Ruyton-XI-Towns
Ruyton-XI-Towns, formally Ruyton of the Eleven Towns or simply Ruyton, is a village and civil parish next to the River Perry in Shropshire, England. It had a population of 1,379 at the 2011 Census.
The preparatory school Packwood Haugh is north of the village. Footpaths south of the village lead to the sandstone promontory known as The Cliffe. It is still an area of common land, which is the northern section of the Nesscliffe Hill Country Park.
Toponym
Mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Ruitone, the village acquired its unusual compound name in the twelfth century when a castle was built, and it became the major manor of eleven local townships. The earliest occurrence of the inclusion of the Roman numeral for eleven in the name is stated to be 1379. Some of the eleven ancient townships, mostly situated to the north and west of Ruyton, still survive as hamlets today; although some, like Coton, are just a collection of farm buildings. The eleven were Ruyton, Coton, Shotatton, Shelvock, Eardiston and Wykey, which remain in the parish; and Felton, Haughton, Rednal, Sutton and Tedsmore, now in the parish of West Felton.History
Lying in the Welsh Marches, Ruyton Castle was rebuilt by 1313 but was destroyed again by Owain Glyndŵr during his rising against England beginning in 1400. Its ruins stand in the parish churchyard.In 1308, an attempt was made to refound the town as New Ruyton, when it was awarded a charter that briefly gave it the same powers as the County of Bristol. However, as raiding continued, the new town declined and lost most of its rights, its borough status being formally abolished in 1886.
The oldest parts of the parish church date from between 1120 and 1148.
Notable residents
- Corbet Kynaston, Jacobite Tory politician, died at Shelvock, one of his manors, in 1740.
- John Robert Kenyon, lawyer and Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford University, was born in 1807 and died in 1880 at Pradoe in the parish.
- Arthur Conan Doyle, while a medical student, worked as an unpaid assistant in the village for a Dr Eliot for four months in 1878, living at Cliffe House. He later recalled Ruyton in his Memories and Recollections as "not big enough to make one town, far less eleven".
- Frederic Richardson Murray, later Archdeacon of Belize, was formerly a curate at the parish church.
- William Blair-Bell, founder of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, lived at Eardiston House in the parish prior to his death in 1936.
War memorial