Topography of Tudor Shrewsbury in depth

This was written by Bill Champion, author of "Everyday Life in Tudor Shrewsbury" and is a finely researched look at this theme for those who wish to explore it in great detail.
An updated version will shortly be produced.
© W.A. Champion (2006)

IV. Topography, 1540-1640.

Welsh Bridge, Shrewsbury (image) [+]
St. Georges Bridge Shrewsbury just prior to demolition in 1790s. (Image courtesy of Shrewsbury Museums Service and www.darwincountry.org)

Shrewsbury's topography was naturally deeply affected by the rise in population between 1560 and 1640.(1) Suit lists show that the increase in the number of streeters (i.e. male householders) was at first concentrated in the suburbs, main thoroughfares and the central core, although growth was always fastest in the suburbs.(2) After 1575, however, rapid expansion also began in peripheral streets with undeveloped garden ground, principally in Swan Hill (once part of Murivance, originally a district name),(3) St. John's Hill and Claremont Hill. Most areas then recorded only modest increases after 1610, with the exception of the suburbs whose population continued to grow more rapidly. As a result, the proportion of male householders residing in the suburbs rose from 18.6 per cent in 1563 to 25.8 per cent by 1634 (Abbey Foregate excluded).(4)

In addition to the development of intra-mural gardens, growth was accommodated by sub-dividing existing tenements and by 'new' building within the built-up area. Documentary references are legion and include such examples as the 'newe bilte' houses and shops in the Cornmarket (1574),(5) and the purchase in 1586 by the draper Richard Lewys of a ruined stone building in St. Mary's Street on which site a new house was then erected.(6) In the town centre where property values were among the highest, speculative building reached imposing heights, as at Ireland's Mansion in the High Street, known later as 'Ireland's Folly',(7) and the four and six-storey houses at Mardol Head depicted in 1858.(8) Corporation surveys of encroachments were instigated in 1563, 1568, 1570 and 1615,(9) with 'new takinges' adding some 16 per-cent to the value of its estate by 1580.(10) The process continued into the 17th century, numerous purpresture rents being exacted for underbuilding of jetties and other street encroachments, although underbuilding itself was largely a post-1650 development.(11) The associated upturn of the housing market is well demonstrated by the Drapers' estate. In 1555-7 the proportion of rents in 'decay', or which had been written off, still exceeded one quarter, but by 1601 the figure had fallen to less than two per cent. As leases fell in the biennial value of the estate also rose steeply, from £37 16s. 6d. in 1555-7 to more than £74 in 1630 and £100 in 1650.(12)

This first 'Great Rebuilding', equally typical of municipal undertakings, was clearly linked to the town's commercial vitality.(13) Extant houses of this period belonging to merchants or professional men include Proude's Mansion (Milk Street, c. 1568), Ireland's Mansion (High Street), the 'Whitehall' (Abbey Foregate, 1578-1582), Perche's Mansion (Castle Street, 1581), Owen's Mansion (High Street, 1592), Jones's Mansion (Dogpole), Rowley's House and Mansion (Hill's Lane, c. 1616-18), and The Porch House (Swan Hill, 1628). Examples demolished in the 19th century included Jones's Mansion (Under the Wyle, parts originally erected by the lawyer William Weale, 1575); and, in the 20th century, Lloyd's Mansion (The Square, 1570), the 'String of Horses' (Frankwell, 1576-7, built for the leather dealer Richard Worrall), Bellstone Hall (Barker Street), Gibbons's Mansion (Wyle Cop), Merivale House (Merivale, 1601), and Sherar's Mansion (Under the Wyle). Gentry town houses included the 'Stone House' (St. Mary's churchyard, 1609-10), built by Sir Humphrey Lee of Langley, and Thornes Hall (Castle Street, c. 1630s), erected by Francis Thornes of Shelvock after he had sold his family ‘place’ on the other side of the street for the new House of Correction.

Visiting Shrewsbury in the 1580s the poet Thomas Churchyard, a native of the town, remarked on both the new buildings 'gay, and gallant finely wrought', and others which although they 'seem'd to be worth nought, were fat within, that outward looked leane'.(14) Each observation was apposite. Externally many of the new Elizabethan timber-framed buildings, at any rate of richer inhabitants, were distinguished by a characteristic style which could include the use of cable-moulded pilasters ending in grotesque heads, sunken quatrefoils, diagonal struts, and barge-boards and tie-beams carved with vine trails – decorative elements associated with a 'school' of Shrewsbury carpenters known also to have worked on houses in the town’s vicinity, including Pitchford Hall (c. 1551) where the style is first identifiable.(15) In Shrewsbury itself it was usually employed on high-status buildings such as Drapers Hall (1576-82) and the headmaster's house at Shrewsbury School (1589),(16) and to houses belonging to richer burgesses. Examples include 16 High Street (the later 'Cross Keys', c. 1575), probably built for the draper William Jones (bailiff on four occasions); and 17 High Street, erected (1561-1579) for the mercer Richard Powell (twice bailiff).

