Published in Windlesora 10 (1991)
© WLHG
It is kind of you to allow me this opportunity of sending good wishes to Windlesora and the Group on their tenth birthday. I have always been impressed by both the quality and quantity of Windsor local history, and it has taken me a little time to adjust to the wider boundaries of Berkshire. Although Windsor was once its county town, Berkshire impinges so little upon local life that Windsorians may see it as no more than an administrative abstraction.
The old boundaries of the Royal County live on in my present appointment, where this archdeaconry has a continuous history of nearly a thousand years. It is older than either the Diocese of Oxford or its original home, the Diocese of Salisbury (which was still Ramsbury when we began), and the Bishop of Reading could perhaps be considered the spiritual descendant of the medieval mitred abbots of Reading. He and I have the pastoral care of an area larger than fourteen English dioceses, and more populous than eleven. Four of our ten Rural Deaneries (Abingdon, Wallingford, Wantage and the Vale of the white Horse) are now in the Administrative county of Oxford.
Our historic boundary to the north and east is the River Thames, which protects our flank for most of the hundred miles from Buscot to Old Windsor. This was the frontier between Wessex (which is us) and Mercia (the rest of the Oxford Diocese). We were invaded by Offa, King of Mercia, as recently as 758 and then laid waste by the Danes in 1006. Civil War still surfaces when there are proposals to unite neighbouring parishes across ancient boundaries. However, once you begin to fiddle with such natural frontiers as the Thames, you start to wonder whether there is any point in having Berkshire at all; it begins to unravel like an old pullover. The sandy area beyond Bracknell is akin to Surrey; the flat lands from Windsor to Reading are like Middlesex (only that has been abolished); the Loddon valley is indistinguishable from Hampshire; the Downs beyond Newbury have clearly escaped from Wiltshire; and Vale of the White Horse is like a bit of Gloucestershire and much of the Abingdon area is pure Cotswold.
The best guide to Berkshire is not Pevsner but Murray’s Architectural Guide, compiled by John Betjeman and John Piper in 1949. They say that if there is one part of the county that can safely be described as Berkshire and not partaking of the characteristics of the bordering counties, it is that triangle with Tidmarch at its eastern apex and Wantage to Hungerford as its western base line. ‘Here are small villages with large fields, tidy beech and oak copses, winding lanes through chalk or sand, hedges with holly trees, occasional heathy commons with larch and chestnuts and brakcen, and many box hedges in cottage gardens.” The only modem intrusions into that idyllic triangle are Harwell, the M4 and the A34, and I suppose the new county boundary between Oxfordshire and Berkshire.
We have no vast churches, except St George’s Chapel (which is right on the edge) and our predecessors pulled down the great abbeys of Reading and Abingdon, thus ensuring that we are unlikely ever to have a cathedral of our own. We have no great houses or historic families, apart from Windsor Castle and its residents. The land is not very fertile, except in the Vale of the White Horse; the biscuits have moved away, and there are no minerals of importance.
On the other hand, we do have the Great Western Railway (which I am glad to see is also the favourite of the Revd Wilbert Awdry) and the Kennet and Avon Canal. Some of our churchwardens are regularly listed by the Sunday Times as among the two hundred richest men in Britain. We have atomic energy, silicon chips, breweries and champion racehorses, besides a near-monopoly of the weather industry.
There is so much quiet distinction about the Royal County of Berkshire that Windsorians should also see themselves as citizens of no mean county. Once the Local Government Boundary Commission has abolished Humberside, it might consider reinstating the ancient boundaries of Berkshire. Perhaps the matter will be resolved by transferring administration to the districts and leaving the counties as a focus for local patriotism. Until that happens, the Archdeaconry of Berkshire will go on doing its best to maintain the continuity developed during the thousand years of its own existence.
David N. Griffiths
Archdeacon of Berkshire
Windsor Local History Group 