In January 2019, metal detectorists discovered a large hoard of Anglo-Saxon and Norman coins in the Chew Valley area of what is now Bath and North-East Somerset, although firmly within the historic county of Somerset.1 The hoard was buried in the years immediately following the Norman Conquest, and was essentially a two-type hoard, composed of the PAX type of Harold II, and the Profile / Cross Fleury type of William I, and thus spans the Conquest, like a small number of other hoards of similar date, including Soberton, Rotherham and Corringham. However, the Chew Valley hoard is by far the largest hoard recorded to date from the immediate post-Conquest period, and although a number of other hoards were deposited in 1066, presumably in the build-up to Hastings (see below, p. 44), Chew Valley contained nearly twice as many coins from Harold’s short reign as the whole of the previously recorded corpus. The hoard thus provides an unprecedented opportunity to re-examine Harold’s coinage, which will be considered here in its historical context. At the same time, the fact that the hoard was compiled and deposited in William’s reign also offers a chance to reflect on the brief period of transition between Harold’s death on 14 October and William’s coronation on 25 December 1066. This transition period rarely receives detailed consideration, being viewed either as a coda to studies of Harold (or of the late Anglo-Saxon period) or as an introduction to William’s inevitable establishment of Norman rule in England.

This essay will first provide a brief account of the hoard itself, before moving on to consider Harold’s coinage as a whole, with some preliminary thoughts on how the hoard impacts on our understanding of that coinage. The next section will consider what previous scholarship has already established as the otherwise minor mint of Wilton within this coinage, and how the Chew Valley hoard reinforces a previous suggestion that Wilton’s sudden pre-eminence may post-date Harold’s death at Hastings. The final section will discuss the possible role of Edith, widow of Edward the Confessor and sister of Harold, both as the likely instigator of the anomalous Wilton coinage and as one of the most important political figures in England in the aftermath of Hastings.

Henley stands to the east of Ludlow in a handsome park which borders the River Ledwyche. A tantalising glimpse of the house is afforded from the Cleobury Mortimer road, where the long brick façade can be seen at the end of a straight drive, framed by the filigree of wrought iron gates by the Davies brothers. The gates were brought in from Wirksworth Hall, Derbyshire, in the late nineteenth century, at a time when the drive was lined with elms that had supposedly been planted in 1816. Henley preserves a stately dignity; the house is coy about its architectural origins and there is a paucity of documentation to give certainty to the house’s development.

The estate was acquired by Thomas Powys (1617– 1671), son of Thomas Powys of Snitton in the parish of Bitterley. It was probably Powys who was responsible for the core of the house as it stands today, perhaps rebuilding an earlier timber-framed house in brick. There is no certainty as to dates, though, and later alterations have made the house’s development hard to assimilate. It is composed of a tall, narrow, three-storeyed range that faces north and south, with two broad, gabled, three-bay outer wings and a pair of narrower three-bay gabled inner wings which flank a centre four-storeyed bay that is now crowned by an eighteenth-century pediment. The outer gabled ranges still have their mullioned and transomed windows whilst the star-shaped brick chimney stacks appear to have survived from the seventeenth-century build.

Thomas Powys was Serjeant-at-Law and made an alliance to another legal family in his first marriage to Anne (d. 1655), daughter of Sir Adam Littleton, 1st Bt of Stoke Milburgh, Chief Justice of North Wales. After Anne’s death, he married again, to Mary, daughter of John Cotes of Woodcote, and through that marriage produced Richard Powys, who established a line of the family at Hintlesham Hall, Suffolk, and also Anne, the first wife of Thomas Hill of Tern (now Attingham, q.v.). By his first wife, Thomas Powys produced two sons who followed their father into the law, both becoming judges, both knighted and both masters of Henley. The eldest was Sir Littleton Powys (1647–1731), who was Chief Justice of North Wales, Baron of the Exchequer in 1695–1720 and a Judge of the King’s Bench. Married to Anne Carter (d.

The Hills of Hawkstone have long-since left their ancestral home of 350 years. Their name is still well known in Shropshire, exemplified by the proud figure of the Peninsula War hero, Rowland 1st Baron Hill (and, later, 1st Viscount Hill) of Hawkstone and Almarez who stands at the top of his Greek Doric column in Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, surveying a great swathe of the county with which his family was long associated.

