There is a touch alike of poetry and of meaning in the name. Our
ancestors were delineators of natural scenery, verbally, and by the use
of names. Taking possession of primeval lands and uncleared forests,
driving their aboriginal owners before them—in one or more syllables they
were wont to give the history of a place, or the more distinguishing
features of a country, and word-pictures then current come down to us
little altered, having coiled up within them considerable sense and
by-gone meaning. Tradition, no less than the popular and generally
accepted etymology of the name, informs us that Shrewsbury was originally
the place of shrubs; that the dusky crow croaked at Crawley, and the
chattering daw built its nest at Dawley. The broc or brag—Anglo-Saxon
terms for the badger, once numerous along the Severn Valley—gave us the
Brocholes. To reynard we are indebted, in like manner, for the modern
name of Foxholes—a place near to the latter, where this animal flourished
when Madeley Wood, now covered with cottages, was what its name implied.
Little local or archæological lore is required to know that Madeley Wood
was the wood bordering on the meadow, or that Madeley is a name derived
from meadowly, or mead—a term still used in poetical productions of the
day. In like manner, Mad-brook, a little stream on the borders of the
village, meandering through meadow land, was Mead or Meadow-brook—as one
of our smaller English rivers is called the Medway, from like
circumstances, and as Brockton on Madbrook was formerly Brook-town—the
town or enclosure on the brook. A tolerable estimate of Madeley, in one
of its early phases, and as it appeared to the commissioners appointed to
carry out the Domesday Survey, at the time it formed part of the manor
belonging to the Abbey of Much Wenlock, may be gleaned from the following
extract:—
“The same (St. Milburg’s) holds Madeley, and held it in the time of
King Edward. Here is one hide (100 or 120 acres) not geldable (not
liable to pay taxes) and three other hides geldable. In demesne are
eleven ox teams, and six villiens (those employed in ignoble service)
and (there are) IIII. boors (peasants) with IIII. teams. Here are
IIII. serfs (slaves of the lower class) and there might yet be VI.
teams more here. There is a wood sufficient to fatten 400 swine. In
the time of King Edward the manor was worth £4 per annum; now it is
worth £5 per annum.”
England at that time was covered over with such manors; they had
overgrown the free peasant proprietors which previously existed in Saxon
times. On each manor was the house of the lord with the Court yard and
garden, &c., comprising several acres. The manor land was for the use of
the lord, but portions were let off. Some doubt now exists as to the
true meaning of a hide of land, as both hides and virgates on adjoining
lands differed, but the conclusion that the hide was a land measure of 33
English acres has been received by some, whilst others hold that it meant
a measure of land sufficient for the support of a family. The most
important agricultural operation of the period was ploughing, and a
peasant rarely undertook this for himself on his own little plot, which
was not sufficient for separate or independent management, with his own
team and plough. The team of a plough consisted then as a rule of not
less than 8 draught cattle, and this continued to be the case, as
recorded by Arthur Young. The bad fodder of that period diminished the
labour power of the draught cattle, especially during winter ploughing,
which was on straw feeding alone. Madeley is undoubtedly derived from
terms still in use, Meadow and ley, or lia; meadows having sometimes been
subjected for a whole year to common pasturage whilst the adjoining land
lay fallow, in order not to exhaust it by constant hay crops.
Such was Madeley in the olden time, when men were goods and chattels,
subject to the rapacity and oppression of their owners, when laws were
enacted by which to kill wild animals was a crime equal in enormity to
killing human beings, and punished with the same rigour; when the right
to hunt was in the hands of kings and those holding tenure to whom they
thought proper to delegate it. The park, to which the modern names of
Park, Rough Park, and Park Street, now apply—names that serve to recall
former features of the surface—was enclosed from the forest, mentioned in
the above extract. Its origin was this; November 28th, 1283, King Edward
(1st) being petitioned that it would not be detrimental to his forest of
Mount Gilbert if the Prior and Convent of Wenlock should enclose their
Wood of Madeley (though within the limits of the forest) with a ditch,
and fence, (haia) and make a park there—allowed them to do so. The same
park is alluded to in a valuation taken 1390; together with one at
Oxenbold, which—including the meadows—was said to be scarcely sufficient
to maintain the live stock of the Priory. The Prior, who appears to have
built houses within the boundary of the forest, in 1259 was ordered to
pull them down; but having offered a fine to the king a charter was
granted the following year, stating that, “for £100 now paid the Prior
and Convent may have the houses in peace, although within the forest.”
