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140-593: Aldermaston ( UK : / ˈ ɔː l d ər m ɑː s t ə n / AWL -dər-mah-stən ) is a village and civil parish in Berkshire , England. In the 2011 census , the parish had a population of 1,015. The village is in the Kennet Valley and bounds Hampshire to the south. It is approximately 8 miles (13 km) from Newbury , Basingstoke , and Reading and is 46 miles (74 km) from London . Aldermaston may have been inhabited as early as 1690 BCE ;

280-449: A Tudor -like appearance. Burr held the estate until his death 50 years later, when this was inherited by his son, who sold it in 1893. The buyer was the wealthy stockbroker Charles Edward Keyser , who was preoccupied with the idea of keeping the village unchanged—or, as he described it, "unspoilt". He forbade advertisements, opposed all modernisation and refused to allow any expansion by the building of houses. He did, however, commission

420-436: A horseshoe nail driven through a tallow candle an inch below the wick and lit in the parish hall. a plot of 2 acres (0.81 ha) granted to the church in 1815 after the inclosure act . The proceedings are overseen by the vicar and churchwardens, who drink rum punch throughout the auction. Traditionally, the churchwardens smoked clay pipes during the event. The parish hall often holds other events, such as plays produced by

560-559: A century as Received Pronunciation (RP). However, due to language evolution and changing social trends, some linguists argue that RP is losing prestige or has been replaced by another accent, one that the linguist Geoff Lindsey for instance calls Standard Southern British English. Others suggest that more regionally-oriented standard accents are emerging in England. Even in Scotland and Northern Ireland, RP exerts little influence in

700-515: A different origin, signifying the amount of land which could be cultivated by one plough team as opposed to a family holding, but all later became artificial fiscal assessments. In some counties in Domesday Book (e.g. Cambridgeshire), the hide is sometimes shown as consisting of 120 acres (30 acres to the virgate), but as Darby explains: "The acres are, of course, not units of area, but geld acres, i.e. units of assessment". In other words, this

840-468: A drinking fountain erected by Charles Keyser to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria . The River Kennet and River Enborne flow through the parish, and their confluence is approximately 0.6 miles (0.97 km) north of the village. The Kennet and Avon Canal forms part of the parish's boundaries with Woolhampton and Padworth . Sections of Grim's Bank are in the parish. Part of

980-466: A free house), later becoming tied to Fuller's Brewery on their acquisition of Gales in 2006. In the 1970s, the pub was home to the Kennet Folk Club. At the rear of the pub is the village lock-up . Built out of red brick, the small single-storey building has a shallow domed roof. The inside of the lock-up measures approximately 7.5 feet (2.3 m) by 6 feet (1.8 m), and is enclosed by

1120-475: A full redevelopment of Aldermaston Manor , the £14 million office development became Blue Circle's international headquarters and the complex was opened by Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester . Historically, Aldermaston was a hundred , though for a period it was within the Theale hundred. By the 19th century, the hundreds had been superseded by other sub-divisions. From then on, Aldermaston was, at times, part of

1260-400: A fully equipped and provisioned force. In early Anglo-Saxon England , the hide was used as the basis for assessing the amount of food rent (known as feorm ) due from a village or estate and it became the unit on which all public obligations were assessed, including in particular the maintenance and repair of bridges and fortifications and the provision of troops for manning the defences of

1400-418: A governess". Kersley's son, also named Anthony, ran the mill until 1895. That year, Walter Parson bought the mill and operated it until approximately 1897. Charles Keyser subsequently oversaw the restoration on the mill building which "had been untenanted for upwards of three years". He let the mill out to a Mr Iremonger from 1901. Locally farmed wheat was milled at Aldermaston Mill until the 1920s. Iremonger used

1540-508: A greater movement, normally [əʊ], [əʉ] or [əɨ]. Dropping a morphological grammatical number , in collective nouns , is stronger in British English than North American English. This is to treat them as plural when once grammatically singular, a perceived natural number prevails, especially when applying to institutional nouns and groups of people. The noun 'police', for example, undergoes this treatment: Police are investigating

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1680-555: A hide had a tax burden equivalent to three of his oxen and close upon one-third of the annual value of his land. A more normal rate was 2 shillings on each hide. Domesday Book , recording the results of the survey made on the orders of William I in 1086, states in hides (or carucates or sulungs as the case might be) the assessed values of estates throughout the area covered by the survey. Usually it gives this information for 1086 and 1066, but some counties were different and only showed this information for one of those dates. By that time

1820-497: A hide of land to be worth £1, or, put another way, for land producing £1 of income to be assessed at one hide." A number of early documents referring to hides have survived, but these can only be seen as steps in the development of the concept of the hide and do not enable us to see the full story. The document known as the Tribal Hidage is a very early list thought to date possibly from the 7th century, but known only from

1960-476: A later and unreliable manuscript. It is a list of tribes and small kingdoms owing tribute to an overlord and of the proportionate liability or quota imposed on each of them. This is expressed in terms of hides, though we have no details as to how these were arrived at nor how they were converted into a cash liability. The Burghal Hidage (early 10th century) is a list of boroughs giving the hide assessments of neighbouring districts which were liable to contribute to

2100-406: A lesser class or social status and often discounted or considered of a low intelligence. Another contribution to the standardisation of British English was the introduction of the printing press to England in the mid-15th century. In doing so, William Caxton enabled a common language and spelling to be dispersed among the entirety of England at a much faster rate. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of

2240-509: A measurement of area, but the logic of its assessment is not easy to understand, especially as assessments were changed from time to time and not always consistently. By the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, it was a measure of 'the taxable worth of an area of land', but it had no fixed relationship to its area, the number of ploughteams working on it, or its population; nor was it limited to the arable land on an estate. According to Bailey, "It

