The story of how that vast fortune was amassed has already been told; some day I might tell the story of how it was spent – a very different story. The manor was bought by Edward Boston, passed to Richard Taylor, then in 1682 to Christopher Hatton of Longstanton. The Hattons held it until 1767, when it was bought by William Mitchell who in 1772 sold it to Thomas Parker. The latter sold it in 1787 to Richard Bendysh of Barrington for £7400 and it remained in Bendysh hands until 1928.
Galleries
