Brewood
Brewood is an ancient market town in the civil parish of Brewood and Coven, in the South Staffordshire district, in the county of Staffordshire, England. Brewood lies near the River Penk, north of Wolverhampton and south of Stafford. Brewood is about east of the county border with Shropshire.
Etymology
The Domesday Book of 1086 documented the town as 'Breude'. The name is probably a compound made up of a Celtic, Brythonic word, and an Anglo Saxon, Old English word.The first element is the British word 'briga', which appears in modern Welsh as 'bre'. This is the most common of a number of Celtic place-name elements that signify a hill. It appears in various combinations, but sometimes on its own. Margaret Gelling, a specialist in West Midland toponyms, suggested that it was often misunderstood by the Anglo-Saxons as a name rather than as a common noun. Therefore, Anglo-Saxons would have thought that they had come upon a place that was called, by the natives, Brig or Bre, rather than this simply meaning "a hill". This is why the word is often combined tautologically.
The second element is probably obvious: the Anglo-Saxon 'wudu', which sign a wood. Hence, the name Brewood means either "Wood on or by a hill" or "Wood near a place called Bre".
History
Origins
The old Roman road, Watling Street, stretching from Londinium across the Roman Province of Britannia Superior to Wroxeter and later Chester, runs one mile to the north of the village as the A5. There were small Roman stations along this route and the most important settlement locally was Pennocrucium, which had an outlying fort. The name Pennocrucium is clearly associated with Penkridge, the town and parish north of Brewood, which is separated from it by the line of Watling Street, and these important remains do lie just outside the parish boundary. However, the remains of a small Roman villa have been found about 500m south of Watling Street, close to Engleton, and so within Brewood parish. Clearly there was a small population in the Brewood area in Roman times, and quite possibly earlier. However, there is no evidence of continuity at any of the main settlements in present-day Brewood. The history of Brewood really begins with the Anglo-Saxon settlement, when it emerged as a village within Mercia. The place name suggests that it came into existence during the earlier part of the Anglo-Saxon period, when there were still people in the area of Celtic language and culture. However, the first real documentation comes after the Norman Conquest of England.In the Domesday Book of 1086, Brewood fell within the Cuttlestone Hundred of Staffordshire. The survey records that it was held by the Bishop of Chester and that it had been a church property before 1066. However, the landholder of the manor of Brewood in the Middle Ages is generally stated to be the Diocese of Lichfield. This is not a contradiction, but reflects the shifts in the seat of the diocese. In 1075, Peter, bishop of Lichfield, had transferred his see to Chester, and there it remained until 1102, when it moved to Coventry. From 1228, the official title was the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield.
Brewood was assessed for tax purposes as 5 hides, the hide being notionally an area of 120 acres, although at this time it had become simply a unit of tax liability, irrespective of actual area. Domesday also records Brewood as consisting of enough land for 20 ploughs. The bishop had twenty slaves cultivating his land in the village. The rest of the population consisted of 24 villagers, 18 smallholders and a priest. There were two mills, presumably on the River Penk. There was also a substantial area of woodland, tending to confirm the accepted etymology. However Domesday records that the value of the village was £10 in 1066, and had halved in the twenty years since. Hence we can be sure that it had prospered in the late Anglo-Saxon period but had suffered a check to its growth during, and perhaps because of, Norman rule.
The development of Brewood
Norman rule brought Forest Law to the area, and it was not until 1204, in the reign of King John, that Brewood Forest was abolished. A forest was a royal hunting reserve, which meant that it was not necessarily wooded. The area of the parish to the east of the Penk was not part of Brewood Forest, but it belonged to the Forest of Cank or Cannock Chase. It was not deforested until about a century later.Brewood market
In 1221, a charter for a Friday market at Brewood was granted to the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield by King Henry III, suggesting considerable growth and increased prosperity since the Domesday survey. However, the charter was valid only until the seniority of the king, who was a child at the time. The market continued, nevertheless, and the king recognised a Monday market too, in 1259, as well as granting the right to hold an annual fair over the feast of the Nativity of Mary, on 7–9 September, although it was transferred to 19 September after the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in the 18th century. In 1382, the burgesses of Stafford tried to get Brewood's markets suppressed, claiming that they had been unlicensed for twenty years and injured their trade. However, Stafford lost to Brewood and both market and fair were confirmed some time around 1390, in the reign of Richard II. The market petered out during the 18th century, and competition from Wolverhampton killed off an attempted revival in the following century. Although a general fair, the most important trade at the annual event was in horses. It continued until after World War I.Around the same time that the market was established, building of the large sandstone church of St Mary and St Chad was commenced, probably replacing a less impressive earlier church. It has undergone numerous alterations and restorations, but it was clearly a large and impressive structure from the outset. Around 1176, the bishop had conferred the church on the deanery of Lichfield Cathedral. The deans kept advowson, the right to nominate the priest until 1868. In medieval England, the local priest, in this case titled the vicar from 1275, was not a salaried official but a feudatory, dependent on a benefice designed to support him in office and owing service to his patron, the dean, in return. The vicar was to receive the altar dues and various other revenues, including mortuary dues and tithes on wool – with the notable exception of wool from the dean's flock, of course. In return, he was to pay the dean a pension of 10 marks.
