Ickford History
Extracted from the Ickford Village Appraisal.
Ancient history
The name Ickfordgives quite a lot of clues to the origins of the village. It is probably a British name, predating the Romans and more than 2,000 years old. Some Roman artefacts have been found in the vicinity. It is likely that the Romans would have settled the river to make their way up the Thames and its tributaries to find suitable places to settle. Ickford is unlikely to have been little more than a small collection of homes, perhaps no more than an extended family unit.

Between the seventh and ninth centuries, the Anglo-Saxons came to settle the sparsely populated area and created the villages of Worminghall, Shabbington, Tiddington and many others around Bernwode forest. Some villages like Oakley and Wheatley were cleared from scrub and woodland to be cultivated by the heavy Saxon ploughs that were necessary for the local heavy clay soils.

The first documentary record of Ickford is in the Doomsday book of 1086. Estimates based on the record suggest that by this time Ickford was probably much the same size as the modern parish today. In the following centuries change would have been slow. Was the village affected by the Black Death, as so many villages were? Was it isolated enough to avoid contagion? We may never know. What we can see in many of the fields around the village are the characteristic Medieval ridge and furrow produced by the heavy ploughs that were drawn by teams of up to eight oxen.

 Top Recent centuries
Remnants of the typical three field system characteristic of the Midlands area can be seen in local nineteenth century maps but there are very few documentary clues to the fate of the village until the end of the eighteenth century. The village appears to have gone through a period of economic improvement in the mid-seventeenth century - the replacement of the origianl wooden bridges by the solid stone versions that still exist are a testament to the enduring quality of the work.

The pace of change was set to increase in the late 1700's. The typical style of local farming was one of small farms run by yeoman farmers who rented their land from absentee landlords and produced enough to subsist on with a little extra to sell at market. Whilst this was economically very inefficient it represented a way of life that had long been familiar. Much of the country was undergoing change too, as a result of the Enclosure Acts, bringing to an end the large open field system. Land was redistributed in a more efficient way into more compact farms. Although there was no Enclosure Act for Ickford it is clear that land was reorganised and this meant that the yeomen farmers were gradually to disappear as the size of the farms increased and the number of the farmers decreased. By the 1840's this process was well developped.

 Top Tradesman
The earliest records of bakers in the village do not occur until after the Nepoleonic wars. The significance of this lies in the economic situation of national and local farm labourers. Not only were they being cut off from the traditional meals with their farming employers but high prices were a restricting factor. The meant that the combined costs of flour and fuel were too great for home production to compete with larger scale commercial output (albeit only on a village scale), which created the opportunity for local bakers. The first was John SIlver in 1838 and 1851 the families of Edward Kimbell and John Oakley were both active in the trade. Similarly, the introduction of butchers had occurred with John Freeman in 1834 and later George Herring who combined this with his farming role, suggesting that it was not possible to sustain it as a full time activity. Meat consumption appears then to have been at a modest level.

There had been a professional fishing family resident in the village since at least 1761 and probably long before that too. The river Thame, which runs through the south of the parish, allowed netting and fish traps to be operated. There are no existing fish ponds in Ickford but examples can be found in Shabbington. Fish had been a useful addition to the restricted diet since medieval times and beyond, particularly during the winter months when cattle had been slaughtered and salted. The last record of a professional fisherman is that of William Becketts in 1845. After this period, improving methods of food distribution and less pressure on food prices may have meant the end of full-time fishing as an occupation.

 Top Artisans
The role of the blacksmith was very important to rural life. This was the source of all mechanical and farrier services. Implements for farming and domestic use were made and repaired at the local forge. With growing industrialisation mass-produced goods replaced individually crafted items.