2380-597: A number of postholes and remains of cereal grains have been found in the area. Written history of the village is traced back at least as far as the 9th century CE, when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles showed that the Ealdorman of Berkshire had his country estate in the village. The manor of Aldermaston was established by the early 11th century, when the village was given to the Achard family by Henry I ;

2520-659: A process called T-glottalisation . National media, being based in London, have seen the glottal stop spreading more widely than it once was in word endings, not being heard as "no [ʔ] " and bottle of water being heard as "bo [ʔ] le of wa [ʔ] er". It is still stigmatised when used at the beginning and central positions, such as later , while often has all but regained /t/ . Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p , as in pa [ʔ] er and k as in ba [ʔ] er. In most areas of England and Wales, outside

2660-484: A range of blurring and ambiguity". Variations exist in formal (both written and spoken) English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire , whereas the adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within

2800-520: A regional accent or dialect. However, about 2% of Britons speak with an accent called Received Pronunciation (also called "the King's English", "Oxford English" and " BBC English" ), that is essentially region-less. It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. In

2940-525: A studded door with a grille. It was last used in 1865 and its drunk inhabitant burnt himself to death trying to keep warm. The lock-up was designated as a Grade II listed building in April 1967. On 11 September 2010 the lock-up was opened to the public as part of the Heritage Open Days scheme. Another pub in the parish, The Butt Inn, is located approximately 1.25 miles (2.01 km) north-east of

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3080-464: A tax on land in 1193-4 to raise money for King Richard's ransom. A hide was usually made up of four virgates although exceptionally Sussex had eight virgates to the hide. A similar measure was used in the northern Danelaw , known as a carucate , consisting of eight bovates , and Kent used a system based on a "sulung", consisting of four yokes , which was larger than the hide and on occasion treated as equivalent to two hides. These measures had

3220-572: A total attendance of 12,000 at the establishment's gates. The 50th anniversary of the event was marked on 24 March 2008 with the "Bomb Stops Here" protest, attended by Vivienne Westwood and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) president Walter Wolfgang . The 2008 demonstration was the biggest protest staged by CND in ten years. Until 2005, AWE discharged "pre-treated waste water" into the River Thames at Pangbourne via an 11.8-mile (19.0 km) pipeline which runs under roads and fields within

3360-472: A town or for the defence force known as the 'fyrd'. For instance, at one period, five hides were expected to provide one fully armed soldier in the king's service, and one man from every hide was to be liable to do garrison duty for the burhs and to help in their initial construction and upkeep. A land tax known as geld was first levied in 990 and this became known as the Danegeld, as it was used to buy off

3500-466: A wall and recessed". A hole was cut in the brick wall beside Ford's yard to house the Shell -branded pump. The location of this pump is marked by a square hole in the present wall. Ford's business offered other motoring services, with signage reading " vacuum , oil , and cycles ". There is a number of small businesses in the village, including a florist and the village shop . In the 1970s the hairdressers

3640-629: Is a commonplace that the hide in 1086 had a very variable extent on the ground; the old concept of 120 acres cannot be sustained." Many details of the development of the system during the 350 years which elapsed between the time of Bede and the Domesday Book remain obscure. According to Sir Frank Stenton , "Despite the work of many great scholars the hide of early English texts remains a term of elusive meaning." The fact that assessments consistently tended to be made in units of 5 hides or multiples of 5 hides goes to show that we are not speaking of fixed or even approximate acreages and this applies not only to

3780-725: Is also due to London-centric influences. Examples of R-dropping are car and sugar , where the R is not pronounced. British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are usually preserved, and in several areas also /oː/ and /eː/, as in go and say (unlike other varieties of English, that change them to [oʊ] and [eɪ] respectively). Some areas go as far as not diphthongising medieval /iː/ and /uː/, that give rise to modern /aɪ/ and /aʊ/; that is, for example, in

3920-399: Is based on British English, but has more influence from American English , often grouped together due to their close proximity. British English, for example, is the closest English to Indian English, but Indian English has extra vocabulary and some English words are assigned different meanings. Hide (unit) The hide's method of calculation is now obscure: different properties with

4060-412: Is based on the equivalent German word Hube , a unit of land a farmer might own. Much work has been done investigating the hidation of various counties and also in attempts to discover more about the origin and development of the hide and the purposes for which it was used, but without producing many clear conclusions which would help the general reader. Those requiring more information may wish to consult

4200-637: Is in Aldermaston Wharf, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the village itself. The station is managed by National Rail and served by Great Western Railway services between Reading and Newbury . The village is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) south-east of the Kennet and Avon Canal at Aldermaston Wharf, which provides waterway links to London (via the Thames ) and Bristol (via the River Avon ). The village

4340-795: Is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times newspaper, the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press . The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules , and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style . Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style for published American English ,

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4480-604: Is named The Hind's Head in honour of the Forster family crest. Built in the 17th century and originally operating as a coaching inn , the establishment was named The Pack Horse during the De La Mare and Forster lordships and The Congreve Arms throughout the Congreves' ownership. The building has a large black and gold clock set into the gable , and a small bell turret upon which is a gilt fox-shaped weather vane . The bell

4620-520: Is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Common Brittonic —the insular variety of Continental Celtic , which was influenced by the Roman occupation. This group of languages ( Welsh , Cornish , Cumbric ) cohabited alongside English into the modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages , influence on English

4760-702: Is on the A340 road, and has nearby access to the A4 road and the M4 motorway . British English British English (abbreviations: BrE , en-GB , and BE ) is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England , or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout

