Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
Hinxworth Church during restoration in 1928 (colourised)
Hinxworth lies in the northern extremity of North Hertfordshire, in the former Odsey Hundred. This ancient division included Ashwell (its central place and once a market town), Caldecote, Radwell, Newnham and Bygrave to the north of the Icknield Way; Clothall, Wallington, Rushden, Sandon, Kelshall, Therfield, Royston, Reed, Broadfield, Cottered and Ardeley were the villages in the Hundred to the south of Icknield Way (the last three are outside North Hertfordshire). Sitting away from main roads, it is a parish that may be unfamiliar to outsiders. It is not uninteresting, of course. Although there are no mentions of the place before the compilation of Domesday Book in 1086, archaeology shows that there is an earlier history to the area.
There is a link at the end to a longer version of this history.
The parish
The parish, a little over 590 hectares (1460 acres) in area, is roughly rectangular, lying in an area characterised in the 1990s as the Hinxworth Lowlands (Landscape Character Area 225). Its gently rolling, low-lying countryside is dominated by arable fields, with a network of drainage ditches between them. The south-western, north-western and north-eastern boundaries are with Bedfordshire, while the south-eastern is with Ashwell and Caldecote. The village lies in the centre of the parish, with the church at its eastern end. The village is connected with the A1 to the south by New Inn Road. Chapel Street is the historic road to the north, connecting with Arnolds Lane, running east to the parish boundary. There are farms to the north and south of the village centre.
Historical Summary
The name is first found in Domesday Book in two spellings, Haingesteuuorde and Hainsteuuorde. It contains hengest, ‘a stallion’, and worð, ‘a farmyard’, the lowest status of farm. In Domesday Book, it consisted of three manors, held respectively by William de Ow, Hardwin of Scales and Peter de Valognes. Peter’s holding was an outlier of his main holding in Ashwell, so was perhaps in the eastern side of the parish. When his last descendant in the male line, Christine de Mandeville, Countess of Essex, died in 1233, the Hinxworth manor passed through her husband’s sister Maud to Maud’s son Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Essex. The holding of Hardwin de Scales was divided between his sons Richard and Hugh; their grandsons William and Hugh were alive in 1207×8, but they were the last of the family to have possessions in the village.
Henry I granted William de Ow’s holding, which was let to two knights in 1086, to Walter de Clare. On his death, it passed to his nephew Gilbert de Clare, who became Earl of Pembroke in 1138. When his son Richard died in 1176, his daughter Isabel and her husband Sir William Marshal inherited the manor. After William’s death in 1219, it passed through the hands of each of his five sons, none of whom had children. When the last son, Anselm, died in 1245, the manor was divided between his five sisters.
The later history of the various manors is complex, tied up in politics and split between different branches of Sir William Marshal’s descendants, until the end of the fifteenth century. Richard Waferer was the owner of the manor that became known as Hinxworth or Wattonbury by 1471×2. His son John sold it in 1521 to John Bowles of Wallington. From then on, it has the usual post-medieval history of short family descents and frequent sales. In 1881, it was bought by John Sale, and after he died in 1881, his daughters continued to own it. They were early donors of objects to Letchworth Museum.
A second manor, Cantlowbury, was not recorded before 1521×2 but seems to take its name from the family of Walter de Cantelupe, who had property in the village in 1176. Walter’s descendants had the advowson (the right to nominate the parish priest) for St Nicholas’s Church in the village until 1326. This shows that they were an important family with large landholdings, although we do not know where they were.
Sir Henry Chauncy named a third manor, Pulters, in his Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire, published in 1700. He said that it was named for Pulter who held it for a rent of 10/8 (53½p) in the reign of Edward IV (1461-1470, 1471-1483) and that they were the patrons of Hinxworth Rectory. However, the Victoria County History discounts the manorial status of Pulters, saying that it was a property held from the Manor of Hinxworth.
