Introduction

Cardington Green in March 2007 

Landscape

Cardington lies in the flood plain of the River Great Ouse, except near the boundary with Old Warden at the south-east where it lies on a clay escarpment. It is comparatively low-lying , the highest point near the Old Warden boundary being just 276 feet above sea level.

Prehistory

Gravel extraction in the 19th century unearthed evidence of human habitation in the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) before about 12000 BC. No material from the Middle Stone Age or Mesolithic (12000-3000 BC) has been found in Cardington but it is known that the area itself was inhabited as the ice sheets from the last Ice Age retreated north.

From about 3000 BC, in the New Stone Age or Neolithic men began to settle down and become farmers. A causewayed camp has been determined to have existed between Chapel End and Sandy Road, from aerial photography. This feature is now ploughed out. The exact function of causewayed camps is not certain but they do not appear to have been permanently occupied, but seem to be places visited occasionally for social interaction, ritual, exchange of goods or some combination of some or all of these. The feature at Cardington had three concentric circular ditches.

Another problematic neolithic feature may have occupied the north-east corner of the parish, near the river. A cursus has been identified here, a feature with long parallel banks with outside ditches, which have squared or curved ends. The name cursus was given to them in the 18th century when they were thought to be Roman running or chariot racing tracks. A ritual use is tentatively ascribed to them, which may perhaps have had an athletic or processional element.

The Bronze Age is held to have begun around 2000 BC as bronze working was gradually introduced. This culture change is accompanied by a new type of pottery called the beaker, and beaker ware was discovered between Fenlake and Cardington in 1949. A leaf shaped flint dagger was found associated with the beakers and with skeletal remains.

At some time after 900 BC iron working techniques began to appear, heralding what is known as the Iron Age. Cardington has produced plentiful evidence of Iron Age occupation just before and during the Roman Conquest from 43 AD. A site was identified north-west of Harrowden in 1971 and another on the Eastcotts border with Wilshamstead near Cotton End. Iron Age and Romano-British occupation of the causewayed camp site has been identified. An Iron Age site which lasted from the late 1st century BC through to the Roman invasion was discovered between Exeter Wood and Little Warden Wood in 1976.

Romano-British Period (43-410 AD)

A coin of the Emperor Septimius Severus (193-211) was found in Cotton End and Roman pottery has been discovered by field walking in 1982, including one piece of orange Samian ware as well as more locally produced pottery (a kiln site has been discovered at Willington on the banks of the river). Near Hillfoot Farm 2nd and 3rd century pottery was discovered in 1976 and fine jugs and a face mask from the second century in 1978. A second century lime kiln was discovered  in 1977 near Mill Farm on a site extending back to the late Iron Age.

A number of Roman roads have been tentatively identified in the Cardington area, one of which passed through the site of the lime kiln noted above. A number of straight, parallel crop marks occur just north of the village which may, or may not, be roads. One of these roads runs straight along the Cardington-Cople boundary.

Dark Ages (410-1066)

Early Anglo-Saxon settlements, built in wood and later overbuilt by successive generations are always hard to identify and none can be so identified in Cardington. It is possible likely that Cardington had an Anglo-Saxon church and it may have been on the current site as masonry identified as Anglo-Saxon was found during restoration of the building in the early twentieth century. An Anglo-Saxon coffin lid of the 11th century was also found in the church and was subsequently built into the east wall of the south chapel. 

Domesday Book (1086)

The name Cardington means Caerda's People's Farm. The earliest mention of the parish is in the Domesday Book of 1086 (as Chernetone) where a number of different land holdings are recorded. Hugh de Beauchamp, held 6½ hides| and two parts of a virgate|. This manor included 12 villagers and 6 smallholders. It included a mill and a hundred eels and parkland for 120 pigs. It had been worth £11 in 1066, when it was owned by 13 Freemen, but after the depredations caused by William I's army moving north to crush rebellion it was worth just £7 when Hugh acquired it. Hugh also held another manor in Cardington, as tenant of the Countess Judith. This consisted of just over 3 hides, 12 villagers, 2 smallholders and 3 slaves. It had been held by Azelin from Earl Tosti in 1066 (Tosti was the brother of King Harold II, who was killed fighting against his brother and for King Harald of Norway at Stamford Bridge in 1066). When Azelin held it, the manor was worth £2, which had been halved by the time that Judith acquired it. This later manor lay half in Harrowden (Eastcotts parish) and by 1086 Judith had given the land to the cannons of St.Paul's, Bedford., which became Newnham Priory about 1180, with its grange at Fenlake Barns. The two manors together, then contained 24 villagers, 8 smallholders and 3 slaves - 35 in all. If this figure is multiplied by four to allow for women and children it gives a population of somewhere around 140.

Manors

As noted above, Cardington Manor itself was held by Hugh de Beauchamp in 1086. He also held a considerable number of other manors in North Bedfordshire and it was probably for him the King William II (1087-1100) created the Barony of Bedford. The manor remained in the de Beauchamp family until the aftermath of the Battle of Evesham in 1265 when John de Beauchamp, who had supported rebel earl Simon de Montfort against King Henry III had his estates broken up. Cardington was given to Joan, daughter of Ela de Beauchamp. She married first Michael Picot then Ralph Paynell and it was the Picot family who held the manor for the next century and more until, some time around or after 1400 the Picot heiress, Dorothy, married James, son of the Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir William Gascoigne (d.1419). Their son, another Sir William, was Controller of the Household of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York and chief minister in the early years of King Henry VIII (1509-1547). Interestingly another of Wolsey's chief servants, his master of Horse, was Sir John Gostwick from nearby Willington.

