The English Administrative County of Buckinghamshire

Population and area summary of the County of Buckinghamshire

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The County of Buckinghamshire is located in The Midland Counties of England, it covers an administrative area of 1,565Km² and in 2001 was home to a population of 479,026 persons, that represents 0.97% of that of England and 0.01% of the population of the entire United Kingdom.

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Boroughs/Districts of the County of Buckinghamshire

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Historical notes about The English Administrative County of Buckinghamshire

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE in 1950

Prominent on the county arms of Buckinghamshire is a swan, and there is something about this bird - contemplative, enigmatic, withdrawn into itself yet masking hidden fires beneath its serene exterior - which gives a clue to the quality of the county and its slow evolution through the centuries, the peace and calm of its inhabitants, unruffled except at moments of unbearable strain, and then erupting into demonstrations of sturdy individualism surprising in their intensity and whole-heartedness. It is in fighting mood, indeed, that the swan is depicted on the county arms. Buckinghamshire is a small county, in some ways a backwater, yet the men and women who have lived there have affected English history to a degree disproportionate to their numbers. Let us take a look first at the corner of the earth in which they live.

The shire of Buckingham was constituted during the ninth century after the expulsion of the Danes. As might be expected in a part of England as wild as the Chilterns then were, the King's advisers had little detailed knowledge of their task, and the grouping of the hundreds in the county is entirely arbitrary, with little natural unity between different area. Buckinghamshire to-day is most conveniently to be thought of in four separate regions, each of which will require some detailed description before we can understand the psychology of the people. I do not wish to load this short chapter with population figures, rainfall statistics or geological details; but it is necessary to get a grip of the widely varying nature of the country and towns included thus arbitrarily in this county's boundaries, to the geographically for a moment, before we can arrive at a true picture of the people of Buckinghamshire against their home background.

Think first of the Thames valley - of the north bank from just west of Staines to just east of Henley, for this is the first section that concerns us; Colnbrook, Slough, Eton, Taplow and Marlow are the principal towns situated in the flat and fertile country whose closeness to London and excellent east-west communications have caused it to be increasingly urbanized, so that the area as a whole has lost, since the First World War, most of the character it once had. The people of Buckinghamshire nevertheless continue to feel proud of having pioneered in the 1920's at Slough the light industries trading-estate conception which is nowadays part of the normal development of nearly every large town in the country; the technical quality of the light-engineering industries of Slough being the highest in the world. I should not omit the development of the first film studios in this area. The charm of Denham village is still as yet unspoilt by the rise of a British Hollywood in its neighbourhood. I must mention also another distinction of this part of the country. Just north of Slough stands all that is left of the ancient forest of Burnham, the remnants of which were bought by the corporation of the City of London in1879 and opened to the public. A journey to admire the vast boles and branches of the famous Burnham Beeches is a popular week-end pilgrimage for many Londers.

Glory of Beechwoods

Secondly, the Chilterrns - the rolling chain of chalk escarpments crossing Buckinghamshire from south-west to north-east between Stokenchurch and Ivinghoe, "ridges" alternating with waterless "bottoms" and the whole falling away to the south and east down to the banks of the Thames and the Colne. This is mostly a dry, flinty country, ungrateful to the farmer, who nevertheless continues to farm it as best he can; but its particularly glory is its beechwoods, where the traditional craft of furniture-making is still widely carried on in many small county factories often by itinerant teams of "bodgers" (as chair-makers are called) working under the trees themselves. High Wycombe - after Slough the second largest town in the county - is the centre of this district, which includes also Stokenchurch, Princes Risborough, Wendover, Beaconsfield, Chesham and Amersham. The boundaries of the three Chiltern hundreds (Stoke, Burnham and Desborough) have remained unaltered since Domesday, and the old office of Stewards of the Chiltern Hundreds - a post of some responsibility before the Chilterns were deforested and cleared of brigands - still exists as a token unpaid office which can be undertaken by Members of Parliament wishing to retire. In High Wycombe are the works in which British postage stamps aer printed; there are also a number of paper-mills, in one of which it is said that blotting-paper was first accidentally discovered, by the negligence of an employee who had omitted the size coating from a sheet of ordinary cartridge paper.

Survivor of the Past

Barely three miles along the Oxford Road from High Wycombe lies West Wycombe, a village that, in its way, is even more celebrated than its larger neighbour. It is rightly acclaimed as one of the most picturesque survivals of an older and more gracious England, and it is a relief to all who know it, that the village is now taken over by the National Trust.

Thirdly, there is the Vale of Aylesbury, from the point of view of agriculture the richest part of the county; it forms part of the gently undulating plain of North Buckinghamshire, and is one of the finest dairy and stock-rearing areas in the whole of England. This well-watered, clayey plain was formerly farmed by crop rotation to a far greater extent than now, as can be seen from the long ridges running across the fields resulting from a special ploughing technique designed to maintain drainage. The deserted manor of Creslow claims Creslow Great Field (three hundred acres) as the largest single pasture in Britain; here cattle have been fattened for the royal table since the times of Queen Elizabeth. Aylesbury - the county town - Buckingham and Winslow are the most notable places in the plain; all are market towns maintaining themselves, as they always have, by supplying the needs of the surrounding countryside, though Aylesbury ducklings are famous, though far fewer than formerly.