Archaeological summary
Metal detected finds by date
The Hertfordshire Historic Environment Record lists seven prehistoric sites and finds, eight Romano-British (AD 43-450), one Viking period (AD 800-1000) and thirteen medieval (AD 1066-1550). This is not a lot of information to write a story, even if we supplement it by historical data, mostly consisting of the family trees of the holders of the manors. The situation is made easier metal detecting has uncovered finds of many different dates. As of April 2020, some 226 finds have been recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme; more than half of them are dated to the Late Roman period (AD 200-450) and almost three quarters are Late Iron Age or Roman. This is because most of the finds of this date consist of scrappy low-value bronze coins that are frequent finds on and around Roman sites, not because there was a massive settlement here at the time.
The pie chart shows the finds of different date; starting at the ‘midnight’ position and working in a clockwise direction brings you forward in time. One thing that jumps out to the trained eye is the number of finds dated AD 450-1100 (16 in all, split equally 450-800 and 800-1100). Metalwork of this date is not often found by detectorists in Hertfordshire, beyond a few hot spots. Hinxworth appears to be one, and we need to explain why that might be so. Something else to note is the drop-off after the Black Death.
Prehistory
The earliest finds from the village belong to the Bronze Age, in the second millennium BC. A faint cropmark towards the north-east corner of the parish may be a destroyed burial mound. A tripartite urn dated 2000-1800 BC was found during excavations by Arthur Waddell at Newinn, in the southern corner of the parish, which is now on display in North Hertfordshire Museum. Dr Waddell also found fragments of a Bronze Age collared urn. Detectorists have also found two Middle Bronze Age spearheads, one in good condition, the other badly corroded, and an awl. Both the spearheads came from a field known as Clacketts, in the east of the parish. The awl came from a field to the east of Middle Farm, closer to the centre of the parish.
Late Iron Age to Roman
Two puzzling finds were made in 1810: coins from the east. One was minted by Mithridates King of Pontus (probably Mithridates VI, who was king from about 120 BC to 63 BC), the other by Perseus of Macedonia (king 179-168 BC). Pontus was a kingdom on the Black Sea coast of northern Turkey and western Armenia, while Macedonia was a northern Greek kingdom. Coins of this period are found occasionally across Britain, and although they are sometimes dismissed as recent losses by collectors, it is more likely that they arrived in the decades after they were minted. They were traded not as money but for their bullion value. We do not know where in the parish they were found, unfortunately.
Dr Waddell’s mystery skull (colourised)
At Newinn, where Arthur Waddell had found Bronze Age remains, he also excavated 15 objects dated by Percival Westell to the Late Iron Age (although a couple of pieces of metalwork may have been Bronze Age in date), and 31 Romano-British objects. Most of these consisted of pots used as grave gifts, although there were two fragments of roof time, one with a dog’s footprint. These discoveries were made less than 150 m from the Roman road that is now followed by the A1. The discoveries at Newinn were perhaps part of the burial ground of a community established along the line of the road. There were also skeletons and an apparently isolated skull, which Waddell believed to be of different dates. He thought that the skull, which was found in a gravelly deposit, had belonged to an unfortunate individual drowned when a flood overtook him. It is more likely that this was a burial in a grave cut into the gravel subsoil.
In 2002, fieldwalking took place west of Marshfield Farm, between Hinxworth Place and the village. This is an area where aerial photography has revealed the presence of buried ditches that suggest occupation. An area of 1.5 hectares was examined, which recovered Late Iron Age and early Roman pottery. This may be connected with the reported discovery of burials beneath one of the barns at Hinxworth Place about 1880, when ‘many skeletons were discovered ranged in order close to the surface under the barn floor’. Although nothing was found with them to confirm the date, they are most likely to have been associated with the nearby occupation.
