The Little Book of Berkshire

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If you are looking for a comprehensive and authoritative history of Berkshire, this is not it. There is a wealth of good books about every aspect of life in the county, and a visit to your local library or bookseller (or, better still, to the comprehensive local history section of Reading Library, where I researched much of this book) will give you the answer to even the most arcane questions about Berkshire. Those of you who know which buttons to press might even risk the Internet!

My brief was more specific. I was asked to produce a book that would be of interest to anyone with links to Berkshire; something that they could dip into, as the mood took them, and where the mainstream history was combined with spicier (or more speculative) fare, such as the area’s most famous ghosts and notorious murderers. As a recipient of one of my previous books in this series put it, ‘the ideal book to keep in your loo’ – but I drew the line at putting ‘now wash your hands’ at the top of each page. Like the remit for the BBC (albeit in a slightly more modest way), I set out to inform, educate and entertain, though not necessarily in that order of priority.

I owe a great debt to the many diligent researchers who have studied Berkshire before me. Having done my full share of trawling through ancient archives for many of my previous books, I can readily appreciate their dedication. Unfortunately, in a book like this, I do not have the space to acknowledge them all, or it would no longer be a little book. But if my efforts encourage you to explore some aspect of our past further through them, I hope my debt will be in part repaid.

Enjoy this little book.

Stuart Hylton, 2014

1

WHAT IS BERKSHIRE?

This is not as daft a question as it may appear, for what passes for Berkshire in 2014 is very different to what has been called ‘Berkshire’ for much of our history. Let’s try and make our way through that history.

The area this book will talk about is based mainly on the Berkshire that was formed by the county boundary of 1831 (but which existed for several centuries before that) and which carried on with only minor changes until the wholesale review of 1974.

Berkshire does not appear to have existed as a recognisable separate unit in Roman times. It was a rural area with no major towns of its own. The main settlements nearby were Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) in what is now Hampshire, and Dorchester (in modern Oxfordshire). That is not to say that the area was uninhabited. There were traces of small-scale Roman settlement throughout the length of Berkshire and, before that, traces of Celtic civilisation. It is thought that the whole of pre-Roman Berkshire fell within the territory of a tribe called the Atrebates, whose northern capital was at the same Calleva that the Romans later developed. There is also evidence to suggest that when Verica, the last leader of the Atrebates, was driven from his lands (including Berkshire) he may have gone to Rome and appealed to them for help. This, it is suggested, may have encouraged the Roman invasion in AD 43.

Berkshire as a separate entity probably dates from the 840s, when Sunningum (East Berkshire) was united with Ashdown (taking in the Berkshire Downs and, probably, the Kennet Valley). It came into being after a spot of unpleasantness (lasting about 200 years) between the rival kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia.

The River Thames forms much of the northern boundary of the county (as it had previously divided Wessex and Mercia), with the rivers Cole, Enborne, Blackwater and Kennet providing other parts of the new county’s dividing line. Various more or less minor changes took place over the next millennium, ranging from tidying up parish boundaries to coincide with those of the county, to the incorporation of Caversham into Reading (and Berkshire) in 1911. Some of the changes related to truly eccentric divisions from years past, such as parts of Wokingham, Hurst, Shinfield and Swallowfield being classified as detached portions of Wiltshire, until that anomaly was rectified in 1844.

It was in 1974 that Berkshire lost some 260 square miles (36 per cent) of its area and almost 20 per cent of its population, when it gave up all of the area north of the Ridgeway to Oxfordshire, including attractive historic towns such as Wallingford and Abingdon, and received in return Slough, Eton and some other minor parts of Buckinghamshire. I leave you to judge how fair a swap this was, for fear of offending readers in Slough. Since the big shake-up of 1974 there have been further, smaller adjustments. Colnbrook and Poyle joined Berkshire in 1995, as did parts of Mapledurham, and Eye & Dunsden in 1997.

So, to answer my original question, I intend to play fast and loose with the county boundaries – working mainly with the traditional nineteenth-century Berkshire, but incorporating material about the post-1974 county where it seems relevant (or more to the point, interesting), and straying beyond even those boundaries when it seems to me that something worth reporting impinges upon life in modern Berkshire.

