“Bisham” is said to have been originally “Bustleham,” but the present form will be preferred by every one. Strangers call it “Bish-am,” but for the natives and the people of Marlow the only way is by the elision of the letter h—“Bis-am”; and thus shall you, being duly informed of this shibboleth, infallibly detect the stranger in these parts.
Bisham village is quite invisible from the river, nor need we trouble to seek it, unless it be for climbing up into the lovely and precipitous Quarry Woods, in the rear. To those who knew Bisham when Fred Walker painted his delightful pictures, and among them, some studies of this village street, there comes, when they think of the Bisham that was and the Bisham that is, a fierce but impotent anger. The humble old red-brick cottages remain, it is true, and their gardens bloom as of yore, but what was once the sweet-smelling gravelly street is now a tarred abomination, smelling evilly, and wearing a squalid and disreputable look. This is the result of the coming of the motor-car, for Bisham is on the well-travelled road between High Wycombe, Great Marlow, Twyford, and Reading, and the village has now the unwelcome choice of two evils: to be half-choked with billows of dust, or to coat its roads with tar compositions.
Of what was originally a Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and then an Augustine Priory, and finally a Benedictine Abbey, nothing is left but the Prior’s lodgings, now the mansion of the Vansittart-Neales, called “the Abbey.” The parish church stands finely by the waterside, encircled by the trees of the park, and there remains a monastic barn. Such are the few relics of the proud home of monks and priors, enriched during hundreds of years by the benefactions of the wicked, endeavouring by means of such gifts to atone sufficiently for their evil lives, and so escape the damnation that surely awaited them.
Such complete destruction is melancholy indeed, when we consider the great historic personages who were buried here: among them the great Nevill, “Warwick the Kingmaker,” slain at last in the course of his tortuous ambitions, in the Battle of Barnet, fought on Easter Day, 1471, and laid at Bisham, hard by his own manor of Marlow.