An area of activity more significant than either Newinn or Marshfield Farm has been known for some time around Middle Farm. Here, aerial photographs show a series of ditched enclosures, all very rectangular. This is a good clue that they are of Roman date. One of them, which consists of three concentric ditches, has been Scheduled as an Ancient Monument (number 1015852) since 14 February 1997 as a ‘Roman fortlet’. According to the Heritage List for England, its ‘garrison of up to 80 men… would have been considered sufficient in an area which was generally regarded as stable… The fortlet may also have acted as a transit camp for troops passing along the Great North Road some 2.5km to the west. The fortlet may also have had administrative purposes perhaps connected with food production at nearby villa complexes such as Radwell… and as a secure stopover for the movement of taxes’.
It is impossible to understand why English Heritage chose such wording as their interpretation can be shown to be wrong. Firstly, the ditches are strictly rectangular, without the rounded corners that are a distinctive feature of Roman military installations. Also, despite the number of metal detected finds from the site, they include not one single piece of military equipment. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England had earlier, and more plausibly, compared it with a Late Iron Age temple site at Gosbecks (Colchester). Similarly, Gil Burleigh compared it with another Late Iron Age religious site at Fison Way in Thetford.
A sceptre terminal (Portable Antiquities Scheme object BH-78F164), © P.A.S.
Finds from the site range from Late Iron Age coinage through to late Roman finds. One of the most intriguing is a tubular copper alloy object decorated with raised bands covered in a repeating pattern of lozenges. It is the end of a religious sceptre, carried by priests, used from the Late Iron Age through to about AD 200. A unique figurine, 63 mm tall, found in 2004 is a goddess combining Minerva and Fortuna. The goddess Minerva instantly alerts us to a comparison with Senuna, a goddess whose shrine was discovered at Ashwell End, just a kilometre away to the east, during excavations between 2003 and 2006. Part of Senuna’s temple treasure that was buried early in the fourth century included plaques dedicated to the goddess that show her dressed as Minerva. This raises the likelihood that the Minerva-Fortuna statuette from Hinxworth was also identified with the local goddess. This comparison with Senuna raises another possible connection. The Bronze Age finds from this area recall Bronze Age metalwork deposited at Senuna’s shrine at Ashwell End. There, they were given as gifts to the goddess by worshippers in the Roman period.
The Venus de Hinx
There is yet another unusual find. It is a marble statue of Venus, missing its arms and lower legs, like its more famous counterpart in Paris, but also missing its head. Unfortunately, we know little about where it was found, because it was spotted in 1911 by H W Bowman, the Ashwell Parish Clerk, being used as a weight on a plough, an indignity to which the goddess of beauty and love ought not to have been subjected. All we know is that it was in use at Middle Farm for many years. We may as well call her the Venus de Hinxworth! Was she also part of the temple furnishings here? The style dates her to some time about AD 200. The statue is now on display in Ashwell Village Museum.
There are two more enclosures known to the south of this religious complex. That closest has been described as both a Roman temple and associated compounds and as a corridor villa. The discovery of Roman roof tile in this area shows that whatever the building was, it was substantially built. It is on the same alignment as the site to the north, the long axis aligned roughly south-west to north-east, which is a clue that the two may be contemporary.
The third cropmark site partly overlaps the middle site and is on a different alignment, more west-south-west to east-north-east. This suggests that it is of a different date from the central site; perhaps most significantly, there are no Roman metalwork finds reported from this area, although they are frequent across the rest of the field. There are finds, though, of early and central medieval date (about AD 450 to 1100). Are we perhaps looking at a shifting focus from the initial religious site to the north to one of a completely different character?
Early medieval
There are some 16 metalwork finds that can be dated to the centuries between the end of Roman rule and the Norman Conquest. This is unusual in North Hertfordshire and must be significant. Some of them are from the area of the third cropmark site in Clacketts (there are two pins, a small-long brooch dated to the sixth century, some sceattas, a type of early Anglo-Saxon coin, a brooch and some hooked tags for securing clothing).