In the far north of the county, and belonging scenically more naturally to Bedfordshire next door, is the valley of the Ouse, which meanders casually across the county from Buckingham through Stony Stratford, Wolverton and Newport Pagnell to Olney - a quiet, un-dramatic countryside, best described in the poems of William Cowper, who lived there for thirty years. At the time of Domesday, when a large part of the Chilterns was still impenetrable forest, this Ouse valley was the most populous part of the county. It is a typical piece of middle England, famous in past centuries for it pillow lace, a cottage industry encouraged by Flemish immigrants at the end of the eighteenth century. To-day the area supports the L.M.S. railway carriage works, which make Wolverton the fourth largest urban district in the county.

Here, then, within one county boundary, are four completely different regions. I cannot refrain from pointing out two further anomalies about the county which testify to the perverse, un-coordinated fashion in which it has evolved - being in this respect a microcosm of England herself. Though the whole county lies within sixty miles of London, its population remains very low, at about two hundred and seventy-five thousand - a good deal smaller than that of the city of Hull. Secondly, many of the market towns on which the country life of Buckinghamshire depends are outside the county itself. Woburn, Leighton Buzzard, Dunstable, Tring, Berkhamstead, Rickmansworth, Uxbridge, Staines, Windsor, Maidenhead, Henley, Watlington, Thame, Bicester, Brackley and Towcester are all within five miles of the county boundary, but all outside the county.

With such a diversity of landscape, climate and occupation, it will be difficult to find a typical Buckinghamshire man in the sense that you could find a typically Norfolk or Devon man. It is no longer true, as it would have been at the beginning of this century, to describe Buckinghamshire as primarily an agricultural county, living of the proceeds of her own land; since to-day the larger part of the county's income is earned, and the larger part of the population employed, in Slough, Aylesbury, High Wycombe or Wolverton, in factories and workshops ministering to a mechanical age. There are also many recent immigrants to the county who use it merely as a dormitory-cum-weekend-residence, and work in London or elsewhere. Electrification of the railway between Aylesbury and London has brought more and more "commuters" to the valleys of the Chess and the Misbourne - families with homes in Buckinghamshire, but few roots there; in the county, but not of it. Fresher still in our minds is the number of shadow factories and evacuated industries which started in the county during the Second World War. Many of these will probably choose to stay there instead of moving back to their former sites.

In order to get some idea of the genealogy of the local Buckinghamshire man as he was at the beginning of this century, before the newcomers began to arrive, it is helpful to look for the moment at the pre-history of the county. The earliest remains so far found within the county are Palaeolithic, and there is evidence that nearly all the races which successively invaded England from the continent - Celts, Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans - swept across Buckinghamshire and left traces of their presence. Of those mentioned, Danes and Norman's left fewdt traces, the latter merely superimposing a new landed aristocracy on top of the old Saxon lords, with little effect on the life of the ordinary man in the county. The fair-haired Saxon type, then, is possibly the predominating type, if any type can be said to predominate at all; but we must add that this holds good for north Buckinghamshire only - in many places, especially in the Chilterns, you can distinguish dark Celtic survivals as well. In fact, it is more realistic to write down the men of the county - as, by and large, of England herself - as of mixed and indeterminable parentage - mongrels, if you like - than to look for a typical Buckinghamshire man.

But though I cannot find a distinctive type, I can point out how the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire have throughout their written history collectively given repeated proof of a sturdy independence and a spirit of innovation and adventure un-expected in such placid surroundings, which makes Buckinghamshire more important in English history than some of its neighbouring counties. The characteristic is sufficiently marked to be worth noting, even before we look at some of the famous men who as individuals have brought renown to the county. The lines in G.K. Chesterton's poem The Secret People

Speak well enough for the men of Buckinghamshire and their determination not to be put upon, particularly in religious maters. I like to believe that Magna Carta, the inalienable charter of all our civil liberties, was signed (June 15, 1215) by King John within the county boundaries, as it may well have been if, as many authorities hold, the document was executed on Charter Island, and not in the meadow of Runnymede, which, of course, is on the Surrey side of the river. Later, the Lollard movement, the earliest stirring of British religious nonconformity, instituted by John Wyclif in the fourteenth century, but even more influential after his death, was widely supported by the Buckinghamshire land-owners and their followers, many of whom were burnt at the stake for the cause. Wyclif himself had held the living of Ludgershall in the county, though he worked mainly from Oxford; but it must have been through the villages Buckinghamshire that his message of asceticism and strict adherence to the Christianity of the Bible first spread south-east towards London on the lips of his travelling friars.

Civil War Battle

In the struggles between the King and the people of England which led up to the Civil War, Buckinghamshire men were again to the fore on the Roundhead side, and it was a Buckinghamshire squire, John Hampden, of whom I shall say more later, who helped to ring matters to a head. In 1642 one of the first battles of the Civil War was a few miles north of Aylesbury; here the Roundhead headquarters were first set up; Charles I's headquarters were later in Buckingham, and throughout the war the county was much fought over.