The 1st Viscount had been born at Prees Hall (q.v.) and spent much of his civilian life at Hardwicke Grange (q.v.). He was unmarried and, at his death, his titles passed by special remainder to his nephew. Just as the 2nd Viscount had reason to be grateful to his bachelor uncle for his peerage, two earlier generations of Hill nephews had unmarried uncles to thank for both the acquisition and the aggrandisement of their Hawkstone inheritance.

The acquisition of Hawkstone had come about in the sixteenth century, when a scion of the family from Court of Hill (q.v.) in south Shropshire, Sir Rowland Hill (1492–1561), bought the manor of Hawkstone from Edward Twynho in 1549 and began to build up an estate which at its height included some 1,181 tenants. Hill was a textile merchant, a creditor to Henry VIII and also a purchaser of lands which fell vacant after the Dissolution. In 1549 he became the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London, a distinction that his descendants were to commemorate in the so-called Obelisk within the park at Hawkstone – a giant column of 1795, surmounted by his statue. Of the appearance of his house on the north Shropshire estate there seems to be no record.

His nephew, Humphrey, succeeded him at Hawkstone, and the estate descended through three generations of Rowland Hills before being inherited by ‘The Great Hill’. This was Richard Hill (1654–1727) who, having taken deacon’s orders, took a career change which led him into military and diplomatic roles. Perhaps his most lucrative appointment was as Deputy Paymaster to King William III in 1688–1696, and, in due course, his wealth established three nephews with landed estates including the ancestral seat at Hawkstone. One nephew, Thomas Harwood (later Hill) ultimately gained Tern – the core of the present Attingham Park, whilst another, Samuel Barbour (later Hill), received Shenstone, Staffordshire.

High Hatton was built, effectively, as a house for an heir-in-waiting by Richard Prynce Corbet (1735–1779), the younger son of Andrew Corbet (1694–1757) of Shawbury Park (q.v.) and his wife, Frances, daughter of Captain William Prince of Abcott (q.v.). Richard’s elder brother, Andrew (1719–1796), who succeeded to the family’s estates, was a bachelor and his eventual heir was his brother’s son, Andrew (later Sir Andrew Corbet, 1st Bt of Moreton Corbet) and so the creation of a modest new capital house allowed for the heir to be brought up close to his inheritance.

High Hatton had been a possession of the Corbet family of Hadley (q.v.) until the sixteenth century when Richard Corbet sold it, and Hadley, to Sir Rowland Hill in 1548. Hill gave High Hatton to his nephew, Rowland Barker of Wollerton, in 1560 and, after a period of consolidation of his property, Barker sold the property on in 1588 to Richard Corbet of Moreton. The High Hatton property followed the descent of Shawbury Park and so became the chosen part of the property for the younger brother’s house. Prior to building High Hatton, though, Richard is recorded by Blakeway as having been living at Hardwicke near Hadnall in 1762.

Richard Prynce Corbet built a modest, and yet tall, two-and-a-half storeyed square brick house that is dated 1762, the height of which is accentuated by the central chimney stack which rises out of the pyramid roof. On the three-bay entrance front, the centre bay projects slightly forward but ornament is sparse beyond the scrolls supporting the entablature of the doorcase and a well-moulded eaves cornice. The east-facing side elevation shows greater movement with a full height canted bay, whilst, tailing off to the west is the service wing – now, regrettably, rebuilt. The verticality of the main block is hugely effective in the flat north Shropshire countryside and is convincingly attributed to Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (c. 1723–1777). Pritchard was certainly the designer of the interiors, since the dining room chimneypiece, with its carved frieze of continuous oak leaves, appears in his Drawing Book as for ‘Ricd. Corbet Esqr. Highhatton’ and is there noted to be the work of John Nelson and Van der Hagen. Pritchard’s involvement is also borne out by other chimneypieces that are characteristic of his work – including an idiosyncratic Chinoiserie design in a first floor bedroom over the dining room.

During the late twentieth century, Priorslee Hall was headquarters of the Telford Development Corporation, the body that determined the use of the land that had been a part of its former estate and, indeed, a good deal beyond it. The house, sadly shorn of its chimney stacks, sits on the edge of the new town, its setting somewhat swamped by modern buildings that, with the Hall, fulfil an institutional use.