Book mount (find BH-1B9603) © Portable Antiquities Scheme
Other finds of this period were made close to the church, including another small-long brooch, more sceattas and a book fitting. This last probably dates from the first half of the eleventh century, and its shape indicates that it came from a religious book, perhaps a copy of the Gospels or a prayer missal, both popular with the educated wealthy at this time.
What seems to be happening is that there was a shift over time, from the site at Clacketts, which may have continued further south as a Pagan Saxon centre, towards the place where a church was eventually established. In time, this became the focus for the growth of a new community, the village of Hinxworth.
The village of Pirton, at the foot of the hills towards Highdown
Sometimes, the amount of information about a place can be overwhelming. After choosing to look at the village of Pirton, it soon became obvious that there is so much information that trying to do justice to it in a single blog post is impossible. Instead, we’ll look at its medieval history and its origins. Even then, there is too much to put into a single post, so what follows is just a summary. If you’re interested enough to want to know more, there’s a link at the end to a longer version.
Pirton in the Middle Ages (and before)
Like so many places in England, Pirton is first mentioned in Domesday Book, where it was called Peritone. Other medieval spellings show that the name contains the Old English words pirige, ‘a pear tree’, and tūn, ‘an enclosed dwelling or farm’. At the time of Domesday Book, which was compiled in 1086, the manor was held by Ralph de Limesy. It was a big place, with 25 villeins, a priest, 29 bordars, an English knight, a freeman and 12 cottars liable to pay tax (Domesday Book was compiled to help King William I work out how much tax he could extract from the population). A villein was an ordinary villager who farmed land in the community’s field; a bordar was another villager who had less land than a villein, while a cottar was someone who lived in a cottage, usually farming someone else’s land. This total of 68 individuals would give a population for Peritone of up to 425 people. Although this is small by modern standards, it was huge for 1086. The town of Hitchin, one of the largest places in Hertfordshire at that time, had a population of little more than 600 by the same calculations.
St Mary’s Church from the south
The history of the manor
The early county historians concentrated on giving the descent of the manor through various families: the then current lords of the manor were the writers’ target audience. All four pages of Sir Henry Chauncy’s 1700 Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire that deal with Pirton are taken up with tracing the descent of the manors. The original manor eventually spilt into three separate parts, while a fourth part became Ickleford, which was not listed separately in Domesday Book. It remained a family possession throughout most of the Middle Ages. The descendants of the earliest Norman lord, Ralph de Limesy (or Limesi), held two of the three manors for up to twelve generations. William Clinton, who was the last descendant to hold the Manor of Lindesei, sold his part in the 1400s, while Edward Oddingsells, the last to hold the Manor of Doddinsells, sold his manor in 1513. Ralph had granted part of the manor to the Priory of Hertford, which he founded about 1087, which remained a church possession until the Priory was dissolved in 1534. It became known as Rectory Manor.
Something that confuses people is understanding exactly what a manor was. Although we can draw the boundaries of a parish on a map, it is much more difficult with a manor, because they were defined legally rather than geographically. In the Middle Ages, the king and the church owned all land, but other people could hold land from them for the payment of rent and services, which might include military service. Doddingsells Manor was held by the payment of a pair of gilt spurs and the sum of 2/6 (12½p), which the tenant handed over at the annual meeting held at Oughton Head, on the boundary with Hitchin. Gil Burleigh, an archaeologist living in Pirton, has suggested that the importance of Oughton Head began in remote prehistory, when it was a focus for religious activities, which continued through to the arrival of Christianity in the seventh century. The manorial meeting may well have been the medieval ‘descendant’ of these activities.
The castle
There is an earthwork castle, known as Toot Hill, in the centre of the village, south of the parish church. We do not know when it was built, although many historians believe that it dates the mid-twelfth century. This period, known as The Anarchy, was a civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, fought 1139-53. In 1935, some schoolboys held an unofficial dig on the top of the motte and their headmaster kept the pottery they found. Most of it dated from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. There were no sherds at all of Late Medieval Transitional Ware, which indicates that the site had been abandoned before 1400.
