Place:Great Brickhill, Buckinghamshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

Great Brickhill was part of the Newport Hundred and the Newport Pagnell Poor Law Union. From 1894-1934 the parish was located in the Aylesbury Rural District when it was transferred to the Wing Rural District. Since 1974 it is a village and civil parish in Aylesbury Vale district, Buckinghamshire, England. It is in the very north of the county, just outside and overlooking, the now independent Milton Keynes.

History

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

The village name is a compound of Brythonic and Anglo Saxon origins, which is a common occurrence in this part of the country. The Brythonic breg means 'hill', and the Anglo Saxon hyll also means 'hill'. In the Domesday Book of 1086 the village was recorded as Brichelle. The affix 'Great' was added in the 12th century to differentiate from nearby Bow Brickhill and Little Brickhill.

Robert Merydale was parson of the parish church of Great Brickhill in 1470, according to a legal record, in which Edward Lucy & Thomas Hampden claim that he owed them £20.

Great Brickhill was described in 1806 in Magna Britannia as follows:

Great-Brickhill, in the hundred and deanery of Newport, lies about two miles and a half to the south-east of Fenny Stratford. The manor was anciently in the Beauchamps, from whom it passed by female heirs to the Bassets and Greys. Richard Grey, Earl of Kent, sold it in 1514 to Sir Charles Somerset, of whose son, Sir George it was purchased in 1549, by the Duncombes: from this family it passed, by female heirs, to the Bartons and Paunceforts, and is now the property of Philip Duncombe Pauncefort esq.

The manor of Smewnes-Grange, in this parish, became the property of Woburn Abbey, in 1293. King Edward VI granted it to Edward Stanton esq. of whose descendant it was purchased in 1792, (under an act of parliament which had passed the preceding year) by the present proprietor, Edward Hanmer esq. of Stockgrove. This manor extends into the parish of Soulbury: the manor-house, which was built by Edward Stanton, the grantee, within a moated site near the River Ouzel, has long been suffered to go to decay.

In the parish church are memorials of the families of Duncombe, Barton, Pauncefort, and Chase. The advowson of the rectory is annexed to the manor. This parish was inclosed by an act of parliament, passed in 1776, when an allotment of land was assigned to the rector, in lieu of tithes, and an allotment to the poor in lieu of their right of cutting furze.

The Victoria History of the Counties of England provides substantially more detail on the manorial record, but does not mention the Beauchamps (apart from one mention of 'the wife of the Earl of Warwick').

In 1643 Great Brickhill was touched by the English Civil War. The Parliamentarian Earl of Essex and his army camped in the village for a month. Great Brickhill was considered a strategic site due to its elevation and proximity to Watling Street (now the A5 road), at the time the main approach road to London from the north. However, there were no battles or even skirmishes here.

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

• The Buckinghamshire section of The Victoria History of the Counties of England, in four volumes, is online and provides an extensive history of the county, parish by parish, up to the end of the 19th century. Parishes are arranged in their original "hundreds", a fairly archaic scheme of dividing counties into reasonably sized sections.

• 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.