Weobley
Herefordshire

William fitz Osbern become Earl of Hereford after the Conquest, and Weobley passed into his hands at some time thereafter.  It was given in turn to Walter de Lacy, a member of fitz Osbern’s household, who held it of the earl.  Fitz Osbern died in 1072 and in 1075 his heir, Roger of Breteuil, forfeited his lands for revolt and Walter became a tenant-in-chief of the crown. 

Walter’s other holdings included a swathe of land in the south-west of Herefordshire which was Welsh at the time of the Conquest.  This area was known as Ewyas Lacy and probably had its main stronghold at Pont Hendre Castle, near Longtown.  Also in this area is the village of Walterstone, which may have been named after him.

Walter died in 1085, falling from St Peter’s Church in Hereford, during its construction, and his lands passed to his son, Roger de Lacy, who is recorded as holding Weobley in Domesday.  Roger held 14 demesne and 50 tenants’ manors in Herefordshire and had large holdings elsewhere.  Weobley was to pass down in a direct line of descent for centuries and the lord of the manor was to have considerable influence on its subsequent history.

The Domesday manor of Weobley possessed 3 ploughs in lordship.  There were 10 villeins, a priest, a reeve, a smith and 5 bordars with 9½ ploughs.  There were 11 serfs, woodland measuring ½ league by 4 furlongs, and a park.  Land newly brought into cultivation, or assarting, had provided land for one plough.  One of the villeins belonged to the church of St Peter in Hereford, by the gift of Walter de Lacy. (One of Edwi’s manors given to Walter was Priors Frome, which Walter, in turn, gave to his new church of St Peter in Hereford.

Although assarting is assumed to occur over many parts of England, Domesday only specifies it in Herefordshire, the other entries being for Fernhill, Much Marcle and Leominster (Darby, 1976, p189).  In general, by the 11^th century England was one of the least wooded countries of Europe, and Domesday appears to indicate that Herefordshire was even less wooded than most of the rest of the country with woodland occupying perhaps around 8% of the land (Rackham, 1980, p 126).  By the 1840s the percentage of woodland in Weobley was less than 10%. (See map on page 54 of A D M Phillip’s paper on land use in the Herefordshire Tithe Survey in the Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club, 1979.)

Specific mention of parks is also comparatively rare in Domesday, and only 35 are recorded.  Emparking was a recent introduction, the earliest recorded park being at Ongar in Essex which was certainly pre-Conquest.  Parks were large enclosures used to contain deer for the table and were not essentially associated with hunting, which took place in unenclosed areas.  The deer would have been the native red and roe deer.  Later centuries would see a large growth in the number of parks and the introduction of the fallow deer (Rackham, 1990, p152).

In 1088 Roger de Lacy was banished after his father’s old ally Bishop Wulfstan, stopped him, in turn, from crossing the Severn, and his brother Hugh took over his estates.  The de Lacys were responsible for the construction of castles at Weobley and Ludlow.  Both castles were associated with early boroughs.  Ludlow appears to be a new plantation but Weobley was already a settlement and the street plans of the two boroughs illustrate the difference (Noble, 1964, p65).

The English surname Webley derives from the settlement and a Thomas de Webbele recorded in 1308 (Shrewsbury mss ).  Weobley was the most common of the Herefordshire place-name surnames in the London telephone directory for the year 2000 and is widely distributed.  In 1337 Richard de Webbelye was the city of Hereford’s mace-bearer (Salt, 1953, p 6) and in the 15^th century a Walter and a Thomas Webbely witnessed deeds from Eastnor, in the East of Herefordshire.

The castle at Weobley was probably built by either Roger or Hugh de Lacy in the late 11^th century.  The castle was garrisoned on behalf of the Empress Matilda against Stephen in 1139 and was re-taken by Stephen himself the following year. 

Weobley was the caput of the de Lacy lands, which included the castles and boroughs at Ludlow and Ewyas Lacy (Longtown), held for the service of 7½ knights.  Presumably originally earthen, the castle seems to have been rebuilt in stone by the third Walter de Lacy in the early 13^th century (Hillaby, 1985).  In 1327 the castle was stated to be ‘of no value being in ruins’ and in 1328 referred to as ‘a ruinous castle of no value’ but this seems to have been a misrepresentation of its condition, for in 1331 it was stated that the castle had been undervalued.  In 1332 the value was ‘£41 16d by the first extent and £81 10s 8½d by the second extent’.  In 1357 John Ailmond was pardoned for the offence of breaking out of his prison in ‘the castle of Webbeleye’, providing that he stood trial for the felony for which he was detained in the first place. In 1483, Weobley was the centre of the rebellion of Henry, Duke of Buckingham against Richard III. Buckingham was executed in Salisbury and his wife captured in Weobley.  John Leland, writing in the 1530s, says of Weobley ‘where is a goodly castell, but somewhat in decay’.

William fitz Osbern, like other Norman lords, had acquired the technique of borough founding in Normandy where William the Conqueror himself had employed it at Caen.  Fitz Osbern, having been given the castle of Breteuil-sur-Iton in around 1050, constructed a boorg there, as he had previously at nearby Cormeilles (Hillaby, 1983).

If they founded boroughs at Ewyas Lacy and Weobley, the de Lacys followed the pattern set by their old patron, and it is possible that the by-laws of these boroughs, as were Hereford’s, were based on the customs of Breteuil, a code which was to become widespread among the new boroughs of the Marches, Wales and Ireland.  The de Lacy borough at Ludlow has been shown to have been privileged with these customs (Noble, 1964).  These laws were designed to encourage immigration from Normandy to provide soldiers and develop trade in the newly acquired lands.

