Shustoke
Shustoke is a village in the North Warwickshire district of the county of Warwickshire in England. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 census was 549. It is situated 2.5 miles northeast of Coleshill, 7.5 miles southwest of Atherstone, 9.5 miles west of Nuneaton and 12.5 miles east-northeast of Birmingham. It includes the sub-village of Church End half-a-mile to the east, where the parish church of Saint Cuthbert's is situated.
History
Shustoke is an ancient village and it existed before the Domesday Book. In 1086 Shustoke was recorded as 'Scotescote' meaning Scots Cottage, as cote means cottage, dwelling or house. The parish church of St Cuthbert's was erected in 1307 on the site of an earlier church or chapel. Some remains of a Celtic-type churchyard cross and reused Norman masonry can be seen. The parish registers are some of the earliest in the country and date from the reign of Henry VIII. Some are in the handwriting of the scholar and antiquary Sir William Dugdale. Dugdale was born in the building now known as 'The Old Rectory' in Shawbury Lane on 12 September 1605, and is widely regarded as the county's first and greatest antiquarian.He built and lived in Blyth Hall and was a strong royalist supporter of King Charles I during the Civil War, being appointed as his 'Garter Principal King of Arms'. On 10 May 1660 at Coleshill he read out the proclamation announcing that Charles' son Charles II was now the King of England. Dugdale's descendants later bought land near Atherstone where they built Merevale Hall. Many of the artefacts of Sir William Dugdale can be seen here, including his ceremonial tabard as Garter Principal King of Arms clothes. During the English Civil War Shustoke is listed among the towns paying arrears to the garrison at Tamworth in an account drawn up by Captain Thomas Layfield for the period from 1 November 1645 to 1 May 1646.
At a weekly rate of £7.5 the total arrears amounted to £108.10. There are many interesting buildings in the parish. Some around the church are typical Arden timber-framing with brick in-fill, dating from the 17th century. Others are the Alms Houses, the moated Shustoke Hall, and a Tithe barn at the nearby hamlet of Church End. Joseph Harrison, the early seventeenth-century vicar of Shustoke, appears to have enjoyed some notoriety as a drunkard. The justices of the Warwick quarter sessions at Easter, 1635 record that the late vicar was "a man of very lewd condition, much subject to drunkenness" and ruled that William Bull, his father-in-law, was to be responsible for supporting his surviving wife and child.