An empty landscape?
(This is a speculative reconstruction of how the area around Highley might have looked
c700AD, when it and many surrounding villages first acquired their current names.
The map also shows spot finds of Bronze Age and Roman-British objects.)
Writing around 1960, the famous architectural historian Niklaus Pevsner claimed that Shropshire had little to interest archaeologists. By this he meant that the County had few spectacular pre-historic monuments such as stone circles or long barrows. Indeed, compared to some other counties, this is a fair comment. At the time Pevsner was writing, the evidence for significant human settlement in Shropshire prior to the Romans was limited. However, in recent years this has changed, largely due to aerial archaeology. Many will know about crop marks. Even a very flimsy building may leave traces in the ground; richer or poorer patches of soil where it once stood. This in turn alters the growth of crops so that some ripen more quickly than others. At the right time of year, ancient walls and boundaries may be seen from the air, as lines against an otherwise uniform fieldscape. Crop marks may only be visible for a few days each year and depend very much on what is being grown in the field as to their visibility. The probability is that we currently only have a very incomplete record of all crop marks in the county. Nonetheless, many have been recorded and sometimes it is possible to make some good guesses as to what they represent without excavating them. A common feature is the “ring-mark”, a circle, typically ten to 20 yards in diameter. This often represents a “round barrow”, a form of burial chamber in use in the Bronze age, about 4000BC. These consisted of a circular heap of earth in which cremations were laid. They were surrounded by a ditch and it is this that gives the circular crop mark. Another characteristic feature is the “rectangular enclosure”. These have often been shown to be late Iron Age or Roman farmsteads; in some particularly good examples, not only the farm itself can be made out, but also the surrounding fields. Other features, such as curved enclosures, are much harder to interpret but may also be pre-historic.
Extensive campaigns of aerial archaeology have shown that the landscape around the upper Severn valley is dotted with features such as these. It has been suggested that, in this area, the population approached that seen in the Middle Ages. Less is known of settlement in the south of the county, in our area. This might not be considered particularly favourable for farmers; the soils are often heavy clays and the Wyre Forest gives the impression that it once extended far beyond its present boundaries. However, recent work has suggested that this might not be the full story. Aerial archaeology has now shown a variety of interesting features around Chelmarsh and Kinlet. Close to Hampton Loade there are curved and rectangular enclosures visible from the air; around Catsley Farm there are two more enclosures as well as a ring ditch. To these features can be added the well-known Roman camp at Wall, Town Farm in Neen Savage, on the road to Cleobury Mortimer, and also what was apparently once an Iron Age fort at Kingswood in Kinlet, recorded by 19th century antiquarians but now invisible. There are also the occasional pieces of flint found around Highley and Billingsley.
Without proper investigation, it is difficult to know what any of these features mean. Crop-marks can be a disappointment when dug by archaeologists; they are sometimes as a result of natural features. Nonetheless, there do seem to be suggestions that people have been settled in this area since the Bronze Age and that by the time of the Roman Conquest the wood had been cleared from the better soils to give a pattern of farms and fields, not entirely unlike the present-day landscape. Whilst there are no documents to confirm this, the evidence may yet emerge from the soil to show that the equivalent of the Highley Initiative existed over 2000 years ago!
A wooded landscape
(This map shows a speculative reconstruction of the extent of the Wyre Forest in middle Saxon times. It also shows ancient parish boundaries, most of which would have been estates at this period. It is suggested that the large outlying parishes were each given one or more estates on the fringes of the forest, to provide woodland.)
Above, I speculated on how the countryside around Highley looked during the period before and during the Roman Occupation. There is increasing evidence that the area was dotted with farms; whilst these would have been more sparse than currently, it is clear that the area was far from virgin forest. However, we know nothing about the people who lived and worked these farms; the historical record is virtually silent until the Domesday Book of 1086. So what happened between the end of the Roman Occupation and the Norman Conquest; can we say anything about the Anglo Saxons who were, in all probability, the first people to live in villages (as opposed to scattered farms) in this part of Shropshire?
