The Lord Of The Manor Was Colonel's Foible (24 June 1977)

I spent an interesting half-hour or so at the recent Jubilee Exhibition of village relics at Little Brickhill.  The exhibition was held in the former village school which is now the community centre, and the organisers could be complimented on bringing together a very nice assemblage of items from times gone by.

Two items in particular attracted my attention.  One was a collection of broken clay and terra cotta tobacco pipes which had been dug up in the garden of a local inn or former inn.

This exhibition at Little Brickhill was the first time I had seen specimens brought together and put on show.  Some were believed to have belonged to Irish navvies who had passed that way while engaged on rebuilding Watling Street.

The exhibition also had an interesting map of the land and property held by Lt-Col A Finlay during the early part of this century.  It embraced most of the parish on the Great Brickhill side of the Watling Street.

Col Finlay had a foible.  He like to be known as the lord of the manor, although the lordship had ceased with the parish’s Inclosure Award of 1797.  To that end he built the house which he called “The Manor” although the former manor house was probably situated elsewhere.  However, he seems to have accepted some of the lord’s traditional functions in a spirit of noblesse oblige.

Among his varied interests I note that he was at one and the same time the chairman of the parish council, chairman of the school managers, a Fenny Stratford magistrate, a member of the county education committee, treasurer of the North Bucks Conservative Association, president of the Bletchley Station Cricket club (which in 1907 won the LNWR cup for teams composed solely of railwaymen), the original master of St Martin’s Lodge of Freemasons, a member of the Royal Arch Lodge, and an honorary member of the Sir Philip Duncombe Lodge of Oddfellows.  He also had the only telephone in Little Brickhill – number Fenny Stratford 28.

Little Btickhill has had one or two famous lords and chief landowners, a great number of average ones and just one infamous one.  Journalism being what it is I will now tell the story of the infamous one, compiled partly from the late Lt-Col J P Wyness’s booklet on Little Brickhill and partly from another source, and it goes like this:

Two great landowning families in the 14th, 15^th and 16^th centuries were the Brocas family and the Pexall family.  They were united by marriage and some of their early tombs are in Westminster Abbey.  One is that if(sic) Sir Bernard Brocas, who died in 1395.  He was a devoted follower of the Black Prince and bought the estate of John de Cheddington, comprising the manors of Cheddington and Horton and lands in Slapton, Dagnall, Marsworth, Ivinghoe, Aston Clinton and Pitstone.

But his son, Bernard the second, rose against Henry IV in support of Richard II and was beheaded for his pains.  The families then split.  The Paxalls(sic) took the holdings in Hampshire and the Brocases the holdings in Beds and Bucks.  Later, Edward VI granted leave to the then holder of Little Brickhill manor to alienate it to one, Robert Brocas.  He was followed by his son, Bernard, who reunited with the Pexalls by marrying one of them.  The fruit of that alliance was named Pexall Brocas and he is the villain of our tale.  In various accounts and documents his name is sometimes spelled Pepall and also sometime Pepul, but Pexall is probably correct in view of his lineage.

He inherited the manor in 1589 and when he was aged 21 and although he was married he went on or continued a rake’s progress involving women that scandalised the land.  There is even one report which says he “had 70 children born to him, but only one son by his lady.”

He lived at Little Brickhill, like his father and grandfather, and there is evidence in the parish register under “Baptisms” that some of the rumours and reports were not entirely baseless.

His career might have been cut short in 1601 when. In his usual devil-may-care fashion, he was involved in the Earl of Essex’s attempted rising against the advisers of the ageing Queen Elizabeth.  Essex was beheaded.  Brocas was charged with causing a riot and publishing a forged deed of perjury, but he was saved in 1603 by the accession of James I who not only pardoned him, but also knighted him.

After that, he seems to have returned to his former ways, for one report says that in 1613 he was convicted by the High Commissioners “for secret and notorious adulteries with divers women.” For this he did “open penance” at St Paul’s Cross, standing in a white sheet and holding a stick in his hand (in lieu of the former candle).  But he was by no means abashed, for after the penance he went to the Lord Mayor accompanied by 30 of his men dressed in scarlet clothes and demanded dinner.

In 1624 he refused to pay a Brickhill church rate because the south aisle had not been reserved for the exclusive use of himself and his servants – which suggests the vicar might well have preferred his room to his company.   But for all his goings-on, he seems to have had fits of the dumps, as he is believed to have been the last private person to employ a jester – a man named Hodge.

The parish register reports that he died in 1630, but leaves some doubt about the burial.  Col Wyness says it has been read to mean that his heart was buried in Brickhill and the rest of his body elsewhere (apparently at Ivinghoe Aston).  And so, “as his affections were very divided in life, his body was divided in death.”