Buckingham

London, Liverpool, Birmingham, et al, are wonderful places full of interesting things and lots to do, but I think the villages and towns of the UK are my favorite places to visit. It's been my experience that people are happy to strike up a conversation and are usually quite proud of their hometowns and their history, and history is around every corner in the UK! So it was that we set off for Buckingham on the day of the big market and food festival. They regularly have a market with greengrocers and baked goods, etc., but there was also to be an antiques and collectables market and the yearly celebration of the foods of Buckingham. Sadly, the antiques and collectibles were the equivalent of what you'd find at a flea market or car boot sale and the food festival was mostly a sugar festival, with every candy maker and baker luring the children with mile-high frosting and gummy bears.

Lest you think that Buckingham was a disappointment, Let me talk about the highlights of my visit. I've become quite a history buff and Buckingham delivers that in spades. My first stop was the Buckingham Chantry Chapel, a National Trust site, and the oldest building in Buckingham.

It's now a secondhand book shop and cafe run by volunteers of the National Trust. Here's where pride in the town's history comes in. I was approached by one of the volunteers who asked if I needed help finding a book. I told him I was there to learn about the building and he then shared his vast knowledge of its past with me. The original building dates from the 12th century when it was a hospital for the poor and infirm. It was later converted to a chantry chapel. The volunteer explained to me what a chantry chapel is. In days gone by, the church taught that if you were righteous, after you died you went to purgatory for your soul to be purified and attain the holiness necessary for heaven. The rich could provide an endowment for priests to sing masses for the chantry founder's soul, thus speeding up the process. Archdeacon Matthew de Stratton endowed this chapel to have masses sung in perpetuity. One wonders what his earthly life was like that a man of the cloth thought he needed that. At any rate, around 1421 the chapel was converted to a school which taught poor boys. (Presumably the Archdeacon had made it to heaven by then.) It fell into disrepair and was rebuilt in 1471. Interestingly, some of the original Norman building remains, chiefly, the Norman door.

The design on the arch around the door is typically Norman. In 1540, the building became the home of the Royal Latin School, a school for boys. At some point in all the rebuilding, the building was divided in two. The front half was the school and the back half was the residence of the Headmaster of the school.

This is where the story gets really interesting (to me, anyway.) In the 1670s, Roger Griffiths was appointed headmaster of the school and moved into the residence with his wife, Lucy, and daughter, Mary. She was educated in the school - the only girl to have attended the Royal Latin School until the Education Reform Bill of 1907. Her father died in a smallpox epidemic but her mother stayed on at the school as a teacher. The new headmaster, Thomas Dalby, started an affair with Mary. In fact, the headmaster's house burned down during a night of passion between Dalby and Mary. Far from being humiliated by this, Mary seems to have been emboldened because she moved to London. There she met and married George Pix, a London merchant tailor. Her Buckingham education was not wasted however, because Mary became an avid reader of history and romances and wrote a play, "Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks" which took London by storm. She went on to write many historical plays, comedies and farces and is now regarded as Buckingham's most famous writer. There's even a poster of her in one of the local coffee shops.

Back to the Chantry: There are still bits of the original chantry intact in the building

including the aumbrey, a small cupboard for the storage of chalices, plates, books, etc.,

and the piscina, used for disposing of holy water and washing the chalices and plates from the Eucharist.

I believe the windows are of the Norman era as well.

The volunteer shift was ending, so I said my thanks and went along to my next stop, the Buckingham Old Gaol, a museum and tourist information center.

The gaol (jail) was built in 1748; the circular bit in the front was added about a hundred years later as a dwelling for the new superintendent. Over the years it has been used as a police station, a fire engine house, an ammunition store, a public toilet, a cafe, and an antiques shop (which is still there, around the back.)

As in most local museums, there are displays of local artifacts, including hoards of coins found buried around Buckingham, fossils from the area, and a very special medieval coin, the Half Angel, a rare coin from the reign of Richard III.

The Buckingham Mace, which dates to the Commonwealth period (1649-1660) and is still used on ceremonial occasions, is on display. It has been refurbished and reguilded several times, most recently in 2003.

On the raised flat top is the Royal Stewart coat of arms. The crown on top was given to Buckingham by Charles the second in recognition of the support given to his father, Charles I (pre-beheading.)

The craft of bobbin lace making was brought to Buckingham by Catherine of Aragon in about 1517. Belgian and French Protestants went to the UK as religious refugees in the 16th and 17th centuries; many of them were lacemakers, so Buckingham was a perfect spot for them to have landed. Lacemaking became a thriving cottage industry in until the 19th century when lacemaking machines drove the prices down.

The part of the building that held the prison cells now features displays of seemingly random items as well as stories of memorable prisoners.

Another one of Buckingham's famous daughters is Flora Thompson who wrote "Lark Rise to Candleford" which you may know from the BBC series which was shown in the US on PBS.

The bus schedule being what it was, we left Buckingham sooner than I wanted. I hope to get back there next time we're in Oxfordshire. On the bus back we were treated to some bits of topiary on the side of the road.