The former mansion is an eminently handsome early eighteenth-century red brick house with stone basement, quoins, voussoirs and string courses, and with a central doorcase, that is crowned by a broken segmental pediment upon brackets. This sits at the centre of three recessed bays, which are embraced to each side by projecting two-bay wings. Originally with straight parapets, the main fronts of the house were enlivened in the nineteenth century with the addition of pedimented Dutch gables, in which the attic windows are now set.

The house was built by Edward Jordan, whose father and namesake had hailed from Dunsley in Staffordshire. He married Sarah, daughter and heiress of John Wyke of Priorslee. Jordan was High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1720 and it is possible that the decision to build may have been made immediately prior to his term of office. By the mid eighteenth century, Priorslee was the seat of Humphry Pitt (d. 1769), who had married Jordan’s daughter and heiress, Sarah. Pitt had been the owner of a collection of early manuscript ballads, which he gave to the eventual Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811). The gift followed Percy’s discovery of the collection when he realised that the housemaid was about to light the fire with one of them at Pitt’s Shifnal house. Percy later published the manuscripts in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).

Priorslee and its estates, in turn, passed to the Pitt’s four daughters and their descendants: Martha, who married Plowden Slaney of Hatton Grange (q.v.) in 1761; Frances, who married William John Yonge, later of Caynton House (q.v.); Maria who married Captain Richard Edwards of the 6th Regiment of Dragoons; and Sarah, who married William Jenks but died leaving a daughter, Elizabeth, who was ward of the Slaneys and who eloped with Henry Beaufoy. A division of the estates, by private act of Parliament, took place in 1800.

Now a thriving girls’ school to the north of Oswestry, the earliest part of Moreton is said to have originally been built by Edmund or Henry Lacon in 1527. The house passed from the Lacons to the Owens of Porkington (q.v. now known as Brogyntyn) and Robert Owen is said to have made further alterations to the house which became a dower house for Porkington. In the late seventeenth century, though, Edward Hunt (married at Selattyn in 1652, died 1702) is recorded as of Moreton Hall.

In circa 1820, Moreton is said to have been sold to John Dickin of the Loppington family who lived there until his death in 1838, whereupon it passed to his second son Stephen Dickin (baptised 1805, died 1843). He, in turn, left the property to his only daughter, Elizabeth Sarah. In 1861 she had married a judge, Edmund Burke-Wood, the son of the Ven. Isaac Wood of Newton Hall, Archdeacon of Chester and Vicar and Patron of Middlewich, and his wife Mary Nugent, a niece of the Hon. Edmund Burke. In 1904 Edmund Burke-Wood died, whilst his widow lived a further ten years until 1914. Following her death, the property was sold by her two surviving daughters in 1919. It was purchased by Ellen Augusta Crawley Lloyd-Williams, who had established a school in Oswestry in 1913.

The house, as it now stands, is a complicated structure. The main body is largely an H-plan, two-storey house which appears to be of early seventeenth-century date, with a three-bay hall range flanked by two-bay cross-wings – that to the east extended northwards in the nineteenth century. The main front faces south and has a hipped roof raised on a modillion cornice, which appears to be a late seventeenth-century alteration. Built of brick with sandstone dressings and raised on a sandstone plinth, the front still retains its mullioned and transomed windows and a lower central doorway to which a cyma-moulding – which runs across the heads of the ground floor windows – drops down. The doorway itself is relatively diminutive and has a Tudor-arched head, whilst above the small first floor window and disturbed brickwork between, suggests that either a later pediment or perhaps an escutcheon of arms has been removed.

Set within a fold of the hills near Porthywaen, Blodwell Hall stands on a natural terrace and was the long seat of the Tanat family. It passed from them to the Matthews family and, following the death of Roger Matthews in 1673, Blodwell passed to his daughter and sole heir, Ursula Matthews (1671–1719/20). She, in 1694, married Sir John Bridgeman, 3rd Bt (1667–1747), son of Sir John Bridgeman 2nd Bt and his wife Mary, daughter of George Craddock of Caverswall Castle, Staffordshire.

