Mansfield
Mansfield is a market town and the administrative centre of the Mansfield District in Nottinghamshire, England. It is the largest town in the wider Mansfield Urban Area and the second largest settlement in Nottinghamshire. Henry III granted Mansfield the Royal Charter of a market town in 1227. The town lies in the Maun Valley, north of Nottingham. The district had a population of 110,500 at the 2021 census. Mansfield is the one local authority in Nottinghamshire with a publicly elected mayor, the Mayor of Mansfield. Mansfield in ancient times became the pre-eminent in importance amongst the towns of Sherwood Forest.
Toponymy
According to historian William Horner Groves there is dispute to the origins of the name. Three conjectures have been considered: the name may have been given to the noble family of Mansfield who came over with William the Conqueror, other sources suggest that the name came from Manson, an Anglo-Saxon word for traffic and a field meaning a place of trade, while others claim the town is named after the River Maun which runs through Mansfield, the town being built around the river.History
Roman to Medieval period
Settlement dates to Roman Britain times between AD 43 to AD 410. Hayman Rooke in 1787 discovered two Roman villas between Mansfield Woodhouse and Pleasley; a cache of denarii. A Roman tessellated pavement was found in one of the villas near Mansfield Woodhouse.In AD 868 the Danes came into the county and by AD 877 they had complete control over the county. Their occupation left names on the town such as Skerry Hill, Ratcliffe Gate and Carr Bank.
image:Roman Mosaic Pavement Mansfield Woodhouse.jpg|thumb|upright=0.6|left|The Roman tessellated pavement found in Mansfield Woodhouse
The Royal Manor of Mansfield was held by the King. In 1042, Edward the Confessor possessed a manor in Mansfield. During the Norman Conquest in 1066, William the Conqueror made Sherwood Forest a Royal Forest for hunting.
Mansfield was recorded as being Mammesfeld in the Wapentake of Broxtowe and the land of William the Conqueror in the Domesday Book of 1086. William owned two carucates, five sochmans, and thirty-five villains; twenty borders, with nineteen carucates and a half in demesne, a mill, piscary, twenty-four acres of meadow and pasture' in Mansfield.
In the time of Henry II of England, the king visited what is now known as Kings Mill, staying at the home of Sir John Cockle for a night having been hunting in Sherwood Forest. Sir John Cockle was later known as the Miller of Mansfield. In 1199 the Manor was owned by King John. King John used to visit Mansfield frequently between 1200 and 1216, that he built a residence here. Later, Edward I held a Royal Council in the town. The Manor, then owned by Henry III, subsequently passed to Henry de Hastings. In 1329 Queen Isabella, mother of Edward III, was the Lady of the Manor of Mansfield.
Market-petition documents of 1227 spelt Mansfield Maunnesfeld. Richard II signed a warrant in November 1377 to grant tenants the right to hold a four-day fair each year; the spelling had changed to Mannesfeld. Mansfield, Skegby and Sutton in Ashfield were the land of the king in 1086 as stated in the Domesday Book. There are remains of the 12th-century King John's Palace in Kings Clipstone, between Mansfield and Edwinstowe, and it was an area of retreat for royal families and dignitaries through to the 15th century. It was here that William the Lion of Scotland met Richard I of England to congratulate him on his return from the crusades. It was also where Queen Eleanor the first wife of Edward I was taken ill and moved to Harby. King John and Edward I are reputed to have had impromptu parliaments at the Parliament Oak near Market Warsop.
St Peter and St Paul's Church is mentioned in the 1086 Doomsday Book and in 1092 it was passed by William II to Robert Bloet the bishop of Lincoln and Lord Chancellor of England.
Access to the town was by road from the city of Nottingham, on the way to Sheffield. In the town centre, a commemorative plaque was erected in 1988 together with a nearby tree to mark the point thought once to be the centre of Sherwood Forest. The plaque was refurbished in 2005 and moved to a ground-plinth.
Tudor and Stuart periods
In 1516, during the reign of Henry VIII, an act of parliament settled the Manor to Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk.Dame Cecily Flogan in 1521, gave extensive land to the parish church and community in Mansfield in her will. The church at the time was in the hands of Edward VI.
Travellers in the 16th and 17th centuries had several inns and stable yards dating from the medieval period to stop at: the Harte; the Swan, which survives and has a 1490 dating stone; the Talbot; the White Bear; the Ram, with timber from before 1500; and the White Lion. Several timber-framed cruck buildings were demolished in 1929; and in 1973 a local historical society documented another during demolition dated to 1400 or earlier. Other Tudor houses in Stockwell Gate, Bridge Street, and Lime Tree Place were also demolished to make way for development before they could be viewed for listing. Most remaining buildings are from the 17th century. The Swan was rebuilt in 1584, and became a coaching inn in the 1820's/30s.
