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The
creation of new towns was common in
the Middle Ages. Bishops, Monasteries
and Temporal Lords created them as
a means of increasing revenue.
An early English example is St Albans,
where the abbot created a triangular
market place to the north-east of
the monastery in the mid-10th
century. Other new towns created
by monasteries before the Norman Conquest
may include Abingdon, Peterborough,
Whitby and Hartlepool and certainly
Durham (Beresford,
1988, p326). After the Norman
Conquest the pace of borough creation
accelerated with 21 new towns created
between 1066 and 1100 and a further
19 by 1130 (ibid.)
In the Welsh Marches the borough foundations
of the first phase include a group
which were founded by William fitz
Osbern which include the boroughs
attached to the castles at Monmouth
(Kissack,
1996, p18) and Chepstow (Noble,
1964, p64).
In Herefordshire, apart from Hereford
itself, for centuries the only borough
in the county, Domesday records several
places which may be identified as
boroughs in 1086. At Wigmore
the borough was specified 'burgo
qd ibi est’ as it
was at Clifford
which Gilbert the sheriff held of
Ralph de Tony at a revenue of both
the borough and the plough 'ten
illud ad firma burga. Car’
and which had 16 burghers. At
Ewyas Harold, the embryo of a borough
might be discernible in the two houses
within the castle itself 'in castello’.
Other boroughs followed - Kington
was probably founded as a borough
around its castle in the early years
of the 12th century (Sinclair
and Fenn, 1995) and Richard de
Capella (Bishop of Hereford, 1121-1127)
seems to have founded boroughs at
Bromyard
(Williams,
1987), Ledbury, Ross-on-Wye and
Bishop's Castle during the same period
(Hillaby,
1997).
The street and property boundary layout
of Weobley possesses elements that
clearly derive from having been planned.
The central core of the present village,
the main street leading to the castle
gate with its tenement plots, would
have been part of the de Lacy planted
borough. However, if the area
around the church is included, the
street layout of Weobley possesses
a disconformity, which probably results
from the church pre-dating the new
borough (Beresford,
1988, p450). A similar layout
exists at Olney in Buckinghamshire,
where there are also two distinct
elements in the village plan, an original
area round the church, and a later
planned borough immediately to the
north (ibid. p107).
The de Lacys also held in the manor
of Stanton (Stanton Lacy in Shropshire)
in Domesday, where the castle and
town of Ludlow was later built on
a new site. The original town
may have been south of the castle
and built around a triangular market
place in the area known as Dinham
(Shoesmith,
2000, p12). Joce de Dinan,
who held Ludlow Castle between 1136
and 1156, may have originally built
this town (Faraday,
1991, p3). Both forms of
borough development, the totally new
plantation and the deliberate development
of an existing village, were common.
In 1251, the Earl of Derby, William
de Ferrers, created the borough of
Higham Ferrers by giving burgess status
to the villagers of Higham (Beresford,
1988, p105). The Ferrers’
borough of Newborough in Needwood
Forest, however, was a new plantation
(ibid. p55).
The original road layout at Weobley
appears to consist of an east-west
road running north of the church,
now represented by footpaths and the
northernmost section of Church Street,
and a north-south road, now the western
part of Church Street. The north-south
road may have continued to the north
towards Pembridge,
via Stockmoor, but if so, little evidence
remains. This road seems to
have run south from the western end
of the church towards the southern
part of Hereford Street and thence
on to Hereford,
and is likely to have been diverted
eastward to accommodate the construction
of the castle.
The east-west road, now metalled for
a short distance north of the churchyard,
was referred to as the Queen’s
highway in a deed of
1598. To the east of the church
this is still a bridle-way to Dilwyn
and would originally have been the
route to Leominster.
To the west of the church the original
road seems to be represented by a
footpath which joins the northern
part of Meadow Street where it takes
a sudden turn to the west, from whence
it probably led to Kington.
The creation of the borough, and more
specifically its market place, would
have created new traffic patterns.
The present Meadow Street, which appears,
either by design or utilisation, to
be a short-cut from the centre of
Weobley to the north-west, would have
made redundant the original road running
west from the church. In any
event, the development of the centre
of Weobley would have occurred before
development on Meadow Street.