The Bridgemans already owned significant estates, some in Shropshire and others further afield. In Lancashire, Great Lever had been acquired by Bishop John Bridgeman (1577–1652) in 1614 when he was already aware of its coal reserves. The Bishop’s son, Sir Orlando Bridgeman (1606–1674), 1st Baronet of Great Lever, distinguished himself as a lawyer, becoming Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas (1660–68) and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (1667–72). In his career he presided over the trial of the Regicides and devised much of the basis of freehold and leasehold property law.

In 1627/8 Sir Orlando had married, as his first wife, Judith Kynaston, heiress of Morton near Knockin. Judith’s own parents were John Kynaston of Morton, living in 1623, and Frances Kynaston of Oteley (q.v.), whilst her uncle, Roger Kynaston, was the owner of Maesbury Hall (q.v.). Her parents represented at least the fourth generation of the Kynaston family to be seated at Morton. The Bridgemans seated themselves at Morton, where the house also became the refuge of Sir Orlando’s father, Bishop Bridgeman – he was fined £3000 and driven from his Palace during the siege of Chester in 1645. He is said to have ‘passed the remaining years of his life in reading and devotion’ at Morton prior to his death and burial at the neighbouring church of Kinnerley, where a monument in the chancel commemorates his life.

Morton was depicted by Stanley Leighton in 1872, showing an L-plan building of part timber-framed and part brick construction, with a prominent – apparently an early seventeenth-century brick gabled wing with plat bands between the stories. Soon after Leighton had laid down his pencil, the house was rebuilt with mock half-timbering encasing the first floor of the long south-facing main wing, and with a new jettied half-timber-fronted gabled projection on the left.

Harnage Grange is a complex house which has been much altered, now standing as a quadrangle, with an open north-west side. The west and east ranges, together with sections of the remaining north wing, are largely built of sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings, and appear to be survivors of the medieval grange. To this, additions have been made in brick that date, partly, from the late sixteenth century – when the Grange became the seat of the Fowler family – and partly from 1878 when a Georgian block was demolished. There are also works post 1933, when the house gained much of its current form following its sale to Colonel G.P. Pollitt.

Harnage had been a Grange of Buildwas Abbey from 1232, having been given to the monastery by Gilbert de Lacy. In 1533 the property had been leased for sixty years to Sir Richard Brereton, whilst the property itself was granted, following the Dissolution along with the other Buildwas properties to Edward, 3rd Baron Grey of Powis. It passed, in 1560, to his illegitimate son Edward Grey.

Nine years later, Harnage was sold to William Fowler (d. 1598) who seems to have already been living at Harnage, having acquired the Brereton lease prior to 1565. Fowler’s family had hailed from Foxley in Buckinghamshire, although his father, Roger Fowler, was of Broomhill, Staffordshire.

Either William Fowler or his son, Richard (d. 1622), undertook a rebuilding of the house to transform it into a fashionable seat. Their work comprised much of the south and east wings, of which perhaps the most notable survivals are the brick crow-stepped, gabled chimney stack at the eastern end of the south front and the crow-stepped gable that stands on the return, on the east front. A two storey gazebo, at the side of the walled garden to the east, with a conjoined octagon and rectangle plan was also evidently a part of this work, suggesting a sophisticated contemporary garden layout. With conical roof and, again, a crowstepped gable, it is an immensely ambitious structure and suggests that the house, in its original sixteenthcentury form, would have been internally decorated to a high standard. The crow-stepped gables, indeed, recall the work at Tong Castle (q.v.), then being undertaken for Sir Henry Vernon.

Acton Burnell is best known to architectural historians for its medieval buildings – the castle and the church – built under the patronage of Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells (circa 1239–1292). Acton Burnell Castle received a licence to crenellate in 1284 and is essentially a manor house, with fortifications for their aristocratic associations. As a structure, it is compact, with four-storey towers to each corner and possibly originally a projection at the east end, now no longer extant. The hall and solar were on the first floor at the eastern end of the main body, and are now represented by three tall, two-light cusped headed windows. An undercroft was below, with a chapel located on the first floor of the north-east tower.

The cruciform Church of St Mary, sited beside the Castle, shows a similar sophistication in its planning and details, and is clearly indebted to the same patron. The quality is impressively high, with precise mouldings and a lavish use of Purbeck marble shafts at window openings. Several features, including the trefoil headed windows of the south chancel wall, are also reminiscent of work commissioned by Burnell at Wells.

