Bromsgrove
Bromsgrove is a town in Worcestershire, England, about north-east of Worcester and south-west of Birmingham city centre. It had a population of 34,755 in at the 2021 census. It gives its name to the wider Bromsgrove District, of which it is the largest town and administrative centre. In the Middle Ages, it was a small market town, primarily producing cloth through the early modern period. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it became a major centre for nail making.
History
Anglo-Saxon
Bromsgrove is first documented in the early ninth century as Bremesgraf. An Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 909 AD mentions a Bremesburh; possibly also referring to Bromsgrove. The Domesday Book of 1086 references Bremesgrave. The name means Bremi's grove. The grove element may refer to the supply of wood to Droitwich for the salt pans.During the Anglo-Saxon period the Bromsgrove area had a woodland economy; including hunting, maintenance of haies and pig farming.
At the time of Edward the Confessor, the manor of Bromsgrove is known to have been held by Earl Edwin, who became Earl of Mercia in 1062.
Norman and medieval
After the Norman conquest, the manor that later held the town of Bromsgrove was held by the King. The royal manor of Bromsgrove and King's Norton covered from Woodcote to Deritend. Among the manor's possessions were thirteen salt pans at Droitwich, with three workers, producing 300 mits. The king had the right to sell the salt from his pans before any other salt in the town.Bromsgrove is sited at the centre of a very large parish, with its church, St John the Baptist, standing at a prominent point in the local landscape. Bromsgrove, along with all the towns in north Worcestershire, was committed to defending the city of Worcester, and is recorded to have contributed burgesses to Droitwich in 1086. There may also have been Anglo-Saxon or Norman fortifications in Bromsgrove, but no archaeological evidence remains outside the literature.
Bromsgrove and the surrounding area was put under forest law when the boundaries of Feckenham Forest were extended hugely by Henry II. Forest law was removed from the Bromsgrove area in 1301 in the reign of Edward I, when the boundaries were moved back.
Bromsgrove was one of the smallest urban settlements in the county, and had no formal status as a borough. A market day was first granted in 1200; however, even at this time, there is little record of an urban settlement. Later, in the 1230s, Henry III arranged that the rectory manor of St. John was transferred to Worcester Priory, to support the remembrance of his father King John, who was buried there. This meant that the town which grew up around this period was divided between two jurisdictions and landlords, the royal manor in the east, and the rectory manor controlled by Worcester Priory in the west. The division ran along the High Street. Nevertheless, records show no sign of an urban settlement in 1240–1250. New initiatives to establish a market took place in 1250, and Bromsgrove residents appear in the tax records by 1275.
The town appears to have been founded as a series of plots of sizes between, marked out along the current High Street. These plots can still be discerned today, in the sizes of the frontages of the buildings. The road entering Bromsgrove from the west appears to have been diverted to ensure that it met Bromsgrove at the furthest point north, forcing travellers to pass south through the whole High Street if intending to continue west.
The town probably benefited from the growth of the local agricultural population in the early medieval period, which began to establish new farmland in places like Stoke Prior and Hanbury through assarting Feckenham Forest. Similarly, the number of minor aristocratic, gentry and ecclesiastical estates grew, which would have needed to buy and sell goods. Hanbury alone had six manor houses and two granges in the 1200s. The Priory Manor itself would have been a potential customer, as would Grafton Manor just south of the town. Nevertheless, not all the local trade would have passed directly through Bromsgrove, as the Priory for instance would often take locally produced goods directly to Droitwich or Worcester, or purchase them directly at other larger centres with particular specialisms.
In 1317, it was given the right hold a Tuesday market and three-day fair every 29 August at the Decollation of St. John the Baptist. The market place and tollhouse were located at the junction of St. John Street and the High Street. Its market was especially used by the surrounding area to sell surplus oats, which were increasingly produced in the area, while wheat was grown in southern Worcestershire. The area was known for the high quality of its pigs.
Common trades can be traced from surnames in this period, and included in the years to 1327 bakers, tanners, carpenters, drapers, dyers, butchers, masons, smiths, shoemakers and fullers. The town had a large number of tanneries and cloth was also produced. Tanneries and breweries were located on the Priory manor side of the town, with access to the Spadesbourne brook. This created significant problems of pollution.
Bromsgrove benefited from sales to travellers, for instance of beer, bread, horsebread, meat and cheese. Brewing and selling ale seems to have been predominantly done by women in Bromsgrove, perhaps to supplement the main income of the household. Between 22 and 29 people are recorded in the 1300s at the Court Leet paying 'fines' for selling ale for more than the fixed price; this seems to have been applied in effect as a tax. Women were able to hold property, sometimes as widows or jointly with their husbands, and owned up to 10% of Bromsgrove's plots at various times.
After the Black Death, the social structure of the Bromsgrove's hinterland changed. Farms tended to merge and become larger, and moved from producing crops to raising livestock. This resulted in higher value goods like wool, leather and meat being sold through Bromsgrove's market and contributed to the town's prosperity in the later Middle Ages. The town's population would have fell, but can still be estimated as around 400 in the later 1300s. The aftermath of the Black Death also caused traders to attempt to hike their prices, which the courts attempted to suppress.