Meadow Street is certainly medieval;
in 1385 there was a feoffment
by John de Norton to several named
persons of land with buildings called
Brounyngesplace in le Medustret.
In 1407 there was a feoffment of a
half
burgage in le Meduwestret
by Roger Croumpe and Joan, his wife,
to John Ekkely, and in 1434 a release
of a messuage
in le Medewestrete is recorded.
The scatter of early housing along
Meadow Street has been used as an
argument in favour of a much denser
occupation of the whole area of the
historic borough in the medieval period.
Certainly there is evidence of the
demolition of buildings. As
early as 1436 a grant to Walter
Deveroux refers to ‘two
places formerly built on’.
Demolition of houses in Weobley is
recorded in 1725,
and large-scale demolition of the
vote houses occurred in 1844-5, estimated
locally in the order of 70-80 dwellings.
A problem arises with the extent of
the area concerned however.
The medieval and early post-medieval
houses in Weobley are distributed
throughout an area which extends approximately
600 metres north to south by approximately
300 metres east to west. In
comparison Hereford is less than twice
the area. The population of
Hereford has been estimated at about
2,850
in 1377. If Weobley's density
of settlement was similar to Hereford's
then a population in excess of 1,500
would be expected in the 14th
century. This is an unrealistically
high figure and the 1379 poll tax
return, with a total of 152 males
and unmarried females of 16 and over,
suggests a much lower one. Nor
do later statistics suggest a high
population; the muster of men of Weobley
aged 16 and over, who were able to
bear arms was 23 in 1539 and 36 in
1542 (Salt,
1953, p21). In 1664 there
were 126 houses in Weobley of which
64 were exempt from paying the hearth
tax (Faraday,
1972, p106). The hearth
tax returns for 1665 list 51 householders
who were assessed.
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The
figure above shows those buildings
which appear on the tithe map in 1838
but not on the 1:2500 OS 1st
edition plan in 1887. These
number at least 43 with two more possible
buildings. (One of these is a
building which in 1887 was on the
same site as a building in 1838 but
with a different shape – which
may be a new building or an alteration
to an existing one. The other
seems not be in exactly the same place.)
Some of these buildings were quite
large and are likely to have contained
more than one dwelling. The
figure of 84 vote houses being demolished
in the mid-19th century
(see above) may therefore not be very
much of an exaggeration. The
buildings which survived from 1838
to 1887 numbered at least 67: many
of these are also would be occupied
by more than one dwelling. Assuming
that the demolished buildings were
the older, more run-down ones, this
would agree with the figure of around
120-130 late medieval and early post-medieval
dwellings for Weobley suggested by
the hearth tax assessment and may
indicate a figure of 700 or more for
the early 17th century
population. Many of the houses
would have been built as the result
of original burgages being sub-divided
over the years and one piece of research
has catalogued around 75 sites that
might be identified as the original
burgage plots. (Information drawn
from a GCE A level thesis which used
a range of techniques to investigate
the archaeology of Weobley.
These techniques included building
surveys, aerial photographs, the tithe
map and hedgerow dating (Lucas,
1991)). This number fits much
more comfortably with the population
which might be expected from the 1379
poll tax figures.
Again, although these figures are
fairly speculative, the inevitable
inference must be that most of the
area of the old borough was not built
up during the medieval period.
It is possible that there was an original
intention to build on the whole area
of the old borough. Medieval
new boroughs were sometimes laid out
ambitiously and sometimes the burgage
plots were never developed.
In 1443 a burgage in the Bishop of
Hereford's early 12th century
borough of Ledbury was still not built
on - 'non edificatum’
(Hillaby,
1970, p11). The buildings
known to have existed in 1838 are
fairly densely concentrated in the
southern part of the village and this
applies equally both to those which
were demolished in 1844-5 and to those
which survived.
On balance it seems that the northern
part of Weobley was highly unlikely
to ever have been as densely occupied
as the southern area, around the castle.
In this context, the lack of archaeological
evidence from Dairy Farm is understandable
and expectations of large-scale medieval
archaeology existing in the northern
part of the old borough are not likely
to be warranted. The exception
to this might be the possibility of
remains of an early village core near
to the church.
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