Bibury - A Brief History
Early occupation is evidenced by Rawbarrow Camp, an impressive Iron Age settlement which looks down upon the village from the valley top. The local Celtic tribe were the Dobunni, who had a major settlement just outside of Cirencester. Rawbarrow Camp may well have been an outlying settlement owing allegiance to the Dobunni. It was the Romans who first settled the site where the existing village stands and an impressive Roman villa was discovered to the east of Bibury Mill.
This riverside occupation was continued by the Saxons who gave us the names of ‘Bibury’ and ‘Arlington’. In the early 8th Century the settlement was held by Earl Leppa from the Diocese of Worcester, who in turn ceded it to his daughter Beage, hence the village became known as Beage’s Bigbury which over time developed into ‘Bibury’. Arlington means literally the ‘farmstead belonging to Aelfred’. During the Saxon period Bibury was an important administrative centre which is borne out by the impressive Saxon elements of the church. What is known today as The Square may have had an important commercial and administrative function during the Saxon and early medieval period.
The village thrived in the Middle Ages due to the lucrative wool trade; the Cotswold Hills provide a perfect environment for sheep farming to this day. However, the village is thought to have suffered greatly due to the Black Death of 1348 and may have lost up to 70% of its population. In around 1380 Arlington Row was constructed as a woollen store by the monks and the wool was dried after the fulling process on wooden racks situated on Rack Isle, the area of land in front of Arlington Row.
It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that most of Bibury’s stone buildings were constructed. At this time the village remained a prosperous community based upon Agriculture; both Arlington Mill and Bibury Mill were constructed around 1790 as were many of the village’s impressive stone barns. However, for much of the nineteenth century the village suffered along with many other English villages due to the gradual decline in the Agricultural Industry at that time. The Victorians viewed the Cotswolds as a bleak and unfashionable place, an area of ‘stone and sorrow’, and this decline in Bibury’s fortunes persisted until its beauty and uniqueness were discovered by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement. It was Morris who described Bibury as ‘the most beautiful village in England’.
Robert Hale in his 1964 book ‘Portrait of the Cotswolds’ says of Bibury: ‘It has become one of the Cotswold show places since William Morris called it the most beautiful villages in England and it has not been spoilt by its many visitors. It caters for them without debasing its own charms, and there are occasions in mid-week when one can sit on the low wall of the mile long main street running with the river without another soul to jostle one’s elbow or break the rural peace. The river is no stripling here but has widened out to some thirty feet, spanned by a three arched stone bridge in whose cool shade big trout linger, looking almost as ancient and speckled as the stone which gives them shelter. This, and the marshy hollow of lush green going back to the shaded backwaters and channels under the wooded hillside and flanked by the old mill and the miniature perfection of Arlington Row’s dormers and gables makes it an open village, showing its charm without reserve.
Bibury has another corner not so openly displayed. At the east end on a bank well above the marshy valley stands the church, the manor house, Bibury Court, and a gathering of typical Cotswold cottages.......’
In Cotswold Country published in 1937 HJ Massingham agrees that ‘Bibury really deserves what has been written about it......its architectural graces, epitomizing all that we mean by cottage England, deserve the extraordinary felicity of their site under the woody ridge.....One of the delights of Bibury are the gradations of contrast between the utra-solid, buttressed mill house by the bridge, the long front of Arlington Row facing it and the vagrom cottage groups between them, lying back from the river with their gables little and great jutting out at all angles.’
Bibury's history is still evidenced in the present-day village, which retains its rural character. But as well as farmers and gamekeepers, the area in recent years has increasingly provided a home to the wealthy, the famous and the creative, from novelists and artists to film stars and TV personalities.
I hope you find the village's history as interesting as I do. Should you have any questions or would like further information please contact me and I'll do my best to help.
Arlington Mill in Bibury
Arlington Row
Bibury church
The bridge at Bibury