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High Street & St Mary's Lane
Evaluation &
monitoring
Excavation
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The town is the site of Wenlock
Priory, which was endowed as a nunnery in the late
7th century by Merewald, King of a people known as the
Westehanorum
or
Westan-Hecanorum.
Merewald's daughter,
St. Milburga later became the Abbess of Wenlock.
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The
monastery seems to have been the origin of the current
name of the place: it would be gwyn-loc, the white
monastery, in Welsh, and was known as Gueneloch to
Giraldus Cambrensis in the early 13th century.
However, another early name, circa 900, was
Wimnicensis, or in Early English, Wimnicas. This name
may come from an earlier native British (Welsh)
source and be related to Vismes in France and Wümme in
Hanover. This name has its origins in a river-name ‘Vimina’,
and although there is no river at Wenlock, the Severn
is only a few miles away, and Vimina may have been the
name of a larger region which included Wenlock Edge.
If
this is the case then we should look for the original
foundation of a church at Wenlock at a time pre-dating
the formation of an English kingdom in the area. The
field systems of the Wenlock area also seem to
pre-date the arrival of the English. |
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The 7th century religious house was one for both men and women, a common
arrangement in the early medieval English kingdoms.
However, it is likely that after a while there were
two separate communities at Wenlock, male and female, each with
its own church. The present parish church, although
wholly post-Norman Conquest in date, may have
originally been the nuns' church. |
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The women’s
community seems to have withered away leaving the
men’s house at Wenlock to become a house of secular
clerks, the only religious house in Shropshire at the
time of the Norman Conquest.
Earl Roger
de Montgomery re-founded Wenlock as a priory of
Cluniac monks dependent on the monastery of La
Charité-sur-Loire, which was of course in its turn,
dependant on Cluny.
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Domesday
records the manor of Wenlock as being held by the
priory of St Milburga. At the time it had 20 hides (4
of them exempt from taxation since the time of King
Cnut). There were in demesne 9½ ploughs.
Its
recorded population consisted of 9 villeins, 3 radmans,
46 bordars who between them had 17 ploughs, but
another 17 would have been possible. There were also
15 serfs.
Domesday
also records that the manor had 2 mills which served
the monks, 1 fishery, 2 hedged enclosures and woodland
for fattening 300 pigs. In 1066 the manor had been
worth £15 but at Domesday (20 years later) the value
had declined to £12.
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The
relationship between the priory and its villein
tenants was often strained. In the mid 12th century
the tenants unsuccessfully complained of their burdens
to the king’s court. Failing in this they nonetheless
withdrew their labour (went on strike) despite
excommunication, and resorted to violence against the
prior’s men. In an attempt to circumvent the local
power the villeins appealed over the head of the Prior
of Wenlock to the Prior of La Charité. Whatever the
outcome of this appeal the obligations on the peasant
tenants of Wenlock remained heavy.
The priory
had established the borough of Wenlock by 1203 when it
was represented as a borough and vill by its own jury.
It had a market and fair by 1227 and by 1247 there
were 39 burgesses (while at the same time the
monastery normally supported up to forty monks).
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By 1801 the
borough and liberties of Wenlock had a population of
16,304. This local authority was abolished by the
Municipal Corporation Act of 1835 which established
the municipal borough of Wenlock which in 1851 had a
population of 18,728. In turn, the Local Government
Act of 1881 formed a replacement authority, Wenlock
Municipal Borough and Urban Sanitary District, which
incorporated Brosely, Madely and Much Wenlock urban
sanitary districts. This area had a population of
15,705 in the census of 1891, which remained fairly
static and in 1961 was 14,935. |
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