Place:Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

Stony Stratford was part of the Newport Hundred and the Potterspury Poor Law Union. The parish was located in the Stratford and Wolverton Rural from 1894 until 1919, and in the Wolverton Urban District from 1920 until 1974.

Since at least Roman times, there has been a settlement here at the ford of Watling Street over the Great Ouse. The town's market charter dates from 1194 and its status as a town from 1215. It is in the north west corner of Milton Keynes, bordering Northamptonshire and separated from it by the River Great Ouse. Before the designation of Milton Keynes in 1967, Stony was in Wolverton Urban District (1920-1967) in north Buckinghamshire and prior to that in Stratford and Wolverton Rural District (1894-1919). (Stratford and Wolverton Rural District was renamed Stratford and Wolverton Urban District for the last year of its life.)

For a time between the late 18th century and 1927 Stony Stratford was divided into two parishes named Stony Stratford East and Stony Stratford West. The division was probably Watling Street. Both of these parishes have been redirected here.

Stony Stratford (often shortened to Stony) is now a constituent town of Milton Keynes (in north Buckinghamshire, England) and is a civil parish with a town council within the Milton Keynes unitary authority.

History

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

Since at least Roman times, there has been a settlement here at the ford of Watling Street over the Great Ouse. The town's market charter dates from 1194^[1] and its status as a town from 1215.^[2]

The town name is Anglo-Saxon in origin, and means "stony ford on a Roman road". The road in this instance is Watling Street, which runs through the middle of the town and crosses the River Ouse just outside it (nowadays by bridge).

In 1789, at Windmill Field (probably) in the parish of Old Stratford near Stony Stratford, an urn was uncovered which contained three fibulae and two headdresses. Known as the Stony Stratford Hoard, it also contained around thirty fragments of silver plaques which were decorated with images of the Roman gods Mars, Apollo and Victory. There were also inscriptions to Jupiter and Vulcan leading to theories that this was a votive hoard associated with a Roman temple. The hoard is now kept at the British Museum.

There has been a chartered market in Stony Stratford since 1194 (by charter of King Richard I). (Until the early 1900s, livestock marts were still held in the market square but in more recent times the square has become a car park, apart from a monthly farmers' market in one corner. The weekly market has moved to Timor Court, and of course no longer deals in livestock). Stony Stratford formally became a town when it received letters patent from King John in 1215.^[2]

Stony Stratford was the location where, in 1290, an Eleanor cross was built in memory of the recently deceased Queen Eleanor of Castile, as her funeral cortège had stopped overnight in the town en route to London. The cross was destroyed during the English Civil War.^[2]

The former Rose and Crown Inn at Stony Stratford was reputedly where, in 1483, the boy-king Edward V stayed the night before he was taken to London (to become one of the Princes in the Tower) by his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who soon became King Richard III. Edward had been returning from Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches to London to claim his crown on the death of his father, Edward IV, when he was met in Stony Stratford by his uncle, who later deposed him.^[2] The inn is now a private house but a plaque on the front wall commemorates the event.

Catherine of Aragon rode from London to address her troops assembling here for the Battle of Flodden, and went on to stay at Woburn Abbey in September 1513.

The town has twice become almost completely consumed by fire, the first time in 1736 and the second in 1742. The only building to escape the second fire was the tower of the chapel of ease of St Mary Magdalen, now a scheduled monument.^[3]

Since at least the 15th century, Stony Stratford was an important stop on the road to Ireland via Chester, becoming quite rich on the proceeds in the 16th century.^[2] In the stage coach era of the 17th and early 18th centuries, it was a major resting place and exchange point with the east–west route with coaching inns to accommodate coach travellers. Traffic on Watling Street and the consequent wear and tear to it was such as to necessitate England's first turnpike trust, from Hockliffe to Stony Stratford, in 1707. In the early 19th century, over thirty mail coaches and stagecoaches a day stopped here. That traffic came to an abrupt end in 1838 when the London to Birmingham Railway (now the West Coast Main Line) was opened at Wolverton – ironically, just three years after the bridge over the Ouse had been rebuilt.^[2] Wolverton railway works provided an important source of employment in the town, with the Wolverton and Stony Stratford Tramway being built to serve the workers. With the arrival of the motor car, the town's position on the original A5 road made it again an important stopping point for travellers.

The 1841 census lists the population as 1,757.

Before the creation of the Borough of Milton Keynes in 1974 (by the Local Government Act 1972), Stony was in Wolverton Urban District.

Cock and Bull Story

Due to the juxtaposition of two hotels in the centre of town, The Cock and The Bull (both originally coaching inns on the main London Chester turnpike), it is claimed locally that the common phrase a originated here.

Listed buildings

The parish has one scheduled monument, nine 'grade II*' listed buildings,^[4] and a further 134 buildings and structures listed at Grade II.

Research Tips

Maps

• 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.