In the seventeenth century George Fox, the Leicestershire shoemaker's apprentice, found in the county some of the earliest and most devoted members of his Society of Friends (nicknamed Quakers from Fox's stern injunction to an erring magistrate to "quake before the Lord"). Some of the oldest Quaker meeting-houses are in this county, including the world-famous house at Jordans, where the grave of William Peen, founder and "first proprietor" of the state of Pennsylvania, is much visited by Americans. The county can shoe many fine chapels, specimens of local builders' work - a genuine folk art which we may later come to admire as we admire the village churches of to-day. Of the later, too, the county has many fine examples. The Eccentric Period church of the Dashwood family at West Wycombe is celebrated.

I mentioned John Hampden, and should like him to be thought of as the typical Buckinghamshire man, bred in the county on the proverbially excellent "Buckinghamshire bread and beef". He became squire of Great Hampden near Wendover in 1620 soon after his marriage. It was in respect of a property at Stoke Manderville, just south of Aylesbury, that in 1635 he endeared himself to countless Englishmen of his own and later generations by refusing to pay what he considered an unjustifiable imposition - twenty shillings of "ship money," an out-of-date defence levy which Charles I wished to revive and enforce. He continued to play a leading part in all the disputes, legal and parliamentary, which followed, and after the start of the Civil War commanded a Buckinghamshire battalion of the Parliamentary army. Wounded at the battle of Chalgrove Field in 1643, he died at Thame and was brought home for burial to Hampden, where his family continued to live for many years.

Next after Hampden must be mentioned the two poets of the county: William Cowper (1731 - 1800), whose association with Olney has already been mentioned, and Thomas Gray (1716 - 1761), who was educated at Eton, returned frequently in after life to his mother's house at Stoke Poges, and in the churchyard there wrote his famous Elegy, celebrating for all time the simplicity and the pathos of ordinary life in an English village. Other poets - Milton (who wrote Lycidas and L'Allegro among the Thames-side meadows near Colnbrook), Waller and Shelly - have had brief associations with the county, but Cowper and Gray must be accounted its principal men of letters, together with the eccentric Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote his best known satires, Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, at Marlow between 1815 and 1820, the latter being probably inspired by the gloomy bat-ridden fastness of nearby Medmenham Abbey.

Distinguished Immigrants

Apart from William Penn, whose claim to a Buckingham ancestry is doubtful, the county can claim few other natives of more than local distinction, though the roll of distinguished immigrants to the county who owned property there and refreshed themselves in its sleepy countryside for their work in London is a long one. It includes Burke (1729 - 1797), who lived the last twenty years of his life at Gregories, near Beaconsfield; Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield (1804 - 1881), whose father purchased the manor house at Bradenham which Disraeli describes in his novel Endymion, and who later moved to the neighbouring village of Hughenden, where he is buried; the historian Grote (1794 - 1871), who wrote most of his History of Greece near Farnham Royal; the two Herschels, Sir William (1738 - 1822) and his son Sir John (1792 - 1871), pioneers of astronomy - it was near Slough that the elder Herschel erected his revolutionary forty-foot reflecting telescope for the study of the stars, parts of which are still preserved to-day; W H Smith, the newsagent, crated first Viscount Hambleden; Lord Dawson of Penn, royal physician; and , since 1918, the successive Prime Ministers of the day, each of whom is enabled by the generosity of the late Lord Lee of Fareham to use as his private country house the mansion of Chequers, tucked away near Monks Risborough in one of the loveliest folds of the Chilterns. Buckinghamshire can claim her influence, too, during the vital formative years of adolescence, on all the pupils of her famous public schools - Eton and Stowe for boys, and Wycombe Abbey for girls - and on the hundreds of Royal Air Force men who begin their service careers at Halton, near Wendover.

I cannot leave this catalogue of Buckinghamshire characters without a tribute to one whom I should call the most enterprising of them all - Master John Shorne, saintly thirteenth century rector of North Marston near Winslow, who is said by his exceptional piety to have successfully imprisoned the Devil in a boot, out of which he would pop his head when required by the rector to do so. How long the Devil stayed there we are not told, but the incident gave rise to our modern toy the Jack-in-the-Box, and several inns in the neighbourhood are still called "The Boot."

Such is our county, its physical appearance, its leading employments, its past history and its outstanding individuals - matters for the man born and bred in the county to contemplate with pride and affection. The old order changeth, the fundamental unity of the county - for geographical reasons, as we saw, never very marked - has already been impaired, and will be still further impaired, by an ever-growing London just over the border. But those newcomers or part-time residents who settle in the county and abandon themselves to its charm will find just the same things to be proud of, and one day to love: good food and drink, an air of sober prosperity in towns, in the country a hundred secret beauty spots of their own discovery in addition to those already famous, fat cattle and land in good heart throughout the Vale of Aylesbury, the glory of winter sunsets seen from a ridge of the Chilterns, beechwoods golden in autumn and the tenderest of greens in the spring, and after dark the nightingale.