Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire

South Buckinghamshire Chiltern Wycombe Aylesbury Vale

Buckinghamshire (abbreviated Bucks) is an administrative county in south central England. It has an area of 1883 sq km, and its county town is Aylesbury. It has a population of 590,000.

The current administrative county of Buckinghamshire is divided into four districts: Aylesbury Vale, Chiltern, South Bucks and Wycombe. It borders onto the administrative counties of Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire, Luton, Hertfordshire, and Berkshire. In 1974 administrative Buckinghamshire lost Slough and Eton to administrative Berkshire; these areas have been administered under the unitary authorities of Slough and Windsor and Maidenhead since 1998. Milton Keynes district became a unitary authority in 1997, but remains part of the ceremonial county (which is based on the post 1974 administrative county).

It is an agricultural county, covering part of the Chiltern Hills to the South and the Vale of Aylesbury to the north. It has fertile agricultural lands, with many landed estates, especially those of the de Rothschild family in the 19th century (see Rothschild properties in Buckinghamshire). Industry: Agricultural, furniture, pharmaceuticals, service and distribution industries. There are some residential commuter areas for London in the south.

The name Buckinghamshire is Anglo Saxon and means The district (scire) of Bucca's home. Bucca's home refers to Buckingham in the north of the county, and is named after an Anglo Saxon landowner. The county has been so named since it was a subdivision of the kingdom of Mercia (585-919).

However some of the settlements in Buckinghamshire date back much further than the Anglo Saxon period. Aylesbury, for example, is known to date back at least as far as 1500 BC. There are a wealth of places that still have their Brythonic names (Penn, Wendover), or a compound of Brythonic and Anglo Saxon (Brill, Chetwode, Great Brickhill) and there are pre-Roman earthworks all over the county. Also, one of the most legendary kings of the Britons, Cunobelin, had a castle in the area (the earthworks of which still remain) and leant his name to the group of villages known as The Kimbles.

The Roman impact on Buckinghamshire is most widely felt in the Roman roads that cross the county. The Watling Street and Akeman Street both cross the county from east to west, and the Icknield Way follows the line of the Chiltern Hills. The first two were important trade routes linking London with other parts of Roman Britain, and the latter was used as a line of defense, though may have been an extension of a much older road.

The single group of people who probably had the greatest impact on Buckinghamshire's history, however, are the Anglo Saxons. Not only did they give the county and most of the places within it their names, but the modern geography of the county is largely as it was in the Anglo Saxon period. One of the great battles worthy of mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was fought between Cerdic of Wessex and the Britons at Chearsley, not less than three saints from this period were born in Quarrendon and in the late Anglo Saxon period a royal palace was established at Brill. The sheer wealth in the county was worthy of note when the Domesday Survey was taken in 1086, probably thanks to the impact of the Anglo Saxons.

The Plantagenets continued to take advantage of the wealth of the county. William the Conqueror annexed most of the manors for himself and his family: the Bishop of Bayeux, William's half brother, became a major landowner locally. Many ancient hunting areas became the king's property (worthy of note are Whaddon Chase and Princes Risborough) as did all wild swans of England. The latter led from the ancient tradition of breeding swans in Buckinghamshire for the king's pleasure and later became the heraldic crest for the county (see below).

This was certainly not the end of annexations of local manors to the Crown. In 1536, in the dissolution of the monasteries, almost a third of the county became the private property of King Henry VIII to dispose of at his pleasure. Henry VIII was also responsible for making Aylesbury the county town over Buckingham, which he did to curry favour with Thomas Boleyn so that he could marry his daughter Anne. Another of Henry's wives, Catherine Parr, also had a sphere of influence within the county.

In the English Civil War (1642-1649) Buckinghamshire was mostly Parliamentarian, although some pockets of Royalism did exist. The Parliamentarian hero John Hampden was from Buckinghamshire, and he helped defend Aylesbury in battle in 1642. Some villages to the west of the county (Brill and Boarstall for example) were under constant conflict for the duration of the war, given their equidistance between Parliamentarian Aylesbury and Royalist Oxford. Many of these places were effectively wiped off the map from the conflict, but have since been rebuilt.

The Industrial Revolution and the arrival of the railway completely changed the landscape of certain parts of the county. Wolverton in the north (now part of Milton Keynes) became a national centre for railway carriage construction and furniture and paper industries took hold in the south. In the centre of the county, the lace industry was introduced and grew rapidly, because it gave employment to women and children from poorer families. Buckinghamshire still has good rail links to London, Birmingham and Manchester and furniture is still a major industry in parts of south Bucks.

