John Clear Wilkerson

`Jack' Wilkerson was born on 27 January 1909 in the Barley district of north-east Hertfordshire, bordering the Icknield Way, and never left the county except for holidays. He came from generations of farmers, tenants of the Dacre family in rural Hertfordshire since the eighteenth century; before that they were yeoman farmers in Essex. For equally long, the Wilkersons had been dissenters and several generations of the family attended the Nonconformist Grammar School in Bishop's Stortford which, in Wilkerson's day, had become known as Bishop's Stortford College. After leaving school he spent a year at Oaklands, the Hertfordshire farm institute at St Albans, followed by two years working on a farm at Hemel Hempstead. Wilkerson then joined his father, Clear Wilkerson, on the family-owned farm which he and his brother continued to run after their father's death. Despite urban encroachment, the area was rich in archaeological remains and, digging into the soil and into parish records, Wilkerson became fascinated by the stages in which the village of Barley had developed over the centuries from a tract of land in a clearing on the edge of the forest into a thriving farming community. On Easter Sunday 1959, walking his land, he found fragments of coarse pottery turned out by the plough in the field known since the sixteenth century as Aldwick. The site was excavated by Miss Mary Cra'ster, F.S.A., of the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge, and uncovered an Iron Age settlement of some twenty acres, including flint and sandstone querns, jars, tools and the skeleton of a dog. In the late 1960s Barley was threatened as a possible site for the third London Airport, and Wilkerson was moved to write Two Ears of Barley; Chronicle of an English Village, 1969, to record for future generations the life and growth of the community should its physical features be destroyed. Two years previously, in 1967, he was elected president of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and in 1975 the C.A.S. published John Norden's Survey of Barley, Hertfordshire, 1593-1603, edited by Wilkerson, assisted by Dr Dorothy Owen, F.S.A. Always careful of the village's welfare and prosperity, he was chairman of Barley parish council for many years and representative of the Royston area on Hertfordshire County Council. He died on 17 May 1995.