The Little Book of Hertfordshire E-Book

Ruth Herman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Hertfordshire is full of stories. The county's proximity to London attracts the great, the good and those less so: Hertfordshire was once home to saints such as St Alban, St Thomas More and the only English Pope, Nicholas Breakspear. Such virtuous figures pose a sharp contrast to those involved in the Hertford elections of time gone by, which were once declared the most corrupt in the country! It is no secret that Elizabeth I became queen at Hatfield House in south Hertfordshire – but did you know that her father, Henry VIII, fled a plague-ridden London to a nearby village while waiting for his first divorce to come through? And that just around the corner, 400 years later, engineers were secretly developing the bombers that helped win the Second World War? There are so many tales to be told about this amazing county that it is impossible to squeeze them all between these covers but open The Little Book of Hertfordshire at any time or any place and you can expect to be amused, entertained and intrigued.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Ruth Herman, 2024

The right of Ruth Herman to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 546 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruth was born some time ago in London. Her first job was as Saturday staff in a dry cleaner, where she was requested not to return after her first day owing to a small mix up in the return of a customer’s trousers! She was also asked to leave her position as a tea lady when she lost a ring in the urn. A junior place in a public relations firm lasted a whole week before they discovered she did not know how to use a stapler.

But, she did improve, and later became the public relations manager for a large international brewery. She was responsible for publicity for all 750 London and South East pubs and restaurants. After this, at the insistence of her daughter, she undertook a humanities degree. She soon discovered she was really quite good at this, and at the end of the bachelor’s degree was awarded a full scholarship to pursue a PhD.

Her academic output was highly praised and considered to be groundbreaking, taking a completely new view of a significant but obscure female professional political journalist. Her books and articles were highly specialist, but her real interest lay in raising an awareness of history in people whose only knowledge on the subject was that Henry VIII had several wives and he wasn’t very nice to them. Having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s over ten years ago she has concentrated on writing the kind of books that make serious history not only accessible, but entertaining. She has authored multiple works, including Grub Street: The Origins of the British Press (Amberley, 2020) alongside articles for local history societies and the Hertfordshire archives.

As a researcher she believes in a thorough investigation of sources, synthesising all available information and producing thought-out conclusions. She is ever mindful of what she does not know and believes in listening to other researchers.

INTRODUCTION

Thank you for picking up, borrowing (or hopefully buying) this little book. While it is important to set the scene, I think it is a reasonable assumption that you already know where Hertfordshire is. But just in case you are unsure, or worse, mistake it for Herefordshire, here are some facts that will serve as reminders.

Hertfordshire is a home county. That means that it snuggles in with London. It also sits next to Bedfordshire and is bordered by Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east and Bedfordshire to the west. It always gets lumped in with the East of England region, which I find odd. According to the last census (2021), on the day of reckoning there were 1.2 million people in Hertfordshire. One thousand years earlier in 1086, the population had been 4,245 (not counting the slaves). However, even though I’m not sure about the slaves, I do know (because the very erudite Anglo-Saxon History website tells me) that there were only nine horses and 120 cattle in the county. This doesn’t seem like very many horses to me, but if you didn’t need to go very far you didn’t need a horse. They also had to make room for the 585 pigs and 579 sheep that are also recorded as living in this not very crowded county.

The county’s history is full of incidents and accidents all jostling for attention. Reluctantly, I have had to leave things out, and I cannot include everything that has happened. I also admit that I have mostly gone for the sensational rather than the worthy. And as I always say about anything I write, I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

IN THE BEGINNING

Cast your mind back 6,000 years. Imagine yourself sitting in a Sumerian dwelling under the warm sun in the land between the two great rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Next to you is an Ancient Sumerian. You are enjoying the benefits of the world’s first civilisation. Call it what you will, human beings are working out that living in an ordered society is good. Within the next thousand years, these clever Sumerians will have invented the first forms of writing, allowing them to send letters and record trade deals. Surely, civilisation has arrived when you can send someone an invoice.