A reconstruction of the timber castle, drawn by Ann Walker of the Field Archaeology team in 1988
The Field Archaeology Section of North Hertfordshire Museum carried out a survey of the field east of the motte in 1988. The survey found that Toot Hill and the surrounding earthworks in The Bury were an unusual form of earthwork castle with two baileys. The larger of the two lay to the east and included the parish church, while the smaller bailey to the west may have been the site of the manor house. Beyond the smaller bailey, Great Green was once known as Chipping Green. The Old English word cēping (pronounced ‘cheeping’) meant ‘a market-place’, which seems to show that Pirton once had a market. This was a period when, despite the political anarchy, many lords were setting up new markets as a way of making money.
Pirton as shown on the map of Dury and Andrews, published in 1766; does this show the layout of the medieval village?
Pirton and the Black Death
The Black Death is currently a topical subject because of the global pandemic of CoViD-19 in 2020. The first record of the disease comes from Kyrgyzstan, where gravestones dating from 1338×9 mention that the people buried in these graves died from plague. From central Asia it spread east to China and west to Europe, reaching England in June 1348. It was spread partly by rat fleas carrying one form of the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but recent work suggests that, like CoViD-19, it also spread from person to person in water droplets in their breath or when they sneezed.
We know of the effects of the Black Death in Pirton thanks to the work of Carenza Lewis, who led the excavation of test pits in people’s gardens across the village from 2007 to 2011. The project aimed to discover how many datable finds were to be found in different parts of the village. The main concentration of finds dated before the Norman Conquest was in the area between Walnut Tree Farm, at the southern edge of the present village, and Hambridge Way, at the eastern end. Over the next 200 years, activity spread across the entire village, with new concentrations around Burge End, at the northern end of the village, and around Shillington Road. From the later 1300s on, the number of finds dropped dramatically, with many of the test pits that had contained large numbers of finds of the period 1050 to 1350 now containing none.
There are 68% fewer test pits containing pottery dating from the two centuries after the Black Death than there are from the two centuries before that. At face value, this would suggest that two-thirds of the village’s population died in the outbreaks of 1347×8 and 1361. Careful plotting of the findspots shows that the reduction was greatest in three zones: around Burge End Lane, around Royal Oak Lane and east of Walnut Tree Lane. These three areas seem to have lost their population completely. The village was now reduced to three main centres, around Rectory Farm, around Burge End and around Great Green. Any hope that the settlement might have grown into a market town would have to be abandoned.
Before Domesday and the castle
The oldest find from the village: a handaxe more then 70,000 years old
Most communities can boast the discovery of prehistoric finds and Pirton is no exception. The oldest find from the village is of a handaxe (not an axe, but a multi-purpose tool), dating back to between 130,000 and 70,000 years ago. When a site north-west of the village was investigated in 1990 during the construction of a oil pipeline, Late Neolithic Peterborough-type ware, dating from about 3100 to 2500 BC was found; this is the same sort of date as the burial mound at Knocking Knoll, close by on the county boundary to the southwest. More Peterborough-type ware was found during the trial trenching on The Fox site in 1993. There is a site just north of Oughton Head, known from cropmarks, that looks like a henge, a Late Neolithic religious site.
A Late Bronze Age socketed axehead from Pirton, dated 950-750 BC
Metal detectorists have also found prehistoric objects in the fields around the village, including a Middle Bronze Age shield pattern palstave, dated 1500-1350 BC. It was found in a part of Danes Field, west of the village, known as Cat’s Brains and is now on display in North Hertfordshire Museum. A palstave is a type of axehead with a ridge between the blade and the tang to stop the axehead from working up into the handle and splitting it. Later types were hollow, so that the handle would fit inside: there is one of this type from the village, dating from 950 to 750 BC.
