Buckden, United Kingdom

Domesday Book mentions 58 households at Buckden, suggesting a population of 200–300. It states there were 19 ploughlands there in 1086, with capacity for a further one. Apart from that, it had 84 acres (34 hectares) of meadows, 3,784 acres (1,531 hectares) of woodland and a water mill. The total manor tax assessment was 20 guilders.

By 1086 the village had a church and priest. The land was then owned by the Bishop of Lincoln, who may already have had a house there. He certainly had one when the Bishop held court by the mid–12th century. In 1227 Henry III granted the Bishop the right to a deer park at Buckden; by the time of a survey in 1647 this covered 425 acres and contained some 200 deer. By the late 17th century the deer were gone and the land enclosed as fields. The deer park lay to the west of the parish.

Buckden later had two manors. The larger was Buckden and the Members, whose lords were the bishops of Lincoln except in brief periods of the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries. The smaller, Buckden Brittains, was the home of the Briton (or Le Briton) family in the 13th century, but later changed hands many times. By the early 19th century, about 1,200 acres (490 hectares) were owned by the manor of Buckden and the Members and about 225 acres (91 hectares) by the manor of Buckden Brittains.

English kings who stayed at Buckden Palace were Henry III in 1248, Edward I in 1291 and Richard III in 1483. Henry VIII sent Catherine of Aragon to Buckden Palace after the annulment of their marriage (an issue known as the King's Great Matter), from July 1533 to May 1534. He and his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, stayed there in 1541. On Friday 18 June 1641, "hundreds of women and boys, armed with Daggers and Javelins, in a very tumultuous and riotous Manner" entered some land at Buckden owned by the Bishop of Lincoln and "turned in a great herd of cattle".

Buckden's site on the Great North Road made it a popular coaching stop in the 18th century. It had four coaching inns. The Lion dates from the 15th century and was enlarged in the 18th. The George Inn, with its courtyard and forge, was remodelled in the 18th century. The Vine dated from the first half of the 17th century and was rebuilt in the 18th to include stables and its own brewery. The Spread Eagle, originating in the 17th century, was altered in the 18th; it had stabling and paddocks. A schedule of 1839 shows six express coaches heading north every day, to Boston, Leeds, Lincoln and York, and as many heading south to London. The presence of elegant Georgian houses in Church Street and the High Street (the former Great North Road) reflects the prosperity brought by its strategic position on the coaching route.

In 1854, just 15 years later, Buckden was called "a quiet insignificant place compared to what it was in coaching times", with the advent of the railways. The population, having steadily risen from 869 in 1801 to a peak of 1,291 in 1841, fell to 995 by 1911.

The open fields in Buckden were enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1813. In 1842 a girls' school was opened (a boys' school having existed for over a century) and a new school building built in 1871. A post mill erected in 1830 worked until 1888, when an auxiliary steam engine was installed. The mill was demolished in 1893. Domesday mentions a water mill on the Great Ouse; this was rebuilt about 1850 and converted to steam power in the 1890s. It ran until 1965, and from then until the 1980s was used for crop storage. By 2015, it had been turned into housing.

In the second half of the 20th century, new housing estates in Buckden led to a marked increase in the population.