Showmaking had been a regular occupation in the village although the people involved varied considerably. Nationally, shoemakers accounted for 133,000 adult male individuals according to the 1831 census, representing the largest single group of artisans. The number of shoemakers employed in Ickford suggests that there were too many to satisfy just local demand; the 1851 census records that there were six shoemakers, two binders and two assistants, when the population of Ickford was 398. Elizabeth Garner is recorded as a shoemaker emplying four men. It is likely that she and her son manufactured shoes mainly for sale to wholesalers, given the closeness of the market town of Thame (5 miles) and Oxford (12 miles). It has been shown that craft employment is shoemaking declined after the 1850's due to emergence of mass production, an increased standard of living and growing awareness of fashion. Elizabeth Garner is the only boot and shoemaker listed in the 1853 Kelly's Directory and by 1862 John Garner and Willaim Bushnell are both recorded as shoemakers, suggesting the reduction in larger scale enterprise in Ickford too.

 Top Long Term Decline
During the 1870's extensive wheat farming on the Great Plains which brought cheap imports to Britain created an exodus of labour from the countryside. Much of the labour force moved to the towns and cities that grew rapidly during the rest of the century. In Ickford the need to feed the population of the capital, and the presence of the railway at Tiddington, created opportunities for dairy farms to supply the expanding market. It was not a profitable enterprise as the local vicar explained when he wrote to the weathly residents of west London at the turn of the century asking for their charitable contributions. The milk that arrives on your morning breakfast table is too expensive to buy for the farm labourers who produce it. In fact from the 1870's there was a steady decline in the villahe population, which lasted for almost a hundred years. It was not until after the Second World War when new housing was built in the village that the population began to rise. Without the new developments the village would have dwindled to a hamlet.
 Top Into the 20th Century
Up to the 1030's, most the of employment in the village was related to agriculture. As mechanisation was limited, the need for farm labourers continued. However, in the 1930's the William Morris car factory was opened at Cowley, Oxford. This offered better wages than working on the land and men began to work outside the village, catching the train or bus from Tiddington or travelling by bicycle. There were only three cars in the village at that time.

Until the arrival of automated machinery in 1947, milking was still done by hand on the six farms in the village. Farmers took the milk to Tiddington station by horse and cart to catch the London milk train. Milk production increased with the introduction of refrigerated bulk tanks until changes in Government regulations, after which beef production became more common in Ickford and the surrounding villages. Two of the beef farms remain in the village: Whirlpool Farm (approximately 130 acres) has around 100 beef cattle and Oak Tree Farm now only has a few beef cattle. Other farms has disappeared - Farm Close stands on the site of a former dairy farm which had up to 170 cows in the 1960's to mid 1970's. Peacehaven Farm was also a dairy farm (until 1982) and later a beef farm (to 1988) but for the last 10 years has been Ivan Dutton's workshop for restoring Bugattis and other cars from all over the world, employing some 15 people.

Mains water and electricity were brought into the village in 1934. Until then, each house in the village had a well and many of these still exist, although only a few are still functional. Mains sewerage was introduced in 1953; before this everyone had a 'privy' at the bottom of the garden. The Old Bakehouse was, as the name suggests, the village bakery. After this, it became the Post Office and shop, owned and run by Mrs. Tapping. Emma Neil kept a shop in The Turn and also bought goods from Oxford every Saturday. When she retired, the shop was taken over by George Kingaby, and Mrs. Simmins of 4 Bridge Road took over the carrier business. The train station at Tiddington was closed in 1961.

The first Scout Troop in Ickford was in 1932, meeting in the Parish Room in Church Road. There were two patrols, the Owls and the Peewits. Brownies began in the village in 1973 (in response to the fuel crisis!); before that the Brownies had to travel to Oakley. A joint Cub and Brownie pack was formed in 1978, with activities including an annual pantomime, a camp at the village hall and the planting of bulbs around the village which flower every spring. The pack split into separate untis when additional leaders volunteered. In 1986, a Beaver colony was formed and a Scout troop for girls and boys (one of the first in the country) was formed in 1991, but both have since faltered as leaders have come and gone. Guides joined the village in 1995, Rainbows in 1998 and the Cubs reopened in 1999 after a spell of closure. These groups together with the Brownies flourish in the village at present.

Since the 1950's the population, the number of and quality of housing has grown steadily. The church, village hall, the village shop, two pubs and the school all help to sustain the local community that has survived and now prospers after more than a thousand years.

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