There are in fact two sources we can use: Domesday Book itself and place name evidence. Although written in 1086, Domesday in fact gives us a glimpse into Anglo Saxon society; with careful detective work, it can shed light on conditions that existed long before it was written. Place names give us a more direct window on the early Anglo Saxon period; most local place names seem to date from the 7th century, when the Saxons first established themselves politically in this part of the world. The names reflect the landscape they saw: the woods, the valleys, the hills and the marshes. Of particular relevance is the word leah, an old English term which at this time meant a wood or a woodland clearing. This was normally preceded by something to describe the clearing: the name of the person who lived there, its shape or something else. Today, leah has become ley, as in Highley, Billingsley and Glazeley. These names show us that there was a belt of woodland extending north from the Wyre Forest, following the valley of the Borle Brook; by contrast, places such as Chetton, Stottesdon and Chelmarsh were less extensively wooded.
In the early Middle Ages the balance between wooded and non-wooded areas was very important. Settlements needed open country for the fields to grow their crops. However, woodland was also required. It provided timber for building, firewood for fuels, grazing for animals and game for food or sport. Domesday Book describes both the size of the fields under the plough and also any woodland associated with a settlement. In the case of Highley, it had a wood sufficient to pasture 36 swine. Pigs were an important part of the diet and were able to feed themselves on acorns in woodland. It is difficult to know just how big the wood would have been; perhaps 200 acres based on comparisons with other parishes.
Domesday Book also gives information about who owned the parish (or, strictly speaking, the manor). Here, it is sometimes possible to see interesting patterns emerge. Highley belonged to the Countess Godiva in 1066, Lady Godiva of popular legend. Godiva would have been a widow at this time and it is likely that the village had originally belonged to her husband, the Earl of Mercia, but had been given to her to provide her with an income after his death. The only other parish in this part of Shropshire that also belonged to Godiva was Chetton. The fact that the two parishes were linked in this way suggests there must have originally been a close connection between them. Chetton seems to have once been a much larger estate than it is at present. One possibility is that it originally held Highley to give it access to woodland. This pattern can be seen elsewhere, where parishes on the fringe of the Wyre Forest are associated with much larger estates which would otherwise lack woodland. Thus Glazeley was once incorporated into Chelmarsh, Billingsley was a detached part of Morville and parts of Kinlet in the Wyre Forest were originally attached to Stottesdon. It may be that this is a reflection of the way the very first Saxon officials in the late 600’s set out their estates, to ensure they all had access to the woodland that they needed.
Vanishing villages
We tend to think of the countryside as timeless and permanent; ancient villages that have changed little in generations. It is certainly true that most of our local villages were mentioned in the Domesday Book and so are well over a thousand years old. However, their history has often been much more turbulent than many people realise.
From the Anglo Saxon period to the start of the 14th century, there was a steady growth in the population. Of course, episodes of war and disease did occur from time to time but the overall trend was upwards. Thus the villages recorded in the Domesday book were expanding communities and this can often be seen in the entries in the book itself. Woodland was being cleared to bring more land into cultivation and new houses were being built. New communities grew up outside the heart of the old established villages. Thus at Highley, Netherton in the south-east of the parish is an example of a “daughter” settlement, founded by villagers looking for new land on which to settle. Sutton in Chelmarsh and Norton in Kinlet are similar examples; these simply mean “south settlement” and “north settlement”, being respectively south and north of the main communities.
At the start of the 14th century, there was a marked change in conditions. A series of poor harvests caused widespread hunger and malnourishment. The effects of these were compounded by disease which killed off much of the livestock. Then, in the middle of the century, plague struck. The Black Death may have killed up to a third of the population and its effects in Shropshire were no different from most other parts of the country. As a result, there was widespread depopulation. Whilst no parishes were totally wiped out, every village must have shrunk in size and some of the outlying communities never recovered. An excellent example of a deserted medieval settlement is at Detton Hall, in Neen Savage. This is a fine, half-timbered building which was the manor house to a small community that once had its own chapel. However, all that is left of the hamlet of Detton is a series of shallow earthworks; the bases of long abandoned houses and hollow ways where there were once roads. In Sidbury, next to the church, there are similar remains of abandoned houses. Sidbury is an example of a shrunken medieval settlement; the village survived, but in much reduced circumstances and never recovered to its former population level.
