Bedford
History of Bedford in the UK
History of Bedford in the UK
1. Introduction to Bedford
This is Bedford. It’s a long town, a market town, sitting on the junction of the rivers Great Ouse and the Little Ouse. It’s in the southeast Midlands of England, about halfway across the country from east to west, and London is 50 miles to the south. Being at this confluence has made Bedford a key, if sometimes hidden, player in important moments of history for two millennia. Our story is therefore a history of geography, but it’s also a story of people. We’re a modestly sized town with a city-sized personality; a half-Welsh, half-Irish, heavily Asian population who, we feel, express what Britishness is in accents representing areas as widespread as Yorkshire, Scotland, Nigeria, and India. To scratch the surface of our history is to see the changes this town has gone through, both in demographic terms and in terms of its changing character. We have had two Norman castles, Saxon fortresses too, Origin-of-Species science, a quirky zoo, an Empire hero, and a ‘beautiful vision.’ We’ve had turmoil, surprise, and cancer cures, and Viking wars on the side. So in part, this is the story of an enigmatic town whose circumstances created riddles to excite the imagination.
At Bedford, England’s golden age meant early sunrise. Our position gave us command over a major medieval route into the heart of England, and this led to development. And yet, while we can see Bedford’s importance in the surveys and charters, nowhere is it written down as vital as it was. People, like people, are exceedingly bad at directing their gaze upwards to broader national and international trends. You have to endure local history because it is the bottom-up pressure that squeezes interestingness out of history: the effect the big things had, and sometimes were subverted by, the small things happening at places like Bedford. If it’s done well, local history will take you out of the English Channel, out of the English field, out of the English village, and out of the English road. It’s local history that is the antidote.
1.1. Geographical Overview
Bedford in the UK began life as the first Saxon capital of England, and as one of the earliest shire towns in the country, it is unique in some respects. The historical roads have included the Great North Road, the Portway, the Chaucer Way, and later the Midland Railway and the M1. In terms of our later history, Bedford was an area designated for fords or bridges. The geography of the Bedford area in the flooding plain along the River Great Ouse in North West Bedfordshire may have witnessed such occupations in wetland during the earliest prehistory. Caves were claimed for the town from Newnham, Elstow, Weybridge, Blunham, and other places in all the early charters.
Bedford is situated in the mid-east of England. Its location has given the town an exceptional strategic position in the country. The River Ouse, as it flows through the town, has had a major impact on the topography of the town and its surroundings. Bedford is part of the county of Bedfordshire. The town of Bedford dominates the natural region of Bedfordshire. The borough also has numerous surrounding agricultural areas. Potential land-to-drain patterns determined several of the boundaries and field patterns at the turn of the 20th century. During the expansion of Bedford after the Second World War, there was also a significant influence. Generally, today we might expect the boundaries to reflect topography, settlement patterns, local government, and natural resources, but where these are notably different, it is possible to see the imprint of the river flow and flood meadows. The natural region is dominated by the River Great Ouse, which is a wide river that in some places has broad meanders and a relatively gentle flow. The river valley is exceptionally wide and flat, as is the valley of the River Ivel, which flows into it. The Ouse used to flood into extensive meadows near Radwell and generally has low banks due to slow currents. In terms of the weather, Bedford was generally free from air pollution, with fresh clean northerly air, and a wide vista of deep blue sky with ever-changing effects of sunset and sunrise. The soil of Bedfordshire is mainly London clay, which is fertile, and there are some heavy fertile boulder clay soils around the edge. It is probable that the parish of Bedford (the town and immediate lands) was one of the earliest settled because of the many rivers, springs, brooks, and pools of water. The spring called ‘Ingeldou’ would, about 2000 years ago, have been fed by one or more waters which meet seaward of Bedford or in Bedford itself. This water could have formed the moat or boundary of the original town. The collection of springs and rivers has sustained life in the dry upland part of town. They have also made it difficult to develop foundations and underground services. There is some fertile soil along the river edges. The town has always been the principal place of the hundred until 1594, and now has become the county town. Due to its location, Bedford began to attract new settlers. As late Saxon and Norman Bedford began to develop, we can see that the geography has played a key role.
2. Early History
There are early traces of human activity in the neighborhood of Bedford, dating as far back as the Bronze Age or earlier period. Prehistoric people built a wood-and-hurdle barrow on the high ground behind Brickhill, from where there are good views, later christened with the name of ‘Maudlin.’ The fine gold torc found at Turvey, though reused, may date from the Late Bronze Age or the Early Iron Age, as do the pottery vessels found at Castle Road, Lurke Street, and St. Cuthbert’s Street, from evidence of habitation on the north bank of the river around Goldington and at Cauldwell Hall.