4900-472: Is possible. The Norman kings, after the Norman Conquest , continued to use the system which they found in place. Geld was levied at intervals on the existing hidage assessments. In 1084, William I laid an exceptionally heavy geld of six shillings upon every hide. At the time the value of the hide was approximating twenty shillings a year, and the price of an ox was two shillings. Thus the holder of

5040-439: Is predominantly flint and brick. Most of the houses in the village are Grade II listed buildings, and many were built using local red and blue bricks. In total, 51 structures in the parish are listed, including gatepiers, greenhouses , a tomb , railings and a wall, the village red telephone box and Aldermaston Lock . Since the early 1800s, Aldermaston has held a candle auction every three years. The open auction starts with

5180-463: Is the case for English used by European Union institutions. In China, both British English and American English are taught. The UK government actively teaches and promotes English around the world and operates in over 200 countries . English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what

5320-422: Is the location of a wood yard, used since the 1930s to prepare local willow for the production of cricket bats . The trees are grown at Harbour Hill Copse, where 70 trees are felled annually for this purpose. There are approximately 1000 trees growing at any given time. The workers at the yard cut the wood into approximate bat shapes, then cure the wood in a kiln. The clefts of wood are then shipped to India, where

5460-582: Is well known in connection with the UK's nuclear weapons programme , as well as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament . The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), which develops, maintains, and disposes of the UK's nuclear weaponry is in the parish. Built on the site of the former RAF Aldermaston , the plant has been the destination of numerous Aldermaston Marches . The village of Aldermaston derives its name from Ældremanestone , Eldremanestune or Hedlremanestone ,

5600-547: The Chambers Dictionary , and the Collins Dictionary record actual usage rather than attempting to prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other varieties of English, and neologisms are frequent. For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the ninth century, the form of language spoken in London and

5740-499: The 1992 recession . The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), for which Aldermaston has become known, is less than 1 mile (1.6 km) south of the village. The establishment is where the United Kingdom designs and manufactures the warheads for its stock of Trident missiles , and where decommissioned and redundant nuclear warheads are dismantled. In April 1958, the first Aldermaston March was held. The march saw around 3,000 protesters march from London to Aldermaston over four days, with

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5880-524: The Bradfield Poor Law Union and Sanitary District , and the registration sub-districts of Mortimer (late 19th century) and Bucklebury (early 20th century). It was at all times an ecclesiastical parish and acquired civil parish status in the 1890s. The civil parish council is elected by every resident on West Berkshire elections. It is in the area of West Berkshire unitary authority . The electoral ward of Aldermaston includes

6020-534: The British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English , Welsh English , and Northern Irish English . Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with] the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within

6160-471: The Court of Chancery and was purchased by Daniel Higford Davall Burr . In 1848, Burr commissioned the building of a neoclassical mansion to the south west of the original building. Burr saved the 17th-century manor's wooden staircase, though all that remains of the building is a staircase to the cellar (which is now home to a colony of bats ). By 1851 the new building was complete, costing £20,000 and having

6300-521: The Danes with Ethelred of Wessex at the nearby Battle of Englefield in 871. Other documented names include Aldermaston ad Pontem (11th century), Aldremanneston (12th century), Aldremaneston (13th century), Aldermanston and Aldermanneston Achard (14th century), and Aldmerston (19th century). Evidence suggests that Aldermaston was inhabited in the 12th century CE, possibly extending back to 1690 BCE. Radiocarbon dating on postholes and pits in

6440-526: The Earl of Wessex , who later became King Harold II of England . Harold's assessment of Aldermaston valued the village's 15 hides at £20 a year. As with much of the land seized by William the Conqueror after his arrival in England in 1066, Aldermaston was held in demesne . His Domesday Book of 1086 identified the existence of a mill, worth twenty shillings , and two fisheries, worth five shillings. During

6580-658: The East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education in Britain. The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect levelling and a thought of social superiority. Speaking in the Standard dialect created class distinctions; those who did not speak the standard English would be considered of

6720-662: The Hampshire boundary. The village is 1 mile (1.6 km) south of the A4 road that links the parish with Newbury and Reading . The main road in Aldermaston, The Street, is part of the A340 road and links the village with Pangbourne and Basingstoke . The course of Ermin Street , the Roman road that linked Calleva Atrebatum ( Silchester ) with Glevum ( Gloucester ) via Corinium Dobunnorum ( Cirencester ) runs south of

6860-465: The Old English for "Ealdorman's Homestead". The Ealdorman —or Alderman —was a person of extreme importance, equating to the modern-day Lord-Lieutenant of the county. Although his country estate was in Aldermaston, he would have spent most of the time in the original county town of Wallingford . The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that the first known Ealdorman of Berkshire , Aethelwulf, fought

7000-493: The Royal Spanish Academy with Spanish. Standard British English differs notably in certain vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation features from standard American English and certain other standard English varieties around the world. British and American spelling also differ in minor ways. The accent, or pronunciation system, of standard British English, based in southeastern England, has been known for over

7140-490: The Scots language or Scottish Gaelic ). Each group includes a range of dialects, some markedly different from others. The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. Around the middle of the 15th century, there were points where within the 5 major dialects there were almost 500 ways to spell the word though . Following its last major survey of English Dialects (1949–1950),

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7280-981: The Thames Basin Heaths . The topography of the land in the parish generally slopes northward to the River Kennet. The soil in the parish is high in clay . Due to the parish's location within the Kennet Valley there is a high concentration of alluvium , with the content largely determined by the London Clay Formation, the Bagshot Formation , and the Bracklesham Beds . The quite flat low clay of Aldermaston's north has with exceptional rainfall led to flooding certain populous streets on three occasions—1971, 1989, and 2007. The flood in 1971 caused by torrential rain

7420-573: The University of Leeds has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects. The team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC , in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout

