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R&DRA -A History of Rickmansworth
by Adrienne Jacques

The settlement called Rickmansworth started life in the Saxon period as an isolated farmstead, or worth, situated between the southern edge of a ridge of the Chiltern Hills and the marshy mere or lake which surrounded the meeting place of three rivers, the Chess, the Colne and the Gade. Traditionally the name of the settlement was thought to derive from Ricmaer's farm but more modern thought concludes that the farm was named after its physical situation. The Old English word for ridge is 'hrycg' and for mere is 'maere' which perfectly describes the location of Rickmansworth. Until the 18th century the alternative spelling of the town's name was Rickmeresworth. Most of the area now covered by the town of Rickmansworth was dense woodland with a few pockets of cultivation.
In the late Saxon period a small wooden chapel was erected on a gravel spur of land, south of the farmstead but above the waters of the fordable river Colne so that the burgeoning community across the river at Batchworth could be served. The chapel became the religious focal point for the surrounding parish which was conterminous with the administrative area, or manor, and all were named after the nearby farmstead of Rickmansworth. In time the chapel became the church of St Mary the Virgin and since it was often surrounded by water, especially after the town ditch was dug, was often known as 'Our Lady of the Island.'
The parish was the south westerly extent of the lands of St Albans Abbey which became part of the shire of Hertford in the reign of King Edgar, (959-75). About this time new roadways were constructed through the forest to encourage pilgrims to visit the Shrine of St Alban. Later, the main roadway through Rickmansworth High Street, became part of the king's street from St Albans to Windsor.
Rickmansworth was recorded in the Domesday Survey for the County of Hertford. The survey showed that the Lord of the Manor of Rickmansworth was the Abbot of St Alban's Abbey and that there was enough woodland to feed 1,200 pigs. There was also arable land for twenty ploughs in the parish. Farming was becoming more important in Rickmansworth and over the next two centuries the growth of farming, both for the Abbey of St Albans and under independent owners, was a feature of the parish.
The sufferings of the Great Pestilence, (or Black Death), of 1348-9 and the subsequent halving of the workforce led to the breakdown of the manorial system of rents & services. A generation later the tenants on the Manor of Rickmansworth, along with many other abbey tenants, felt they were being pressurised by the Abbot to return to the servitude of the former system. It was this underlying resentment which led the men of Rickmansworth to join the uprising against the Abbot of St Albans and his officials in the June of 1381. This was part of a widespread disaffection against manorial lords, later called the Peasant's Revolt. The uprising in Hertfordshire was started by the people of St Albans on Saturday 15th June, the same day as the king granted a general charter giving the peasants their freedom. Recognizing the inevitable, the Abbot began to issue charters to all the demanding townships.
The Rickmansworth Charter granted all tenants living within the town the right to hold their tenancies as free men, with the additional right to sell their property without any restrictions. With many other concessions, this charter gave the people of Rickmansworth everything they desired and for a few days they rejoiced in their freedoms. But, around the beginning of July the King recalled his letters of manumission and all the charters were declared null and void and had to be surrendered to the Abbot and destroyed. Fortunately, enough copies had been made to cause great annoyance to the Abbot and his successors.
However, during the 15th century there was a gradual relaxation of abbatical control. This enabled one entrepreneur to build up an accumulation of lands which were enclosed to form the Manor and Park of Le More. The existing timber framed house was replaced with a small crenellated castle which was to be home to several notables including George Neville, Archbishop of York, and Cardinal Wolsey, before becoming a royal manor in 1530.
It was while Cardinal Wolsey was living at the Manor of the More that there was a terrible calamity at Rickmansworth Church. One night the church was deliberately set ablaze by Lollard sympathisers who particularly targeted the statues of the saints and the image of Christ on the rood screen. The arsonists made sure of their blaze by pushing staves of wood wrapped in fibrous material through the bars of the chancel. They also set fire to the reserved sacrament on the high altar. The christening font was broken up and holy water scattered about the church and in the vestry ornaments and jewels were set ablaze. The organ in the rood loft was also destroyed, helped by the 200 pounds of candle wax stored there. However, the church was saved from total destruction because of its flint walls.
The dissolution of St Albans Abbey in 1539 broke a link with Rickmansworth which had lasted 700 years and had seen the town grow from a single farmstead to a community capable of running its own affairs. In 1542 the Bailiff, men and inhabitants of Rickmansworth were granted a royal licence to hold a Saturday market and a fair on the 15@h August, the Feast of the Assumption. This was in addition to the 13th century Batchworth Charter Fair held on the 17th May. In the town a two storied Market Hall of timber framed construction was built in the middle of Rickmansworth High Street, within a stone's throw of the Swan, the main inn of the town. The lower storey of the market hall was constructed as an open area where bolts of material from the local cloth making industry could be sold. At this time there were just over fifty families in the town augmented by around two hundred and fifty families in the surrounding parish.
