At the deepest level, Ware speaks to Britain’s long human story as an island of rivers and routes. Our gravel pits and landfill link us in geologic time to the ancestral Thames, which flowed through Ware until half a million years ago. In the Mesolithic, as Doggerland was submerged and Britain became an island, prehistoric finds along the Lea confirmed a presence here.
People used this corridor 8,000–10,000 years ago, long before there was a “Britain” in name.
People already used the area in ways familiar from national syntheses of the Thames–Lea system: moving along waterways, exploiting wetlands, returning seasonally to good hunting grounds and crossing places.
Archaeological evidence shows year-round long-term inhabitation on the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) site by Ware lock. The Neolithic brought farming to the Lea valley at Ware for the first time, and by the end of the that period, trade networks meant that the ford was for the first time a connection for overland commerce, for example bringing flint tools from Grimes Graves in what is now Norfolk.
At the deepest level, Ware speaks to Britain’s long human story as an island of rivers and routes. Our gravel pits and landfill link us in geologic time to the ancestral Thames, which flowed through Ware until half a million years ago. In the Mesolithic, as Doggerland was submerged and Britain became an island, prehistoric finds along the Lea confirmed a presence here.
People used this corridor 8,000–10,000 years ago, long before there was a “Britain” in name.
People already used the area in ways familiar from national syntheses of the Thames–Lea system: moving along waterways, exploiting wetlands, returning seasonally to good hunting grounds and crossing places.
Archaeological evidence shows year-round long-term inhabitation on the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) site by Ware lock. The Neolithic brought farming to the Lea valley at Ware for the first time, and by the end of the that period, trade networks meant that the ford was for the first time a connection for overland commerce, for example bringing flint tools from Grimes Graves in what is now Norfolk.
The Bronze age brought the Beaker People to Ware. With them they brough a proto-Celtic language that would become Brythonic by the Iron Age – the language in which the name of the Lea first comes to us, from the god Lugh, the shining or bright river.
Prehistoric stages in our town’s history brought different populations and different languages, a change that has continued to happen to the modern day, an important part of the cultural development of town and nation.
By the late Iron Age and Roman period, that crossing becomes part of the empire’s road network as a sizeable roadside settlement on Ermine Street, with buildings, pottery kilns and cemeteries that tie Ware directly to the national story of conquest, Romanisation and integration into wider imperial markets. The Ninth Legion built Ermine Street as part of the conquest of Britian, then as a major trade route from London to York, linking the east of Britain to the Empire.
1066 is the one date in British history that every school child knows.
The 1086 Domesday Book reveals our name – Waras – at the weirs – now Ware.
Ware witnessed Harold’s army march up the Old North Road to fight Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge. Ware in Domesday appears as a large royal manor on the Lea with about 125 recorded households, putting it among the biggest 20% of settlements in 1066.
Under Edward the Confessor Ware was already substantial, with a relatively large population, five mills and high tax value; by 1086 it had a deer park, a newly planted vineyard, at least two mills and notable fisheries (including a render of “375 eels”). Before the Conquest Ware was held by Anschil/Eskil of Ware, who possessed over 27–30 estates spread across Hertfordshire and the South Midlands and was major royal thegn.
When Harold marched south to Hastings through Ware, Eskil would very likely have taken his men along. They almost certainly fought and died with their King, as William the Conqueror took England.
Ware in the 1300s became a model medieval English town. Diverting the road to a new bridge over the Lea and laying out burgage plots along the new High Street effectively turned Ware into a planned market town focused on river crossing traffic.
Ware, like many English towns between the 12th and 14th centuries, used bridges and burgage tenements to channel trade, foster a money economy, and create semi autonomous urban communities.
Joan, the fair maid of Kent, wide of the Edward, the Black Prince and mother of Richard II, held the manor and had the church of St Mary’s rebuilt. Place House, the manor house of Ware, was significantly improved and enlarged at this time, building on Petronil de Grandmesnil’s 11thcentury house which probably stood on the site of Anschil’s Saxon house. During this time, the river and road connection saw a shipment of Edward IIIs wine brought from Cambridge by land, then sent by the High Sheriff “with all speed” down the Lea to London.
