Thaxted

Coordinates: 51°57′16″N 0°20′46″E / 51.9544°N 0.3461°E / 51.9544; 0.3461

Thaxted is a town and civil parish in the Uttlesford district of Essex, England.

History

Thaxted appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Tachesteda", Old English for 'place where thatch was got.' Once a centre of cutlery manufacture, Thaxted went into decline with the rise of Sheffield as a major industrial centre. A light railway, the Elsenham & Thaxted Light Railway, eventually opened in 1913, though the railway itself never reached nearer than three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) from the town, as building earthworks across the River Chelmer proved too costly. With the growth of road transport, the line was closed to passengers in 1952 and closed altogether in 1953. The name of Cutler's Green, a small hamlet about a mile to the west of Thaxted, recalls the trade that yielded the area's early wealth. To the West of Cutler's Green is an area named 'Richmond's in the Wood'.

Governance

An electoral ward in the same name exists. The population of this ward at the 2011 census was 3,512.

Thaxted (disambiguation)

Thaxted may refer to:

Thaxted (tune)

"Thaxted" is a hymn tune by the English composer Gustav Holst, based on the stately theme from the middle section of the Jupiter movement of his orchestral suite The Planets and named after Thaxted, the English village where he resided much of his life. He adapted the theme in 1921 to fit the patriotic poem "I Vow to Thee, My Country" by Cecil Spring Rice but that was as a unison song with orchestra. It did not appear as a hymn-tune called "Thaxted" until his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams included it in Songs of Praise in 1926. This setting was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Other hymns written to the tune include