Now travel west about 6,000km and have a peek at Hertfordshire Man and Woman. What were they up to, apart from wondering when the rain would stop? This was when the county was still largely the land of the hunter-gatherers. This was also the time when it was slowly dawning on the population that growing crops of your own in the same place every year was more efficient than trying to find something to eat every day. It’s fashionable to go to forage for delicacies if you have a Waitrose around the corner but a successful harvest of the hedge and woodland is not guaranteed. And if wild plants are the only source of food, failure to gather any means you get very hungry. As for the hunting, with an animal population that included wolves, it is easy to see the advantage of domesticating cattle. It is always preferable to avoid something that categorically did not want to be eaten and would happily turn round and eat you. Having said that, there is evidence that there were still people who clearly enjoyed or felt the need for chasing and bringing back dinner.

Sumerian writing

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows England that the weather played a part in early humanity finding a home in this diverse land. As the ice age moved north, with it came the original inhabitants, who left very little behind except for a large quantity of pointed things at the bottom of a lake in Hitchin. It’s only fair to say that if we told these people that they were moving into Hertfordshire they would be puzzled; this was not simply because Google Maps had not been invented but because Hertfordshire did not exist, at least not in name. That didn’t happen until the second half of the eleventh century. The term ‘shire’ arrived in Hertfordshire in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1011, just in time to be assessed in the Domesday Book, a medieval forerunner of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

So since very little appears to have been recorded in the county’s early stages, let’s move on quickly. Despite being unnamed, this part of the country proved attractive to tribes of marauding Gauls, followed closely of course by the Romans. For about 350 years the Romans did their best to bring their sophisticated lifestyle to the Britons. However, some of the natives did not take kindly to the regime. One queen, the famous and formidable Boudica, got more than cross when her husband, the king of the local tribe, the Iceni, died and left his realm to be jointly ruled by his wife and the Romans. The Romans weren’t about to let some jumped-up native queen get the better of them and they ignored the will. St Albans (or Verulam) found itself, for the first but not the last time, in the path of the angry Britons as they made their extremely violent way from their homeland in East Anglia to London.

Boudica (top right) in ‘Portraits and Dresses of the Most Remarkable Personages & Sovereigns in England, Prior to the Norman Conquest’ by Francis West.

Reliable facts are difficult to find but it seems that Boudica and her equally fierce soldiers sacked the city and did not leave much behind. Thereafter, St Albans ‘enjoyed’ the attention of rebels and factions from the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil Wars. But these will come later, and we are now leaving St Albans in about AD 60.

THE ORIGINS OF THE NAME

Names are often less than obvious if you don’t know how they evolved. A good question to ask, therefore, is how did the county of Hertfordshire acquire this particular label? The literal meaning is the place where stags cross the river, which is why the county has the deer on its coat of arms. The county started life as the area of land around the fortress built at Hertford. The name Hertfordshire is first seen in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1011 and the county has had people living here since the Bronze Age.

There is a good variety of villages and towns and I strongly suggest you find a decent map of the region, which will help you get an idea of distances. In particular, the contrast between how far villagers had to walk and the proximity of the great houses to each other. Think of Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennet walking across the fields to see her sister laid up in Pride and Prejudice, which was set in Hertfordshire. There are also some strange and hopefully amusing place names (probably less funny if you happen to live in one of these places).

But before we go to these unusual and creative names we will visit a town that simply cannot make up its mind what it wants to be called, or at least how to spell it. Even the local museum appears to be baffled by the choices:

At one point, the road signs pointing to it had different spelling. Named after the dedication of the parish church to Saint Hippolytus (one of only two in England), we probably ought to call the village St Hippolytus’s. No one has tried that since the seventeenth century and the English Place-Name Society preferred St Ippollitts when it published its survey of Hertfordshire placenames in the 1930s.

At least it hasn’t physically moved its position and if you consult a variety of maps you will find St Ippolyts is consistently located between the Stevenage Road and the Codicote Road. For those people who prefer road numbers, that is between the A602 and the B656, 2km (1.2 miles) south-east of Hitchin.

The church after which the village is named has always been called St Ippolyts. This consistency does not seem to have been applied to the cluster of dwellings that make up the accompanying village. So we have the following names to choose from: Apolites, Pallets, Nipples or St Ibbs. Or you could follow the 1881 census with twenty-eight place names, all of: Iplits, Ipolits, Ipollitts, Ipollyts, Ipolytes, Ipolyts, Ippatyts, Ipplits, Ipployts, Ipplyts, Ippolett, Ippoletts, Ippolits, Ippolitss, Ippolits, Ippolitss, Ippolitts, Ippollit, Ippollits, Ippollitts, Ippollyts, Ippollytts, Ippololits, Ippolts, Ippolytis, Ippolyts, Ippolytts, Ippoplitts.

