Shropshire

Shropshire is a ceremonial county in the West Midlands of England, on the border with Wales. It is bordered by Cheshire to the north-east, Staffordshire to the east, Worcestershire to the south-east, Herefordshire to the south, and the Welsh principal areas of Powys and Wrexham to the west and north-west respectively. The largest settlement is Telford, while Shrewsbury is the county town.
The county has an area of and a population of 498,073. Telford in the east and Shrewsbury in the centre are the largest towns. Shropshire is otherwise rural, and contains market towns such as Oswestry in the north-west, Market Drayton in the north-east, Bridgnorth in the south-east, and Ludlow in the south. For local government purposes the county comprises the unitary authority areas of Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin. The county historically had a large exclave around Halesowen and Oldbury, which are now in the West Midlands county.
The south-west and far west of the county are upland. The Shropshire Hills occupy most of the south-west and include the Stiperstones, Clee Hills, Long Mynd plateau, and the Wenlock Edge escarpment. Together with the Wrekin, which stands isolated to the west of Telford, they have been designated a national landscape. To their west is the upland Clun Forest, and in the far north-west of the county are the Oswestry uplands. The north of the county is a plain, and the far north contains Whixall Moss, part of a national nature reserve. The south-east is a sandstone plateau which forms part of the catchment of the Severn, the county's major river; it enters Shropshire in the west and flows through Shrewsbury before turning south-east and exiting into Worcestershire south of Bridgnorth.
There is evidence of Neolithic and Bronze Age human occupation in Shropshire, including the Shropshire bulla pendant. The hillfort at Old Oswestry dates from the Iron Age, and the remains of the city of Viroconium Cornoviorum date from the Roman period. During the Anglo-Saxon era the area was part of Mercia. During the High Middle Ages the county was part of the Welsh Marches, the border region between Wales and England; from 1472 to 1689 Ludlow was the seat of the Council of Wales and the Marches, which administered justice in Wales and Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. During the English Civil War Shropshire was Royalist, and Charles II fled through the county—famously hiding in an oak tree—after his final defeat at the Battle of Worcester. The area around Coalbrookdale is regarded as one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

History

Prehistory and antiquity

Evidence of Neolithic occupation of a religious form dating back before 2,000 BC, was discovered in 2017 in the grounds of a church, the medieval Church of the Holy Fathers in Sutton, Shrewsbury, making it Britain's oldest place of worship.
The Shropshire bulla, also known as the Shropshire sun pendant, is a Late Bronze Age gold pendant found by a metal detectorist in 2018 in Shropshire. At Mitchell's Fold there is a Bronze Age stone circle set in dramatic moorland on Stapeley Hill.
The area was once part of the lands of the Cornovii, which consisted of the modern day counties of Cheshire, Shropshire, north Staffordshire, north Herefordshire, and eastern parts of Powys. This was a tribal Celtic Iron Age kingdom. Their capital in pre-Roman times was probably a hill fort on the Wrekin. There is an important Iron Age Hill fort at Old Oswestry earthworks, this has been linked to where King Arthur’s Guinevere was born and called "the Stonehenge of the Iron Age."
According to tradition, Caracticus made his last stand against the Romans in Shropshire. Ptolemy's 2nd century Geography names one of their towns as being Viroconium Cornoviorum, which became their capital under Roman rule and one of the largest settlements in Britain.

Middle Ages

Early period

After the Roman occupation of Britain ended in the 5th century, the Shropshire area was in the eastern part of the Welsh Kingdom of Powys; known in Welsh poetry as the Paradise of Powys.
As 'Caer Guricon' it is a possible Shrewsbury was the site of the seat of the Kingdom of Powys in the Early Middle Ages. This would date establishment of the town to the 500s CE under Brochwel Ysgithrog. It is believed the area of Shrewsbury was settled in the 5th century by refugees from the nearby Roman City of Viroconium Cornoviorum, most physical evidence dates from the 7th century.
Oswestry saw conflict in the early mediaeval period and is traditionally suspected to be the site of the Battle of Maserfield, where Oswald of Northumbria was defeated and killed by the forces of King Penda in 641 or 642 CE. Oswald was later regarded as a saint, with Bede saying that the spot where he died came to be associated with miracles, and people took dirt from the site, which led to a hole being dug as deep as a man's height.
Around 680 CE Merewalh, a son of King Penda, founded a dual monastery for both monks and nuns at Much Wenlock. One of his daughters, Milburga, went on to be appointed as its second abbess, and later was canonised with the site of her bones becoming a popular pilgrimage destination, with the modern pilgrimage route of the Abbesses' Way running from Wenlock Priory to Shrewsbury.
King Offa of Mercia annexed the entirety of Shropshire over the course of the 8th century from Powys, with Shrewsbury captured in 778, with two dykes built to defend, or at least demarcate it from the Welsh. King Offa converted the palace of the rulers of Powys into his first church, dedicated to St Chad.
File:Offa's Dyke near Clun.jpg|thumb|Section of Offa's Dyke near the Shropshire town of Clun, constructed after the Saxon annexation of the area in the 8th century AD
In later centuries, Vikings repeatedly invaded, with Wenlock Priory being destroyed in 874. To protect against this threat, fortresses were built at Bridgnorth and Chirbury.
File:Æthelflæd_as_depicted_in_the_cartulary_of_Abingdon_Abbey.png|thumb|The relics of St Alkmund were brought to Shrewsbury in the C10th, possibly by Æthelflæd, lady of the Mercians, daughter of Alfred the Great.
In 914, Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, fortified Shrewsbury, along with two other fortresses, at Scergeat and Weardbyrig, Viking rides from the north traveling south were reaching Bridgnorth at this time. In the early tenth century, the relics of St Alkmund were translated to Whitchurch, this was also probably the work of Æthelflæd.
There is evidence to show that by the beginning of the 900s, Shrewsbury was home to a mint.
Archaeological excavations at the site of Shrewsbury castle in 2019 have indicated that the castle itself may have been a fortified site in the time of the Saxons.

