History
The town name is an Old English language word that means 'marshy ford on a Roman road'. The Roman road in this case is the Watling Street. There are traces of the Roman settlement Magiovinium on the edge of the present day occupation. (Possibly the oldest known gold coin in Britain was found here, a gold stater of the mid-second century BCE). The town was recorded in manorial rolls in 1252 as Fenni Stratford, though previously it was just known as Stratford: the prefix being added to distinguish the town from nearby Stony Stratford.
Being an ancient market town, Fenny Stratford was the location of a weekly market for many years until 1665 when the town was badly hit by the bubonic plague. As a result the main road that ran through the town was diverted away from it, and the market died as a result. The market was never reinstated: the town was very much in ruins by the early eighteenth century, and had by this time joined with both Bletchley and Simpson, being commonly considered a hamlet of the former.
Read more about this topic: Fenny Stratford
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)