Local historian and Coventry Society member. Peter James, tells us about some of the boundary changes that took place in and around the city and the trouble they caused. Peter writes…..
Five Hundred years ago there was serious unrest in Coventry. On Lammas Day the 1st August 1525 a rebellion began. After the grain harvest it was the custom for landowners to allow cattle and sheep belonging to commoners to graze on their fields. The custom allowed for grazing to last from Lammas Day on the 1st August until Candlemas on the 2nd February.
Reasons
The town leaders had allowed enclosure of common land and had profited by collecting rent from landowners. By 1480 over half of what had formerly been common land had been enclosed.
Retribution
The commoners ripped out the boundary hedges and closed the town gates. After attacking St. Mary’s Guild Hall and breaking down the doors they took a box containing money. It was symbolic as it contained about £60 received from landowners for use of common land. It implicated the council leaders who had deprived the commoners of their rights.
Royal response
King Henry VIII wrote to Sir Henry Willoughby on 6th August 1525 who then ordered the citizens of Coventry “to desist from their riotous combinations and the circulation of seditious bills and writings.”
Thomas Grey 2nd Marquess of Dorset also became involved and threatened that if order wasn’t restored he would seize the city in the name of the king. Order was restored so Thomas didn’t need to act further.
On Michaelmas day the 29th September an order was issued demanding that all land recently enclosed needed to be reopened.
Emparking was the act of enclosing land by fencing it off for exclusive use. It required royal permission and the issue of a licence. Empark derived from the Anglo-Saxon word pearroc which meant a piece of land surrounded by a fence. The fence or hedge was quite often on a bank with a boundary ditch.
Emparkment at Fletchamstead
After the dissolution of the monasteries, land previously held by the Templars in Fletchamstead passed to Queen Katherine Parr. It was eventually purchased by Sir Thomas and Dame Alice Leigh in 1564 and their son Sir Thomas “made a park there and built a fair house within it”. This was Fletchamstead Hall which stood until the middle of the twentieth century. It was located at what is now the site of Finham II School at the junction of Torrington Avenue and Wolfe Road
Nether Fletchamstead Hall once stood in the vicinity of Queen Margarets Road in Coventry. By 1487 the land belonged to Sir John Catesby and later to his son Humphrey who sold it to John Smith a lawyer from Coventry. When John Smith died in 1501 the property passed to his son Henry who changed its usage. He emparked 100 acres of arable land and made 26 people homeless.
Stareton
In 1640 Baron Thomas Leigh gained permission to empark 800 acres of land at Stoneleigh allowing him to create a new deer park. However the alterations probably took some years to complete.
“The town lands absorbed” shown in the above plan resulted in the removal of six properties. By 1683 a further plan of Stareton shows that these cottages had disappeared and the two adjacent ponds had been filled in. While the “new road” shown in the 1640 plan had become known as Stareton Lane.
One of the lost cottages had been the home of John Hands a blacksmith formerly from Coundon and his wife Elizabeth (nee Masters) once a Stareton widow. This timber frame house was later rebuilt on Stareton Lane less than half a mile away and although much altered it survives today as the Grade II listed Yew Tree Cottage.
Enclosure
Land ownership and usage underwent significant change during the late Medieval and Tudor period. Enclosure of common land caused local unrest and in some instances symbolic defiance. A broader historical trend was emparkment where former communal or agricultural spaces were converted into exclusive parkland often at considerable social cost.