2

JUST PASSING THROUGH: TRANSPORT IN

BERKSHIRE’S HISTORY

ROADS, ANCIENT AND MODERN

Part of England’s, and possibly Europe’s, oldest road runs through Berkshire. For 5,000 years, or more according to some authorities, the Icknield Way has provided traders with a drier and less forested (and hence safer) route between the Dorset coast and the Wash, in Norfolk. Iron Age forts were built along its length to protect this trade. In later years, its main function was as a drovers’ road, taking large numbers of sheep to market in places like East Ilsley, near Newbury. (East Ilsley was in 1844 the largest sheep market in England, outside Smithfield.) The part of the Icknield Way running across the Berkshire Downs divided into a higher route along the ridge of the Downs, predictably called the Ridgeway, which crossed the Thames at Goring/Streatley, and a parallel lower route, the Icknield Way itself. The Ridgeway was designated a National Trail in 1973.

As we saw, Roman Berkshire was not a recognisable administrative area, and it was not even a significant channel of communication – there are roads out of neighbouring Silchester, heading north in the direction of Dorchester, east to London (which barely scratches the edge of modern Berkshire) and west to Cirencester, but no settlements of any size within the county itself.

Some of the earliest references to transport in Berkshire relate to unwelcome visitors. In AD 869, two Danish Viking armies made for the area, one sailing up the Thames and another marching overland down the Ridgeway. They met at Reading, where the confluence of the Thames and Kennet rivers provided routes to the north, east and west, and where they were able to occupy a former West Saxon fortress at the junction of the two rivers. By AD 871 they were firmly established in their base and, after a number of skirmishes, their army was defeated by that of the West Saxons at the Battle of Ashdown (dealt with in more detail in chapter 8).

In post-Roman times, towns on river crossings became increasingly important in shaping trade routes. Bridges at Abingdon, Wallingford, Henley and Maidenhead became key points in developing more direct westerly routes out of London. Others linked the Cotswolds, and their wool exports, to the channel ports. No less than five new bridges across the Thames were built during the thirteenth century, including Caversham, which dates from 1231, Maidenhead (built prior to 1255), Henley and Marlow. Windsor’s bridge was older still – tolls from it were being collected as early as 1172.

There would tend to be a chapel on some bridges, like the one at St Anne’s at Caversham, or a resident hermit to collect alms (as at the Ock Bridge in Abingdon). Charities or religious institutions might also collect tolls towards the upkeep of the bridges.

In Reading, responsibility for the upkeep of the Thames Bridge was shared between Reading and its neighbouring (but at that time independent) settlement of Caversham. They could never agree about repair works, with the result that it spent centuries in a state of almost continuous disrepair, for a long time in a curious ‘half and half’ structure, partly of wood, partly of stone. In any event, tolls often put bridges beyond the means of the poorest travellers, who had to continue relying on ferries or (where feasible) fording rivers.

Between the bridges, mediaeval highways were rights of passage, rather than structures with fixed routes, and travellers would take whatever route was necessary to make progress. This may help explain why the very earliest maps did not show the roads between towns, given that their alignments were so uncertain.

If the poor condition of the roads was not enough, the misery was compounded by the fear of robbery. This had become so bad by 1285 that Edward I ordered that highways between market towns should be widened so that there would be no ditch, undergrowth or bushes, where anyone could lurk with evil intent, within 200ft on either side of the road.

King Edward I

This only applied to a few major roads, and there were constant disputes as to who was responsible for maintenance of particular roads. In Reading after the dissolution of the Abbey, responsibility for their upkeep passed to the corporation (but not the resources to do anything about it). They fell into worse than usual disrepair, until a 1560 charter from Queen Elizabeth gave them both the responsibility and the means (financial and material – including the gift of 200 loads of stone from the ruins of Reading Abbey) to carry out the repairs.

A grossly inefficient parish-based unpaid labour system for repairing roads was introduced in 1555. It proved utterly inadequate to cope with the increased traffic trying to use them.

Celia Fiennes, in 1690, described the road from Reading to Theale as a ‘sad clay deep way’ and to Newbury was all ‘clay mirey ground’. Wagons could sink axle-deep in mud, and in places the track was not wide enough for two carriages to pass. This road was nonetheless part of the Great Bath Road, probably the most important route in post-Roman Berkshire, forming a spine through the county linking London to the cities of Bath and Bristol.

