Twenty local history enthusiasts stepped back in time on a walk organised by Bishop’s Stortford Library. The free event, led by experts from Bishop’s Stortford History Society, followed a route from St Michael’s Church to Waytemore Castle. Historian and Stortford resident Dr Gareth Oakland was among the group...
One of the best ways of finding out about a town is to look at the architecture. This tour of central locations in Bishop’s Stortford showed us that buildings can tell us so much about the way our ancestors lived.
Led by three genuine experts, we started at St Michael’s Church, the resting place of Edith the Beautiful, wife or lover of King Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king. The church has been extensively rebuilt, restored and added to since Edith’s time, but as we passed downhill through the Saxon lanes, we were asked to imagine a village of perhaps a hundred souls, perched on the hill above the swamps of the river below.
Fast-forward a few decades and Stortford witnessed the construction of its own castle used by Norman bishops to awe the Saxon farmers and keep them in line.
Between these two landmarks, we stopped off at the original High School, rebuilt and relaunched by Rev Francis Rhodes (1807–78) for 13 boarders and, behind its modern façade, largely the same building that his infamous son Cecil would have known.
Now Brookes hairdressers, it stood on the western edge of what was then a much larger Market Square, a place with at least four pubs and the town bawdy house at the Reindeer Inn, now occupied by the Tourist Information Centre. This establishment was run from the 1660s by Samuel Pepys’ “good friend” Betty Aynsworth.
I have spent my whole academic career studying statues to great men, but this was the first time that I’d heard of a brothel-keeper memorialised in a local road name, Aynsworth Avenue.
Our final stops were in the commercial heart of the town; the Corn Exchange, the mills, tanneries and curriers (a profession I had not heard of previously) and the many maltings that produced more malted barley than any other place in Britain. Bishop’s Stortford really did keep the country – and the Empire – alive through its production of safe, brewed drinks.
What was remarkable in this part of the tour was how many buildings have been reused, recycled, repurposed over the centuries and yet retain signs of their previous occupations. Stand at the corner of Bridge Street and Devoils Lane and look up – you might just see an old, painted advertisement for Stubbing the grocer.
The town has changed so much over the centuries. We were shown pictures of North Street when it was a mud track with horses and carriages, and then when there were just a few cars.
We looked around at the traffic-clogged street and tried to imagine what those Saxons, Normans, Tudors and Victorians would have made of the changes.
A thoroughly worthwhile couple of hours and worth jumping on the next one that the library organises.
Photos by Maureen Gould and Helen Miller