The Museum County Record Office
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THE MUSEUM The Museum is still suffering considerable The exhibition of the Museum's collection of inconvenience from structural problems and so samplers and embroidered pictures was to far it has proved possible only to relocate the coincide with the publication of a fully illustrated Biological Records Office on the ground floor in catalogue of the collection written by Rosemary an area which was formerly occupied by a small Ewles, a former member of staff. Two of the store off the Education Room and by the smaller exhibitions were held in both the Museum and the of the two Geology Galleries. The work of the Milton Keynes Exhibition Gallery, those on 18th Museum is likely to be made extremely difficult Century Gardens in Buckinghamshire and of the over the next year or two. Museum's collection of British Studio Ceramics. A Museum Visitors Survey has been under• The Aylesbury Past Project under Hal taken using a standard questionnaire produced by Dalwood continued for the whole year but ends in Data & Research Services of Milton Keynes who March 1988. Apart from continuing a pro• processed the forms by computer. The survey was gramme of fieldwalking they carried out an carried out from 30March to 16April and from 13 excavation on the site of the old police houses in July to 7 August and in total 493 visitors were Walton Street, Aylesbury and further details of interviewed. The main aims of the survey were to this are given in the archaeological notes. When try to discover where people visiting the Museum some pliosaur bones were found on the came from and what they thought of the Museum. Watermead development site in Aylesbury a As was anticipated it showed that a majority of limited excavation was carried out by the Project visitors are local and are most probably County team. This was a locally important find. The ratepayers. Over 500Jo were ratepayers of bones are of a carnivorous reptile the size of a Aylesbury Vale District Council and over 80% small whale which lived in the seas covering most lived within 25 miles of Aylesbury. Over 80% said of southern Britain in Jurassic times. Whilst they were likely to visit the Museum again and individual bones of pliosaurs have been found in were satisfied with the displays in their own the Vale before a spread of associated bones such interest areas. It was however obvious that people as this is unusual. In addition tape recordings were found it difficult to find the Museum due to the made of some older inhabitants and in December lack of direction signs in Aylesbury and that a booklet Aylesbury Remembered was published. publicity was not proving satisfactory. The work done under this MSC scheme has been invaluable. During the year most of the temporary exhibi• tions were initiated by the Museum staff. The The number of visitors to the Museum during most successful undoubtedly being one displaying the year was 29549; this compares with 36439 in photographs of the Vale and Chilterns in the 1986. There is no apparent reason for this as the 1890s from a private collection of glass plate temporary exhibitions have if anything been more negatives which had never been displayed before. interesting than the previous year. C.N.G. COUNTY RECORD OFFICE Extracts from the Report of the County Archivist There was a small but significant increase in reasons. However, staffing problems in the the Office's establishment, but full searchroom were ended by the appointment of a implementation was deferred for financial production assistant. Meanwhile the backlog of 230 cataloguing grew and the storage problem books for the Drake family's Shardeloes estate, became more acute. 1746-1768, was acquired with help from the Purchase Grant Fund administered by the There was a total of 108 accessions during the Victoria & Albert Museum. The second is year. A further large consignment of records of already in the Record Office. Among other the former Aylesbury Borough Council was estate and family records received were letters received, dating from 1917 (the date of the home from George Church, a transported town's charter) to the 1950s. Among other convict from Olney; an account roll for the Colet official records deposited were some County estate in Wendover, 1514-15; a royal grant of Planning Officer's files relating to the the manor of Taplow, 1614; and a pre-enclosure establishment of Milton Keynes, and some First map of Marsh Gibbon, 1819. Finally, an album World War records of the Royal Bucks Hussars. presented by Miss P. Appleby of Amersham deserves special mention, containing as it does a The ecclesiastical parishes of Horton, unique record of the activities of the Women's Wooburn and Gerrards Cross deposited their Land Army in Bucks during the Second World older records and nineteen other parishes made War. additional deposits. The Horton registers begin in 1571, Wooburn's only in 1653, but the parish As usual, listing was concentrated on recent has a wealth of material from the late accessions, including several from last year, but seventeenth century onwards, much of it relating a number of large accessions remain to be dealt to poor relief; there is also a rare parish census of with. Cumulated indexes to the published lists of 1801. accessions for 1976-1985 were completed and await typing. The conservators battled on. 636 Webster & Cannon Ltd, builders, of paper documents were repaired or flattened, and Aylesbury, passed over their surviving older de-acidified. 