The parish council were probably exhausted from wrestling with this split personal identity crisis and they gave it its official title and spelling as St Ippolyts on 2 October 1996. But they showed their remaining confusion with the two official road signs to the village. The name is spelt differently at either end of the village.

There is one important thing to remember about Hertfordshire that shaped its history and made it a very important county. There were very few major towns in the country before the Industrial Revolution but Hertfordshire had more than its fair share of them. St Albans is about 20 miles from London, Hitchin is about 31 miles away from the capital and Hertford is 20 miles. These distances, while not practicable for a daily commute until quite recently, were very convenient for those who wanted a country estate within dashing distance of a Parliamentary or commercial emergency. A horse and rider or even a horse and carriage would get you to the capital in less than a day. Toll roads improved the ride enormously, removing potholes and mud. They also improved the career prospects for robbers, but until the railways arrived that was the best you could do.

St Ippolitts, where clearly someone didn’t drive carefully.

There are other names that are interesting. Why are there two villages with nearly the same name, near to each other but called Kings Langley and Abbots Langley? The answer is that one village was bought by the wife of Edward III, who took a fancy to it and bought it to make herself a hunting lodge. The original name of Chilterne Langley became Langley Regina, and then in those unreconstructed misogynistic days, it appears to have become Kings Langley. Abbots Langley, on the other hand, had been a gift by a rich Anglo-Saxon to the abbey at St Albans.

There are some places that do not have an identity crisis but might want to think about presenting friendlier or more conventional names. There’s nothing nasty about Nasty, but it might be a trifle embarrassing if every time you were asked for your address you had to say Uranus Road in Hemel Hempstead. There’s Snatchup in Redbourn, which could be twinned with Boggy Bottom in Abbots Langley, although Bummers Hill in Buntingford might be a better match. And I really don’t want to comment on Cock Lane, Broxbourne. No doubt Ugley in Bishop’s Stortford is quite pretty. There are certainly a lot of Bottoms in Hertfordshire. Take your pick from Beech Bottom Dyke (St Albans), Bottom Lane (Sarratt) and make sure you haven’t lost anything when you leave Robbery Bottom Lane, Welwyn. There are some that are self-explanatory and do not leave much to your imagination, such as Cum Cum Hill (Essendon) and Alldicks Road (Hemel Hempstead). I will leave you in Trapstyle Road, Ware. I hope that you escape and will be able find your own way home.

INVASION ALERT – MAKE WAY FOR THE SAXONS

I think it is now time to look at the wave of uninvited visitors who decided that England (and what eventually became known as Hertfordshire) would make an excellent new home. Unfortunately for us, there is very little to say about Hertfordshire after the Romans left and the Venerable Bede literally put the area on the map by giving it a name. There were people living in the unnamed territory but there is a certain vagueness about who they might be. They may have been Celts hanging on until someone told them who they were.

The only town that seems to have any presence was Hitchin. In the absence of any real evidence, all I can offer is what the village might have looked like if they were there. But it’s interesting to see that punishment seems to have been a favourite pastime among these early folk. The stocks and the whipping post stood in pride of place to shame the culprit and deter others (and provide entertainment). Another major concern was the fire hazard presented by houses largely made of straw. The answer to this threat hangs on the wall of the police station (once the church house) at Welwyn in the shape of a fire hook, an essential tool for removing roof thatching away from danger when you have a half-timbered house going up in flames and no smoke alarms.

THE NORMANS ARE COMING!

It wasn’t long before the next wave of invaders interrupted the generally home-loving Saxon space. They came from France and it was 1066. Or rather from Normandy, which was where the famous (or infamous) Duke of Normandy came from to become the possibly the first King of England of whom most people have heard. In common with the rest of his new possessions, he wanted to know how much Hertfordshire was worth. The Domesday Book was William the Conqueror’s effort to establish how much he might expect in taxes from his brand new acquisition.