In some cases, there are no physical remains and historical detective work is needed to locate the vanished hamlets. One way of doing this is by place name. Sutton in Chelmarsh is today no more than a handful of houses at a road junction, but the name suggests that it was more substantial in medieval times. In Kinlet, Norton’s End is now a farm, but the name shows that it was once on the outskirts of a distinct community (it was literally at the far end of Norton- the “north town” in Kinlet). In Highley we have the farm of Woodend, showing the limit of a wood that extended north into Chelmarsh. Today this is just a single farm, but 16th century deeds show that this was formed from four distinct holdings named after their former occupiers: Thatchers, Pountneys, Barnards and Holloways. Furthermore, there was a chapel here; the Lady Chapel. By the mid-16th century all of this had gone; in all probability the four small holdings were amalgamated into the single farm of Woodend by the tenant who took over once the Black Death had passed in the later part of the 14th century. This story could be repeated at almost all the shrunken and deserted settlements around here.
Moving villages
(This map shows the village of Billingsley about 1840, taken from the tithe map copies
of H. G. Foxall. The original village was by the church; however, mining activity
has caused the centre of population to move south, to the junction of the road leading
to Highley.)
In the previous article, I wrote about the way some villages and hamlets have shrunk or even disappeared over time. This is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the way in which settlements within the countryside have the potential to change their size and appearance. However, even apparently stable villages can have very complicated histories that can only be unravelled by careful detective work.
Villages can move over time. A good example of this is Billingsley. Today, although small, the centre of Billingsley is unmistakably by the Cape of Good Hope, at the junction of Bind Lane with the main Bridgnorth-Cleobury road. However, the church sits in relative isolation almost a mile away, with just a couple of farms and cottages for company. In most villages, the church marks the original centre of the community and this is almost certainly the case with Billingsley. “Hall Farm”, in Covert Lane but close to the church, may have been the site of the manor house and there would have been a scatter of houses and cottages between the two. In medieval times, these would have been surrounded by large, open fields where each tenant had a few strips of land to cultivate; the last vestiges of these strips may be seen in a field a little north of Hall Farm. Around the edge of the parish, the more independent farmers would establish their own holdings; one of these would have been at Southall Bank, just over the other side of the road from the Cape, towards Chorley. Over the years, Billingsley would have shrunk like most villages in the area and many of the cottages and small farms would have been abandoned. However, at the start of the 19th century, this process was reversed by the opening of a large coal mine and a blast furnace close to Southall Bank Farm. The Cape of Good Hope was built to serve the workmen and it is possible that the main Bridgnorth-Cleobury road was diverted to run past it. Thus the centre of the village moved from the church to the mines. Although this first phase of industry vanished almost as quickly as it arrived and most of the miners’ houses were abandoned, the Cape remained. When coal mining resumed at the end of the 19th century, the new pit was again sunk close to the Cape. Whilst ultimately this again bequeathed to Billingsley just a couple of new houses and a row of “temporary” tin bungalows, these survived long enough to influence the late 20th century planners and so the present small village grew up. So, in the course of about 200 years, almost the entire village has moved to the far south of the parish.
A rather similar pattern seems to be present in Chorley. Here it is likely that Chorley Hall marks the original site of the community. Again, coal mining in Lower Chorley and Harcourt meant that most of the houses were built about 0.5 miles east of the hall; now, infill is gradually bringing the two parts of the village together again.