Following Robert Burnell’s death, the Acton Burnell Manor passed to various members of the Burnell family and then to the Lovells, before forfeiting to the Crown. A succession of owners followed before it was purchased, in 1617, by Humphrey Lee (d. 1632) of neighbouring Langley Hall.

Lee was granted a baronetcy in 1620 and his seat at Langley had also, like Acton Burnell, once been a Burnell possession. When Margaret, the wife of Edward Burnell died in 1377, Langley was divided, with a third of the manor passing to each of her three daughters. Of these, Joan (d. 1400) was the wife of Robert de la Lee, of Lea Hall (q.v.) and she was succeeded by her daughter, Parnel (d. 1442), wife of Robert Lee of Roden. The Lee family was able to reunite the other two-thirds of the manor of Langley by the early sixteenth century. Sir Humphry added to the gatehouse at the family’s seat at Langley Hall and also built the atmospheric chapel which remains in a field adjacent to the surviving gatehouse. Yet when he died, it was at St Mary’s Acton Burnell that he was buried, commemorated by a monument by Nicholas Stone.

This plain, early-Georgian brick house of circa 1727 was built for Elizabeth Crompton (d. 1747) whose crest may yet be seen on the lead rainwater hoppers on the sides of the house. With corners bound by stone quoins, and being of relatively modest scale, Broseley Hall might easily be mistaken for the Rectory. It is, though, close to the site of an earlier house and, until 1955, had its own estate that extended down to the River Severn.

Elizabeth Crompton’s great-grandfather, Francis Adams (d. 1668) of Cleeton, had begun to purchase property at Broseley from William Porter in 1620. His daughter, Sarah, married William Crompton and, at the time of the Hearth Tax assessment in 1672, Compton was possessed of a house with fourteen hearths.

Elizabeth was a spinster and yet, in her 1727 work, built with some ambition. Her house is of five bays and three storeys, crowned by a plain parapet, its front elevation with central segmental-headed doorcase flanked by Tuscan pilasters. On the garden front, the house has a pair of central pedimented doors – the one on the right being a sham – standing below the tall and broad window of the staircase. The interior has a double-pile plan, with the wide entrance hall at the centre terminated by the staircase which rises, beyond a segmental arch, in a dogleg, with fluted column newels and three twisted balusters to each tread.

On Elizabeth Crompton’s death she left Broseley to another spinster, Mary Browne (d. 1763), daughter of Ralph Browne of Caughley. Mary had built the now-ruined church at nearby Jackfield as a chapel-of-ease and, at her own death, she left Broseley to her widowed sister-in-law, Anne Browne (d. 1767) who, in turn, left the estate to her brother, Francis Turner Blithe (d. 1770). Formerly known as Francis Turner of Whitley (q.v.), he was the son of the Shrewsbury draper, William Turner and his wife Hannah Blithe. On the death of his uncle, Francis Blithe, Francis inherited the Allesley Estate in Warwickshire, and so adopted the Blithe name.

Stableford Hall is essentially a plain, mid-Georgian house of brick, with a principal south-east-facing front of seven bays and two-and-a-half storeys, the outer two bays and central bay projecting slightly. Around the corner, on the north-east front, rises a full height canted bay. The form of the house was tricked up in the later nineteenth century, when a substantial parapet was added to the façades, heavy stone segmental-arched lintels crowned the windows, and a single-storey three-bay balustraded porch with pairs of Tuscan pilasters flanking arched openings was set before the door.

Stableford had come into the possession of the Warter family as a result of the marriage of John Warter to Joan, daughter and heiress of Walter Bullock in the reign of Henry VII. John had also acquired lands at Cruckmeole (see Longden Manor q.v.), which became the principal Warter seat, although a branch of the family continued to own Stableford until the seventeenth century. Then the property appears to have been partitioned by John Warter (d. 1627) – his great-granddaughter Miriam, the wife of Edward Perks, sold her property and his grandson, John Warter, a barrister from Mortlake, Surrey, also sold his portion.

