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Ware is one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Western
Europe.’ So wrote the archaeologist, Robert Kiln, in his book,
‘The Dawn of History in East Herts’, where he described
how excavations on the GlaxoSmithKline site near Ware Lock had revealed
settlements going back to the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age of
some 5,000-10,000 years ago.
The reason why people first settled here is due to Ware’s
position on one of the country’s oldest roadways, at the point
where it crosses the River Lea. The road later became known as Ermine
Street and later still the Old North Road, which was the main road
of medieval England. The stone implements of these prehistoric Ware
citizens can be seen in the Ware Museum, along with a clay pot of
the Bronze Age ‘beaker folk’ - contemporary with the
great civilisations of Crete and Mycenae and the Trojan War. There
is evidence of even later Iron Age fortifications in many parts
of the town.
When the Romans came, they paved and widened Ermine Street to form
a military road for the legions marching northwards, and a small
town grew up along the road. It was probably also an inland port
and one of the more grisly exports from here may have been slaves,
since a Roman slave shackle (now in the Ware Museum) was found near
Ware Lock. A number of buildings have been found on the GlaxoSmithKline
site, including pottery kilns, and finds have included jewellery
and ladies’ toilet implements, like eyebrow tweezers.
It must have been a substantial town, from the large number of burials
which have been discovered around the edges of the Roman site. It
is these burials which are undoubtedly the reason why, during the
16th century, the GlaxoSmithKline site became known as the Buryfield
(long before the Great Plague of 1665, which is sometimes thought
to be the reason for the name).
After the Romans came the Anglo-Saxon invaders and examples of early
Saxon pottery were found during the extension of the Library in
the High Street in 1977. One rare and intriguing find is a Saxon
coin of the 7th century AD which came to light just north of the
High Street - it is also in the Ware Museum.
It is towards the end of the Saxon period that the story of Ware’s
early history really takes off. In the 9th century, a large Danish
force had overrun the Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and
East Anglia, until only Wessex was left. The Peace of Wedmore in
886 established a frontier between Wessex and the Danelaw. Part
of this frontier was the River Lea, and Ware found itself a frontier
town; it is thought that two Ware place-names, Wengeo and Widbury,
are of Danish origin.
The ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ records that, in 895, the
Danes moved a large force along the Thames and up the River Lea
for 20 miles, where they established a fortification. King Alfred
came up the river with an army of Londoners and tried to engage
the Danes in battle but was beaten off. So Alfred, using the Danes’
own tactics, built fortifications on either side of the river and
started work on diverting the river’s course so that the Danes
could not row their ships down the Lea again to the Thames. Then
the Danes decamped and marched across country to the River Severn.
Most archaeologists now believe that this happened at Ware, and
the town’s Saxon name ‘Waras’ comes from the weirs
Alfred built.
One result of the Danish wars was the building of Hertford as a
Saxon fortified burg, and for a while Ware appears to have been
controlled by the authorities in Hertford. However, the Domesday
Book records that in the later Saxon period, under King Edward the
Confessor, Ware was still a substantial settlement with a large
population, five mills, and worth more in taxes than Hertford.
After the Norman Conquest, Ware regained its independence and began
to grow. The first step was taken by Hugh de Grentmaisnil, the lord
of the manor recorded in the Domesday Book, who obtained a charter
in 1078 to found a priory, as a daughter house of his family’s
Abbey of St Evroul in Normandy. This priory was established to the
north of the High Street, in the area of St Mary’s Church,
and suppressed by King Henry V in 1414 - it is not to be confused
with the Franciscan friary south of the High Street, which is now
known, rather confusingly, as ‘The Priory’. Hugh and
his immediate descendants rebelled against the King, with the result
that their estates in Ware were forfeited to the Crown.
The manor of Ware was eventually restored to Hugh’s great-granddaughter,
Petronil or Parnel, who was married to Robert Beaumont, Earl of
Leicester. It was Petronil and her son, Robert, who at the end of
the 12th century laid out the town centre as we know it. Using the
priory as a sort of pivot, they diverted the course of the old road
so that it ran parallel with the river for about half a mile and
then crossed the Lea at a new bridge, much farther to the east than
the old one. The new High Street they created was wide enough to
accommodate a market, shops and a fair. An added bonus was that
a number of attractive ‘burgage plots’ were created
between the road and the river, designed to be sold or let to burghers,
or free merchants. The new town layout and diversion of the old
road were given official recognition during a visit by Henry III,
who declared that the new bridge formed part of the King’s
Highway. Royal charters for a market and an annual fair were granted
at about the same time, as well as a charter for the tolls of all
ships going down to London from Ware Bridge and all vehicles crossing
the bridge.
