Description
CONTENTS
1 Introduction
2 Water levels, locks and fords
3 Middle Thames mills
4 Middle Thames wharves
5 Riverside place names
6 Ancient wells and springs and associated legends
INTRODUCTION
All written history is biased in favour of the views of the writer or his master. All ancient history is the recording of an oral tradition. It is, therefore, illogical to disregard oral tradition today while accepting it in times past. Oral history has one advantage over written history in that it is uncensored.
Some of my ancestors have walked and ridden over, shot over and hunted over South Bucks and East Berks for some 300 years of fully recorded history, a further 400 years of intermittent history, and traditions going back a further 400 years. While it is difficult to date traditions, they are unlikely to have been fabricated, or contemporaries would have refuted them, but they may have been exaggerated.
The Lowland British language of South Bucks and East Berks used by farm labourers up to the mid 19th century was locally known as the old fashioned way of speaking. It was never written down, except as place names or surnames. It was as private to the cottager and yeoman as the mystery of the ‘horseman’. As with the words of their mummers plays, it was classed as rubbish or nonsense by the parson and the squire, the only people who might have had time or the inclination to record it, when they heard it.
Some words have been recorded in the 20th century as dialect words, but to find a plausible topographical origin for many of the field names one must look to Breton or Cornish dictionaries as well as Welsh ones.
A knowledge of this old fashioned way of speaking does help to explain and link together the names of the wells, streams, weirs, canals, locks, watermills and wharves of South Bucks, East Berks and nearby places.
The maps in this book are based on the Ordnance Survey of 1808 with help from Roques and Robertson’s maps. The larger scale field name maps are based on the enclosure and tithe maps of the late 18th and early 19th centuries of the area, with approximate modern grid lines superimposed for reference to modern maps.
The pictures are drawn from old engravings and paintings, photographs, old drawings, descriptions, research and, when all other sources fail, sheer imagination.
The sources of information vary and include many local guide books, mostly from early this century and late last century, the records of St George’s Chapel Windsor and of Burnham Abbey at Hunterscombe, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire County Records, the Victorian County Histories and Tighe and Davis’ history of Windsor.
But more important by far than the written sources were the throw away remarks, traditions and old tales from my father, Hugh, and grandfather, Fred Bayley of Slough, my grandfather’s cousin William Bulstrode, my great aunt and uncle Amy and Philip Headington, Alderman Taylor of Slough and numerous friends and acquaintances born and brought up in the district.
This book is arranged to be used for reference purposes, and to be dipped into rather than read as a story. Hopefully it will set the scene and give background to the stories, legends and traditions we find in our local history.
Book Details
- Title: The survival of the lowland British Language.
- Author: Michael H. H. Bayley
- Subjects: History; Folklore — England; Social life and customs; Celtic language.
- Publication Details: Maidenhead : Self-published, 2004.
- Identifier: None