Industry is not the only reason for communities moving. Kinlet Church, like Billingsley Church, sits far from the present centre of the village around the Eagle and Serpent pub. In this case, the old village was probably cleared by the squire, William Childe, when the present Kinlet Hall was built in 1729. The Cape was conveniently sited to serve traffic on the main road and the building of the village school close by in the 19th century helped to establish this as the new centre of the community. Thus whether by accident or design, many of our settlements are not in their original positions.
Planned villages
(This survey of the Childe estate property in Cleobury shows how the town retains
some of its medieval planned form, with a central High Street and long, narrow burgage
plots leading off from this. Around the perimeter are back lanes. However, there
are probably more complicated elements in the plan; the curved shape of the High
Street is unusual.)
Villages obviously must have started at some point in history, when a settler, farmer or soldier decided to clear a patch of land and build houses for himself and his followers. In most cases, we know nothing about the date or the nature of this act; in many parts of the countryside there is evidence that existing settlements can trace their origins to Iron Age times. Whether this is true for the wooded area that existed in the vicinity of Highley and surroundings is not clear. However, we can sometimes use the plan of the village to infer something about its history, even in the absence of any written records or archaeological digs.
The village plan is, as the name suggests, the way the old buildings such as the church and houses relate to each other and other features in the landscape such as roads or streams. Classically, there are several forms that can be recognised. In some cases, the buildings seem to be clustered around an open space; a village green. Sometimes the village is strung out along a road; the “linear settlement”. In other places, the houses and farms are so scattered that there is no discernible pattern. With luck and imagination, it may be possible to make sense of the plan. Sometimes it seems that a single individual was responsible for the layout of the village; at other times the community must have grown without any such central control.
Highley, in many ways, fits the pattern of a linear settlement, with the old houses stretching along the main road from the Manor House in the south, all the way up the High Street to Court House and Dowsley Cottage. Superimposed on this is a scattering of old farms and cottages in small clusters: Netherton, Borle Mill, Woodend and Woodhill. This of course ignores the more recent houses built after the start of mining, even though many of these are now over 100 years old. This suggests that the main centre of Highley was originally by the manor house and church; thereafter development was largely unplanned, with new hamlets or farms appearing randomly in the waste land of the parish in the early middle ages, whilst the main village grew up along the main road leading north. It is possible that there are the faint traces of an older arrangement still embedded in the landscape. The church and the manor house are diagonally opposite each other; the main road and Church Lane form two sides of a possible square. It is possible that the very earliest village was laid out around a green which subsequently was turned into normal fields. Whilst we may probably never know for certain, the distance between the church and former manor house is intriguing.
Chelmarsh provided another example of an interesting village plan. Here the church is adjacent to Chelmarsh Hall. However, there is then a distinct pattern of small fields and interconnecting footpaths stretching north for about a quarter of a mile. Today this pattern stops a little beyond Manor Farm, but a map of 1631 suggested that it extended to where a cross once stood. This cross may be the one that now stands in the churchyard. The pattern of small regular fields and lanes suggests that many of these plots were originally designed for houses: houses which have either long since fallen down or which were never even built. There are many precedents in the Middle Ages for ambitious lords engaging in what amounted to speculative building, trying to turn a small settlement into a new market town. Chelmarsh may have been one of these. Chelmarsh and Highley both belonged to the powerful Mortimer family in medieval times; perhaps we can still find evidence in their layouts of how it was once hoped that these villages would develop?
Catsley New Town?
Some of our local towns and villages have grown “organically”; they have arisen naturally as a small cluster of houses has grown, without any outside interference. Highley is a good example of this. On the other hand there are the “planned” towns and villages, where an outside owner has deliberately built a large number of houses to create a new settlement or expand on older one. Bridgnorth is a good example of a planned town on the equivalent of a green field site; in its present form it dates from around 1100 when the castle was built. Cleobury Mortimer, although an important centre in Anglo-Saxon times, was extensively redesigned at a similar period when the Mortimer family made it their administrative centre. Not all planned towns took off; efforts to establish a market at Stottesdon in the 13th century failed.