7560-562: The West Country and other near-by counties of the UK, the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as non-rhoticity . In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word beginning with a vowel. This is called the intrusive R . It could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently. This

7700-600: The York Nativity Play from the 15th century York Mystery Cycle . The play follows a script by E. Martin Browne with carols by William Byrd , Johannes Eccard , and Michael Praetorius . The performances are at the village church in early December, and the actors are local people who have appeared in the play for many years. In 1964, the play was recorded and broadcast by the BBC Home Service under

7840-753: The chimney stacks . The Forsters' house was fronted by two porches, separated by a central section with seven bays . The porches had ornate Solomonic columns , similar to those at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford . The interior of the house featured a number of mythical statues, as well as artwork by Gaspard Dughet , portraits of William Congreve and Godfrey Kneller , and Tintoretto 's Esther Before Ahasuerus . The house's Jacobean garden featured patterns of groves and avenues of oak , yew , Spanish chestnut and lime trees . In

7980-437: The 11th century but to charters of the 7th and 8th centuries. Nevertheless, the hide became the basis of an artificial system of assessment of land for purposes of taxation, which lasted for a long period. The most consistent aspect of the hide is described as follows by Sally Harvey (referring particularly to Domesday Book): "Both Maitland and Vinogradoff long ago noticed that there was a general tendency throughout Domesday for

8120-424: The 11th century, Northamptonshire was assigned 3,200 hides, while Staffordshire was assigned only 500. This number was then divided up between the hundreds in the county. Theoretically there were 100 hides in each hundred, but this proportion was often not maintained, for example because of changes in the hundreds or in the estates comprising them or because assessments were altered when the actual cash liability

8260-491: The 14th century, when it passed through marriage to Thomas De La Mare of Nunney Castle , Somerset . The De La Mare family governed Aldermaston for approximately 120 years, until Elizabeth De La Mare whose male relatives predeceased her—married into the Forster family. In about 1636, the Forsters built a large manor house to the east of the church. The house incorporated parts of an earlier (15th century) house, including

8400-418: The 18th and 19th centuries. The family let the mill to Francis Webb (1797–1811), Mr Sherwood (1811–1820), Mr King (1820–1824), Mr Waldren (1824–1828), Mr Mathews (1828–1848), and William Gilchrist (1848–1856). Gilchrist (Mathews' business partner) bought the mill from William Mount in 1856 using money inherited from his brother's death the previous year. Owning it outright for approximately a year, he drowned in

8540-678: The 1990 test season , the Turbo 333 bat, made from Aldermaston wood, was launched in his honour. In 1955, the Aldermaston Pottery was established on the main street by studio potters Alan Caiger-Smith and Geoffrey Eastop . The pottery was renowned for tin-glazed and porcelain wares, which used scrap wood from the Village Farm woodyard to fire the kiln . The pottery closed in 2006. It had previously scaled back its output in 1993 due to Caiger-Smith's partial retirement after

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8680-649: The 1990s, a team of gardeners formed from the produce show entered the Chelsea Flower Show . They won a silver gilt in the Best Courtyard Garden Award in two consecutive years, for gardens named "Calma" and "Time Lords". The parish of Aldermaston forms a group with the local parishes of Wasing and Brimpton. The three share a monthly Parish Magazine featuring stories from churches, organisations, schools, businesses and various miscellany. Since 1957 there has been an annual performance of

8820-466: The 2001 census data, which showed that 49.8% were female. In 2005, 3% of the parish population were unemployed and 25% were retired. The retirement figure increased in the Pinelands and Ravenswing areas, with a statistic of 42%. Most residents' places of work are in surrounding towns, with their location in the parish largely dictating where to look for work. The 2005 survey identified that residents in

8960-629: The 21st century. RP, while long established as the standard English accent around the globe due to the spread of the British Empire , is distinct from the standard English pronunciation in some parts of the world; most prominently, RP notably contrasts with standard North American accents. In the 21st century, dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary , the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ,

9100-524: The Achard family founded the church of St Mary the Virgin . In 1292, Edward I granted the right for the lord of the manor to hold a market in the village. Another charter was granted by Henry IV , with evidence that the market existed until approximately 1900. The Achards also established an annual fair to observe the feast of St. Thomas the Martyr on 7 July. Aldermaston was held by the Achard family until

9240-483: The Anglo-Saxon version of the same work hid or hiwan is used in place of terra ... familiarum . Other documents of the period show the same equivalence and it is clear that the word hide originally signified land sufficient for the support of a peasant and his household or of a 'family', which may have had an extended meaning. It is uncertain whether it meant the immediate family or a more extensive group. Charles-Edwards suggests that in its early usage it referred to

9380-665: The Business Category Award in the regional final of the Calor Village of the Year competition. The judges stated that the village "has a very successful business community" and that "local businesses are well-supported by villagers and in return these businesses support village activities". In addition to the business award, the village was announced as the Overall Winner of the "English Country Village of

9520-480: The Danes who were then raiding and invading the country. It was raised again for the same purpose on several occasions. The already existing system of assessment of land in hides was utilised to raise the geld, which was levied at a stated rate per hide (e.g. two shillings per hide). Subsequently the same system was used for general taxation and the geld was raised as required. The hide was a measure of value rather than

9660-836: The English Language (1755) was a large step in the English-language spelling reform , where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling. By the early 20th century, British authors had produced numerous books intended as guides to English grammar and usage, a few of which achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers . Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication

9800-434: The Germanic schwein ) is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork (like the French porc ) is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans. Another example is the Anglo-Saxon cu meaning cow, and the French bœuf meaning beef. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English;

