Talk:Buttsbury: Difference between revisions – Wikipedia

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@Crouch, Swale – I’ve just reverted your edit calling Buttsbury a village. I am aware of the historical convention that where there’s doubt over whether a settlement should be described as a village or a hamlet, if it has the parish church or gives its name to the parish then it’s called a village, and if not then it’s a hamlet. However, I think it was always understood that there had to actually be a settlement there for that convention to come into play. There is no settlement at Buttsbury. Apart from the church, there are just eight properties today that the Royal Mail gives Buttsbury addresses, all of which are isolated houses / farms in the lanes around there, not forming a recognisable village. I can find no road signs marking the entrance to the “village” or signposting the way to Buttsbury. Kelly’s Directory of 1914 described Buttsbury as a parish (as it then was) but not a village – note how other entries (e.g. Canewdon on the same page) get described as a “village and parish”. It’s also clear that older sources which do talk about a village of Buttsbury are talking about the bit of Stock village along the High Street which was in Buttsbury parish, for example: The Practitioner, 1893, page 143 Other sources since the abolition of the parish are also explicit that there is no village at Buttsbury: Essex, Marcus Crouch, page 128

It’s worth bearing in mind that many of the smaller parishes (particularly those created in the boom period for new parish creation in the couple of hundred years after the Norman Conquest) were old vills or manors where it suited the lord of the manor to provide a church. Doubtless they would argue it was the spiritual welfare of the residents they had in mind, but another major influence was the fact that becoming a parish then entitled them to become the rector and receive the tithes that would otherwise have gone elsewhere. Many such parish churches created in this wave of parish-making stood in close proximity to the manor house, whether or not there was a settlement there as such. If there was no settlement, it’s more accurate to think of such parish churches as forming part of what historians often call the “manorial complex”, comprising the manor house, its associated farm buildings and the parish church. Such cases or others where there a is church but no village (perhaps for deserted medieval villages where the church remained in use) which should not automatically be called a village if that isn’t how reliable sources describe it. Stortford (talk) 08:12, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]