Finding Quarrendon

TRACING A LATE MEDIEVAL BUCKINGHAMSHIRE VILLAGE THROUGH ITS DOCUMENTS

By Garry Marshall

Published May 2021  |  Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society

Across Buckinghamshire there are many sites like Quarrendon. Once a thriving village surrounded by open fields, with a moated manor house held by the Earl of Warwick, today there are only grassy earthbanks, silted-up channels and a ruined wall where the chapel once stood. Busy Aylesbury is only three miles away.

But here Garry Marshall brings Quarrendon alive again. In a vivid demonstration of the art of historical research he traces the villagers through the annual harvest of peas and corn, the sale of sheepskins and wool, repairs to the manor roof after gales and to the bridges after floods.

Here are straying animals and empty cottages after ‘the pestilence’ – and  the two shillings spent on cheese and nine shillings on ale ‘for those who came to help with the harvest’. This is an account of how manor court and account rolls, surviving in an Oxford archive, have been made to reveal the lives of Buckinghamshire people across a gap of 600 years

Booklet – 36 pages, pamphlet, with 16 colour illustrations – ISBN 978-0-9957177-8-7

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