High medieval period

After the Norman conquest in 1066, major estates in Shropshire were granted to Normans, including Roger de Montgomerie and later his son Robert de Bellême, who ordered significant constructions, particularly in Shrewsbury, the town of which he was Earl.
Many defensive castles were built at this time across the county to defend against the Welsh and enable effective control of the region, including Ludlow Castle and Shrewsbury Castle.
The western frontier with Wales was not finally determined until the 14th century. Also in this period, a number of religious foundations were formed, the county largely falling at this time under the Diocese of Hereford and that of Coventry and Lichfield. Some parishes in the north-west of the county in later times fell under the Diocese of St. Asaph until the disestablishment of the Church in Wales in 1920, when they were ceded to the Lichfield diocese.
The county was a central part of the Welsh Marches during the medieval period and was often embroiled in the power struggles between powerful Marcher Lords, the Earls of March and successive monarchs.

Modern history

From 1457, King Henry VI created for his son, Prince Edward, a Council to rule Wales and the Marches, Cheshire, and Cornwall, which became the Council of the Marches. Shropshire was governed via this council for several centuries.
According to historian John Davies, at its peak under Sir Henry Sidney and for a period thereafter the Council:

represented a remarkable experiment in regional government. It administered the law cheaply and rapidly; it dealt with up to twenty cases a day and George Owen stated that the 'oppressed poor' flocked to it.

Civil War

During the English Civil War, Shropshire was a Royalist stronghold, under the command of Sir Francis Ottley. In the autumn of 1642, Charles I had a temporary capital at Shrewsbury, though he immediately moved to Oxford after the events of the Battle of Wem. Prince Rupert established his headquarters in the town on 18 February 1644, being welcomed by Shrewsbury's aldermen.

Victorian era

was the birthplace of the modern Olympic movement.

Culture and cultural references

Literature and legends

In the High Medieval period the Shropshire area influenced important poetry: the poet William Langland, writer of Piers Plowman, was born in Cleobury Mortimer, and the 14th-century alliterative poem St Erkenwald is written in a local dialect. The only copy of the ancient poem 'Life and Death' was also found in Shropshire.
In this period the county was also associated in divers places and ways with Arthurian legends, for instance at Hawkstone, where there is a legend that one of the caves of Hawkstone Park was the burial ground of King Arthur, and the Arthurian story of the giants Tarquin and Tarquinus is located, or Whittington Castle and linked to the Holy Grail since the 13th century. Old Oswestry has been identified as a possible home of Guinevere. Ludlow Castle site features heavily in the folk-story of Fulk FitzWarin, outlawed Lord of Whittington, Shropshire and a possible inspiration for the Robin Hood legend.
Parts of Shropshire are inside the ancient Forest of Arden, which was the part if the English Midlands, that in antiquity and into the Early Modern Period was bounded by the Roman roads including to the North by the Watling Street and to the west by Wales. This forest was the Setting of Shakespeare's As You Like It, and that play is acknowledged to potentially be a cultural monument to Sir Rowland Hill, a prominent Tudor statesman and publisher of the Geneva Bible from the county.
Shropshire was the original seat of prominence of the Cotton family who held the Cotton Library before it was taken to found the British Library.
Shrewsbury Abbey features in The Cadfael Chronicles; Brother Cadfael is a member of the community at the Abbey.
The poet A. E. Housman used Shropshire as the setting for many of the poems in his first book, A Shropshire Lad. Moreover, many of Malcolm Saville's children's books are set in Shropshire. Additionally, D. H. Lawrence's novella, St. Mawr, is partially set in the Stiperstones area of South Shropshire.. The Clark Tracey Quintet, commissioned by John C. Williams’ Leasowes Bank Music Festival in Ratlinghope, recorded in 1987 the jazz album Stiperstones, inspired by the south Shropshire landscape.
The early 20th century novelist and poet Mary Webb was born in Shropshire and lived most of her life there, and all her novels are set there, most notably Precious Bane, with its powerful evocation of the Shropshire countryside. A school in Pontesbury bears her name.
Shropshire is widely believed to have been an influence for J. R. R. Tolkien's landscape of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings. Specifically, the Wrekin and Ellesmere are said to have inspired the English fantasy writer.
In Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Jonathan Strange is from the county, and some parts of the book are set there. Another fictional character from Shropshire is Mr Grindley, from Charles Dickens' Bleak House.
P. G. Wodehouse's fictional Blandings Castle, the ancestral home of Lord Emsworth, is located in Shropshire. Also from Shropshire is Psmith, a fictional character in a series of Wodehouse's novels.
In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon attempts to trick Jack into revealing the location of his country home by inferring he resides in Shropshire.
The 1856 plantation literature novel White Acre vs. Black Acre by William M. Burwell features two Shropshire farms acting as an allegory for American slavery – "White Acre Farm" being the abolitionist Northern United States, and "Black Acre Farm" being the slaveholding Southern United States.
The angel Aziraphale, a principal character in Good Omens, was credited with designing Shropshire by Terry Pratchett.
In the novel Howards End, Mr. Wilcox's daughter gets married in Shropshire. Part of the novel is set near Clun.