9940-403: The Hampshire border. Raghill is an industrial area to the east of the parish, which has some light residential developments. The average age of residents in the parish is approximately 50 with 31.5% of residents in the 45–64 age group. The average age of residents of Aldermaston Wharf is 30.7, and in the mobile home parks the average age is 53.9. Of these, 53.3% were female. This is in contrast with

10080-526: The Manor and was succeeded by AEI's senior representative, Thomas Allibone . Allibone held the position for 32 years, until Blue Circle Industries acquired the estate in 1985. Allibone was succeeded by Tony Jackson, and the current Lord of the Manor is Andy Hall. Blue Circle could not gain planning permission in the grounds of the court, so the MERLIN reactor was demolished to make way for Portland House . With

10220-922: The Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English that writers can turn to in the absence of specific guidance from their publishing house. British English is the basis of, and very similar to, Commonwealth English . Commonwealth English is English as spoken and written in the Commonwealth countries , though often with some local variation. This includes English spoken in Australia , Malta , New Zealand , Nigeria , and South Africa . It also includes South Asian English used in South Asia, in English varieties in Southeast Asia , and in parts of Africa. Canadian English

10360-603: The River Kennet in 1857 after visiting the Angel public house in Woolhampton . Joseph Crockett purchased the mill in an auction the same year, before it was acquired by a Richard Sisling of Godalming in 1858. In approximately 1860, the mill was purchased by the Kersley family. Between then and 1885, it was operated by Anthony Kersley, a miller and maltster who employed "six men and a boy, a carter, several domestic servants and

10500-712: The South East, there are significantly different accents; the Cockney accent spoken by some East Londoners is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation (RP). Cockney rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand, although the extent of its use is often somewhat exaggerated. Londoners speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors. Estuary English has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. Immigrants to

10640-550: The UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country and particularly to London. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 125 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's schoolchildren. Notably Multicultural London English , a sociolect that emerged in the late 20th century spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London . Since

10780-576: The United Kingdom , as well as within the countries themselves. The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England (which is itself broadly grouped into Southern English , West Country , East and West Midlands English and Northern English ), Northern Irish English (in Northern Ireland), Welsh English (not to be confused with the Welsh language ), and Scottish English (not to be confused with

10920-426: The United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English . The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. Globally, countries that are former British colonies or members of the Commonwealth tend to follow British English, as

11060-465: The West Scottish accent. Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect. Once regarded as a Cockney feature, in a number of forms of spoken British English, /t/ has become commonly realised as a glottal stop [ʔ] when it is in the intervocalic position, in

11200-410: The Year" competition in 2006, as well as category winners in the "Building Community Life", "Business", "Young People" and "ICT" categories. The majority of houses in the village were built between the 17th and late 19th centuries, including examples of Victorian Gothic architecture . Only one house has been built on the village's main street since the early 20th century. The parish hall, built in 1897,

11340-406: The area show activity from 1690 to 1390, 1319 to 1214, and 977 to 899 BCE. Wheat and barley grains have been found in these excavations. Tests show that most of the barley was dehulled , but that absence of such debris may mean that the cereal was brought in from other areas. Before the 1066 Norman conquest , the land and properties of Aldermaston formed part of the estates of Harold Godwinson,

11480-446: The assessments showed many anomalies. Many of the hide assessments on lands held by tenants-in-chief were reduced between 1066 and 1086 in order to effect an exemption from or reduction in tax; this again shows that the hide is a tax assessment, not an area of land. Sometimes, the assessment in hides is given both for the whole manor and for the demesne land (i.e. the lord's own demesne) included in it. Sally Harvey has suggested that

11620-488: The award of the grant in 2007, Leeds University stated: that they were "very pleased"—and indeed, "well chuffed"—at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the Black Country , or if he was a Scouser he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a "canny load of chink". Most people in Britain speak with

11760-472: The building of a parish hall in 1897 and provided the village with a water supply, and the water fountain on the small village green was installed to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee . Keyser oversaw the restoration of the village almshouses in 1906 and 1924, and defrayed the cost of a memorial oak tablet in memory of those killed in World War I . Of the 100 men from the village who served in

11900-622: The country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio". When discussing

12040-498: The defence of the borough, each contributing to the maintenance and manning of the fortifications in proportion to the number of hides for which they answered. The County Hidage (early 11th century) lists the total number of hides to be assessed on each county and it seems that by this time at least the total number of hides in a given area was imposed from above. Each county was assigned a round number of hides, for which it would be required to answer. For instance, at an early date in

12180-478: The early 18th century the Forsters oversaw the building of almshouses in Church Road. Built by R Dixon in 1706, the houses became known as "Dixon's Cottages". The manor passed through the Forster family until 1752, when the Forster lineage ended and the estate was inherited by Ralph Congreve, the husband of the last Forster's grand-niece. On Ralph's death a second-cousin of dramatist William Congreve inherited

12320-523: The earthwork in the AWE complex survives at a height of 3.3 metres (11 ft) and with a ditch 0.9 metres (3.0 ft) deep. The village has a couple of Sites of Special Scientific Interest called West's Meadow and Aldermaston Gravel Pits . The landscape of Aldermaston is influenced by Paices Hill and Rag Hill, which are extremities of the chalk formation the North Wessex Downs as part of

12460-546: The emergency services were "really stretched because of what happened over the county and the Glade event", that "the A340 road junction was two or three-foot under water", and predicted that "a lot of householders would be homeless." The 1831 census showed that 68% of the employed population of Aldermaston were working class or "labourers and servants". 20% were middle class ("middling sorts"), 10% were upper class ("employers and professionals") and 2% were unclassified. In 1887

12600-404: The estate's land. Aside from these, there were six smallholdings within the parish but outside the land owned by the court. These were Springhill Farm, Court Farm, Strawberry Farm, Circus Farm, Ravenswing Farm, and Frouds Farm. Of these, Church Farm and Forster's Farm remain in operation. Upper Church Farm was originally known as Harry's Farm, after a William Harry who died in 1544. The local pub