The Belgae of pre-Roman times, and the Romans who came after them, created the first farms, fields, and roads of the sort later used by the Anglo-Saxons. Above all, they began to transform Bedfordshire, along with most of England, into a series of parishes separated by headlands of unenclosed open fields. Bedfordshire, along with the rest of England, nonetheless changed significantly during the Iron Age, as part of an additional and widespread period of increased trade and exchange that is sometimes associated with the additional importation of classical power and consumer products. As part of this, and as a result of an increase in population, prehistoric Britain had seen further changes and developments in social structure and cultural activities that eventually brought about the first coinage and urban centers. The Romano-British farm beyond the south bank of the Ouse seems to have been visited by a noted traveler, probably in some year before AD 312, for he left behind a hoard of Roman denarii which appear to date from between 104 and 225. Some time after this, the manor was granted to the abbot of Ely, a highly influential figure.
2.1. Prehistoric and Roman Periods
In prehistoric times, Mesolithic and Neolithic people moved through the area. The first actual tendency to settle consistently occurred by about 4000 BC. Since then, all generations have left their mark in the rolling landscape of Bedfordshire. The Bronze Age, beginning about 4000 years ago, saw the erection of large barrows and enclosures, but settlements began to decrease around 700 BC. Then gradually, after centuries, Iron Age folk appeared again to have built a long backward-looking type of society with communities clustering around enclosed settlements, known as hill forts, where everyone took shelter in times of trouble. The settlements included two large forts at the foot of Castle Lane; sites that were subsequently to be occupied by the Roman conquerors of Britain. Tomorrow, the archaeological heritage center for Prehistoric Bedfordshire will stand on the site, and we will discover more about some of these people who lived on the river terraces.
An increasing number of artifacts and pot sherds are emerging to show that as the new century BC began, Bedford signaled its importance as a thriving community in the fertile basin of the River Ouse, so convenient for trade and communications. On the left bank was a large residential area that contained farmsteads and domestic plots with a stone and timber building that is likely to have served as a base for the local administrator, a keen fighter who was also responsible for business matters such as supply and records. The riverside location provided a suitable wharf with access to the river and the main street. This open cobbled street would have been the focus for vegetable and meat markets where you could also purchase craft and country pottery, honey, salt, orchard fruits, wheat, and animal skins. Earthenware manufactured in settlement workshops proved popular enough to be traded as imports well beyond the southern and western edges of the modern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire. Water and sewerage services, unwilling reproductions of Roman pottery in show, and professionally dug coins, teeth, querns, and meat hooks were among items discovered by council workers in the 1940s when they constructed the open-air pool just off the High Street. A variety of Roman artifacts from the region are on display in our archaeology gallery.
3. Medieval Bedford
Throughout the Middle Ages, the shape and nature of Bedford changed and adapted many times, but at its core, it was an adaptable and resilient place. Its remit was bound to become more complex and wide-ranging under the Norman ascendancy in England. The physical shape of Bedford was adapted by the Normans, likely transforming the streets and buildings left by the early English inhabitants. By 1085, work had started on a castle at Bedford. The site was a good defensive point between the much wider river and the marshy area called the Fens; from the rear of the motte, the castle’s defenses were a double bank of earthworks and a ditch protected by Watermead. A protective oval arrangement enclosed the motte atop which the keep would be constructed. This palace was probably constructed for a viscount in the 1130s and occupied into the thirteenth century as Bedford was a main royal residence.
Bedford was now also of greater importance to the national administration; from 1194 onward, merchants paid to have an annual fair in Bedford and had increasingly greater rights as a borough. Numerous references can be gleaned from historical records to properties in the town and fine descriptions of farming lands, churches, and mills and their uses. These descriptive details allow great insight into the origin of some of Bedford’s many field names. Agriculture was still the main industry in the town; the fact that Bedford was a predominantly agricultural and amenity town is borne out by its increasing trade in wheat, cattle fodder, and wool. In general, Bedford’s main money-spinner was the trade with surrounding villages. This was in sharp contrast to some other towns in the region, of which over half of their trade was conducted elsewhere; Bedford’s trade with communities outside the county was primarily drapers. They provided the woolen cloth for which Bedford had such a large reputation in the country bars closest to the county itself: Northamptons, Buckinghams, Hertfords, and Huntingdon. A greater portion of more prosperous rush and linen weavers worked out of Bedford. There was also an increasing presence of a number of other businesses, some large and some small, including dyers, tanners, blacksmiths, and a number of watermen using the river. Several molds also started to be established to deal with the heavy stone-laden traffic that was passing through the wet Fens. Socially, there were also many other religions besides the parish church in Bedford. A priory found in the South and a Cistercian abbey founded in 1154 at Elstow were the main religious institutions.