In the early to mid Victorian era a major cholera epidemic and agricultural famine took their hold on the farming industry which for so many years had been the stable mainstay for the county. Migration from the county to nearby cities and abroad was at its height at this time, and certain landowners took advantage of the cheaper land on offer that was left behind. One of the county's most influential families arrived in Bucks as a result of this, the Rothschilds, and their impact on the county's landscape was huge (see Rothschild properties in Buckinghamshire).

Mass urbanisation of the very north and south of the county took place in the Twentieth century, which saw the new towns of Milton Keynes and Slough being formed. This was a natural extension of the industrialisation of the landscape, and provided much needed employment for many local people. Both have since become unitary authorities in their own right, reducing the land area of Buckinghamshire by almost a third.

Today Buckinghamshire is considered by many to be the idyllic rural landscape of Edwardian fiction and is known colloquially as leafy Bucks. (As an illustration of the stereotype the television show The Vicar of Dibley is set in Buckinghamshire). This point of view has led to many parts of the county being very popular with commuters for London, which in turn has led to an increase in the general cost of living for local people. However pockets of deprivation still remain in the county, particularly in the large towns of Aylesbury and High Wycombe.

The coat of arms for Buckinghamshire features a white swan in chains. This dates back to the Anglo Saxon period, when swans were bred in Buckinghamshire for the king's pleasure. That the swan is in chains illustrates that the swan is bound to the king, an ancient law that still applies to wild swans in the UK today. The herald was first used at the Battle of Agincourt by the Duke of Buckingham.

Above the swan is a gold band, in the centre of which is Whiteleaf Cross, representing the many ancient landmarks of the county. The shield is mounted by a beech tree, representing the Chiltern Forest that once covered almost half the county. Either side of the shield are a stag and a swan.

The motto of the shield that is in Latin says Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum and means 'no stepping back'.

This is a list of the towns in the traditional county of Buckinghamshire (before the first boundary changes in 1974). For the full list of towns, villages and hamlets in Buckinghamshire for the same time period see List of places in Buckinghamshire.

Towns that are no longer in the administrative county of Buckinghamshire are marked with an asterisk (*)

Properties belonging to the National Trust are marked with an asterisk (*).

The following people are either from Buckinghamshire, have lived in Buckinghamshire, or continue to live in Buckinghamshire.

• Nancy Astor, society hostess, lived in Cliveden
• Nick Beggs, musician, is from Winslow
• Lynda Bellingham, actress, is from Aylesbury
• Cilla Black, television presenter, lives in Denham
• Enid Blyton, writer, lived in Beaconsfield
• Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII, had a house in Wendover
• Melanie Brown, musician, lives in Little Marlow
• John Craven, television presenter, lives in Princes Risborough
• Roald Dahl, writer, lived in Great Missenden
• Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, politician, lived in both High Wycombe and Beaconsfield
• Iain Duncan Smith, politician, lives in Swanbourne
• Noel Edmonds, television presenter, once lived in Weston Turville
• Edward the Confessor, king of England, had a palace in Brill
• T.S. Eliot, writer, lived in Marlow
• Noel Gallagher, musician, lives in Little Chalfont
• Sir John Gielgud, actor, was living in Aylesbury when he died
• John Hampden, politician, was from Great Hampden
• David Jason, actor, lives in Wendover
• Jerome K. Jerome, writer, lived in Marlow
• Howard Jones, musician, is from High Wycombe
• Jason "Jay" Kay, musician and frontman of Jamiroquai, lives in Princes Risborough
• Arthur Lasenby Liberty, merchant, was from Chesham
• John Milton, writer, lived in Chalfont St Giles
• Florence Nightingale, nursing pioneer, was from Middle Claydon
• Mike Oldfield, musician, once lived in Little Chalfont
• Ozzy Osbourne, musician, has a house in Chalfont St Peter
• John Otway, musician, is from Aylesbury
• William Penn, politician, was from Penn
• Terry Pratchett, writer, was born in Beaconsfield
• Pauline Quirke, actress, lives in Beaconsfield
• Tim Rice, lyricist, is from Amersham
• Andy Riley, writer, is from Aylesbury
• Nathan Mayer Rothschild, banking pioneer, had houses in Ascott, Aston Clinton, Eythrope, Halton, Mentmore and Waddesdon
• Mary Shelley, writer, lived in Marlow
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, writer, lived in Marlow
• Jackie Stewart, racing driver, lives in Wendover
• Edmund Waller, poet, was from Amersham
• Roger of Wendover, chronicler, was from Wendover
• John Wyclif, theologian, lived in Ludgershall

• Buckinghamshire County Council
• Buckinghamshire Family History Society
• Buckinghamshire Tourist Guide
• Bucks Free Press
• Bucks Travel Information