The Manor remained with the Gascoigne family until the last part of the sixteenth century and at some point must have passed or been sold to a Thomas Colby as he was arrested for debt in 1593 and the Manors of Cardington and Eastcotts were both seized and conveyed in 1616 to Sir Arthur Savage for life, and were then to pass to Sara Smithes for her dowry. In 1671 Sir William Palmer is obliquely noted as Lord of the manor in a suit in which he is described as owning the mills thereabouts for "time out of mind", the mill, of course, being property of the Manor. Charles Palmer was noted as lord in 1693 and another Charles as holding court there in 1749. The manor house was sold in 1769 by William Nailor Blundell and Mary Nailour, widow, to local man Samuel Whitbread, founder of the famous London brewery. The manorial rights were sold to him by Dorothy Palmer in 1779. Samuel Whitbread died in 1796 and was buried in Cardington Church. His son Samuel II was a member of parliament and patron of Drury Lane Theatre, who killed himself in 1815. The manor remained in the ownership of the Whitbread Family, who still live at their seat of nearby Southill Park.

In the years after 1086 Cardington supported a number of other manors. Wake Manor became the property of Ida, elder daughter of Ela de Beauchamp, and thus sister of Joan who was granted Cardington Manor. She married John de Steyngreve and the manor, with another Wake Manor, in Bromham, passed down through the Steyngreve family, then to the Patishulls and Wakes but seems to have ceased to exist some time after the death of Sir Thomas Wake in 1458, it is possible that the Gascoignes bought it and absorbed it into Cardington Manor.

John de Beauchamp, who lost Cardington Manor in 1265, has a sister, Beatrice and she formed another manor in Cardington. Her son-in-law, John de Botetourt succeeded her as Lord, the manor passing through the Latimer family and the Nevills of Raby [Leicestershire] until Sir John Nevill, Lord Latimer, died in 1577 when it passed to his daughter Dorothy, Countess of Exeter. The last mention of this manor occurs on the death of David, Earl of Exeter and great nephew of Dorothy in 1643. The family continued to hold the land, despite the extinction of the manor, Exeter Wood being purchased from the then Earl in 1879 by Samuel Charles Whitbread.

There were two other manors in the ancient parish, that of Cotes alias Cotton alias Eastcotts alias Cardington Cotton End and that of Sopwell Priory [Hertfordshire] which was also in Eastcotts.

Sudden Death

Volume XLI of Bedfordshire Historical Records Society series is a set of translations by R.F.Hunnisett of medieval coroner's rolls for the county; entry 59 reads: "About midday on 3 Sep 1270 Amice daughter of William le Lorimer of Bedford went into "Wilputtesburne" in Cardington field by Cardington wood to gather corn. Thunder and lightning occurred and she was struck and fell and immediately died…"

Charities

Cardington has benefited from a number of charities, perhaps the earliest being that created by the will of Thomas Forster in 1647, this established £5 per annum to be given to the poor of Cardington. Other money charities included 5/- a year based on a cottage in Wilshamstead and was established by John Canning Howard and 10/- per annum from Whiteman's Charity. Later, in 1888, Rev.Maurice Farrell left £100 in stock to fund a distribution of clothing amongst the poor.

Stephen Whitbread, in his will of 1697, had left a cottage to be occupied by a poor widow of the parish. This became two cottages when the original burned down and was rebuilt by John Howard, the philanthropist and prison reformer. A more important housing charity is the Whitbread Almshouse Charity, established by Samuel I in 1788, in which four houses were erected by him on the Green for "poor decayed housekeepers, widowers, widows or single persons, regular attendants on public worship, of sixty years of age or upwards, who had resided in the parish for twenty years or upwards; the number of inmates to be not less than four or more than eight. 

From the Nineteenth Century

The hamlets of Harrowden, Cotton End and Fenlake formed part of Cardington until 1866 when they were formed into a separate civil parish called Eastcotts, though remaining in the Church of England parish of Cardington (except for a small portion transferred to the new parish of St.Michael & All Angels, Bedford in 1955). Fenlake was transferred to the Borough of Bedford in 1934. The civil parish of Cardington today [Mar 2007] is a long strip of land running from the river Great Ouse at Priory Business Park and the sewerage farm south-east as far as Little Warden Wood. The only settlements now within the parish is Cardington village itself along with Pasture Farm, Hillfoot Farm and the Gables.

Population

Cardington has never been a particularly populous village, but numbers have dwindled considerably over the years to a point where the modern population is three fifths of that two hundred years ago; the figures do not include those in the former township, now separate parish, of Eastcotts:

1801: 508;  1851: 574;  1901: 433;  1951: 333;  2001: 315

The lowest number of inhabitants ever recorded for Cardington in a census was 249 in 1991, the highest 606 in 1821.