3.1. Norman Conquest and Domesday Book
Eventually, the Abbey and people of Aescendune ceased to be Saxon and became Norman with the universal flood that followed the victory at Hastings. On the other side of Bedford, William the Conqueror was holding lands at Colmworth and Elstow, and several lordships, among them that of Ravensden, were granted to Hugh de Beauchamp. Bedford at once became a part of the feudal kingdom that the Normans imposed upon England like a harness or a hide, until, in the words of Mr. Finney and with no impropriety, “The whole land was not less interpenetrated by the ideas and institutions of feudalism than it had been interpenetrated by parochialism.”
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It is out of our present province to narrate the story of Bedford in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at large: we are only concerned with the first Norman period. For our first detailed account of Bedford, we are thrown back once more on the all-important Domesday Book, the supreme palimpsest of the towns, fields, and manors of England. The exact population of Bedford cannot, in strictness, be gathered from this work. There are in it, namely, two references that would tally fairly well if cordially reconcilable. First, the borough is said to have ninety-eight burgesses, or citizens — a term that denotes in a royal town in Domesday tenants from the king. Secondly, the whole manor of Bedford is rated at £40, the particular manor being rated at £32, and St Neots, Biggleswade, Wootton, Clapham, Elstow, Goldington, and Clapham were assessed at £8. A very rude illustration will perhaps explain the leading agricultural features of Bedford in the time of Edward the Confessor, who could draw in Sussex alone a high rent of about 17d. per acre, and Bedford itself in all 1800 loaves of bread. On the estate of twelve hides at Bedford, for instance, seven ploughs were served by the dependent cottagers; also, there are sixty villeins who have six ploughs among them all. Every twelve villeins have in one hide one plough, and if these are at any time absent, the act of each of them is rated at 3d a year. A horrible liability of two shillings rests upon the twelve after such absolutions. The king retained two-thirds of the toll, the lord a third. Trifling items such as the yield of the urban orchards, and the produce of the servant staff in pannage and herbage, are recorded elsewhere on the same estate. The total value of the 12 hides was £101/8, while the beneficial worth was £38.
4. Modern Era
The modern era of Bedford town’s history was from the mid-18th to the late 20th centuries. This period was one of growth and prosperity sandwiched between the agricultural strength of the 17th and 18th centuries and the downturn in the early post-war period. These years were also the period of industrialization, the widespread urbanization of a population buoyed and boosted by an ever-increasing birth rate and the mass migration towards the beginning of the 19th century.
In 1900, some 16,500 people lived within the town of Bedford; by 1950, that number had risen to 40,000, and by 2002, it had reached 75,000. The shift from an agrarian society to an industrial one was at the forefront of the century’s activities. The rapid growth of urban centers was built on the diverse and widespread network of factory and workshop industries that produced cotton, leather, lace, engineering, and in Bedford, bricks.
The arrival of the railway in 1846 was one of the spurs that prompted Bedford’s emergence as a market town for raw materials, factory products, agricultural foodstuffs, and a place of settlement for newcomers. Factories, mills, housing, and warehouses lined the banks of the River Great Ouse, and trade routes into the town from other parts of the country were developed, with trade and traffic in part depending on season and climate. Agrarian depression, tied in turn to modified agricultural working practices, led many 18th-century laborers to abandon the countryside for work in Bedford, where factories, processing and packing industries, and, of course, building and construction took off in the later years of the 19th century and into the early 20th. The population expanded rapidly, fueled by the arrivals from the countryside. Alongside the development of work and the practical aspects of daily life, there was a turn toward Victorian values of education, self-improvement, and community endeavor. The rich perhaps strived to convince themselves of progress, and the working class and other new arrivals from here and elsewhere recognized the importance of education in achieving a better standard of living. A number of charitable and religious industrial schools and colleges were established in Bedford that provided little or no elementary education. Parishes were the first to establish schools and create facilities with public subscription, supplemented by grants paid to schools based on the average attendance of pupils. By 1876, the Commission supported more good local schools across agriculture and industry, assisted to an extent in no small degree by the donations of a few wealthy individuals.
4.1. Industrial Revolution and Growth
After many centuries during which Bedford had changed little, the arrival of the railway in 1846 brought significant change. The development of manufacturing industries had led to a huge social and economic change in Britain in the preceding century. This period is sometimes referred to as the “Industrial Revolution” because of the rapid way in which the development of new industries followed the creation of the first factories. The government of the day chose not to direct this economic revolution but to allow individuals to respond to market opportunities with a limited degree of control. Free market economics, often called “laissez-faire”, had never been tried before on this scale and industrialists had relatively few constraints. Where the growth of new industries was most rapid, the result was a sudden influx of workers and the growth of towns. Bedford and the surrounding area was one of those places where the seeds of the industrial revolution bore fruit.
