Place:Mentmore, Buckinghamshire, England

Watchers
NameMentmore
Alt namesMentemoresource: Domesday Book (1985) p 43
TypeVillage, Civil parish
Coordinates51.87°N 0.684°W
Located inBuckinghamshire, England
See alsoWing Rural, Buckinghamshire, Englandrural district of which the parish was a part 1894-1974
Aylesbury Vale, Buckinghamshire, Englanddistrict which the parish joined in 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog


Mentmore was part of the Cottesloe Hundred and the Leighton Buzzard Poor Law Union. The parish was located in the Wing Rural District until 1974, and is now in the Aylesbury Vale District.

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Mentmore is a village and civil parish in the Aylesbury Vale district of Buckinghamshire, England. It is about three miles east of Wingrave, three miles south east of Wing.

The village toponym is derived from the Old English for "Menta's moor". The Domesday Book of 1086 records the village as Mentmore.

Queen Edith, the daughter of Earl Godwin and wife of King Edward the Confessor had a hunting lodge at Mentmore, between the site of the present Mentmore Towers and the hamlet of Crafton at a site known as Berrystead. The well of this lodge is marked today by a wood still known as Prilow, derived from the Norman French pres l'ieu ("near the water").

In 1808 Magna Britannia reported:

MENTMORE, in the hundred of Cotslow and deanery of Muresley, lies about eight miles to the north-east of Aylesbury. The manor was anciently in the families of Bussel and Zouche: in 1490 it was granted to Sir Reginald Bray, from whom it descended, by a female heir, to the family of Sandys: in 1729, it was purchased with the manor of Leadbourne, by Lord Viscount Limerick, of a Mr. Legoe, who inherited them from the family of Wigg. They are now the property of Richard Bard Harcourt esq. who purchased them of Lord Limerick's son, James Earl of Clanbrassil. In the church are some memorials of the families of Theed and Wigg.
The impropriate rectory, which was given by the Bussells to the priory of St. Bartholomew, in Smithfield, is now the property of Mr. Harcourt, who is patron of the vicarage.


The Church of England parish church of St Mary the Virgin dates from the 14th century. It contains monuments to the Wigg and Theed families and one to Neil Primrose. It is a simple structure of three aisles and a clerestory. It was heavily restored by the Rothschild family in the 19th century. The tower has a ring of five bells, which were recently restored.

The village manor house, built by the Wigg family as a 16th-century half timbered structure, was re-faced in redbrick, with a Georgian front extension in the mid-18th century. The Wiggs were lords of the manor from the 16th to 18th centuries.

The ownership eventually passed to the Harcourt or D'Harcourt families, until it was brought in 1850 from the trustees of three Harcourt sisters who had been left insolvent on the death of their father. The purchaser was Baron Mayer de Rothschild.

The Baron employed the leading architect of the day Joseph Paxton to build a new grandiose mansion; the site chosen because of its fine elevation, was that of the village itself. To a Rothschild this was no problem, the village was moved to the site it occupies today. In fairness to the Baron the villagers were living in semi-derelict hovels, and were probably only too pleased to be rehoused.

The plan chosen for the new village was "Tudor meets Victorian" around a village green and mansion gates.


While Paxton and his son-in-law George Stokes worked on the mansion later to be known as Mentmore Towers, George Stokes also designed the first cottages for the new Mentmore. On the death of Baron Mayer in 1877 his heiress Hannah de Rothschild continued the building of the village using another architect George Devey (his work was a forerunner of the arts and crafts movement). These houses can be identified by the 'H de R' cypher on their gables. After her marriage to the 5th Earl of Rosebery the building continued with another architect John Aspell; his work appears similar to that of Devey, but has less refinement and is clearly of a cheaper construction. The Old Post office in the centre of a block of housing is clearly Devy's work, yet the houses adjoining are clearly of the lesser hand. The picturesque style Thatched or South Lodge is another of Devey's work, as is the former riding school with its stable yard – (now a housing complex).

Of particular note, is the cottage orné style Old Dairy; this building was designed by George Stokes in 1859, it is a pastiche of the Hameau de la Reine at Versailles. While intended as a functioning dairy, its verandas were also designed as a setting for Baroness Mayer de Rothschild's afternoon tea parties. This is one of the last buildings still to be owned by the Rosebery Estate and was restored in 2007.

At this time Anglo Saxon remains were found near the site of the present front drive of Mentmore Towers. The drives to the mansion are the original public highways, which were also re-routed at this time.

By 1880 the village and its new approach roads were more or less finished and looked much as they do today. The late 6th Earl of Rosebery who died in 1974 was fond of saying nothing had been built in Mentmore in his lifetime. While this was not strictly true, as both he and his father had built stable blocks at the stud farms, one could believe what he said. The only buildings not owned by him were the church and the vicarage. The vicarage, an austere high gabled Victorian building, built in the 1880s, was sold by the Church Commissioners in the 1960s and is now a private house.