12740-548: The estate. After World War II , the manor was returned to AEI who built the MERLIN reactor on part of the land. The reactor was opened on 6 November 1959 by The Duke of Edinburgh . With the opening of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) in 1950, Aldermaston became synonymous with a number of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) marches . In 1953, Pole stepped down as Lord of

12880-482: The final manufacturing can be undertaken under moisture-controlled conditions. In the 1960s, Blue Peter aired a short documentary on the cricket bat production entitled "The Life of a Cricket Bat". It was presented by Christopher Trace . The yard would take on three up-coming cricketers for the winter, in the hope that the hard work would "toughen them up" to get them picked for the England cricket team . One year

13020-458: The idea of two different morphemes, one that causes the double negation, and one that is used for the point or the verb. Standard English in the United Kingdom, as in other English-speaking nations, is widely enforced in schools and by social norms for formal contexts but not by any singular authority; for instance, there is no institution equivalent to the Académie française with French or

13160-532: The land of one family, worked by one plough and that ownership of a hide conferred the status of a freeman, to whom Stenton referred as "the independent master of a peasant household". Hides of land formed the basis for tax levies used to equip free warriors ( miles ) of the Holy Roman Empire . In 807 it was specified that in the region west of the Seine, for example, a vassal who held four or five hides

13300-523: The last southern Midlands accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath or grass (i.e. barth or grarss ). Conversely crass or plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby , five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite which, unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by

13440-518: The later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary . Dialects and accents vary amongst the four countries of

13580-520: The main source of industry in Aldermaston has been agriculture. According to the 1831 census, approximately 66% of working men (aged 20 and over) were employed in some form of agriculture. The next highest industry by workers was "retail and handicrafts", which employed approximately 20%. Employment categories in the 1881 census were more discreet; just 20% of working men identified their employment as agriculture. 30% however, were listed as "general or unspecified commodities". In this census, women's employment

13720-608: The manor is documented in the Domesday Book of 1086. St Mary the Virgin Church was established in the 13th century, and some of the original Norman architecture remains in the building's structure. The last resident Lord of the Manor , Charles Keyser, died in 1929. Aldermaston Court , the manor estate and house, was requisitioned for armed forces use during the Second World War . The name "Aldermaston"

13860-510: The manor. The Congreve Family owned the estate at the time of the 1830 Swing Riots . The rioters marched across Aldermaston, wrecking twenty-three agricultural machines. Workers were so frightened by the riots that they left their machinery in the open in an attempt to limit additional damage. In 1843, the manor house was destroyed by fire, news of which was carried in The Illustrated London News . The estate passed into

14000-484: The march went from London to Aldermaston). This was an annual march from 1958 to 1963. Aldermaston was the original location of Glade Festival . The 2007 event was jeopardised by torrential rains and flooding but cautiously went ahead. In 2009, the festival moved from the area and was held near Winchester . Between 2006 and 2017, blues festival "Blues on the Meadow" was held in the village. Aldermaston railway station

14140-457: The mass internal migration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and given its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands and East Anglian . It is

14280-523: The mill until the late 1920s, shortly before Keyser's death. After Keyser had died and the Aldermaston estate had been divided and sold, his widow, Mary, approached Evelyn Arlott to run the mill as a tea room and guesthouse . The Arlott family purchased the mill in approximately 1939, after the death of Mary Keyser. In 1939, there were seven farms on the Aldermaston estate—Forsters Farm, Village Farm, Church Farm, Upper Church Farm, Raghill Farm, Park Farm, and Soke Farm. These accounted for approximately 75% of

14420-698: The neighbouring parishes of Wasing , Brimpton , Midgham , and Woolhampton . The ward is the smallest in West Berkshire by population. The ward's councillor is Dominic Boeck, who represents the Conservative Party . Aldermaston is under the catchment of Thames Valley Police and is covered by the Brimpton Neighbourhood Policing Team. In a meeting with Aldermaston parish council, the police reported that 57 criminal offences were reported to have taken place in

14560-413: The number of hides for which an estate should answer. As each local community had the task of deciding how its quota of hides should be divided between the lands held by that community, different communities used different criteria, depending on the type of land held and on the way in which an individual's wealth was reckoned within that community, it is self-evident that no single comprehensive definition

14700-474: The parish as white . In 2005 30% of parish residents lived in the village. Of the 70% outside the village, 30% lived at Aldermaston Wharf , 20% in the local mobile home parks, 10% in the Falcon Fields development and 10% in "other outlying areas". Falcon Fields is a housing development on the southern border of the parish, completed in the early 2000s. Ravenswing and Pinelands are mobile home parks near

14840-412: The parish between 2009 and 2010. Of this, the majority was theft from non-dwelling properties. Vehicle crime had dropped by 57% on the previous year but violent crime had risen from four to six incidents. Five of these crimes were reported to be domestic violence . There have been no reported cases of robbery in Aldermaston since 2006. Aldermaston is in West Berkshire, about 2 miles (3.2 km) from

14980-513: The parish of Aldermaston—between 1901 and 1961, 368 houses were built in the parish. Census (1801–2001); Census 2011; Cassey's History, Gazetteer and Directory of Berkshire and Oxfordshire (1868) A number of parish border changes occurred in the first half of the 20th century, including the net loss of 307 acres (124 ha) to Beenham and Woolhampton on 1 April 1934 alone. By 2001, the parish population had reduced to 927. The 2001 United Kingdom Census identified that 99.3% of householders in

