Bulstrode Camp, in Bulstrode Park, near Gerrard’s Cross, is the largest hill-fort in Buckinghamshire. Oval in shape, it was originally defended by two outer banks with accompanying ditches. Excavations in 1924 failed to date the site.
According to local tradition, however, it was used, if not raised, in Anglo-Saxon times. At the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror supposedly gave the manor belonging to the Shobbington family to one of his followers, who arrived with a company of armed men to take possession of it. The Saxon lord of the manor, not about to yield his ancestral lands to a Norman without putting up a fight, summoned the help of neighbors and entrenched himself and his followers behind the earthwork’s defenses. There they made a still resistance, and finally, having no horses, he mounted his small army on bulls and routed the Normans. When William was told of this, he sent for Shobbington to account for himself, and he and his seven sons bestrode to court. William was so taken with this bold behavior that he allowed Shobbington to keep his estate, and gave him his heirs for ever a new name, commemorating the occasion, that of “Bulstrode”.
This odd legend, recorded by M. A. Lower in English Surnames (3rd ed. 1849), is a piece of popular etymology explaining the place-name Bulstrode, recorded as Bolestrode in 1195 and thought to consist of Old English bula and strōd, meaning bull-marsh. It is also designed to account for the arms of the Bulstrode family, which includes a bull’s head in canting allusion to their name, itself taken from the place-name. Whoever first told it – perhaps the Bulstrodes themselves – took pride in the antiquity of the Shobbington-Bulstrode line.