About Berkshire
From Saxon times until 1974 Berkshire was a boot-shaped county extending up to the western outskirts of the city of Oxford, and separated from it by the River Thames. That river marked the northern county border, separating Berkshire from Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. To the south-east the county adjoined Surrey, and to the south, Hampshire. To the west lay Wiltshire with a finger of Gloucestershire touching the north-west corner.
The county contained 141 ecclesiastical parishes in 1831, rising to 202 by 1901. The increase reflected demographic changes rather than territorial expansion.
In 1834 the New Poor Law assigned these parishes into 12 Poor Law Unions, generally based on population centres (but of widely varying size) replacing the Hundreds of medieval times. In January 1835 Abingdon became the first such Union to be formed in the UK.
Berkshire County Council came into existence in 1889, with Reading finally supplanting Abingdon as the official county town. In 1894 a tier of rural and urban district councils was created under the county council, together with 185 civil parishes, most of which formed parish councils.
Between 1889 and 1912 a series of minor adjustments were made to the county’s boundaries; in the west Hungerford became all Berkshire, taking in part of Chilton Foliat and thus rationalising two former splits; in the south-west Shalbourne was transferred to Wiltshire, and Combe re-allocated from Hampshire into Berkshire; in the north-west Lechlade was lost to Gloucestershire; and Reading secured a piece of Oxfordshire in the form of Caversham.
In 1974 the Boundaries Commission removed the ‘leg’ from the Berkshire boot, and with it the Berkshire Downs, Wantage, Didcot, Faringdon, Wallingford, Abingdon and the Vale of the White Horse (which provided the county’s emblem), allocating them all to Oxfordshire. Smaller adjustments were made elsewhere on the border, including the switch of Slough from Buckinghamshire into Berkshire.
During 1989 further local government changes saw Berkshire County Council abolished to be replaced with six unitary authorities: Bracknell Forest, Reading, Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead, West Berkshire and Wokingham.
In 1991 a general tidying-up of parish boundaries took place, altering some long-standing lines whose original Saxon logic was indiscernible to twentieth-century bureaucracy. This resulted in re-allocation of some individual houses and small hamlets to different civil parishes.
Old Berkshire formed an archdeaconry first created in 1220, and divided into the rural deaneries of Abingdon, Newbury, Wallingford and Reading, and incorporating three peculiars. The archdeaconry answered until 1836 to Salisbury diocese, in the archdiocese of Canterbury, before it was then transferred to the Oxford diocese. In consequence, church records, wills, administrations and other pre-1858 probate documents could be located in the county record offices of Berkshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire and at the National Archives, according to the date and ecclesiastical origin of the record concerned.
When seeking your Berkshire ancestors it is worth considering how the county’s population has changed over time. The 1801 census recorded 109,000 people in Berkshire, most of them in the west and north west portions of the county. Two centuries later, in the 2001 census, more than 800,000 people lived in the equivalent area, most of them now at its eastern end.
Occupational changes must be taken into account too. Agriculture provided almost 40% of Berkshire’s jobs in 1801 and still over 20% of them in 1851. By 1931 this figure had fallen to less than 7% and in 2001 below 1% of the total. As railways opened up the county in the Victorian age, new industries from brick and biscuit manufacture to the railway infrastructure itself brought thousands of new jobs into the county. New workers and their families needed homes and the face and character of many of Berkshire’s towns and villages were much altered by the houses and associated buildings constructed to meet that need. This is a process that continues little changed in the early 21st century.