Rickmansworth grew in stature under the glory of the Tudors as befitted a town with royal manors within the parish. Henry VIII often hunted in the parkland of the Manor of the More and used the castle to house part of the extensive royal wardrobe. The Manor of Rickmansworth came into royal ownership after the dissolution of St Albans Abbey and, almost a hundred years later, was purchased by a local man, Sir Thomas Fotherley. His forebears had lived in the parish since late medieval times. Sir Thomas had made his fortune in the house of the nobility, becoming in the process a staunch supporter of Charles 1. The manor was mortgaged to support the king in the English Civil War but was recovered by Sir Thomas' son in 1652.
Many who opposed the king before and during the Civil War fled abroad to escape persecution. Three sons from the Lane family of Shepherds Farm, Rickmansworth went to America in 1642. Many of their descendants have visited the birthplace of the family but although the farm is still extant its fields are now covered with houses. The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 caused puritan dissenters to withdraw to the countryside. The Society of Friends (Quakers) had a strong network of members in the secluded hills of Buckinghamshire with some meeting places across the Hertfordshire border. One of their leaders, William Penn, married Gulielma Springett at Kings Farm, Chorleywood and the couple set up house in Rickmansworth for the first five years of their marriage.
The years after the restoration of the monarchy were times of uncertainty for Rickmansworth. The cloth industry had disappeared and repeated epidemics of plague and small pox were undermining the population. Attempts were made to solve the growing social problem with the provision of almshouses. John Beresford, who had made a fortune dealing in gunpowder in the Civil War, bequeathed two cottages on the south side of Rickmansworth High Street which were turned into almshouses for four aged people. Thirty years later, John Fotherley, the Lord of the Manor of Rickmansworth, built five almshouses on the north side of the High Street for poor and needy widows. The Beresford Almshouses were later relocated to their present site in Bury Lane, whereas the Fotherley Almshouses remained on their original site until the nineteen thirties.
One necessity of life, the brewhouse, continued to succeed, despite the general decline of the town. The manor brewhouse was at the Gorralls in the centre of town but it was Samuel Salter's brewery at the eastern edge of Rickmansworth which really flourished. The Salter family ran the expanding business until 1829 and the brewery continued to be a dominant feature of the town for another century.
The provision of education for the poor of the town was instigated by the founding in 1711 of the Rickmansworth Charity School. The school was set up for the purpose of teaching the poor to read and for instructing them in the knowledge of the Church of England. The school was funded by the subscriptions of the gentry, including non-conformists, and met at first in a rented room. When the Rickmansworth Poor House closed down in 1836 the growing school moved into its premises in the High Street, adjoining the present Baptist Church.
The construction of a Palladian mansion in Moor Park in 1720 brought welcome opportunities for employment to Rickmansworth. Fifty years earlier the Moor Park estate had been purchased by the Duke of Monmouth, the natural son of Charles 11. He built himself a fine Stuart house on the rising ground at the centre of the estate. Benjamin Hoskyn Styles purchased the house with the proceeds of his insider dealing in the South Sea Company. Mr Styles and his architect, Sir James Thornhill, extended Monmouth's fine brick house and covered the whole building in Portland stone, which had to be transported by river and road from Dorset. Inside, the entrance hall had its ceiling removed to make an imposing reception room surmounted by a flat ceiling painted to look like an Italian dome. Styles spent £150,000 on the house but Thornhill had to go to law to get his bills paid. The extravagant house continued to be a source of local employment opportunities as successive wealthy owners imposed their own ideas on the estate.
The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century brought an increasing demand for paper and the mills around Rickmansworth were re-vitalised for paper production, eventually making Rickmansworth the foremost paper-making town in Hertfordshire. The Rickmansworth mills continued to make hand made paper until the 1880's with Loudwater and Scotsbridge becoming famous for supplying paper for the 'Illustrated London News' owned by Herbert Ingram. The town also had a steam powered mill at the western end of Rickmansworth High Street which was used for spinning silk.
The Grand Junction Canal reached Rickmansworth in 1796 linking the town with London & the Midlands. This bought immediate benefits by halving the price of coal. Local businesses began to use the canal, especially when Salters Brewery constructed a side arm to a wharf in the town. In the early twentieth century the WH Walker & Bros Ltd boat building firm set up business at Batchworth and the village developed a community to serve the canal people.
The revival of non-conformity within the town in the late eighteenth century was assisted by the complacency of the established church. Nathan Sharman was instrumental in setting up the congregation of Baptists at Mill End which in 1823 built the Ebenezer Chapel in the Uxbridge Road. The Baptist Church in the High Street was built in 1843 and Methodism took root in the town in 1816, two years after a Methodist minister was preserved from death at the hands of a Rickmansworth mob. Roman Catholicism was officially re-introduced into Rickmansworth in 1886 by Father Henry Hardy who for nearly twenty years nurtured the Catholic faith which was then developed further by the French Order of the Augustines of the Assumption. The church of St Mary's was rebuilt twice in the nineteenth century, the first time to accommodate the growing population of the parish which had increased by a quarter since 1801. Then as the outlying hamlets were desirous of having their own churches, and since its architectural style left much to be desired, it was decided to rebuild to the perpendicular style of the medieval church.