Our friary, known as the Priory, founded in 1338, was a significant stopping point for Pilgrims to the Shrine at Walsingham, the High Street often known as Walsingham Way. This was also true for the “alien” Benedictine Priory, founded in 1081 as a dependency of the Abbey of Saint Evroult in Normandy. As England and Normandy separated, the “alien” priory was suppressed by 1414. The first town bridge was built also by Petronil de Grandmesnil, diverting the London road from the old ford and reshaping Ware in the process. It also started the feud with Hertford, which lost trade, and whose residents broke down the bridge in 1191.
The medieval town shows how English ideas of liberty, lordship and community were hammered out on the ground. Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, held Ware as one of his principal manors while he helped negotiate the Magna Carta and served as one of its twenty five enforcing barons, linking the town’s river crossing to the most famous document in the national story of rights and constraints on royal power.
The Magna Carta, the founding document of civil rights in Britain, has a direct connection to Ware.
Later in the fourteenth century, Ware men joined the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, or Great Rebellion, fighting for those same rights. They attacked Hertford Castle, owned by the hated John O’Gaunt, placing the town inside the wider national drama of peasants, townsmen and artisans challenging fiscal exactions and asserting their own sense of justice.
At this time we see Ware’s first mentions in literature, as Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of Ware’s place on the road from Berwick to London, and of Roger of Ware, the eponymous cook of the Cook’s Tale. This shows Ware as a well-known town.
Across the same centuries, disputes over the Lea—Ware’s lords versus Hertford over weirs, tolls and navigation—mirror a broader English struggle between private rights and common passage, between mill power and the needs of trade.
At this time, radical preachers like John Ball were active and our region saw a rise of Lollardy and religious ideas that would lead to the protestant Reformation.
The Tudor and early Stuart centuries in Ware encapsulate how religious change and questions of monarchy touched ordinary places.
Under Mary, the burning of Thomas Fust at Ware marketplace for evangelical “heresies” connects the town directly to the national story of Reformation and Counter Reformation.
A small town hosier condemned for rejecting the mass and denouncing the Catholic hierarchy as liars was the local face of a country torn over doctrine and authority.
The attempt by protestant Lords to stop Catholic Mary becoming Queen on Edward’s death in 1553 played out in Ware. The town and area were seen as safe protestant territory.
Lady Jane Grey was formally proclaimed queen in Ware in 1553 by William Parr, Marquess of Northampton. This brought the high politics of a succession coup into a Hertfordshire marketplace on the Great North Road.
She only was queen for nine days.
This period sees Ware mentioned in literature again. In the 1590s, we see a Ware attraction, the Great Bed, noted in Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, and also Epicoene by Ben Jonson. 70 years later an anonymous poem London Undone, about the Great Fire, mentions the Great Bed in comparison to survivors sleeping crammed together in the fields outside the City.
Ware’s tradition of godly preaching and dissent, including figures like the Puritan vicar Charles Chauncy (who tore down the altar rail in St Mary’s Church to bring God closer to the people and had to flee to north America as a result) and a probable circle of “godly” laity, shows how radical religion rooted itself in Lea side communities that would become important for Civil War allegiance and identity. Chauncy, and a significant number of local religious radicals who helped found Harvard University and several colonies across the Atlantic link Ware to the story of Empire.
Ware’s links to London were strengthened with the building of the New River from Chadwell Spring to Islington in the first decade of the 1600s. First approved by King James I, then by act of Parliament, the channel (not a river at all) supplies significant water to London to this day. By 1620, the New River Company was also illegally drawing water from the Lea (something now done legally). In 1725 the Attorney General on behalf of William North and the poor of Ware, sued the Company for infringing on ancient rights to the use of the water of the Lea.
Battles over water supplied from Ware to London is an early echo of modern disputes between cynical corporations and citizens. This puts Ware at the start of national attempts to control the impact of capitalism and monopolies on the lives of ordinary people.