In the Public Record Office in London there is an account of Earnwood, written in 1565. Earnwood is the east part of Kinlet; it originally included a large amount of the Wyre Forest as well as farms and a cluster of cottages. Up until the end of the 16th century, it was considered separate from Kinlet and was a manor in its own right. The 1565 account includes a list of rents that the inhabitants of Kinlet paid for their land. Several are recorded as paying 12d for “burgages”. A burgage is the name given to a plot of land, usually with a house or a shop built on it, in a medieval town. The person who rented the land, the “burger” was given freedom from a whole range of other taxes and services that his rural equivalent would be expected to pay. The person who founded the town and gave out the burgage plots for rent would hope that by attracting entrepreneurs to the town, it would prosper and pay him more in tolls and taxes than he would get if he had left his land for agriculture. As noted above, this was a gamble that did not always come off and there are hundreds of villages and hamlets that once had urban pretensions in the Middle Ages. One of the clues comes from references to “burgages” in old documents. Thus there is evidence that at one point, somebody had desires to found a town at Earnwood.
There is one more piece of evidence that there might once have been a town planned for Earnwood. Opposite Catsley turn, where the roads join from Kinlet and Cleobury to go to Bewdley, there are two fields which, in the 18th century, were called Great and Little Philippatown. The –town ending might be significant.
In the Middle Ages, Earnwood belonged to the powerful Mortimer family. In the mid-14th century, the head of the family was Roger; his wife was Philippa de Montacute. Roger died in 1360 leaving Philippa to face widowhood. As was usual, provisions had been made to support Philippa if she did not marry again. She was given many of the Mortimer estates in Worcestershire; income from these would provide for her. She was also given Earnwood. It was as well she was given these estates, as she lived for another 22 years. It is highly unusual to find towns being established in the second half of the 14th century, but in 1376, Philippa did just that when she gave Bewdley its first known charter. Could the Philippatown fields preserve the memory of another attempt to establish a town by Philippa, perhaps before she settled on Bewdley?
There may be other explanations for the “burgages” in the accounts and the field names may be a coincidence. It is difficult to imagine why anyone should want to start a town on the Catsley turn and I have some doubts whether the site was even in the medieval manor of Earnwood. However, next time you drive past, perhaps you can be forgiven for imagining the ghost of a medieval estate agent trying to sell vacant building plots!
The Domesday village of Highley
(This map shows a speculative reconstruction of land use in Highley at the time of
the Norman conquest.)
For many places in England, the Domesday Book is the first time they are mentioned. This is the case for Highley and it provides a unique snap-shot of the village at the time of the Norman Conquest.
The Domesday Survey dates from 1086; it was essentially a tax survey. William of Normandy had claimed England as his kingdom after the Battle of Hastings 20 years before, but nobody could agree on how much revenue he could claim in taxation from his subjects. The Domesday Book was produced to answer that question: it was designed to tell the Crown exactly how much money they were entitled to. Commissioners were sent round almost every village in the country to find out who owned the land in that place and what it was worth. The survey looked both backwards and forwards, determining what state the manor had been just before the Conquest (“In the time of King Edward”), what it was worth now and what its future value could be.
Highley was assessed for tax on 3 “hides”. A hide was nominally a unit of land which could be taxed. Its precise value varied from 60 to 120 acres. This would suggest that something like 300 acres in Highley was cultivated. The village is about 1500 acres which indicates that substantial amounts were either grazing or woodland. In fact Domesday records enough woodland to fatten 36 swine although it is far from clear how big this would be. The village population consisted of 6 farmers, 6 smallholders and one official called a “radman”. The farmers would have held substantial acreages in the common fields that surrounded the village. The smallholders would have been less well off with smaller holdings. The “radman” was an official who had to ride out of the village on the lord’s business and he may have had military duties. Allowing for the families of these men, the total village population would have probably been about 60 people.
The villagers would have shared their land in common fields and jointly had enough work to occupy 2.5 plough teams. Not all the land in the village was worked by the villagers on their own behalf; the lord also worked land for himself which required another 1.5 ploughs. No doubt the villagers were expected to look after the lord’s land as well as their own. The plough teams would each have been made up of 8 oxen and these would have been able to plough about 100 acres a year; in rough agreement with the guess of about 300 acres cultivated from the hidage.