Even in later years, Bromsgrove did not grow a market in luxury goods, except for one haberdasher. Its markets did not compete with the larger centres for the highest value goods, such as wines or jewellery.
Church court records show that Bromsgrove had an urban underclass, including prostitutes and beggars. Assaults, murders and burglaries are also recorded. Servants, often young people, feature particularly in the records of disorderly behaviour. However, violence was not confined to the lower and middle orders; other courts issued warrants for the arrest of two of the Staffords of Grafton Manor in the 1401 and 1450, along with their followers, some natives of Bromsgrove, for politically motivated violence.
Governance of the town itself is difficult to discern. Manorial records give evidence for courts, rents and fines, but do not present evidence about the organisation of matters that relate to the town itself, such as the maintenance of roads and other facilities. The main representative post appears to be that of Bailiff. The royal manor, with its Court Leet, dealt with the majority of financial matters including tolls and revenues from the market, after disputes with the Priory manor over rights to various revenues and fines were settled. The royal manor would therefore have paid for the upkeep of the market and the tollhouse, which also served at some points as a jail.
Christopher Dyer suggests that local societies may have grown up to deal with some of its organisational issues. There was for instance a guild in the town during the 1300s. There were three crosses erected in the town, and reports of well-paved roads in the 1400s, so Dyer concludes that the town's voluntary self-organisation seems to have been adequate to deal with its key problems.
Bromsgrove in the Middle Ages probably reached a population of no more than 600. It was not especially wealthy. Taxation records show that most families, even among the richest, had relatively moderate incomes, compared to other towns in the Midlands. It did, however, have an urban character, and attracted people into the town from the surrounding area.
Early modern
By the end of the Middle Ages, Bromsgrove was a centre for the wool trade. Manufacture of cloth, particularly narrow cloth and friezes is first recorded in 1533. Nailmaking was probably introduced in the region in the sixteenth century and was taking place in Bromsgrove in the seventeenth century. It provided an alternative trade for the rural poor, who would initially have supplemented other work with the nail trade.At the Reformation, around 1540, the Priory Manor was given to the new Dean and Chapter. Tithe collection and rents would have carried on in a similar fashion.
One major change was the political fortunes of the Talbot family, who chose to remain Catholics. They were connected to the Wintours by marriage, with the result that they were suspected of involvement in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
Civil War, Restoration and dissenting religion
Bromsgrove did not play a major military role in the English Civil War, although it was a town involved in the support of the Trained Bands, the system of local militias used for law enforcement. In 1642, as preparations for war were made, Parliament surveyed the capabilities of the trained bands and documented that Bromsgrove had a store of munitions, including ten barrels of powder. The Royalists occupied the county in late 1642, following the Battle of Edgehill. In February 1643, Charles I ordered that Bromsgrove's vicar John Hall be removed from his post as a rebel.The town would have been subject to the deprivations of the county in the wars, such as high taxation, pressing of men into military service and requisitioning of food and other property as armies passed through the area. For instance, in 1643, the Worcestershire Committee complained to the King about the "plunderings and abuses" of the Royalist troops of Sir Thomas Aston, which had made it impossible for Bromsgrove and other places to pay their monthly contributions. The following year, Parliamentary forces briefly imposed themselves on northern Worcestershire. In June 1644, General William Waller's force of around 10,000 men pursued the King's army across the county as it retreated from Oxford. Waller's army during June lived off whatever they could requisition, first in the Vale of Evesham, then Bromsgrove and Kidderminster.
The Talbot family who held Grafton became central figures in the county's military organisation under the Royalists. The promotion of Catholics and recusants like the Talbots was a source of controversy in Worcestershire, referred to, for instance, by the clubmen in their attempts to resist the demands of both armies in the later part of the first war. In the third civil war of 1649, the Talbots joined King Charles II at the Battle of Worcester with a force of local men and had a role in his escape. The battle was traumatic for the county, as the Scottish troops in support of Charles looted as they traversed the county.
Afterwards, as some of the Scots dispersed trying to escape, further skirmishes occurred as they were arrested or killed. Local tradition recounts that Battlefield Brook and Battlefields Farm was named after one of the encounters, although it is unclear whether before or after.
Disputes about the vicarage continued through the Interregnum and Protectorate. John Hall was vicar again until 1652. John Hall's successor John Spilsbury, previously a fellow of Magdalen College, was unpopular with some of Bromsgrove's churchgoers, who attempted unsuccessfully to eject him. Spilsbury was removed after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, and left the Church of England by refusing to conform to the Act of Uniformity along with around 2,000 other Anglican ministers from the Commonwealth period. He was confined to his house, banished from the county and finally imprisoned for his non-conformism. The toll on his health may have led to illness and death. He did return to Bromsgrove, where he was annually visited by Hall's son, an Anglican bishop. He was licensed as a Congregationalist teacher in 1672 in Bromsgrove and died in 1699. A Congregationalist chapel was established in Bromsgrove in 1693.