In 1977, Towers, village and farms were put up for sale in their entirety. Today the village retains much of its Victorian character. The stable blocks are now developments of new housing, and executive style homes have been built in the village, yet Mentmore still appears predominantly unchanged.

Contents

Research Tips

Maps

  • The page, Wing Rural District, includes a map of the parishes in the district.
  • An outline map of the current civil parishes of Buckinghamshire (post 1974 and omitting Milton Keynes unitary authority) is provided by the Boundaries Commission.
  • Another map which gives no source, appears to have been drawn to show the county in the late 19th century and labels the parishes directly. However, the map does not show towns and villages (unless they are parishes using the same name) and some parishes have been found to be missing from this map.
  • A map provided by the Open University (a British university based in Milton Keynes) gives the locations of the old civil parishes and the new communities that make up Milton Keynes. It can be expanded to read the labels.

Registration Offices

Birth, marriage and death certificates can now be ordered online from Buckinghamshire County Council. The full postal address is Buckinghamshire Register Office, County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1YU.

The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1UU) holds

  • Church of England and Nonconformist churches including registers of baptism, marriage and burial.
  • Around 35,000 wills proved by the Archdeaconry of Buckingham.
  • County and District Councils (lists of councillors, minutes of meetings, etc).
  • Quarter and Petty Session courts.
  • Landed estates of families including the Aubrey-Fletchers, Hampdens, Carringtons and Fremantles.
  • Historic maps including OS, tithe and inclosure maps
  • A wide range of local history books, some for loan.
  • Pamphlets and articles of local history interest.
  • Local newspapers
  • Computers for access to family history resources like Ancestry and FreeBMD.
  • Published material is listed in the Library Catalogue.
  • Catalogues to some of our manuscript material is available through Access to Archives, part of The National Archives (TNA). Their database contains catalogues describing archives held locally in England and Wales and dating from the eighth century to the present day.

In Buckinghamshire, as with other counties in England and Wales, the location of offices where Births, Marriages and Deaths were registered has altered with other changes in local government. A list of the location of Registration Offices since civil registration began in 1837 has been prepared by GENUKI (Genealogy: United Kingdom and Ireland). The table also gives details of when each Registration Office was in existence. In the case of Buckinghamshire, the same registration offices were used for the censuses since 1851. Buckinghamshire now only has a central registration office at County Hall in Aylesbury, but there are facilities for registering births, marriages and deaths in specific libraries around the county.

Nineteenth Century Local Administration

English Jurisdictions is a webpage provided by FamilySearch which analyses every ecclesiastical parish in England at the year 1851. It provides, with the aid of outline maps, the date at which parish records and bishops transcripts begin, non-conformist denominations with a chapel within the parish, the names of the jurisdictions in charge: county, civil registration district, probate court, diocese, rural deanery, poor law union, hundred, church province; and links to FamilySearch historical records, FamilySearch Catalog and the FamilySearch Wiki. Two limitations: only England, and at the year 1851.

During the 19th century two bodies, the Poor Law Union and the Sanitary District, had responsibility for governmental functions at a level immediately above that covered by the civil parish. In 1894 these were replace by Rural and Urban Districts. These were elected bodies, responsible for setting local property assessments and taxes as well as for carrying out their specified duties. Thses districts continued in operation until 1974. Urban districts for larger municipalities were called "Municipal Boroughs" and had additional powers and obligations.

Poor Law Unions, established nationally in 1834, combined parishes together for the purpose of providing relief for the needy who had no family support. This led to the building of '"union poorhouses" or "workhouses" funded by all the parishes in the union. The geographical boundaries established for the individual Poor Law Unions were employed again when Registration Districts were formed three years later. In 1875 Sanitary Districts were formed to provide services such as clean water supply, sewage systems, street cleaning, and the clearance of slum housing. These also tended to follow the same geographical boundaries, although there were local alterations caused by changes in population distribution.

Online Historical References

  • GENUKI for Buckinghamshire provides a lot of material on the county history from a variety of aspects. The maps of the hundreds are reproduced from 19th century publications and show the topology as well as the locations of the various parishes. There is also a schematic map covering the whole county. GENUKI does not contain much information about the 20th century and beyond.
  • Local History Online provides a list of local historical organizations. Each of these societies and organizations has its own website.
  • The FamilySearch Wiki on Buckinghamshire explains the jurisdictions relating to civil affairs, parishes and probate (wills and testaments) for each parish in the county and also outlines when these jurisdictions were in existence. The data does not cover the post-1974 period.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Mentmore. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.