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Places to stay in Ickford
The name Ickford gives quite a lot of clues to the origins of the village. It is probably a British name, predating the Romans and more than 2,000 years old. Some Roman artefacts have been found in the vicinity. It is likely that the Romans would have settled the river to make their way up the Thames and its tributaries to find suitable places to settle. Ickford is unlikely to have been little more than a small collection of homes, perhaps no more than an extended family unit. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, the Anglo-Saxons came to settle the sparsely populated area and created the villages of Worminghall, Shabbington, Tiddington and many others around Bernwode forest. Some villages like Oakley and Wheatley were cleared from scrub and woodland to be cultivated by the heavy Saxon ploughs that were necessary for the local heavy clay soils. The first documentary record of Ickford is in the Doomsday book of 1086. Estimates based on the record suggest that by this time Ickford was probably much the same size as the modern parish today. In the following centuries change would have been slow. Was the village affected by the Black Death, as so many villages were? Was it isolated enough to avoid contagion? We may never know. What we can see in many of the fields around the village are the characteristic Medieval ridge and furrow produced by the heavy ploughs that were drawn by teams of up to eight oxen.
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