Ware’s experience of the seventeenth century crisis ties local lives to the classic national narrative of civil war, revolution and rights. Ship money and other fiscal pressures, controversial across the kingdom, were felt in Ware just as they were in better documented towns, shaping local attitudes to Charles I’s government and reinforcing a tradition of suspicion toward over mighty monarchy. During the Civil Wars, men from the town and its hinterland appear on both sides—royalist Fanshawe connections on the one hand, Parliamentarian sympathisers and soldiers on the other—illustrating the way small communities were internally divided by national conflict.
The wider Lea corridor, including Ware, also features in the networks of radical preaching, petitioning and mustering that fed into later episodes like the New Model Army’s debates and the search for a new constitutional settlement, even if the famous meetings occurred elsewhere. From the Putney constitutional debates, the soldiers of the New Model Army came to Ware, to Corkbush Field, where the Levellers mutiny and the Agreement of the People, were put down by Cromwell.
Ware lived the Civil War as many English towns did: as an argument about godliness, taxation and the limits of royal power that cut through families, churches and guilds.
We had an early Quaker congregation whose former burial ground is still a small park in town.
The river and the road brought ideas and people from London to Ware. A theme that continues to this day.
If the political story can be told at Ware’s bridge and church, the economic and imperial story runs along its river and rail. From the late medieval period, and decisively from the seventeenth century, Ware grew into one of England’s premier malting towns, processing barley from its own hinterland and from East Anglia into brown malt shipped down the Lea for the London brewing trade. This is not just a local specialty: Ware’s brown malt became the classic base of London porter, so that the taste of the metropolis’s defining eighteenth century beer depended directly on Hertfordshire kilns.
As a coaching inn town, halfway from London to Cambridge, Ware witnessed the growth of traffic on the Old North, the coming of the Royal, and then something of a decline as turnpike fees drove traffic to the Great North Road, now the A1. Ware reacted by developing tourism, with pleasure gardens and gazebos (Dutch summer houses) on the Lea to attract visitors.
Improvements to the Lea Navigation, and later to turnpikes and railways, inserted Ware into the national story of “improvement” and economic development, part of the Industrial Revolution, and the making of a single British market, as bigger barges and faster journeys knit London and its provisioning hinterland into a tighter economic system.
Ware is both representative as a market town feeding a great city, and uniquely influential because it helped shape what that city drank.
An inland connected town, Ware is not greatly marked by slavery and empire, except generally as part of the wealth that flooded into Britain from that shameful trade. The turnpike at Wadesmill on the edge of town (once part of Ware Extra), the first in the country, was the site of an important decision.
The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson decided to dedicate his life to ending the slave trade while on a journey through Ware.
This started him on a journey of thousands of miles and hundreds of thousands of stories during which he invented modern political campaigning and advocacy.
Also at this time Ware is again part of the national literary life, with William Cowper’s John Gilpin, and poems by John Scott (building a folly Scott’s Grotto still a town tourist attraction) writing about Ware. Numerous other minor poets also mentioned the town in the later 18th century, a sign the town was still well known enough to be worth mentioning.
The nineteenth century in Ware trace in miniature the shift from an agrarian industrial to a scientific and service based Britain. Brickfields around the town, firms such as Hitch, and engineering companies like Plaxton brought Ware into the national narratives.
In the 19th and 20th centuries Ware was part of the national narratives of urban growth, transport and manufacturing.
But the feature that truly defined Ware in the 19th century was the Maltings industry, mass producing malt for England’s beer. The town became the pre-eminent maltings town, with over 150 Maltings dominating the skyline and the sweet smell of malt production hanging in the air across the valley.
The arrival of the railway in 1843 brought Ware from one day from London to one hour, and changed our perspective on the wider world forever. One of the final travelers through the town, in October 1843, by coach was Queen Victoria on her way to Cambridge, recorded during that journey as moving at the speed of 14 mph. Then, the coaching inns vanished.
The Victorian engineering revolution came to Ware in 1845 as celebrated engineer George Stehenson of Rocket railway engine fame built a new iron bridge across the Lea at a cost of £2000. National developments, as so often, were reflected by events in our town.
By the late 20th century, Ware’s economic profile matched the now‑familiar national pattern of post‑industrial re‑use and heritage‑driven regeneration
The founding of the Allen & Hanburys pharmaceutical site at Buryfield in the late nineteenth century, now part of the GlaxoSmithKline complex, connects the town to British (and global) histories of industrial science, medicine and multinational capital. “Humanised” cow’s milk suitable for infants was developed here.