The most notable of the medieval vicars was William de Pecco, who showed a shrewd eye for economic advantage. He somehow persuaded the nuns of Blackladies to let him impose a tithe on sheep and lambs that belonged to other people but were kept on their land – a long-standing matter of dispute between the parish and the nunnery. He also exchanged parcels of land with John de Horsbrok to rationalise the vicarage lands, and arranged to pay John and his successors the small annual rent of 3d. to site the vicarage bakehouse on his land. Apparently the financial position of the vicars fluctuated wildly. The vicarage was supposed to be worth £6 17s. 8d. in 1535, but in 1604 the vicar received an income of about 100 marks, despite the fact that he was described as "no preacher, a notable swearer and drunkard". In 1646, after the first round of the English Civil War the living was valued at a mere £20 and the vicar was bailed out by Parliament's Committee for Plundered Ministers, which gave him £50 from the sequestered estates of the dean and £8 from those of John and Peter Giffard at White Ladies and Blackladies. In the early 18th century the vicarage needed another subvention, this time from Queen Anne's Bounty, a fund designed to aid the poorest Anglican clergy.
Religious communities
From the mid-12th century, two religious communities of women developed in the Brewood area: the Benedictine priory of St Mary, Brewood, which was generally known as "Blackladies"; and the Augustinian priory of St Leonard, Brewood, which was generally known as White Ladies Priory or "Whiteladies". Both priories were suppressed in the first wave of the dissolution of the monasteries, and their buildings and local estates ended up in the hands of the Giffard family.The Leper Well
Unusually, there were two recorded sulphur wells at Chillington and Gunstone. The latter seems to have had a leper house: there is a farm with this name today at Gunstone, and there is a sulphurous leper well nearby. Sulphurous water was a medieval, actually ineffective, remedy for leprosy. Leprosy or Hansen's disease was common in medieval Europe and seems to have reached a peak between the mid-12th and mid-14th centuries. The Third Lateran Council decreed segregation for lepers in special leper houses. These were generally under monastic supervision. Leprosy declined rapidly until it faded from consciousness after the Black Death, but the waters were still used by people and animals suffering from skin ailments in the late 17th century.Brewood Grammar School
was founded in the town in the reign of Elizabeth I, replacing a chantry school founded in the previous century and dissolved when all chantries were suppressed in 1547. Richard Hurd, educated at the school by William Budworth in the 1730s, and later to become a Bishop of Worcester, was one of the most notable students.The market, the grand church and the grammar school mark out Brewood as a small town, not just a village, by the standards of this period, and it was sometimes referred to as the Borough of Brewood. Around 1680, the township had about 60 houses, but this had grown to 210 houses, with a population of 919 by 1811. In 1834 William White described Brewood as "a small but well-built market town, with several good streets and a spacious market-place." The historic centre consisted of the market place, with Bargate, Newport and Stafford Streets, and Sandy Lane meeting at it. Dean Street, south-east of the church was another important old street. These still contain many houses of considerable age, mostly Georgian, but with many also from the 16th and 17th centuries. They form a large proportion of the many listed buildings in the parish of Brewood and Coven. Speedwell Castle, in Bargate, is a striking eighteenth-century house said to have been built from the proceeds of a bet on a horse.In the early 19th century the parish consisted of eight liberties or constablewicks: Brewood town, Chillington, Coven, Engleton, Gunstone and the Hattons, Horsebrook, Kiddemore, and Somerford. The liberties outside the township were mainly based on the old medieval manors of the parish, centred on the seats of local landowners of note and influence. The fortunes of these varied considerably over the centuries. By the early 19th century, Coven had grown considerably and was described as "a considerable village" by William White in 1851. Chillington, on the other hand, had been a village of about 30 houses in the 17th century but had declined to a collection of five farms by 1834.