However, the new arrangements did not pass without opposition. One
of the records of the time states that ‘the bailiff and men
of Ware have turned aside the way that used to pass by Hertford
to Ware to the detriment of the town of Hertford’. Official
recognition or not, Hertford could not let this pass, and its bailiffs
acted by putting a chain across the new Ware bridge. This happened
when Sayer de Quincey, Petronil’s son-in-law, was lord of
the manor. The story has it that Sayer broke the chain and threw
it into the river, telling the bailiffs that they would follow if
they tried to repeat the exercise. Since Sayer de Quincey was Earl
of Winchester and one of the barons who made King John sign the
Magna Carta, the men of Hertford did not repeat the exercise, but
Hertford went on grumbling for many years afterwards about Ware’s
new prosperity.
Ware was situated on the Old North Road, the main thoroughfare of
medieval and Tudor England from London to York and Scotland. In
the centuries following the Norman Conquest, the main traffic on
this road was military, but in about 1400, the people themselves
began to move more freely around England, either for trade or on
that medieval equivalent of tourism, the pilgrimage. Ware is mentioned
in the most famous account of a pilgrimage, Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury
Tales’, as being the town from which the cook originated,
and Ware was itself on the other main pilgrimage route, to the shrine
of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham in Norfolk. One Tudor writer said
that the road through the town was known as ‘Walsingham Way’.
To serve these pilgrims and travellers, virtually every building
in Water Row (the south side of the High Street) was an inn at some
time during the period from 1400-1700. There were other inns in
Land Row and Baldock Street, as well as a few in Amwell End, but
it was the inns of Water Row that were ‘great and sumptuous
hostelries’, as described by Raphael Holinshed. The most important
were the Crown, the White Hart, the Christopher, the Bull, the George
and the Saracen’s Head. The inns have long since been converted
into shops, but the waggonways, which are a feature of the High
Street, remain as reminders of the great inns of the past. No wonder
the Tudor poet, William Vallens, described his home town as ‘the
guested town of Ware’.
What led to the disappearance of the inns was another thriving Ware
industry, malting. The passage of wagons bringing barley into the
town for malting made the roads almost impassable for much of the
winter, with the result that, in 1663, England’s first turnpike
was set up at Wadesmill, in an attempt to control the malting traffic.
Immediately, travellers began to find alternative routes. Before
1663, Samuel Pepys travelled to Cambridge by way of Ware - often
complaining about the state of the road, particularly when he had
to get down from the coach and fell into a ditch - but after the
erection of the turnpike, he preferred to go via Bishop’s
Stortford. Others went by way of Hatfield, on what became known
as the Great North Road.
In an attempt to attract what was left of the coaching business,
the Ware innkeepers offered new facilities. Riverside gardens were
laid out with summerhouses, or gazebos, for the enjoyment of their
guests. In addition, any visitor who wished to stay in an inn containing
the Great Bed of Ware was treated to an elaborate and bawdy ritual.
In their time, a number of Ware inns housed the Great Bed, which
is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It is thought
to have been made as a sort of advertising gimmick for the Ware
inns.
The malting industry dominated the life of the town from the 17th
century, and Ware could justly claim to be the premier malting town
in England. What gave malting in Ware the edge over other centres
was its position between London and the barley-growing counties
of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and also its situation on the River
Lea with easy transport by barge to London. One of Ware’s
specialities in the early years was brown malt - a malt which had
been cured at a high temperature over a wood-burning kiln - and
this became the main ingredient of ‘porter’ or ‘entire’,
the main drink of London’s labourers during the 18th century.
Brown malt earned Ware its superiority and its own quoted price
on the London Corn Exchange. There are many former malthouses in
the town, now converted to other uses, and the last working malting,
Paul’s at Broadmeads, was a thoroughly modern, computerised
plant. However, that too closed, in January 1994, thus bringing
to an end the 600-year-old malting industry for which Ware was once
famous.
The Present and the Future
The malting industry has gone, and many of the old maltings have
been converted into offices, factories and residential units, but
Ware still retains its industrial character. The main employer is
now GlaxoSmithKline which continues to manufacture its world-famous
drugs on the site first occupied by Allen and Hanburys in 1899.
As well as the manufacturing site, GlaxoSmithKline also has a large
modern research establishment nearby. The town’s other industries
are located on the other side of the town in Crane Mead, Marsh Lane
and Broadmeads.
Ware’s historic assets in the road and the river still continue
to flourish, even though the main A10 traffic travelling between
London and Cambridge now uses the bypass which runs on a viaduct
across the Meads. The River Lea no longer carries commercial barges
but is well used by pleasure craft of every description and is very
popular with anglers. On the north bank of the Lea, many of the
gazebos have been restored and are now seen as one of the town’s
unique attractions.
Ware is a busy commercial town but proud of its heritage. Many of
the older buildings are listed, and the town is designated a centre
of ‘outstanding archeological and historical interest’.
In recent years, Ware has begun to attract tourists and guided tours
of the town centre are held on some Sundays in the summer months.
There are also regular Summer band concerts in the Priory grounds,
as well as the opening of the Museum on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturdays
and Sundays. However, Ware does not live in the past. At the start
of a new Millennium, Ware is a bustling town, with large science-based
industries and many small businesses, with nine churches and eleven
schools, with many voluntary organisations and, above all, a thriving
community spirit.
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Ware and its Neighbours
