Medieval Leighton Buzzard

Leighton Buzzard lies beside the River Ouzel, at a bridging point, on gently rising ground above the level of flooding. The original town would have consisted of the High Street, which was laid out ascending this low rise with the Market Square at the top, two main roads - North Street and Lake Street leading north-east and south-east respectively and the area around the bridge (originally called Lovel End) and the church, unusually at the bottom of the slope.

The Domesday Book states that a market was held in Leighton and it may well have origins in the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon period. It is not known where it was held. No evidence exists to suggest that the market of 1086 was not in the present Market Square, but it may have been elsewhere, closer to the bridge over the River Ouzel and around the church, for example, and it is possible that the present site may have been a piece of early medieval town planning. This may help to explain why All Saints church is not at the top of the slope and in the prime location of the town, as would normally be expected - perhaps the prime location, the market, shifted in the 12th century but the church, naturally, remained in its established position.

The typical layout of an early medieval market town consisted of burgage plots, that is to say strips of land running back directly from and at right angles to the High Street and/or Market Place. Despite such burgage plots, Leighton Buzzard never achieved borough status and thus never had burgesses (freemen of a borough who acted as officials). Perhaps it would be better to refer to 'shoprows' rather than burgage plots as the term shoprow was used in a document of 1491: "…one void piece of land lying in the Shoprows in Leighton on the south part between the Highway on the north part and the Highway near the Motehall leading to the Hethe". This unusual description seems to refer to a piece of land on the "island site", called Middle Row, in the Market Square - the Motehall, or Moot Hall, being the later Town Hall, itself later a Fire Station. The nearby Market Cross is 15th century, though it may stand on the site of an earlier one.

Leighton Buzzard was clearly a reasonably thriving market town in the early Middle Ages but must, like everywhere else in Europe, have received a set back with the advent of the Black Death. This came to England in 1348, the first case being recorded in Melcombe Regis, now Weymouth in Dorset. It had reached Leighton Buzzard by the next year as evidenced by the deaths of two successive vicars of All Saints in that year.

Grove Priory had its roots in a gift of £56 arising out of the Royal Manor of Leighton given by Henry I (1100-1135) in 1129 to the French Abbey of Fontevrault in Anjou. In 1164 his grandson Henry II (1154-1189) gave the whole of the manor to Fontevrault and it gradually came to be known as the Manor of Grove, later called the Manor of Leighton Alias Grovebury. The site lay in Bedfordshire and, despite the name, had no presence in the Buckinghamshire parish of Grove just across the River Ouzel. The site lay south of the modern A505 and Grovebury Farm in an area of sand quarrying.

Grove Priory only seems to have functioned as a priory in the 13th century (although there is an isolated mention of Richard de Greneburgh, Prior of Grove in 1333). Fontevrault Abbey was a double site, containing both monks and nuns under separate Abbot and Abbess. Grove, however, consisted solely of monks. The priory church seems to have been dedicated to Saint John as mentioned in a Roll of the Justices in Eyre in their visit to Bedford in 1227 when a groom fell from a cart and died and the price of the horse which caused the accident was given to the "Chapel of Saint John at Grove" [Bedfordshire Historical Records Society Volume III]. The men's chapel at Fontevrault was also dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist. The prior is usually simply called the Prior of Leighton from 1194 to 1240 or the Prior of Grove from 1242 to 1297.

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