Creslow (occasionally also known as Christlow) is a village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authorit ...

within

Aylesbury Vale The Aylesbury Vale (or Vale of Aylesbury) is a geographical region in Buckinghamshire, England, which is bounded by the Borough of Milton Keynes and South Northamptonshire to the north, Central Bedfordshire and the Borough of Dacorum (Hertford ...

district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is close to Whitchurch, about six and a half miles from Aylesbury. It is in the

of Witchurch. The village name is Anglo Saxon in origin, ''Cærsehlaw'', meaning 'cress hill'. It was recorded in the

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...

of 1086 as ''Cresselai''.Parishes: Creslow'

Victoria History of the Counties of England The Victoria History of the Counties of England, commonly known as the Victoria County History or the VCH, is an English history project which began in 1899 with the aim of creating an encyclopaedic history of each of the historic counties of En ...

, A History of the County of Buckingham: Volume 3 (1925), pp. 335-338. Date accessed: 22 April 2012 In the

Victorian era In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardia ...

and much admired then, there was just one house left in the village, the

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals w ...

, which dated from the 14th century. It was then the property of Lord Clifford but has also now disappeared. The church at Creslow, which dates from the 13th century, was formerly owned by the

Knights Hospitaller The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem ( la, Ordo Fratrum Hospitalis Sancti Ioannis Hierosolymitani), commonly known as the Knights Hospitaller (), was a medieval and early modern Catholic military order. It was headq ...

(the Order of St John of Jerusalem). Following the dissolution of the Monasteries it was held by the Crown, and the whole of the manor was used as pasture for the cattle of the Royal Household. The

ecclesiastical parish A parish is a territorial entity in many Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest, often termed a parish priest, who might be assisted by one or m ...

was abolished by

Queen Elizabeth I Elizabeth I (7 September 153324 March 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. Elizabeth was the last of the five House of Tudor monarchs and is sometimes referred to as the "Virgin Queen". El ...

and the building itself was demolished during the

English Civil War The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of civil wars and political machinations between Parliamentarians (" Roundheads") and Royalists led by Charles I ("Cavaliers"), mainly over the manner of England's governance and issues of re ...

, by the

regicide Regicide is the purposeful killing of a monarch or sovereign of a polity and is often associated with the usurpation of power. A regicide can also be the person responsible for the killing. The word comes from the Latin roots of ''regis'' ...

Cornelius Holland, and was never replaced. More recently Creslow was the site of a Foreign and Commonwealth Office/

MI6 The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...

signals intelligence station, which was closed down in 1998 and, now in private hands, operates as a data processing facility and fibre optic hub under the name

Creslow Park Creslow Park is a large specialist technical facility located in Creslow, in the Aylesbury Vale in the English county of Buckinghamshire. It was originally established in 1944 as Creslow Transmission Station, a top secret radio communications facili ...

References

External links

Photograph of the Manor House
{{authority control Villages in Buckinghamshire Civil parishes in Buckinghamshire