360 were guarded and filed, while records, dating from 1885. Other business 16large maps and 8 parchment documents were records included a collection of sale particulars repaired. The largest single task was the repair of from the High Wycombe area, 1887-1961, and a the seventeenth-century papers of Sir Robert plumber's estimate book for the Winslow area, Clayton. 1891-1920. Personal visits during the year totalled 2611 The court rolls and other manorial documents (2645 in 1986). Postal enquiries amounted to 719 deposited with the Buckinghamshire Archaeo• (706). A total of2576 (2735) telephone calls were logical Society were transferred to the Record logged, of which 1186 (1172) were enquiries. Office. Over a hundred manors are represented. 13,473 (13,452) items were produced, including There are particularly good runs of rolls for 2122 (1692) rolls of microfilm. Chalfont St Peter, Chesham, Hartwell, Long Crendon, Iver and Stone. The Claydon House Manuscripts Trust In June the trustees appointed a qualified A substantial body of Westbury estate deeds archivist to catalogue the Verney archives, was deposited through the British Records concentrating on the estate records stored in the Association. The greater part dates from the Paper Room, rather than the more celebrated early eighteenth century, but there are extracts correspondence, which is available on microfilm from earlier records. The first of two account in the Record Office. REVIEWS Aldbury: the Open Village. A portrait of country This is an account, designed and published by life. Jean Davis, pp. 170, 43 plates, 5 maps. Jean its author, ofthelifeoftheinhabitants of Aldbury Davis, Little Barley End, Aldbury, 1987. £5.95. from the Middle Ages to the present day, focusing 231 on the first half of the nineteenth century, for 45 'acre' or 'half acre' strips. The parish possessed which exceptionally abundant records survive• Town Houses for widows, and the Church House registers, vestry minutes, accounts, diaries, for the poorest of the poor. The seventh Earl of letters, surveys, engravings and Peter de Wint's Bridgewater, who arrived in 1803, ensured by water-colours. Physical changes in the village, its vigorous rebuilding that there was a house for fields, woods and commons are traced through every family and a few to spare, despite the rising maps, terriers and the Tithe Award. population. The arrangements for 'roundsmen' (surplus labourers allocated to farmers by the Uniquely among parishes of the Icknield Belt overseers) are discussed, but there are no beneath the Chiltern escarpment, Aldbury was corresponding particulars of work provided by not enclosed, even when the General Enclosure the surveyors of the highways. Act of 1845 facilitated this. There were fifteen owners at that time, and the dead hand of the The churchwardens' books are a treasure; they Pendley estate was probably enough to frustrate record work on the church fabric and furnishings, enclosure; further, the advantage to Asbridge and the sundial (recently stolen) and the lychgate, and Stocks would have been slight. Hence while the purchase of a pitch-pipe and tune books. Mrs Pitstone (1856) and Edlesborough (1865) were Davis lovingly describes the singing, lined out by given new roads, regular fields and compact farm the parish clerk from the lowest deck of the three• units, the medieval topography of Aldbury decker pulpit, the woodwind players ('Nebuchad• survived, and with it a wealth of minor place nezzar's band') and the bread dole, which was not names (unfortunately not indexed). However, for for 'those that go to Meetings'. Yet one Baptist two centuries the manorial courts had not supplied the bread, another tended the church controlled the open fields, and even regulation by clock and a third repaired the pulpit cloth and the the Vestry is not evidenced after 1757, though curtains. One wishes that more could have been stinting of the uplands commons was maintained said of the inner life of the Baptists, who have by the agreement of the major occupiers. All the been near the heart of the community for three copyholds had been converted into freehold by a centuries; the account is sympathetic but, perhaps private Act in 1691, thus loosening what had been of necessity, viewed mostly from the outside.