These hints of activity from such remote periods have no connection with the development of Pirton as a village. People have come and gone in our landscape for thousands of years, without establishing settled communities. It was during the Iron Age, in the first millennium BC, that the pattern of our present landscape began to take shape. By the end of the Iron Age, in the first centuries BC and AD, a settlement was growing up at the north end of Danes Field. Part of it was excavated in 1990, showing that it continued to grow through the Roman period (AD 43 to 411) and into the fifth or even sixth century. The village extended north-eastwards along the stream past Burge End. At the same time, another community was developing around the sports club, east of Walnut Tree Road.
Fifth- or sixth-century AD potsherds from Priors Hill
During the fifth century, these settlements shrank, although people continued to live in both. Instead, a new community revealed by excavations from 2015 to 2018 grew up at Priors Hill, south of Rectory Farm. There had been some activity here in the Iron Age, but it did not develop into a village like that in Danes Field. The community at Priors Hill flourished from the fifth to ninth centuries. A group of perhaps three or four rectangular enclosures, parts of which survive as earthworks, developed around this area, each of which seems to have been occupied by well-off families. The survival of these is very rare and the fact that there are at least three is even more unusual.
The 8th to 10th-century Christian cemetery at Coleman’s Close
Between AD 700 and 800, a new location was chosen for a cemetery, which was laid out in a fenced area to the south of a building that was probably a church. This was discovered in the 1990s, during the construction of Coleman’s Close, to the north of The Fox. Finds from the graves include part of a broken pottery bottle imported from France, an expensive and unusual object. Activity here continued almost to the time of the Norman Conquest, when it became part of one of the concentrations mentioned above.
Thatched cottage in Rushden (Herts)
A lot of the historical research into our district has been focused on the four towns – Baldock, Hitchin, Letchworth Garden City and Royston – but they are only part of the story. Most places are villages and hamlets and these were the sorts of settlements most people have lived in over time. There are places that were once regarded as towns – Ashwell, Codicote and Knebworth – because they had markets, but which have become less important, even though they are now larger places than when they had their markets.
The district currently has 82 individual settlements (can you name them all?), spread between 37 parishes. Some parishes have only one settlement – Baldock, Bygrave, Caldecote, Hexton, Hinxworth, Holwell, Ickleford, Kelshall, Langley, Letchworth, Lilley, Newnham, Nuthampstead, Pirton, Preston, Radwell, Reed and Wallington – but the others have more than one. Whitwell is the main settlement in St Paul’s Walden parish, while Codicote and King’s Walkden have seven settlements each (Codicote, Codicote Heights, Driver’s End, Nup End Green, Oakhills, Pottersheath and Tagmore Green are all in Codicote parish, while Breachwood Green, Darleyhall, King’s Walden, Ley Green, Lye Hill, The Heath and Wandon End are the settlements in King’s Walden).
The village pump in Hexton
It gets even more complicated if you go back over 900 years to the time when Domesday Book was compiled, in 1085-6. This names places by vill, a manorial unit held by a specific person or institution. We use the term ‘held’ rather than ‘owned’ because in feudal law, everything belonged either to the king or to the church, so lords of the manor only had properties because their feudal overlords had granted it to them. The could throw out the lord at any time they wanted. Domesday Book lists 103 separate vills in North Hertfordshire; there are six in Reed alone, where today we recognise only one village. This complexity can make life very difficult for the local historian.
In coming weeks, I’m going to be writing about some of these smaller places in the district. I want to show that our history isn’t just about the bigger places, which we might think of as more important. Everywhere has its own story and these stories are every bit as interesting as those of the towns. The history that I am interested in goes beyond the lords of the manor and the parish priests to the lives of ordinary people, the places they lived and how they occupied their time.
If you couldn’t name all the settlements, here’s a list, which includes the name of the parish they are in, when they were first recorded in documents and what we believe the name to mean.