Leonard Stanley
Leonard Stanley, or Stanley St. Leonard, is a village and parish in Gloucestershire, England. It is southwest of the town of Stroud.
Situated beneath the Cotswold escarpment overlooking the Severn Vale, the surrounding land is mainly given over to agricultural use. The village is made up of some 600 houses and has an estimated population of 1,545 as of 2019. The hamlet of Stanley Downton lies less than a mile to the north and is within the parish. In 1970, the village was twinned with the commune of Dozulé in the Calvados region of Normandy, northern France.
Originally a Saxon village, a priory dedicated to St. Leonard was founded in c.1130. As the village grew, Leonard Stanley developed into a busy weaving and agricultural centre with inns, a marketplace, and two annual fairs. Whilst agricultural usage continues, in recent years the village has become a dormitory village for the nearby towns and cities. The last village shop and post office was not closed in the early 2000s.
Geography
The underlying geology of the area is blue lias that was laid down during the Jurassic and Triassic periods.The parish is roughly triangular in shape. The northern boundary runs along the southern branch of the River Frome at a level of 100 feet. The Bitton Brook runs northward towards the River Frome and forms a shallow combe in the north part of the parish. To the south the tip of the parish rises up to 650 feet at Sandford's Knoll. A nature reserve, Five Acre Grove, lies to the west of the village. It is designated as a Key Wildlife Site.
Transport
A regular bus service, operated by Stagecoach West, connects Leonard Stanley to towns such as Stroud, Cheltenham and Gloucester.The nearby railway stations of Stonehouse and Stroud are on the Cheltenham to London mainline with GWR providing a regular service to Paddington and Cheltenham Spa stations. Cam and Dursley station, situated west of Leonard Stanley, provides further regular mainline train services to Bristol and Birmingham.
By road, Junction 13 of the M5 motorway lies northwest of the village.
History
What once had been described as a market town, "Leonard Stanley with its fairs and its weekly market, for some time the only one in the hundred, was formerly a centre of trade; it was described as a market-town in 1650. It declined in importance after the 17th century, and the beginning of the decline was later associated with the fire of 1686."Prehistoric
During the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras, the Severn Valley was covered by dense forest. There is evidence of a small Mesolithic community living in the area and a collection of surface flints has been discovered just to the northwest of Leonard Stanley on a forty-acre area of gravel. Finds include Mesolithic tools, scrapers, and triangular points.Norman
In 1086, the Domesday book records the village name as Stanlege, a word derived from the Norse, meaning a stony forest or glade clearing. There were two Saxon landowners or tenants at the time of the conquest, Godric and Wisnod, who may have been brothers. The settlement consisted of 25 households placing it, by size, in the top 40% in the country. By 1086, the Saxon lords had been dispossessed of their lands and Ralph de Berkeley appointed as Lord and chief tenant. Stanlege was a significant settlement lying within the administrative area of the hundred of Blacklowe which by 1220 had been incorporated into the larger hundred of Whitstone.By 1116 a small church dedicated to St. Leonard had been built and in 1130, Roger de Berkeley II, founded an Augustinian Priory. The new building was sited close to the old church on rising ground above Seven Waters, and building work began in c.1131. This included the construction of a priory church also dedicated to St. Leonard which served both as the collegiate church and parochial church for the village. The priory church is a grade 1 listed building and remains in use today as the parish church of St. Swithun's.
In 1146, the priory was appropriated by Gloucester Abbey and became a Benedictine cell until its dissolution in 1538. Over the years the village became known by various names including Stanley St. Leonard, Stanley Monochorum and Monk's Stanley. In recent years it is sometimes known as Stanley St. Leonards but most commonly as Leonard Stanley.
Tudor
In the early 14th century Edward II granted a charter for a weekly market which was subsequently renewed by James I in 1620. The market was held on Saturdays at the marketplace near, to what is now, the village green. The village held two annual fairs, one on the first Saturday after St. Swithin's Day, July 15, and the second on November 6, St Leonard's Day. It has been suggested that whilst the collegiate part the church was dedicated to St. Leonard the parochial part had a separate dedication to St. Swithin. Though there is no clear evidence for this, or any dedication to St. Swithin, it could explain why the church is today known as St. Swithun's and why the saint's day was celebrated.In August 1535, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn spent almost the entire month in Gloucestershire. After staying at Gloucester Abbey, the king travelled to Leonard Stanley arriving there on 6 August 1535. After visiting the priory and staying overnight, he and his court then travelled on to Berkeley the following day. It was three years later, on 11 June 1538, that Henry sent an imperative request to the Abbot of Gloucester to recall the monks from Stanley St Leonard. The priory was dissolved and a ninety nine-year lease with an annual rent of £20 was granted to Sir William Kingston in September 1538.
