Marston Moreteyne

You have to go all the way back to 1011 to find the first mention of Bedfordshire. It was, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, part of the area overrun by the invading Danes, although there is good reason to believe that the county’s beginnings might even go back 100 years before that. Whatever, the name was spelled at that time as Bedanfordscir.

So, if Bedfordshire itself was then pronounced more like a tongue-twisting gargle, is it any wonder that Marston Moreteyne, whose current spelling actually goes back to the 16th century, has seen more varieties than a can of baked beans.

The name is likely to have come from the Saxon word, "mercs-tun", which probably means "marsh place". Certainly, the greater part of the parish is less than 200 feet above sea level, and it was the clay soil and subsoil that ensured the area became famous for its lively brick-building industry. The parish was first mentioned - as "Mercstun" - in the Saxon Chronicles of 969. By the 11th century, it had become Merstone and, in the 14th, it was Mershtone. It was getting close to the present day-spelling 100 years later - Merstone Morteyne.

The village, on level ground 136 feet above ordnance datum, was one of the 14 parishes that formed the Redbornestoke Hundred - a hundred being an area grouped together for taxation, judicial and administrative purposes under William the Conqueror and the English kings that succeeded him. Evidence suggests that the original settlement of Marston used to be located to the south of the present village’s position where, in a field off Station Road, there is a large boulder that, according to local tradition, the Devil once visited.

It is said that a former owner of the field was unwisely playing "jumps" - probably another name for leap-frog - on a Sunday. The Devil, villagers claimed, jumped on to the stone from the church tower and whisked the field’s owner off to eternity. In fact, though it is now long gone, there used to be a pub nearby to mark the event. It was called "The Jumps".

St Mary’s, by the way, is one of 36 churches in Britain with a detached bell tower. It was built, as we know it today, probably around the middle of the 14th century, but the fact that it is some 60 feet from the church proper suggests it was there in some form or other before then.

The oldest parts of the church itself, the chancel and the vestry, were built probably around 1340 by the Morteynes. So not being consistent with the spelling of the family name didn’t make them bad people.... In 1086, when the Domesday Survey took place, the overlordship of Marston Manor was with Nigel de Albini, whose family became barons of Cainhoe. But, by the end of the 13th century, the Morteyn family were holding the manor. They had come from Normandy - from a place called Mortain, near Contentin. No wonder there have been so many different variations in the spelling of our village’s name...

Anyway, the last male descendant of the Moreteyne family was John, who died in 1373. He and his wife, Elizabeth, had a daughter, Jane, who married Richard Reynes, of Clifton Reynes, near Olney.

Note. For consistency throughout this pack, the spelling "Moreteyne" has been used except where trading names are different