Bedfordshire

The strategic context of new burhs created by the West Saxon King Edward the Elder at Buckingham, Newport Pagnell, Towcester and probably Aylesbury in the period 914 to 917, is examined to determine the ways in which the foundation of these burhs as new fortified settlements was associated with the formation of new burghal territories to maintain their strategic functionality. These were arguably divided into units of around 300 hides, here termed 'proto-hundreds', in the late ninth and early tenth-century programmes of burghal formation. These in turn were divided into vills or estates, in most cases as 5-and 10-hide units. These developments are compared with processes which can be inferred from similar evidence from neighbouring shires of Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, where similar proto-hundreds of between 200 and 400 hides formed primary landscape divisions within their burghal territories. All these are argued as comprising elements of a major reorganization of the administrative landscape as part of the essential infrastructure of the formation of the burhs. These new cadastral redevelopments demonstrate the organizational precocity of the West Saxon state at this period. These proto-hundreds were subsequently divided into 100-hide units as a development which was arguably concurrent with the creation of the shires, formed by fusion of the earlier burghal territories, in probably the third quarter of the tenth century. The course of development of burhs and burghal territories, and of hundreds, wapentakes and shires, as new elements in the administrative landscape of late Saxon England, raises fundamental issues about the ways in which both the Mercian and West Saxon states set about organising themselves to put in place the administrative infrastructure which was needed to meet their strategic and social agendas, in different historical contexts. While the shires of central Wessex were established well before the ninth century, those of western and central Mercia were later developments. It is argued in this paper that a crucial factor in these developments in Mercia was

These seven stories bring together some of the finest supernatural writing from and about Bedfordshire in Victorian times and in the years before the Great War: one-hundred-and-twenty pages in the second in the Pwca Ghost, Witch and Fairy Pamphlet series. Mrs J. H. Riddell tells of a secret duel and the resulting haunting of a Bedfordshire mansion. Ada Goodrich Freer solves the poltergeist mystery of Goldington Grange: follow the eyebrows... Jessie Adelaide Middleton does some of her own detective work on the spirit of the Wicked Lady Ferrers, who once rode the roads between Markyate and Dunstable. John Owen describes a terrifying night in the vicarage at Little Barford. George Hurst remembers Tim Goodwin, at Milton Ernest, and Tim’s unfortunate friendship with the Devil. A now long forgotten writer recalls a vision at a Christmas house party at Barton-Le-Clay. Then, Mrs Goodhall recounts her never-to-be-forgotten encounter on ‘the broad plateau of a high hill, between Willesden and Ravensden’. These stories are collected here together because they offer not just supernatural thrills, but real reading pleasure: the authors were all capable and often entertaining writers

In September 2017 Archaeological Solutions (AS) carried out an archaeological strip, map and sample excavation of land between 20 & 48 The Lane, Wyboston, Bedfordshire. A trial trench evaluation had previously been undertaken demonstrating the presence of post-medieval and modern activity which had disturbed earlier medieval deposits. The
excavation revealed medieval boundary ditches and pits, post-medieval
ditches possibly representing a small enclosure, and a 19th /20th century ditch, pond and activity associated with the infilling of a possibly natural depression. The site produced a very mixed artefactual and ecofactual assemblage, containing pottery representing all periods from the 11th
century onwards, and demonstrating a notable degree of residuality in several contexts. The character and dating of the archaeology is consistent with the site’s location within the postulated extent of the medieval settlement of Wyboston and with its use in the later post-medieval/early modern period as a close associated with a roadside farmstead.

A brief summary of an archaeo-topographical and geophysical survey of a riverside enclosure near Temspford, Bedfordshire. This site is tentatively suggested as the possible site of a documented Danish fortification at Tempsford, where the Danish forces were attacked and defeated by the army of Edward the Elder in AD917. There is a high potential for further investigation of the site.