North Marston, Buckinghamshire

Description
Marston, North, or Northmarston, a village and a parish in Bucks. The village stands 4 miles S of Win-slow station on the Oxford and Bletchley section of the L. & N.W.R., and 7 N of Aylesbury, and has a post and money order office under Winslow; telegraph office, Whitchurch. The parish comprises 1983 acres; population of the civil parish, 580; of the ecclesiastical, 658. A perennial spring, called Sir John Shorne's Well, is at the foot of the village; is fabled to have started into being by miraculous act of a sainted incumbent in the 13th century; and was, together with a costly shrine of the same person in the church, frequented for ages by so many pilgrims that the place became populous and flourishing. A recent analysis showed that the water contained much free carbonic acid and some mineral salts in minute quantities. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford; net value. £240 with residence. Patrons, the Dean and Canons of Windsor. The church stands on an eminence; is a building of stone, partly Decorated English and partly Later, with a tower; has a handsome E window and reredos, erected by Queen Victoria (who also restored the chancel at a cost of £3000) in memory of Mr J. C. Neild, who bequeathed to her his fortune of about £250,000, and died in 1852; and contains fine oak stalls, a piscina, three brasses of 1499,1602, and 1613, also one (1852) in memory of Neild with inscription and coat of arms, and a curious memorial of Mr John Virgin. There are Wesleyan. and Primitive Methodist chapels, and 26 acres of poor's and church lands. Scheme College, a high school for 100 boys, was founded in 1876 by the Rev S. B. James, D.D., vicar of the parish.