He sent his men … into every county, and had them find out ‘How many hundreds of hides … or what land or, livestock king himself had in the land … what dues he ought to have each year’ … He had all this investigated so very thoroughly that ... not one ox nor one cow nor one pig was left unrecorded.

The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, entry AD 1085.

William was nothing if not thorough.

But the most efficient king is only as good as his organisation. And it must be admitted that William’s survey, all achieved without the aid of spreadsheets, calculators or other electronic devices, was extraordinarily efficient. We only have Hertfordshire to worry about in this little book but the Normans took the gathering of information about who owned or leased land very seriously. The calculation of taxes due to the king was of prime importance, if only because he needed it to keep the country in order. There is something elegant about the levying of taxes to keep the taxpayers in their place.

The Bayeux Tapestry and a sketch from Cassell’s Illustrated History of Britain, Vol. 1 (1873), both showing William the Conqueror.

It was also an excellent way to see who might be getting above themselves. The county was split into fiefs (land held directly from the Crown) and if this isn’t confusing enough, the workhorses of the whole system were settlements confusingly named hundreds. These hundreds were the layer below county level and it was here where the administrative work was done. Think of them as a county hall that had been taken apart and its constituent parts had been spread around the area. I suppose they equate to town or district councils. Law was dispensed and tax collected at this level, and decisions about military service and official business were carried out here. Although Domesday sounds like the end of the world, it meant ‘judgement’. There were nine hundreds in Hertfordshire and while this organisation was efficient, it no doubt made the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants more and more aware of what was later called the ‘Norman Yoke’. Not only were they aware of it, but it was also getting heavier.

Hertford paid taxes directly to the king. It is lucky for William’s tax gathering that he arrived when he did and not several hundred years earlier. Apparently, in about the sixth century there weren’t as many people in Hertfordshire as there had been. A serious outbreak of plague combined with the departure of the Romans decimated the area. Thankfully for William, when he arrived, while there was no more land there were many more taxpayers. As he had acquired the land by conquest, there were no legal hitches because he had killed off the only other link in the property chain (see the tale unfold on the Bayeux Tapestry). A close examination of the Domesday Book reveals that ownership of land took a dramatic turn after the conquest. Before 1066, King William had no places that looked to him as their lord. After the Conquest, he had astonishingly suddenly acquired 2,360 places. And 180 of those places were in Hertfordshire. So we slot those places (villages) into their hundreds.

If we drill down a bit deeper, the land is calculated in hides and, surprise, surprise, there were 100 hides in a hundred. The calculations now become increasingly vague because a hide was the amount of land that would support one peasant family. Clearly, the better the land the less acreage you would need to graze your animal(s) and grow crops. However, this appears to be too vague even for our quirky medieval predecessors. Some standardisation was inevitable and by the time William came along to count them, a hide theoretically equalled 120 acres. But it was a very lucky peasant who could claim to have such a large patch, since by the time of the conquest a peasant might only have a quarter of this on which to feed a family. At least one of the villages, Chells, had disappeared as a village and is described in the Domesday Book as ‘deserted’. Given this slow collapse, it is no wonder the peasants eventually revolted, although it took them 300 years to get around to it.

PEOPLE, KINGS AND QUEENS

If we are going to look at the relationship of individuals to the county we might as well start at the top of the ladder. There seem to be quite a few members of various royal families who spent some considerable time in the county. Sometimes it was willingly and sometimes because they were not given a choice. The reason for Hertfordshire’s convenience is down to a very happy coincidence (and not through any fortuitous planning) that a lot of Hertfordshire is close enough to London for a rapid escape but not so far away that you couldn’t quickly dash back to sort out any political hiccups in Westminster or business problems in the City. And when the various plagues made their frequent appearances, Hertfordshire was one of the nearest rural areas that was far enough away that you might escape catching it.

Hertford Castle was popular with English monarchs, although some of them may have been under thinly disguised house arrest during their formative years (as was Elizabeth I). But they were grateful when it provided a convenient alternative to disease-ridden London. The castle was well used without being a particularly spectacular building. Its origins start with the earthworks with which the Saxons fortified Hertford to resist the Danes’ demand for Danegeld.