Before the Conquest, Highley had been owned by the Countess Godiva and had paid her 15 shillings a year. Godiva held much land in Shropshire including Chetton; Highley was one of her smaller estates. Whilst she may have occasionally visited it, the radman may well have looked after most of her interests. Like many Shropshire villages Highley suffered immediately after the Conquest when its value went down to 3 shillings; perhaps it was caught up in the unrest that characterised those times. William gave Shropshire to Roger de Montgomery who in turn gave many manors including Highley to Ralph de Mortimer. By 1086 the manor had recovered and was worth 18 shillings although the Domesday commissioners felt there was enough potential arable land for another 2 ploughs. The Mortimers, no doubt, were soon busy bringing that land into cultivation. The Mortimers were one of the great baronial families of Medieval England; besides giving their name to Cleobury Mortimer, their early stronghold they also eventually produced an heir to the English throne.
The woods of Highley
(This map is a speculative reconstruction of land use in Highley at the end of the
Middle Ages.)
Woodland features large in the early history of Highley. The village name means “the (woodland) clearing of Huga”. This shows that in the 8th or 9th century, when this name was probably first established, the village was surrounded by thick woodland. By the time of the Domesday Book, the wood was described as sufficient for the upkeep of 36 swine. This gives an insight into one of the functions of woodland; it was an area where animals could graze. In most medieval manors, the tenants had the right of “pannage”, to allow their pigs to eat acorns in the wood. It is not clear what sized wood would be needed to keep 36 swine (presumably the rather precise figure of 36 reflects an original estimate of “three dozen” which became formalised when written up for the Domesday survey!). There are some surveys from Worcestershire which suggest that this would be an area of about 150 acres. This seems rather low for the total area of woodland in Highley, which was probably two or three times the size at this date. However, woodland had various uses, including the hunting of game, and perhaps the villagers were only allowed access to a proportion of what actually existed.
In the centuries immediately after the Norman Conquest, the woodland in Highley must have come under considerable pressure. The population increased and more land had to be brought into cultivation to feed it. Domesday Book anticipated this by noting how something like 150 acres of marginal land, probably rough grazing, could be cleared and turned into arable. In the event, probably two or three times this was eventually cleared. Just occasionally we can get glimpses of this; in about 1230 one of the chief landowners in Highley, William de Wootton, granted 3 acres of wood to the Hospital of St Wulstan’s in Worcester. This was at Brook’s Mouth, where the holding soon grew to 30 acres. Until the 19th century this was known as Woolstan’s Wood. The Hospital appears to have cleared the land and perhaps turned it into pasture or meadow, before subletting it to tenants. This process of granting woodland to create new farmland was called assarting and many of the village farms such as Hazelwells or the Rea seem to have originated in this way. Woodend Farm tells its own story; marking the point when it once stood on the boundary of a wood that extended north to Hampton Loade.
The woodland in the village belonged to the Lord of the Manor. When he allowed an assart, the farmer would have sole rights over the newly cleared land; in return he would pay a rent to the Lord for his new estate. Whilst this worked both to the benefit of the farmer and the Lord, it was not such good news for the rest of the village. The newly cleared land would no longer be available to them for grazing or for firewood. For the smallholders, these rights were very important. Thus there was considerable pressure to retain some woodland for common grazing. By about 1500, something like 140 acres of common woodland remained in the village, known as “Higley Wood”. (It may not be a coincidence that this is roughly the same size as the land allowed in Domesday for the village swine). This was located in the north of the village, roughly on the land now occupied by Garden Village. In 1603 it was still in existence when it contained 3200 oaks. However, shortly after that, economics finally won through; the land was divided between the major farmers in the village in plots of about 5 to 10 acres. These enclosed their holdings, felled most of the trees and the last of the common woodland of Highley vanished.