Weobley, situated at a point equidistant from Hereford and Leominster, appears to have been a successful borough.  It sent its own Jury to the Assize of 1255.  At the end of the 13^th century Edward I empowered the Herefordshire boroughs of Weobley, Bromyard, Ledbury and Ross to return two members of parliament each.  Weobley returned Adam Sagoun and John Compaygnoun as its members in 1295 and two members to the parliaments of 1298, September and October of 1302 and to the parliament of 1305.  It returned Richard Yagon alone in 1306 (Williams, 1896, pp 155,156).  At this time, Weobley, Bromyard, Ledbury and Ross had the privilege of representation withdrawn.  This was at their own request, the two shillings per day payment to members being, they claimed, beyond their means (Noble, 1964, p69).  Hereford and Leominster were then the only two Herefordshire boroughs represented until Weobley regained parliamentary borough status again in 1628.

Whatever problems Weobley may have experienced in paying its parliamentary burgesses (and much larger towns would experience the same problems in succeeding centuries) documentary evidence suggests that Weobley was at least reasonably prosperous. It was situated near the rich sheep farming area centred on Leominster, which produced the wool known as ‘Lemster Ore’.  The value of this wool is indicated by a 1454 act of parliament which fixed the price of  ‘Herefordshire woll in Lemyst’ at  £13 per bag in comparison with £8 6s 8d per bag for Cotswold wool (Roskell, 1992, p437).

Weobley in 1831 by John Hilden

In 1315 a grant was made to ‘the bailiffs and good men of the town of Webbeleye of pavage for three years upon all wares for sale brought into their town’. When this was expired, a new grant was made in 1319, specifically at the instance of Queen Isabella, this time for 5 years.  Medieval Weobley possessed a market, a water-mill and by 1327, a wind-mill.  Apart from milling, the normal range of medieval trades were represented in the borough; in 1316 the local smith, Miles Smith (fabri), had a messuage near the castle and in 1360 a Weobley tanner, John Geffes, was murdered in Worcestershire.  Deeds mention a tailor in 1363, and a baker and a muleward in 1370.  A Jewish community was present in the late 13^th century (Salt, 1953, p 19). 

The Subsidy of the Ninth and the Fifteenth records only three Herefordshire boroughs where burgesses paid the higher ninth part in 1341.  Hereford has 87 names, Leominster 32 and Weobley 17 (Reeves, 1972, p45).

In the poll tax for the year 1377, every person not a genuine pauper, of 14 years or over was liable to pay one groat (four old pence).  Unfortunately we do not have the Weobley figures for 1377, but the 1379 tax was on all males and all unmarried females of 16 years or over.  In this latter year, 152 persons were recorded as having paid the poll tax in Weobley (Fenwick, 1998).  Among the occupations listed are carpenters, shoemakers, piscator, a smith, a tanner, a butcher, a petimarch and a tegulat.  The last term refers to someone who worked with bricks or tiles and implies that Weobley had buildings which required this skill, a petimarch is a small merchant or trader.

John Hayes was a butcher in Weobley in 1428 and in 1455 the tanner John Garston was pardoned of outlawry.  There are specific references to shops in 1292 (Salt, 1953, p 19), 1294 (ibid. p 12) and in 1392, when a licence for alienation in mortmain for property including three shops was granted.

In 1402 the then lord of the manor, Sir Walter Devereux, was killed at the battle of Bryn Glâs.  In this action a large force of English under Edmund Mortimer, consisting mainly of the Herefordshire levy, were defeated by a Welsh army led by Owain Glyn Dŵr.  It took place on a hill just south of Pilleth, a village to the south of Knighton and just to the west of Offa’s Dyke.  The defeat caused consternation at Henry IV’s court and steps were quickly taken to limit the damage by improving defences at Clifford, Brecon and elsewhere (Davies, R R, 1995, p107).  Men from Weobley would certainly have been among the dead, and the mutilation of corpses by the Welsh added horror to the English accounts of the action.  Bryn Glâs is thirteen miles from Weobley, and the alarm in the borough would have been considerable.

The de Lacys were notable benefactors of the church.  Walter could have been said to have given his life to it, albeit accidentally (see above).  Hugh de Lacy, who was possibly buried in the Church, had given the living of Weobley Church to Llanthony Priory.  Hugh’s elder brother, Roger, had been banished (see above), but another brother, Walter, entered Gloucester Abbey as a boy and rose to become Abbot in 1130 (Wightman, 1966, p169).  Giraldus Cambrensis recounts the story of one William, a kinsman and former soldier of Hugh, who after some sort of religious experience had taken to an eremitic life in an isolated spot in Wales.  It was he who was allegedly the inspiration of Hugh to assist in the foundation of the priory of Llanthony in 1108.  The priory, the first house of Augustinian Canons to be built in Wales, was later endowed with the tithes of Weobley and the patronage of the church passed to the prior and convent (Phillott, 1871, p350).  Llanthony was all but abandoned following the Welsh rebellion of 1135 and a new house, Llanthony Secunda, was built outside Gloucester and its church consecrated in 1137.  The Lacys maintained their interest in the first church and at the end of the 12^th century Hugh de Lacy II made grants of lands and churches from his new possessions in Meath specifically to the Welsh house.  This led to a formal split in 1205, followed by a lengthy dispute over joint property resulting in a settlement in 1213.  The two houses were re-merged in 1481 with Llanthony Prima being made a cell of Secunda.  The Weobley tithes and patronage would probably have followed the legal position, only passing to the Gloucester house in 1481.

Weobley in 1891

View the web-site of the Weobley and district Local History Society

Archaeological sites in Weobley can be viewed at Historic Herefordshire On Line.