One of the iron founders whose business grew rapidly in the early years of the Industrial Revolution was Thomas Squires. Thomas, who had lived at Danesbury House in Goldington Road since 1820, probably set up his foundry in 1834. In 1906, it advertised “General Engineers and Contractors. Makers of Agricultural Machinery of every description. Builders of High-Class Portable Engines. Manufacturers of Platforms, Vans, Weighbridges.” Products for the home, such as lighting, stoves, fireplaces, and cooking ranges, were just a small fraction of the work Squires was capable of undertaking. Many farms and mills in Bedfordshire were modernized by having Squires’ machinery installed. The other major employer in the town was Charles Wells. Charles started his brewery in 1876, and it continued as a family firm until 2007. Charles Wells was sold to Marstons, which renamed itself Marstons plc. The company continued to form one of the UK’s biggest independent brewing businesses. In 2008, the company announced the sale of 182 tenanted pubs to Admiral Taverns. In August 2011, the Charles Wells brewery was sold to an independent family firm based in Sussex. The new owners claim to have kept the brewery’s heritage alive.
5. Recent Developments
The late 20th and early 21st centuries brought tremendous changes to Bedford. Since the 1980s, there have been significant shifts in the local economy as a result of globalization and the retreat of industry, while at the same time, a whole host of local initiatives, policymakers, and organizations have sought to address the town’s heritage and history as a resource in the promotion of economic regeneration. Changing demographics have transformed the town from a primarily white and Christian community to a multicultural, multi-faith society. The advent of information technology has given local people access to worldwide communication and broadened their horizons while transforming the way they spend their leisure time and do their shopping. It has also increased job opportunities in offices and call centers but led to the disappearance of many of the small workshops that dotted the town center streets. In the 1980s and 1990s, new plans and developments began to transform the town center, which had remained relatively unchanged for decades. Modern buildings, particularly commercial office spaces, were constructed, new road systems modified traffic flow, and there was an increasing tendency for large corporations to move in as small family businesses vanished. In the 21st century, the pace of these changes has quickened as once-familiar landmarks disappeared to be replaced by street water sculptures, modern flats, restaurants, and entertainment venues. This is Bedford adapting to still further changes thrust upon it rather than embracing them for its own sake or molding them. Even in the 21st century, the need for things like the Bedford Embankment Settlement to provide support to people striving to live when unexpectedly unemployed, sick, or homeless is as necessary as ever. In this way alone, old architecture and history can continue to serve the people of Bedford, provided the local heritage is not lost in the rush to modernize and embrace change.
5.1. Cultural and Economic Changes
The last five years have seen a massive program of change to the cultural makeup of Bedford. The award of over £2.5 million of private and three local authority grants for the stewardship of place has seen the development of the riverside, including the future home of the Bedford and Luton Academy of Health and the University of Bedfordshire’s Business School. The north of the river has received and is continuing to receive a much-needed facelift with the refurbishment of the bus station, the police station, and the opening of the Howard production facility with the British motorsport heritage craft business. One of the more dramatic things we have changed over the last five years is to actually care about the place we work in. We have discovered an arts and cultural scene local people didn’t really know existed, and we have seen civic pride rejuvenated and regularly attend many of the events we mentioned before. As well as the dramatic cultural changes, the last five years have seen some big changes in the town’s economy. We need to have the powers to change our area; we need to control arts and leisure, and the support we get from outside the borough has to be to the benefit of people in Bedford rather than the other way around. Over the last 20 or so years, the Bedford economy has changed almost beyond recognition. The workforce is increasingly becoming more employed in public service and IT rather than in manufacturing. Half of shorter working residents currently working will be doing jobs at the end of their careers that don’t exist yet. Employment is again high despite the slow progress of the recovery and drop in public sector employment. The borough is already very diverse. We have, unusually for a unitary area, no fewer than 33,000 who were born outside the United Kingdom and more than 10,000 who speak English not at all well or not at all. Control over who comes into the UK is quite different from control over who comes into a particular place. On the same lines, towns and cities across the UK are working on similar projects, like us. Community-based projects across the country are seeking to address the local impacts of issues like obesity, smoking, and alcohol-related harm. There is already a rapidly increasing focus on individual strengths and abilities, capitalizing on these before using the strengths of the family, and only then the community, to address issues that need urgent attention.