This was not an ancient or even mediaeval creation, but was developed to carry the increasing traffic from the capital to the fashionable spa and the major port of Bristol. To say it was ‘developed’ may be overstating the case, since it was not even very clearly defined. It would regularly split into several different tracks, with no clear indication as to which was the right way to go (generally the higher route was the safer bet in wet weather). Travellers often even hired local guides; Samuel Pepys did not, and managed to get lost between Newbury and Reading.

Things had not looked up much by the time William Cobbett made his rural rides in 1822. He described the roads in the Windsor area as being mostly ‘upon as bleak, as barren and as villainous a heath as ever man set eyes on’.

Nonetheless, the first stagecoach service through Berkshire was advertised in 1657. The vehicle was unsprung, carried only four people and took three days to complete the journey from London to Bath and Bristol, ‘God willing’ as the advertisement discouragingly put it. By the 1830s there were twenty-five stagecoaches and three Royal Mail coaches in each direction, running along the Bath Road through Maidenhead daily. Slough had twenty-four services, Reading seventeen, Newbury twelve, Hungerford ten, while Windsor got just four, Bracknell three and Wokingham two. In addition, there were cross-country services, for example linking Reading to Brighton, Oxford to Windsor, and Hungerford to Swindon.

The biggest maintenance problems faced those parishes that contained part of a long-distance route, like the Great Bath Road. Some way had to be found of making the long-distance traveller pay towards the wear and tear he caused on the highways. An answer came with the introduction of Turnpike Trusts. Private Acts of Parliament brought into being trusts that would replace the parishes as highway authority on specific routes. They were able to raise loans to fund highway improvements, which they repaid from the tolls paid by the users of the roads.

Turnpiking was a very slow and piecemeal way of upgrading a road, as the improvement of the Berkshire part of the Great Bath Road illustrates. The road from Reading to Theale was one of the first to be turnpiked (in 1714), followed by Twyford to Maidenhead (1718), west and east of Newbury (1726 and 1728), Cranford to Maidenhead (1727) and Twyford to Reading (1736). Other Berkshire roads to be turnpiked at this time included Maidenhead to Henley Bridge (1718), Reading to Basingstoke (1718), Reading to Wallingford (1763), Newbury to Oxford via Abingdon (1770), Hungerford to Wantage and Fyfield (c. 1795) and Windsor to Hurst (1823).

So, by the start of the nineteenth century, a reasonable network of turnpiked roads existed between most significant settlements in the county. Each trust had to justify to Parliament that the turnpike was needed (not so difficult, given the appalling state of so many roads) and that the scale of charges they were proposing was justified by the financial outlay needed to improve and maintain the road. Turnpike proposals were generally hotly contested, since the placing of a tollgate could determine who had to pay to reach a key destination and who did not.

Once established, there was widespread evasion and fraud to contend with. Landowners would conspire with travellers to enable them to circumnavigate the barriers, and all sorts of ingenious ways were found to reduce the tolls for which travellers were liable. The tariffs themselves were exceedingly complex, with different rules applying according to the weight of your load, the shape, height and width of the wagon wheels and the form of motive power (steam road vehicles, once they came along, faced punitive tariffs from some trusts).

The Maidenhead Trust was one of the first to have its own weighing machine for wagons. There were also numerous complicated exemptions to the tariffs – for pedestrians, funerals, churchgoers, horses going to water, members of the Royal Family, etc.

Trusts were also entitled to a share of the unpaid labour that still looked after the non-turnpiked roads in the parish. But this was by no means easily obtained, given that the parishes still struggled to maintain even local routes (since turnpikes never made up more than a fifth of the total road network). Trusts often had to resort to the courts to get their share of the labour. As if all that were not enough, the complex tariffs gave the toll collectors considerable scope for in-house fraud, and their tollhouses were popular targets for highwaymen.

All in all, it is small wonder that turnpike roads – though they made significant improvements – were not a panacea for overland travel in Britain. They were still limited by the speed at which horses could travel, and even the speediest traffic – the mail coaches – were still taking twelve hours between London and Bristol in 1836. Goods carried by wagon or canal barge could take several days – longer, if the canals were closed down by frost or drought. When not bogged down in mud, the roads could also be extremely bumpy. The Marlow Road (the modern A404) was noted as being less rough than the Great Bath Road, and for that reason was favoured by the likes of the Marquis of Salisbury, for being easier on his gout. It became known as the ‘gout track’. As for The Great Bath Road, the Gentlemen’s Magazine for September 1754, after