When the irresistible William I came along, he built the castle and then was so pleased with it he made it a royal residence. It was useful as well. From time to time, it provided a comfortable prison, particularly as somewhere to keep foreign kings when you brought one home as hostage. And once it was taken (I suppose you could say hostage) by Louis, the French Dauphin (more of that later). By this time the castle, originally purposed to provide military protection, had evolved into a comfortable royal residence as somewhere to escape from the dirt of the capital and enjoy the countryside. Edward III was particularly generous and gave the castle to his mother, who then gave it to her fourth son, John of Gaunt. Elizabeth I found the place useful, particularly during plague outbreaks, and even held Parliament there (hence the Parliament Square in the centre of Hertford). However, she may have had mixed feelings about the place.

It is no secret that Elizabeth was at Hatfield House when she heard of her succession to the throne. She had moved up the ladder to the top spot when her sister, Mary, died. We also know that Elizabeth spent a lot of her younger life there, not necessarily willingly as she was mostly under house arrest. Her father, Henry, had given her the palace when she was only 3 months old and a bit in the way, particularly as she wasn’t a boy. The downside of this early occupancy was that she was accompanied by the Lady Mary, later Mary I, who had just been declared illegitimate. There must have been more than a little tension between the two as they grew up, both victims of Henry VIII’s multiple marriage policy of discarding and decapitating surplus wives. Mary was the daughter of Katherine of Aragon (divorced) and Elizabeth was the child of Anne Boleyn (beheaded).

While we are in this part of the world, there are a few more facts about Hatfield House that may come as a surprise. It is a magnificent piece of architecture, originally built by Henry VII’s right-hand man, John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, whose main talent was squeezing money out of people.

Hertford Castle

Hatfield Old Palace

Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII, had a much better scheme for raising money. You did what amounted to nationalising the Church, then threw the monks out of the monasteries, leaving these desirable properties available for sale to new owners. Hatfield Palace came under that category, having been another of Cardinal Wolsey’s properties. Henry confiscated it when it became available on Wolsey’s convenient death (surprisingly, by natural causes) and it provided a useful place to store surplus daughters.

When James I inherited the palace along with England, he decided he wasn’t particularly keen on it, so he swapped it for Theobalds (also in Hertfordshire, and we will get to that in a minute), which was owned by Robert Cecil. Since Cecil immediately got to work rebuilding the Old Palace into what we see today, perhaps he was also not a fan and if it had been anyone else he might have declined the swap. But in those days, you didn’t argue with kings (particularly if you would prefer your head to remain attached to your body). The Old Palace is still there, attached as firmly as Cecil’s head to the ‘New Build’, and is available for weddings and fantasising on the benefits of being a medieval king. There is also a certain amount of speculation that Cecil may have been a very early exponent of repurposing. Stones were taken from Tyttenhanger Manor in a nearby village and given to Cecil just at the time he was doing some rebuilding at Theobalds. Several carts full of stones were sent from the owner of the manor to Cecil, so he must have used them for something. However, for all we know he might have been building a giant rockery.

We will now move across the county to Cheshunt to have a look at this Theobalds that seemed to appeal more than the Hatfield property. What did James’s side of the bargain bring him? Unfortunately, this is difficult to say, because the English Civil Wars rather did for the original building and the house standing there now only dates to 1763. James used the house as a hunting lodge, but it also witnessed a truly epic drinking bout. James was not called the ‘wisest fool in Christendom’ for nothing. Before he took possession of the house, he had Cecil invite him and his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark, to spend some quality time together (along with the inevitable royal retinue). The visit lasted five days and cost £1,180 (nearly £160,000 in today’s money) mostly in alcohol.

These are two royal palaces. Henry was not averse to staying in more modest residences and we are now just going to pop back to Hatfield to the village of Colney Heath and the less grand but charming Tyttenhanger House. The Abbots of St Albans lived in this manor house, which boasted fishponds, grazing for cattle and walks for quiet contemplation. For excitement they hunted deer. It was idyllic. In fact, it was so lovely that Henry VIII also fell in love with it. Unfortunately, when he visited it, he had already fallen out of love with his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and was about to start his wife exchange scheme. The year was 1528 and the Abbot of St Albans, resident of Tyttenhanger, was Cardinal Wolsey.