15120-598: The parish. A water processing facility was installed on-site in 2006, though the Pangbourne Pipeline remains in situ . Lafarge Aggregates owns various sites in the parish. In 1974 the village won an appeal against Pioneer Concrete 's application for gravel extraction near the village. Similar events took place in March 2003 when hundreds of local residents protested against an application of gravel extraction by Lafarge. Larfarge's initial appeal, in April 2003,

15260-485: The ploughland data in Domesday Book was intended to be used for a complete re-assessment but, if so, it was never actually made. The Pipe Rolls , where they are available, show that levies were based largely on the old assessments, though with some amendments and exemptions. The last recorded levy was for 1162-3 during the reign of Henry II , but the tax was not formally abolished and Henry II thought of using it again between 1173 and 1175. The old assessments were used for

15400-506: The population of the parish was 528. By 1896, the population had grown to 585. The population fluctuated steadily around 550 until the 1950s and 1960s, when a population explosion resulted in the 1961 UK census reporting 2,186 residents in the parish. This coincides with the opening of the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the early 1950s, and the majority of this figure counts residents in the parts of Tadley within

15540-430: The pub brewed beer on-site; a brewery was built as an out-building behind the main pub building. John Knight produced beer at the pub for 40 years, selling it for 2 d . The brewery building is still in existence, with the wooden louvres still operational. The building is now the pub's kitchen. In the 1970s, the pub was owned by Whitbread . In the mid-1990s the pub was taken over by Gales Brewery (having previously been

15680-532: The reserve, including the common teal , shoveler , common kingfisher , water rail , and common nightingale . Britain's first roadside petrol station was opened by The AA on the Bath Road near Aldermaston on 2 March 1919. The following year, one villager requested that a pump be installed by his house. "Chuffer" Ford, who lived in The Forge with his wife Olive, was told by Keyser that it must be "behind

15820-509: The rest of William's reign, and that of his son William Rufus , Aldermaston was owned by the Crown . The history of the Lords of the Manor of Aldermaston Court can be traced to Achard D'Aldermaston, who was born in 1036. Six families have had lordship of the Aldermaston estate. In the 11th century, Henry I gave Aldermaston to Robert Achard (or Hachard) of Sparsholt . In the mid-12th century,

15960-443: The same hidage could vary greatly in extent even in the same county. Following the Norman Conquest of England , the hidage assessments were recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, and there was a tendency for land producing £ 1 of income per year to be assessed at 1 hide. The Norman kings continued to use the unit for their tax assessments until the end of the 12th century. The hide was divided into four yardlands or virgates . It

16100-519: The south of the parish (Falcon Fields and Ravenswing/Pinelands) travel towards Tadley and Basingstoke whereas those further north in the parish tend to find work in Reading, Newbury and London . At this time, 52% of homes were owned outright, with 30% owned with a mortgage. Rented accommodation accounted for 12% of residences. The population at the 2011 census was 1,015, giving a population density of 78.37/km (202.99/sq mi). Historically,

16240-603: The theft of work tools worth £500 from a van at the Sprucefield park and ride car park in Lisburn. A football team can be treated likewise: Arsenal have lost just one of 20 home Premier League matches against Manchester City. This tendency can be observed in texts produced already in the 19th century. For example, Jane Austen , a British author, writes in Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice , published in 1813: All

16380-612: The title of Star Over Aldermaston . One member of the production team was David Shute . Aldermaston was mentioned in Plum Pie (1966) by P. G. Wodehouse —"Every now and then we march from Aldermaston, protesting like a ton of bricks... And then we sit a good deal." This was a reference to the demonstrations of the CND (the Aldermaston Marches) which took the form of marches from Aldermaston to London (apart from in 1958, when

16520-403: The traditional accent of Newcastle upon Tyne , 'out' will sound as 'oot', and in parts of Scotland and North-West England, 'my' will be pronounced as 'me'. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are diphthongised to [ɪi] and [ʊu] respectively (or, more technically, [ʏʉ], with a raised tongue), so that ee and oo in feed and food are pronounced with a movement. The diphthong [oʊ] is also pronounced with

16660-600: The village and surrounding lanes. The floods also hit the Church of England primary school, with the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service evacuating pupils and staff from the school in life rafts . The evacuation used four rafts, rescuing pupils and teachers from the school through windows. The 165 people (140 pupils and 25 members of staff) were taken uphill to the parish hall, where blankets and sleeping bags had been provided. Thames Valley Police stated that

16800-510: The village's own amateur dramatics society. The society, known as The Aldermaston Players, have staged fundraising events in the village in 1996. In 1976, the parish hall hosted an episode of the BBC 's Any Questions? . The village, along with the neighbouring parish of Wasing, holds an annual produce show at The Old Mill. The show, which was previously held behind the Hind's Head pub, hosts produce competitions in approximately 100 classes. In

16940-435: The village, but none of the road survives in the area. At the southern end of The Street is a small triangular village green called The Loosey—possibly named after a "Lucy" who planted the oak tree which stands on the green. The Loosey is the site of a Roman well, discovered in 1940 by a cow that almost fell down it. The Loosey was previously home to the village maypole (which was often climbed by Daniel Burr 's monkey) and

17080-426: The village. The pub is named after the archery butts that were located in the fields opposite the pub. The Falcon Inn was on the southern border of the parish. The pub closed in 2009 and was demolished in 2011. The Aldermaston Brewery was established at Aldermaston Wharf in 1770, and was demolished in the 1950s. It was replaced with a cable factory, which was demolished in 1990. Old Village Farm (on Fishermans Lane)

17220-549: The war, 22 were killed (the highest percentage of town population in the country). The tablet bears the name of each man lost in action. During Keyser's lordship, John Marius Wilson 's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales listed Adminston as a possible name for the village. On his death in 1929, his wife, Mary, continued to occupy the house until she died in 1938. The estate was auctioned off in September 1938, and many lots were purchased by their occupiers. The manor house

