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Extract from Jean Davis's book - At Pitstone Green there is a Farm

In 1807, Lord Bridgewater had bought a farm of 57 acres from Thomas Birdsey that we know was occupied in 1798 by Thomas Eustace. The homestead of this farm was sited where Pitstone Green Farm now stands and is shown on a map dated 1755 from the Ashridge collection in the Herts County Record Office entitled "a farm lying in the several parishes of Pitstone and Marsworth in the county of Bucks and of Tring and Aldbury in the county of Herts being the estate of Mrs Ann Astley".

The farm was made up of eighty- three separate strips in the common fields and three enclosed pieces of land. To this farm was added another bought by Lord Bridgewater in 1804 from Thomas Kerr, occupied by 1800 by James Burt and another bought in 1806 from Billington, occupied in 1798 by William Poulton. Land from these farms together made up a holding of 112 acres, with one or two areas of enclosed land and many strips in the various furlongs of the great open fields of Pitstone. Although the creation of larger farms must have made sense financially (small farms in France today make food cost more there) the fact that the land was spit up into so many small scattered strips must have made farming in larger units more difficult. The small strips were necessary when most farms occupied no more than one or two of them in each of the open fields. So; no wonder that there was some consolidation of them in 1829. Strips were exchanged so as to make larger pieces of land under one farmer. The enclosure act fr Pitstone in 1854 finally an end to them altogether. The farm created by the joining together of these three farms was and still is called Pitstone Green Farm this part of the village was known as Pitstone Green as it bordered the Green, a large open area of common grassland some 100 acres in extent.

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