SNIPPETS OF SUNDON HISTORY

            At the manor of Sundon a weekly market was held but the site is not named. A fair was also held annually on ‘the vigil, the feast and the morrow, of the Annunciation’, which is celebrated on March 25^th.

            In the church an altar dedicated to St. Nicholas once stood against one of the side walls. Interestingly the first listed Vicar signed himself as ‘Chaplain’.

            It seems that at the end of the nineteenth century, as recently, the parish was running out of space in the graveyard. Minutes of a vestry meeting held in 1894 mention a letter being sent to the ‘Estates’, the Page-Turner family who owned the land belonging to the demolished Sundon House, thanking them for a grant of land to be added to the churchyard. Funds were also raised to place a suitable fence in front of the ‘Church Garden’.

SUNDON MILL was a Trestle Mill with one pair of stones and common sails with cloths which could be furled when not in use and which were spread over the sails to power the mill. The original mill is shown on a map as standing beside the Sundon Road, a short distance from the entrance to the disused cement works. Village residents say that there was still a mill in Upper Sundon  earlier in the last century

            . In early times people ground their own flour with stone querns, then water mills were introduced into this country probably by the Romans. By the late Saxon era Bedfordshire was prosperous and every manor had its mill which was usually of ecclesiastical or manorial foundation and to which the peasants had to take their corn for grinding.

            At the Doomsday survey one hundred and three mills were recorded in Bedfordshire. The customary definition of a mill is one pair of millstones, two pairs within one building would constitute two mills, which may have affected the calculations. They may not have all been water mills, some may have been powered by hand or animals, as a flat county like Bedfordshire may not have been regarded as favourable for the wide spread  use of  water power. These eleventh and twelfth century mills must have been relatively primitive with a crude wheel driving a stone quern which would have been enclosed in a rudimentary hovel.

[Imperial Gazatteer of England & Wales, 1866-9]

Sundon, Bedfordshire

SUNDON, a parish in Luton district, Beds; 4 miles NE of Dunstable r. station. It has a postal pillar-box under Dunstable. Acres, 2,160. Real property, £2,631. Pop., 450. Houses, 100. Most of the land belongs to the executors of Sir E. H. Turner, Bart. The living is a vicarage, united with Streatley, in the diocese of Ely. Value, £163.* Patrons, the Trustees of Sir E. H. Turner, Bart. The church is early English. There is a Wesleyan chapel.