17360-568: The world are good and agreeable in your eyes. However, in Chapter 16, the grammatical number is used. The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence. Some dialects of British English use negative concords, also known as double negatives . Rather than changing a word or using a positive, words like nobody, not, nothing, and never would be used in the same sentence. While this does not occur in Standard English, it does occur in non-standard dialects. The double negation follows

17500-450: The yard had help from Frank Tyson , Alan Moss , and Peter Loader . The following year they hosted three Davids—David Kaufman, David Spragbury, and David Gibson . The wood yard was featured on A Question of Sport , when cricketer Graham Gooch took part in the programme's "Mystery Guest" round. Gooch endorsed the bats made from Aldermaston willow, which were sold by Stuart Surridge . When he scored 333 runs against India at Lord's in

17640-526: Was notably limited . However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon , eventually came to dominate. The original Old English

17780-506: Was a music shop , which was opened by Terry Wogan . Before this it was a cooperative village stores started by Charles Keyser. There are two business parks in the parish—Calleva Business Park (on the Berkshire/Hampshire border) and Youngs Industrial Estate on Paices Hill. The latter opened in the early 1980s, and is the location of Paices Wood Country Parkland , a wildlife project managed by BBOWT. In 2007 Aldermaston won

17920-474: Was a way of dividing the tax assessment on the hide between several owners of parts of the land assessed. The owner of land assessed at 40 notional (or 'fiscal') acres in a village assessed at 10 hides and paying geld of 2 shillings per hide would be responsible for one-third ( 40 ⁄ 120 ) of 2 shillings—that is, 8 pence—though his land might be considerably more or less than 40 modern statute acres in extent. The surname Huber (also anglicized as Hoover )

18060-528: Was also documented. Of the 137 working women in the parish, 40 (slightly fewer than 30%) worked in domestic services, whereas 82 (approximately 60%) were of an unknown occupation. In about 1797 a schoolmaster living in the village cultivated the Williams pear . The schoolmaster (either Mr Wheeler or his successor, John Stair) was the original cultivator, but the pear (a cultivar of the European Pear )

18200-557: Was bought by Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) for £16,000. One of the houses in the village is recorded as having fetched £1,375. As AEI's chairman, Felix Pole became the de jure Lord of the Manor upon their purchase of Aldermaston Court. During the 1940s RAF Aldermaston was created on the parkland at the southern end of the parish, with the Women's Land Army and the XIX Tactical Air Command stationed on

18340-526: Was exacerbated by the non-porous tarmac and buildings of the Atomic Weapons Establishment which managed for the first time to overwhelm its balancing ponds . This happened again in July 1989, when an average of 6 inches (150 mm) of rain was deposited across the parish in two hours; water rose 5 feet (1.5 m) above the ponds and broke through a brick wall. The destroyed wall was rebuilt with 17 grilles to avoid another build-up of water. A donation of £10,000

18480-424: Was given to the village by Blue Circle . In July 2007, torrential rain flooded some of the traditional village centre and primary school . The storm coincided with the annual Glade Festival and jeopardised the event. The festival gates were temporarily closed while organisers assessed the flooding, which submerged one of the stages. The festival's car park was incapacitated, with thousands of revellers stranded in

18620-577: Was hence nominally equivalent in area to a carucate , a unit used in the Danelaw . The Anglo-Saxon word for a hide was hid (or its synonym hiwisc ). Both words are believed to be derived from the same root hiwan , which meant "family". Bede in his Ecclesiastical History (c. 731) describes the extent of a territory by the number of families which it supported, as (for instance), in Latin, terra x familiarum meaning 'a territory of ten families'. In

18760-837: Was intended to be rung as an air-raid siren during the Second World War . In the early 19th century the pub's signboard carried the arms of the Congreve family, as well as branding for a company named "Adams". In the British Parliamentary Papers of 1817, the Committee on the State of the Police in the Metropolis reported evidence of a John Adams—a Reading-based distiller and hop merchant—who competed for business against H & G Simonds Brewery . By 1850,

18900-419: Was named after Richard Williams of Turnham Green , who grew several grafts of the original tree. On 5 December 1956, a plaque commemorating the tree was unveiled on the wall of the village school . The Domesday survey records a mill in Aldermaston. Aldermaston Mill, previously called the "Kingsmill", supplied flour to Huntley & Palmers in Reading. The mill was owned by Wasing's Mount family throughout

19040-422: Was never a truly mixed language in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication). The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and abstract English is, the more it contains Latin and French influences, e.g. swine (like

19180-403: Was perceived as being too high or too low or for other reasons now unknown. The hides within each hundred were then divided between villages, estates or manors , usually in blocks or multiples of 5 hides, though this was not always maintained. Differences from the norm could result from estates being moved from one hundred to another, or from adjustments to the size of an estate or alterations in

19320-405: Was responsible for showing up to a muster in person, fully equipped for war. Three men who each possessed one hide, though, merely were grouped such that two of them were responsible for equipping the third, who would go to war in their name. Those holding half-hides were responsible for readying one man for every group of six. This came about as a way of ensuring that the liege took to the field with

19460-588: Was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman . These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it

19600-726: Was turned down by West Berkshire Council . A further application to extract aggregate at the Wasing Estate was due to be decided in 2010. One former extraction site, Butts Lake Quarry , is now a local nature reserve and the flooded lakes have been identified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and is now operated by the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT). The reserve contains specimens of trees such as alder , cherry , hawthorn , oak, and willow. Examples of reeds present include typha latifolia , phragmites australis , mentha aquatica , and lythrum salicaria . Numerous species of bird nest in

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