The list which follows is intended to be an apparatus for the local historian, archaeologist or topographer who wishes to use this sort of evidence, in combination with place-names, archaeological findings, and landscape study, for a closer investigation of the settlement history of the area. Before the end of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom a hierarchy of churches was already well-established in eastern England. The oldest or more important churches in a shire wrere the old minsters, one of which was often the seat of a bishop. To them the inhabitants paid dues at Pentecost, and at other times. Central churches in large royal estates also enjoyed a position of some importance and controlled other churches within the estate. Then came ordinary parish churches, collecting tithes and administering all sacraments within circumscribed areas which would later be called their parishes, although within the same areas other, subordinate churches, usually called chapels, might, with the agreement of the owner of the ‘mother’ church of the parish, provide mass, but no other sacraments, to the inhabitants of a distant hamlet, or the dependants of an isolated manor house. Since hamlet churches, and even some manorial chapels, would presumably have become parish churches if the settlement they served had existed, or had been sufficiently populous, at the unknown point when the parochial system crystallised, a list of them will at least provide an order, if not a dated chronology, of settlements. I have already experimented with this in Lincolnshire, with results that seem useful, but this Bedfordshire exercise seems to have been less satisfactory, for few clear patterns of settlement emerge, and some problems are posed which at first sight seem insoluble. Why, for example, are the parishes of Sandy and Eaton Socon so large, and why, despite much Roman and earlier habitation, are there so few subordinate settlements of any size within them in the medieval period?

The physical nature of the area and its ancient topography or landscape, must be the first consideration in assessing the settlement patterns created by incoming continental settlers after the Roman era had ended. Central and north-east Bedfordshire is a wide plain drained by the Ouse and its tributary the Ivel, and nowhere higher than 200 feet above sea-level.

The Cistercian abbey of Woburn was endowed by Hugh de Bolebec, in 1145, with the manor of Woburn and its appurtenances, and with the church of Birchmore. There is no mention in the grant of a parish of Woburn, which presumably lay within Birchmore, and certainly by 1242, when a charter concerning the market and fair in Woburn was executed, it is clear that the only ecclesiastical provision there was a chapel. This chapel seems to have been regarded as private, or manorial; it was served by a stipendiary curate who was provided by the abbey, and was evidently completely under monastic control. Meanwhile the rectory of Birchmore had been appropriated to the abbey’s own use and no vicarage was ordained, the cure being served by a monk and a stipendiary priest, and after 1399 by a monk alone. When in 1519 the Bishop of Lincoln was visiting the southern parts of the diocese, the abbey’s proctor displayed this and other appropriations and seven years later in 1526, the “parish of Birchmore” was said to be served by a curate. These are, however, the last appearances of what was evidently a “lost settlement” and from now on the “chapel of Woburn” replaced it in all but the most formal of connections. The Cistercian order had successfully claimed exemption from episcopal jurisdiction but this cannot have protected from episcopal and archidiaconal visitation the parishioners of its appropriated churches, in those parishes where regular vicarages had been ordained. But in the “protected” churches, such as this, there clearly was no such arrangement and it was to deal with this situation that the act of 31 Henry VIII c.13, s. xxiii ordered that all such exempt churches and chapels … “shall from henceforth be within the jurisdiction and visitation of the Ordinary or Ordinaries, within whose diocese they or any of them be situate or set”. Woburn Abbey was dissolved in 1537 and within ten years Lord Russell had acquired “the rectories of Birchmore and Woburn”. From then on Woburn was treated as a perpetual curacy in the nomination of the Russells, whose curates were admitted by the Bishop or Commissary, while Birchmore was an impropriate rectory without cure of souls.

Few people have done more for those interested in the history of Bedfordshire than Joyce Godber. Born at Kempston, brought up at Willington, she has spent much of her life serving the county of her birth. As County Archivist from 1945 to 1968 she made sure that no comparable record office had a more complete coverage of its area’s sources, and none had collections more thoroughly catalogued and indexed. She had great satisfaction in seeing the office move in 1969 from its unbelievably cramped quarters in the Shire Hall to the well-designed and spacious premises in the new County Hall, towards which she had worked for many years. The Bedfordshire County Record Office had been the creation of Dr G. H. Fowler, and he was also founder and first editor of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, Miss Godber followed him here too, and was editor from 1945 to 1976. The editorial work, and her own contributions to the series ranging from the Newnham Cartulary to the charming life of the Marchioness Grey, took up most of her spare time for many years. Her work in both fields led to her comprehensive History of Bedfordshire, written during her last two years as County Archivist, which has become an essential tool for all studying any aspect of the county’s past.

As a small tribute to the work done by Joyce Godber over the years, a group of friends and colleagues considered that it would be appropriate to produce a volume of studies on aspects of Bedfordshire history, all of which expand some topic mentioned, but of necessity briefly, in her History of Bedfordshire.