The Manor was passed to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury the husband of Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury in 1589, who then passed it to Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury until his death in 1616. Bess's daughter Mary Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury the wife of Gilbert Talbot became the owner. Finally the Manor was passed to the Dukes of Newcastle and Portland.
Mansfield and surrounding areas in Nottinghamshire became a strong centre for Nonconformism, separating from the Church of England.
In 1647, George Fox who was originally from Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire lived in Mansfield and worked as a shoemaker for 4 years. George lived in a cottage at the site of St Phillip Neri Catholic Church and ground on Chesterfield Road. It was at this time he started his ministry. George Fox in 1649 was imprisoned in Nottingham for interrupting the service at the church in Mansfield Woodhouse. He became the founder of the Quakers. Mansfield became the birth place of the Quaker religion after Fox had a revelation walking past St Peter and St Paul's Church and felt compelled to preach to others. The revelation is mentioned in his journal to which he states 'and as I was walking by the steeplehouse side, in the town of Mansfield the Lord said unto me, that which people do trample upon must be thy food. And as the Lord spoke he opened it to me how that people and professors did trample upon the life, even the life of Christ was trampled upon…'. The 'steeplhouses' meaning the church of St Peter and St Pauls Church. This was during the time of the English Civil War.
There is a Quaker Heritage Trail in the town. The former meeting house was on the site of the bus station. Fox met Elizabeth Hooton at her home Quaker House in nearby Skegby; she is usually considered to be the first person to accept the doctrines of Quakerism.
image:Old Meeting House, Mansfield.jpg|thumb|right|The Old Meeting House, Meeting House Yard built in 1702
The Old Meeting House on Stockwell Gate was built in 1702 and is the oldest nonconformist place of worship in Nottinghamshire. The history of the church is traced back to 1666. During the persecution of Presbyterian ministers, eight ministers sought refuge in Mansfield under the protection of Reverend John Firth.
In 1690, during the reign of William III and Queen Mary, Daniel Clay was put in the pillory in Mansfield for disloyalty, for speaking these words: "God dam King William and Queen Mary and yt King James both should and would come again."
Elizabeth Heath founded the almshouses for the poor in 1691. Six were to house Quakers and six members of the established church.
18th century
In 1709, Samuel Brunt left £436.15 to the relief of the poor inhabitants of Mansfield. Faith Clerkson in 1725 and Charles Thompson in 1784 both donated money to educating children in Mansfield. This formulated the beginning of the Brunt's Charity.Robert Dodsley, who wrote The King and the Miller of Mansfield, was a stocking weaver in the town. His writings were set in the town also. He became one of the foremost publishers of that day, publishing Dr Samual Johnson’s 'London' in 1738. Later, he suggested and helped finance Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.
In 1750, George Whitefield, one of the founders of Methodism) came to preach in the town. The Moot Hall in the Mansfield Market Place was erected in 1752 by Henrietta Harley, Countess of Oxford and Countess Mortimer.
The Earldom of Mansfield in Nottingham was created in 1776 for the Scottish Lawyer William Murray who became the first Earl of Mansfield. He became the Lord Chief Justice of the Kings Bench. William Murray presided over the 1772 Somerset v Stewart case which lead to the abolition of slavery on British soil. Lord Mansfield was a family connection of Jane Austen’s family. It is believed this led to the novel Mansfield Park.
It was recorded that the Mansfield Workhouse was originally based on Nottingham Road in 1777, housing 56 inmates. It later moved to Stockwell Gate, where the Mansfield Union Workhouse was designed to house 300 people under the Mansfield Poor Law.
In 1790, John Throsby described Mansfield as 'a flourishing and genteel market town, general well built.....and is certainly an ancient place, and some think of high antiquity'.
19th century
In 1851, Lord George Bentinck was commemorated in the Cavendish Monument in the Market Place in Mansfield., paid for by public subscription. The monument has a square base and three steps, and the style is Gothic revival It was originally intended to include a figure of Lord George, but there were insufficient funds.In 1894, William Horner Groves described Mansfield as "one of the quaintest and most healthy of the towns in the Midland counties, is the market town for an agricultural district of eight miles around it. It is the capital of the Broxtowe Hundred of Nottinghamshire, and gives its name to a Parliamentary Division of the county"