By the early nineteenth century, Stableford had become the seat of the Jasper family who, in addition to their landed interests, also had a flour mill at Bridgnorth which used power from a Trevithick engine to drive its three stones. The Jaspers are said to have been amongst the earliest landowners to have harnessed steam power for threshing, having an engine in circa 1804. The Hall remained the seat of John Jasper in 1851 and he was a notable sportsman who kept a pack of harriers at Stableford. By 1870, though, Stableford had passed to his grandson, Thomas Smith, the son of Frances Jasper (d. 1852), third daughter of John Jasper, and

her husband Captain T. Smith of the 82nd Regiment. It was probably Thomas Smith who was responsible for the Victorian alterations to the exterior of the house which, after his departure, was noted by John Randall as essentially the brick house that had been built by the Jaspers. By the time that Randall wrote of Stableford, though, Smith had moved to Beaumaris and sold Stableford to the Chandos-Pole family.

Longdon, as it survives today, is a tantalising relic of a much larger house – the history of which is very poorly recorded. Of brick, with stone dressings, the present house is but the southern wing of a west-facing E-plan, late sixteenth-century house. Two storeyed and with gabled attics, the house sits on a stone plinth and has two huge chimney breasts which still remain, with diagonal stacks rising above. In spite of a reeded late-Georgian doorcase and a tripartite sashed window of similar date, the house still retains most of its mullioned and transomed windows.

Internally, too, the hall retains panelling contemporary with the exterior, and other fragmentary details such as the surviving top flight of the staircase which has slat balusters and moulded handrail, plaster strapwork and foliage emanating from vases, together with two plaster roundels with signs of the Zodiac in the ceiling of a first floor room. These remnants suggests a high status build and yet the history of the house is extraordinarily sketchy and even the nineteenth-century historians, such as Mrs Stackhouse Acton, failed to notice the house.

Prior to the Dissolution, Longdon-Upon-Tern was owned by the Lilleshall Abbey. It was acquired by Alice Bromley, who swiftly sold it on to James Leveson. James’ grandson, Sir Walter Leveson (1551–1602) sold his Longdon property, in 1589, to John Tayleur, whose family was already leasing the property. Tayleur, who had married Anna, the daughter of David Jenks, their son John, and also his son Creswell Tayleur (d. 1675) were all described as ‘of Longdon’, and so it might have been for John Tayleur senior that the sixteenth-century house was built.

The Tayleurs are said to have sold the majority of their Longdon property to Robert Phillips of Wellington in 1647 – perhaps in connection with their purchase of the now-lost Rodington Hall estate in that same year, from which they ultimately moved to Buntingsdale (q.v.).

Longdon, meanwhile, passed through the Phillips family to a daughter Anne, who, with her husband Henry Barnes, sold the estate in 1781 to the Howard or Hayward family, a London mercantile family with connections in Whitchurch, Shropshire.

By 1851 Longdon was owned by William Howard but occupied by Henry Stormont, the house having presumably been truncated some time before that. In 1906 the house remained the property of the Howard family and was occupied by R.M. Williams.

Essentially an early nineteenth-century brick house with stone dressings, built in 1836 on an earlier site within Cheswardine parish. The previous house appears, from a drawing of 1835, to have been a close studded, timber-framed structure of various dates, with a gabled porch containing an arched entrance.

As it now stands, Ellerton comprises the symmetrical early nineteenth-century entrance front of two storeys, with triple gables, the centre one projecting and having a tripartite tapered, arched headed opening within which is set the front door. The centre window above the door, like the first floor windows on two bays to each side, has a tapered head and pronounced drip mould. To the right hand side of this block is an early twentieth-century extension with twin gables, to match those of the earlier house, and two windows at first floor level. The bricks and stone were so well matched, it is almost imperceptible. Paired windows again occur on the ground floor of the outer gable, whilst the inner one has a pair of French doors that lead out from the large living room that the extension contains.

The earlier house at Ellerton Hall had been owned by the Soudley (or Sowdley), Wedgwood and Eyton families. Lucy Wedgwood (1647–1698), who had married Philip Eyton of Eyton, was the owner in 1672. She was paying Hearth Tax on eight hearths at Ellerton in the same year that she was widowed. Her son, Soudley Eyton (1669–1701), inherited, but on his death the estate passed to his uncle and was then sold to John White of Trentham (later known as John White of Cherrington).

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Ellerton was owned by Joseph Tomkinson (d.1761) who appears to have come into the property through his wife, Mary. The Tomkinson’s daughter Elizabeth (bapt. 1733) married the Edgmond farmer William Taylor, in 1761. Taylor is said to have been descended from the Taylors or Tayleurs of Rodington (q.v.).