The later 19th century saw change in Ware as elsewhere.
The century brought social developments as children were all beginning to receive primary education after the 1870 Education Act, and even before. St Mary’s School was founded in the first half of the century, but by the 1870s was operating as a national infants, boys and girls school.
The final cholera epidemics in slums like Kibes Lane happened in the 1830s and 1840s. In the latter half of the century the first slum clearances happened and housing began a slow improvement. In 1872 Edward Lear whose nonsense poems remained popular for many years wrote “There was an old person of Ware,” a more frivolous mention of the town than previous literature.
The town is further marked by national initiatives in the twentieth century. In 1911 Ware had more pubs per head of population than anywhere else in Hertfordshire, in the 21st century we still have plenty but most have closed as is the case across the country.
The great campaign for votes for women grew in strength.
Ware was on the route of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) Great Pilgrimage in July 1913.
The marchers held organised meetings outside the old Town Hall and the French Horn pub in the town as they passed through. Louisa Puller of Wadesmill was a noted NUWSS activist, the organisation used legal campaign means as opposed to the more militant activism of the Suffragettes led by the Pankhurst family.
World Wars marked our town. The war memorial contains 243 names of war dead in World War One, tragically a quarter of those of service age. The entrance to the town Tesco is a road that runs through a World War Two bombing site where sadly six displaced people were killed in the house they had been moved to, the bomb changing the geography of our town.
Our King George Field (a feature shared with many towns), is a recreation ground founded on old Common Land as the slums were cleared and new housing built. In the fifties and sixties the town changed as many from London moved up the Lea, but our deep sense of community remained solid.
As thousands of years ago, new waves of population from London and elsewhere came with the big expansion of Ware in the 1960s and again in the 1980s as part of social and demographic change across the country. By the late twentieth century, with maltings closed or converted and heavy industry in retreat, Ware’s economic profile—pharmaceutical employment, light industry, commuting and services, along with the conservation of historic buildings and riverside gazebos—matched the now‑familiar national pattern of post‑industrial re‑use and heritage‑driven regeneration. The shops of the medieval High Street remain, although many have give way to service businesses. Ware’s High Street has changed as many have, but has maybe survived better than a lot of towns. Allen and Hanbury, now GSK, developed drugs like Zantac and Salbutamol at Ware, part of a pharmaceutical industry worth hundreds of billions for the British economy. Riverlabs, a pharma start up facility, now contributes to global medical business and continues Ware’s historic ties to Britain’s role in the world.
Across all these periods, from deep time and the beginning of Britain’s story as an island, Ware contributes more than colour to a pre written national script.
Ware offers concrete case studies for core themes—riverine origins, Roman and medieval integration, Magna Carta and revolt, Reformation and religious pluralism, civil war over sovereignty, industrialisation and imperial provisioning, twentieth century de industrialisation and scientific modernity.
It also helps explain how “England” and “Britain” as imagined communities took shape: not only through parliaments and battles, but through repeated experiences in towns like Ware of hearing proclamations read, seeing martyrs burned, loading barges with grain and malt, working in factories and laboratories, and living among buildings that layer friary, maltings and offices on the same plots.
Some day in the future, historians will look back at today’s Ware – in this post-Brexit, post-COVID world with its struggles over identity and purpose, and no doubt they too will see the national story continued to unfold here along the River Lea.
We have seen populations come and go, replaced time and again by new waves of immigration, all bringing different languages and cultures. When Athelstan founded England, Ware was already some 7000 years old.
We have forged our identity from many origins and with links to the whole country, to Europe and the world.
To tell the national story through Ware is therefore to insist that Britain’s history is not abstract but embodied in particular places, and that one small Hertfordshire town—continuously occupied from deep prehistory to the present—has helped make, and still reflects, what the country understands itself to be.
Written by Martin Butcher, who first moved to Ware when he was 18 months old. After some time exploring the wider world, Martin returned to Ware 20 years ago to raise a family and continue his lifelong interest in exploring the River & the Road and all who have settled here. Watch this space for a future podcast.