Place:Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this article is based on an article in Wikipedia

Bishop's Stortford is a historic English market town and civil parish in Hertfordshire, just west of the M11 motorway on the county boundary with Essex. It is the closest sizeable town to London Stansted Airport, 27 miles (43 km) northeast of Charing Cross in central London, and 35 miles (56 km) by rail from Liverpool Street station, the London terminus of the line to Cambridge that runs through the town. Bishop's Stortford had a population of 38,202 in 2001, easing to 37,838 at the 2011 Census, but estimated to have risen again to around 40,000 by 2017.

Bishop's Stortford is now the principal urban area within the East Hertfordshire District. Prior to the introduction of district municipalities in 1974 it was an urban district. Originally it was part of Braughing Hundred.

Bishop's Stortford is commonly spelled Bishops Stortford or Bishop Stortford. Both of these spellings are redirected here.

History and naming

Nothing is known of Bishop's Stortford until it became a small Roman settlement on Stane Street, the Roman road linking Braughing and Colchester. The settlement was probably abandoned in the 5th century after the break-up of the Roman Empire.

A new Saxon settlement grew up on the site, and was named Steort-ford meaning "the ford at the tongue of land". In 1060, William, Bishop of London, bought Stortford manor and estate for £8, leading to the town's modern name. At the time of the Domesday Book of 1086 the village had a population of around 120. The Normans built a wooden motte-and-bailey edifice known as Waytemore Castle.

Only the baptismal font survives from the Norman Church of St Michael, which was rebuilt in the early 15th century and altered and restored in the 17th and 19th centuries. Its conspicuous belfry and spire were built in 1812.

The River Stort is named after the town, and not the town after the river. When cartographers visited the town in the 16th century, they reasoned that the town must have been named after the ford over the river and assumed the river was called the Stort. After 1769, the River Stort was made navigable, and the town became a stop on the mail coach road between Cambridge and London.

By 1801, Bishop's Stortford was a market town with a corn exchange. The town's main industry was malting barley. The railway came to Bishop's Stortford in 1842.

Of the six suburbs of Thorley, Thorley Park (redirected to Thorley), Havers, Bishop's Park, St Michael's Mead and Hockerill (these four redirected here), the last is a separate ecclesiastical parish east of the River Stort, centred around the old coaching inns, All Saints in Stansted Road and the railway station.

A notable person born in Bishop's Stortford was Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), the son of the vicar of St Michael's Church. He was the effective founder of the state of Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), and of the De Beers diamond company and the Rhodes Scholarship.

Research Tips

• Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Register Office Block CHR002, County Hall, Hertford SG13 8EJ. Indexes and Catalog
• Hertfordshire Family History Society
• Ordnance Survey map of Hertfordshire 1900 provided by A Vision of Britain through Time
• Ordnance Survey map of Hertfordshire 1944 provided by A Vision of Britain through Time
• GENUKI outlines information for genealogists for the county. It is also a doorway to pages covering individual parishes.
• Joiner's Marriage Index is available for Hertfordshire on GENUKI. Individual parishes are covered separately.
• Wikimedia Commons has a variety of maps of Hertfordshire, and parts of Hertfordshire, past and present.
• A Vision of Britain through Time is a website produced by the Department of Geography of the University of Portsmouth. It outlines all parishes as they were in the 19th century.
• The FamilySearch Wiki lists its collections of church records and vital records along with those provided by other organizations, both commercial and voluntary.
• The commercial website FindMyPast also has a collection of wills and newspaper transcriptions, as well as the "1939 Register" (an equivalent to the census gathered at the beginning of World War 2).
• The hundred of Braughing: Introduction and map as provided by British History Online in the Victoria County History of Hertfordshire, volume 3, pp 289-291
• The parish of Bishop's Stortford ibid, volume 3, pp 292-306