The Court House, formerly surrounded by this park, and near to the
station now called by its name—on the Great Western line—is an
exceedingly interesting building, and one claiming the attention of the
visitor. The present structure is in the Elizabethan style of
architecture; but the grounds present traces of earlier buildings. In
the years 1167, 1224, 1250, and again in 1255, mention is made of the
Madeley Manor. In 1379 the estimated value of pleas and perquisites of
the court is entered at two shillings.
Near the old mansion is the Manor-mill, formerly worked by a steam called
Washbrook, which formerly supplied the extensive vivaries or fishponds
that furnished the kitchen of the establishment with the necessary means
of observing fast-days. Interesting traces of former pools and fisheries
are observable. Under date 1379, we find the water-mill at the Court or
Manor house “fermed” for 10s. per annum, and at a valuation taken of the
prior’s temporalities at an earlier period, viz., 1291, the same mill is
mentioned. Mills, then, were invariably the possession of the lord of
the manor, lay or ecclesiastical, and tenants were compelled to grind
there. They were therefore an important source of profit, and carefully
enumerated, and it is worthy of remark that where a mill is described as
being at a particular place, even at an earlier period—as in the Domesday
survey of the country—there, as in the case of the Manor mill at the
Court, one is now generally to be found in ruins or otherwise. In the
garden, which is still highly walled, and which was probably originally
an enclosed court, upon an elegant basement, approached by a circular
flight of steps—the outer one being seven feet in diameter and the inner
one about three—is a very curious planetarium, an horological instrument
serving the purpose of a sundial, and that of finding the position of the
moon in relation to the planets. It is a square block of stone three
feet high, having three of its sides engraved, and the fourth or north
side blank. Over this is a semicircular slab of stone so pierced that
the eye rests upon the polar star.
Although little of the original building where festivals were held,
suitors heard, or penalties inflicted, remains, the present edifice has
many points of interest. The substantial, roomy, and well-panelled
apartments, upon the ground floor, and the solid trees, one upon the
other, forming a spiral stair-case to the chambers above, are objects of
no little interest. Ascending these stairs the visitor finds himself in
the chapel, the ceiling of which is of fine oak, richly carved, having
the arms of various ancient families in panels. The arms of the Ferrars
family may be seen in a shield over the principal doorway,—indicating the
proprietorship at one time of some member of that family. It was also
the residence of Sir Basil Brooke, fourth in descent from a noble knight
of that name, a zealous royalist in the time of Charles I.
This family appears to have been resident at Claverley in the fourteenth
century. Mr. Brooke, of Haughton, near Shifnal, has deeds in his
possession showing the purchase of certain arable and pasture lands at
Beobridge, by Richard de la Broke, of Claverley, in 1316, and again in
1318, where he is described as Richard de la Broke, clerk, son of Richard
de la Broke, Claverley.
Mailed and full-length fine stone figures of this highly-distinguished
family, who lived here, and shed a lustre on the place, formerly reposed
in the church, to whose sacred keeping they bequeathed their dust.
Equally vain, however, were their bequests and hopes, for when the
originals were no longer able to put a copper on the plate their very
tombs were destroyed, and their stone effigies ruthlessly turned out of
doors, and placed in niches outside the church, where, shorn of a portion
of their limbs, they still do penance in pleading attitudes, and look as
though they implored a bit of paint to prevent the inscriptions beneath
from being lost for ever. The stone in one case has lost its outer
coating, and the artifice of the sculptor in tipping nose and chin with a
whiter material has been disclosed, and thick coats of paint are peeling
off the defaced epitaphs which set forth the merits of their originals.
The inscriptions are in Latin, but the following is, we believe, a free,
if not an exact, translation:—
“Here lieth interred John Brooke, Esquire, the son of Robert Brooke,
Knight, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. He was a zealous and
loyal subject of Queen Mary, and assisted her in securing her rights
in opposition to the violent factions of the time. He published an
excellent commentary on the English Law in several volumes. After a
study of jurisprudence and science, being of an extensively liberal
mind and universally beloved, he made a Christian-like end, October
the 20th, in the year of our Lord, 1598, in the 62nd year of his
age.”