Situated in what is still relatively remote country in the lee of Wenlock Edge, the manor of Church Preen was held in 1086 by Helgot, of Roger, Earl of Shrewsbury. Helgot’s descendants as lords of Castle Holgate maintained an over rule until the sixteenth century. However, from before 1163 the manor had been granted to Wenlock Priory and a monastic cell with two or three monks was established. The long and low Church of St John the Baptist, with its simple lancet windows and nave and chancel within the same overall structure, dates from this period. Adjoining the church at right angles on its southern side, and built of the same local stone, stood the principal monastic structure, known as the Prior’s House. This structure survived as the nucleus of the Manor House until its demolition in 1870.

At the Dissolution, in 1534, the Prior of Wenlock handed over Preen to the Crown, and in 1536 it was conveyed to Gyles Covert or Cirrote. Covert’s brother, Richard, who succeeded in 1559, sold Church Preen to Humphrey Dickins of Bobbington, Staffordshire, in 1560. The property then passed by descent through the Dickins family until the mid eighteenth century, and it appears that they were themselves seated at the so-called Prior’s House. Thomas Dickins – Humphry’s great-grandson – was certainly recorded as such, whilst other members of the family were recorded as church wardens of the parish church, several with monuments therein.

In the early eighteenth century, the then scion of the Dickins family, John, son of Thomas Dickins (d. 1710), ran into financial difficulties. Arthur Sparrow, the nineteenth-century squire historian of Preen, relates that in 1709 he owed one Joseph Girder, Serjeant-at-Law, £1,056, however it does not appear that he necessarily squandered his inheritance without an attempt to salvage the estate at Church Preen. An extraordinary prospectus was compiled for John Dickins, dated 1727 and entitled, ‘Leases for Twenty-One Years To be granted of an ESTATE Capable of such Improvements That the Lessees will be thereby entitled to the Gain of Six-Hundred Pounds for the Payment of One’.

No doubt inspired by the scenes of industry, and their supposed returns, at Coalbrookdale, Dickins made exaggerated boasts of the mineral wealth of Church Preen with a view to persuading investors to sink money into the establishment of bar iron furnaces on the estate.

Bicton, to the west of Shrewsbury, was conveniently placed for the London to Holyhead road which divides and also serves as a line of demarcation between two of the capital mansions of this village. These two houses, Bicton Hall and Bicton House, had another architecturally significant neighbour property in the form of The Woodlands which, at one time, was part of the Bicton House property.

Bicton Hall

This is a double-pile, white-rendered building of two storeys and five bays, with the left-hand bay having tripartite windows at both ground and first floors and the front door set in a Greek Revival stone doorcase immediately to the right. Its west front appears early nineteenth century although the building has a much earlier core, whilst the house was formerly of three storeys – the top floor having been removed prior to 1964.

The property was owned by a Shrewsbury family, the Knights, in the sixteenth century, but by the end of the seventeenth century it had passed to Anne and Elizabeth Payne, the spinster daughters of Vincent Payne, a Shrewsbury corvisor. The Misses Payne sold Bicton Hall and its estate to Arthur Tonge of Shrewsbury, in 1694, for £275, and from the Tonges it passed to the Mucklestons.

With the death of John Muckleston, the Bicton estate was inherited by his daughter, Letitia. She was then still a minor and, at the age of eighteen, married Richard Jenkins. Jenkins was already the possessor of Hargrave on the Long Mountain and the Abbey House, in Shrewsbury, which he had inherited from his father, Thomas Jenkins (d. 1730) High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1729.

The Jenkins’ grandson, Richard Jenkins (d. 1797) married Harriet Constance Ravenscroft of Wrexham and appears to have undertaken improvements to the house and estate. Richard and Harriet’s eldest son – a further Richard Jenkins (1785–1853) – succeeded. Married to Helen Spottiswode, daughter of an East India Company servant, he himself had an important career in India. He had joined the Bombay Civil Service at the age of fifteen in 1800 and went on to serve as acting resident at the Court of Dowlur Rao-Scindia 1804–5, before becoming Resident at Nagpore in 1810–1827. From 1832–53 he was a director of the East India Company and, in 1839, he became its Chairman.