Stuart and Georgian
By the 1600s, Leonard Stanley was a busy market town with a thriving cloth industry. The market house stood near the village green, and a fulling mill used for the cleaning of cloth had been built near the complex of fishponds at Seven Waters. The main village was situated along The Street, a road running from the priory church to the Bath Road. Farming and the clothing industry were the main employment for the villagers. Wealthy clothing families bought up land in and around Leonard Stanley. The Grange, previously known as Townsend House, was the first stone-built house in the village and stands at the junction of The Street and Bath Road. It was built for the wealthy clothier Richard Clutterbuck and dates from 1583. In 1549, another wealthy clothier, John Sandford, purchased the estates of Leonard Stanley Priory which included Priory House Farm.In the early afternoon of 23 March 1686, a catastrophic fire destroyed most of the wood-framed buildings to the west of The Street. The fire was such a significant event that King James II issued an appeal for money for rebuilding work. Many villagers were affected and lost their homes, stables and possessions reducing them to poverty.
Other houses suffered less severe damage. Lavender Cottage and Yew Tree House, both standing near the corner of the village green, underwent extensive rebuilding in the 17th century suggesting they too had suffered some damaged from the fire. A few of the older buildings on The Street did survive including The Mercer's House, Weavers Cottage, Vine Cottage and Chapel House. The Mercer's House, dating from 1392, was originally a single house of cruck frame timber construction, the beams filled with wattle and daub. By the 16th century it had been extended into three houses which were attached. By 1559, part of the building included a thatched weaver's shop with two looms.
Little of the money raised for rebuilding work ever reached Leonard Stanley. Most was diverted for other pressing needs created by the ongoing civil upheavals which eventually led to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Less than a sixth of the funds reached the village. This significantly impacted the community, and the village never fully recovered with the market house being in a state of dilapidation by the 1770s.
Following the fire, some building work did occur. Church Farm was built in 1688 on Church Road. On the frontage are the initials “JS”, probably a later relative of John Sandford who had bought the land in 1549. Grain and cloth were stored in the upper floors of the building. The oval windows seen near the top of the gables were left unglazed to encourage owls to nest in the building. The owl windows were a method of pest control reducing the number of mice and rats.
Priory House Farm was rebuilt in the early 17th century replacing an earlier building on the same site. The owner, another John Sandford, made significant alterations in 1750 which included an imposing new façade with a carved pediment of the Sandford coat-of-arms. Also of interest near the farmhouse is a brick privy dating from the 18th century. The privy is double seated and sited over a small stream, later to be sketched by Stanley Spencer.
The building now known as Tannery House was built in 1770 for the surgeon James Clutterbuck and is situated at the corner of Church Road and Bath Road. The nearby Brookside Cottage, dating from the late 17th century, was originally more than one dwelling that formed part of Tannery Cottages. On the opposite side of the Bath Road, numbers 2 and 4 both date from the early 17th century. On Church Road, the houses now known as Church View and Stoneleigh previously formed the Cross Keys Inn, first mentioned in 1707. The Inn was a meeting place for both the local Clothworkers Society and the church clergy who assembled there before a service at the church. The brick outline of the archway to the inn is still visible. At the other end of the row of cottages is Ivy Cottage, an example of a clothiers cottage, dating from the late 16th or early 17th century. The only inn now remaining in the village is the White Hart which was first mentioned in 1740. Adjoining it and to the right is the old Parsonage today known as Rhymney Cottage.
By 1632, in Stanley Downton, a corn mill was in operation on the southern channel of the river Frome. This was Stradlyngs or Lye's mill and by the early 18th century there were seven houses at Stanley Downton together with the Flag Inn built in 1700.
The Methodist minister, Charles Wesley, visited the village and preached beneath a large elm tree on Monday, 27 August 1739. The exact location of the elm tree is not recorded in his journal though oral tradition has it that the tree once stood at the junction of Church Road and Bath Road. This spot is known locally as Wesley's tump and a nearby road is named Wesley Road.
John Wesley, Charles's brother, and the founder of Methodism also preached at Leonard Stanley. On the afternoon of Sunday, 7 October 1739, he spoke for over two hours to a large crowd of about three thousand people ‘at Stanley on a little green near the town’. It is thought that this was the same spot from which his brother Charles spoke a few months earlier. A thunderstorm took place during the sermon, though apparently, the crowd was not deterred and stayed through to the end.
The last member of the Sandford family to live in the village died in 1765 with the estate passing on to Robert Timbrell of Kemble who had married a Miss Sandford. The vicarage was built in 1783 and a Wesleyan Chapel, offset slightly from The Street, opened in 1818.
By this time significant technological improvements were being made in industrial mechanisation and transportation. After years of opposition by the mill owners, in July 1779 the Stroudwater Navigation, a canal, opened linking Stroud to the River Severn. Mechanisation of the cloth making process signalled the end of the cottage weaving industry with the construction of Stanley Mills in 1813.