Rickmansworth Parish had the distinction of having the pioneer Chartist settlement within its area. The Chartist movement arose after the presentation to Parliament of a Charter of Rights, one of which was universal suffrage without property qualifications. The petition was received with insulting indifference and Feargus O'Connor resolved to form a Chartist Land company to provide property for industrial workers, by means of a lottery. Heffingers Farm, between Mill End and West Hyde was purchased in 1846 by the Chartist leader who set out plots of between two & five acres. The settlement was named O'Connorville after its founder with the estate roads being named after northern industrial towns. The tenants, chosen by ballot, were meant to be self sufficient but the scheme foundered due to lack of agricultural experience. There were only three original settlers left in 1858 when the O'Connorville estate was sold and Mr W P Roberts, the radical Chartist lawyer, bought most of the ground rents. The village eventually reverted to its original name and later became an exclusive estate for affluent commuters.
In 1862 the first railway came to Rickmansworth connecting the town with Watford, some five miles away. The railway was seen as being of mutual benefit to both towns but Rickmansworth had no main line railway to boost its development. The Watford-Rickmansworth line carried goods traffic as well as passengers and had a transhipment wharf to the canal beside its Rickmansworth terminus. Local watercress from the flourishing business of the Bradbery family of West Hyde was sent to London by this route. The line closed to passengers in 1952 and to goods in 1962 and the line now provides a cycle/walkway between the two towns.
Thirty-five years after the Watford- Rickmansworth railway was opened, the Metropolitan Railway arrived in Rickmansworth and put the local fly stage coaches out of business. Opened in 1887 the line provided a fast and reliable half hour journey to London and, just as the Watford / Rickmansworth railway had brought some housing development near its Rickmansworth terminus, the Metropolitan line proved to be a stimulus for house building on the fields of Rectory Farm and along the road to Mill End. After the First World War, and the subsequent sale of farms and estates in the area to the Metropolitan Country Estates Ltd, development in Rickmansworth intensified. Rickmansworth became part of the advertising dream of Metroland and was part of the rural arcadia tempting people out of London to become house-owners. The population of the Rickmansworth area doubled between the wars and the shops of the town expanded to fulfil the needs of the residents. Ramblers and cyclists were also encouraged to use the railway to discover the delights and pleasures of rural Metroland. Housing development was halted by World War 11 and was restricted after the war by the formation of the Green Belt around London. Rickmansworth was also promoted for its healthy ambience and two city-bound schools, Merchant Taylors' and the Royal Masonic Institution for Girls, bought large tracts of land to take advantage of the country air.
After the Dissolution of St Albans Abbey, Rickmansworth was governed by the Parish Vestry but the growth of the town meant that under the Local Government Act of 1894 the community could apply for Parish Council status. Four years later the town became an Urban District Council, with its more rural hinterland becoming a Rural District Council. In 1953 the Rickmansworth Urban District Council decided to commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11 with a Grant of Arms incorporating symbols from the coats of arms of leading families of the parish. The shield from the Coat of Arms is still used by Rickmansworth School. Rickmansworth UDC ceased to exist in 1974 when the town became part of the district of Three Rivers.
There are two societies which have an interest in the history and artefacts of the local area. The Rickmansworth Historical Society was formed in 1954 to gather information about, and study, the history of the ancient parish of Rickmansworth. The Three Rivers Museum for local history, opened in 1988. It has premises in the town at Basing House where artefacts and information about the locality can be viewed. Readers of this article are encouraged to visit the Museum to learn more about the town.

The following publications on Rickmansworth are available from the Rickmansworth Historical Society:

"Rickmansworth, a pictorial history" by Adrienne & Christopher Jacques. Phillimore. Price £13.99. ISBN 1-86077-027-4.
"Rickmansworth Park" by Adrienne Jacques. RHS Price £3.50. ISBN 0-9544583-0-3.
"Thoughts on Old Ricky" by Florence Samuels, nee Knight. RHS Feb. 2000 Price £2.50.
"The Rickmansworth Historian" - past copies Nos 1-38.
The Rickmansworth Historical Society Newsletter is published 4 times a year. Contact address: G M Saul, Chairman, 20 West Way, Rickmansworth, Herts. WD3 7EN.
Publications available from the museum include the above plus:
"Down Memory Lane" by Barbara Carpenter.
"A Pocket History of Rickmansworth" by EV Parrott.
A Journal "Yesterday-Today" published in the Spring & Autumn.

The Contact address for enquiries about the above publications is: 23 Copthome Road, Croxley Green, Rickmansworth, Herts. VVD3 4AB.

The views expressed on this website are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the R&DRA Committee as a whole