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Bedfordshire (Bedford, Luton, Dunstable, Leighton Buzzard, Biggleswade, Sandy)
Historical information about Bedfordshire
- Bedford was a Saxon town and stronghold. The Danes captured t and held it, were thrown out by Edward the Elder, but returned again in 915 and were routed with great slaughter. Ninety-five years later they burnt the town. The Normans had a strong castle there, and there is still a high mound behind the Swan Hotel to mark where the great keep once stood. There have been sieges of Bedford since then, but the bloodshed ended when Henry III hung William de Breaute, defender of the castle, in 1224; since when it has known peace save for that brief incursion of Prince Rupert and his cavaliers when they captured the town in 1642.
- Today Bedford is clean, brisk and mainly modern. Even the Bunyan Meeting House was rebuilt in 1849, and its magnificent bronze doors given by Francis, Ninth Duke of Bedford, date only from 1876.
- Sharnbrook, Shefford and Sandy are large villages or small towns, as your fancy pictures them, and each has that air of agricultural prosperity, the panorama of well-farmed fields and tidy woods, the glimpses of mansions in pleasant parks, the memories of Roman camps and roads. At Chicksands, near Shefford, is the old house of Chicksands Priory, standing in a large park and formerly owned by the Osborns, who have been lords of the Manor since 1576, when Peter Osborn was Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer of the Exchequer and Keeper of the Privy Purse to Edward VI. He was imprisoned in Queen Mary's reign, but under Queen Elizabeth rose in the esteem of Lord Burleigh, and became a High Commissioner for Ecclesiastical Affairs. And there, in an outspread map of neat and progressive towns, with their modern and unobtrusive industries; of old villages and straight Roman roads that knew the tramping legions and the dusty coaches; of villages that lived by milking stool and plough; of market gardens that send their strings of lorries thundering through the night to London; and of great houses sitting in ancient parks, some, alas now forlorn and cast on lean days, you have a picture of this unobtrusive English county through which, placid and peaceful, winds the broad and reedy Ouse, the river that is alike the backbone and the wealth-giver of these flat lands and the gentle hills which flow down from empty skylines.