The interior refurbishment of older buildings is also evident, and reflected national trends. Thus at 19 Mardol a medieval tenement (dismantled in 1954) consisting of a ground-floor shop with an open hall and smaller solar above, was remodelled with the insertion of a ceiling over the first-floor rooms, carried on richly moulded timbers. The solar was then decorated with wall paintings consisting of formal devices and a frieze, frescos also being found in new-built houses (e.g. one in Claremont Street, demolished 1866).(17) In the early 17th century a brick wing was added, probably to accommodate the kitchen, formerly located apart at the back of the plot, and additional chambers.(18) That pattern was probably typical albeit subject to variations dictated by the plot form. Thus, where the hall had stood on the ground floor chimneys were built to replace the open hearth, and floors, sometimes more than one, were put in above (e.g. 8A Castle Street, demolished 1961).(19) The insertion of ceilings provided an opportunity for moulded plasterwork, surviving examples being found at Perche's Mansion, 127 Frankwell, and 78 Mardol. New wainscotting and carved fireplaces are also recorded.(20) How far these and other signs of increasing domestic comfort penetrated Salopian society is less clear, although the shearman Roger Wilson, who committed suicide in 1591, had wainscott pieces about the house,(21) and glazed windows are known to have been inserted into the houses of at least some of the town’s artisans by the 1560s.(22)

Brick rather than timber is not known to have been employed as the principal building material until the erection in 1616-18 of the mansion of the draper-brewer William Rowley,(23) and was used again at Thornes Hall, constructed with Dutch gables.(24) Stone, however, could still be used for greater houses, as at the Stone House, the town mansion of Sir Humphrey Lee;(25) Bellstone Hall, a court-yard house in Barker Street erected (c. 1590) by the draper Edward Owen; and ‘Whitehall’, built for the lawyer Richard Prynce. Effectively a country mansion with a gate-house set among the Abbey Foregate fields, Whitehall or ‘Prynce’s Place’ was among the first double-pile houses of its kind in England, although its style was ‘wholly in a local traditional idiom’.(26) Both Bellstone Hall and Rowley's Mansion were entered by porches in the debased neo-classical style, although classical motifs of much more impressive coherence appear on an overmantel in the Old House (Dogpole),(27) attributed to the Shrewsbury carver Robert Sego with a putative date of 1553 (though probably not in situ),(28) and the new style was perhaps first employed for civic works at the Welsh Gate in 1576-7.(29) In contrast, the Shrewsbury school of carpentry still employed late-medieval detailing, similar for instance to the screen work of some pre-Reformation churches in the Marches where several of the town’s carpenters originated.(30) Elizabethan Shrewsbury was thus characterized by a transitional mix of decorative styles.

Shrewsbury's topography was also profoundly affected by the de-sacralization of monastic and liminal space brought about by the Reformation. In addition to the destruction of the churchyard crosses,(31) the cross beside the pinfold just outside the Castle Gates (mentioned in 1382 and shown on the 'Burghley' map) had gone by 1584,(32) as too by 1683 had the cross at the end of the Stone Bridge in Abbey Foregate.(33) The Spelcross hermitage at Coleham end had been turned into a raucous alehouse by the late 16th century,(34) and Cadogan's chapel in Frankwell was used as a pesthouse during the plague outbreak of 1604.(35) At the abbey church the damage caused by the purchaser William Langley, a rich tailor, to the fabric was severe enough to provoke the parishioners to litigation,(36) and many alterations, both domestic and industrial, were made to the adjacent precinct and its buildings.(37) Both the Dominican and Franciscan houses, as the ‘Burghley’ map shows, had also been stripped of their roofs by the 1570s with only parts being retained for use.(38) Part of the Franciscan premises were subsequently employed, by the 1630s, as an important brew-house.(39) By 1620 too the owner of the friaries, the barrister Roger Pope, had blocked off rights of way through the premises and converted the Round Tower at the Austin Friars (part of the defensive 'new work' of the 14th century) into a tanning room. The blockhouse behind the conventual buildings was also made into a dovecot.(40) In 1599 alderman Thomas Edwardes, owner of St. Chad's College, was also to claim that the college buildings were outside the borough's jurisdiction and thus precluded him from having to serve as bailiff.(41)

In most respects occupational distributions inherited from the Late Middle Ages persisted, although the density of particular trades became much more pronounced.(42) Thus a notable concentration of clothworkers developed in the area of Murivance (Swan Hill), Shoplatch and St. John's Hill, while the present Butcher Row (first distinguished in suit lists from Fish Street, which originally included it, in 1628-9) reflects the fact that butchers had begun not only to work but to live there in large numbers. How that situation arose is suggested by the development of the eleven butchers' stalls erected in Fish Street in 1468. In 1610-11 they were enlarged by the corporation with the erection of upper chambers and then let at higher rents.(43) Later the street was to become known as Double Butcher Row to distinguish it from Single Butcher Row which lay around the corner on Pride Hill and had also been colonized by the fast-growing number of butchers.(44) Elsewhere an important concentration of river trades grew up in the streets of the Welsh Ward beside the River Severn. Of 58 riverworkers, including two ship-wrights, recorded in the suit list of 1668, 39 lived in Frankwell, Mardol and Knockyn Street (Hill's Lane).

The suburbs continued to harbour the majority, as much as three-quarters, of the town's labourers, although their presence by no means masked the continuing importance of trades long associated with particular suburbs (glovemakers in Abbey Foregate, leatherworkers in Coleham and Frankwell, and brickmakers in Castle Foregate). Surnames suggest that a disproportionate number of labourers were Welsh – perhaps twice as many as among tradesmen – a feature also true of the riverworkers. In 1563 some 22 per cent of the streeters in Frankwell, Mardol and Knockyn Street bore the Welsh patronymic 'ap' (25/116) compared to 8 per cent in the rest of the town (29/346),(45) a concentration reflected in the street-name Carnarvon Lane which ran off Mardol.(46) Although fuelled by betterment migration, the Welsh influx pre-dated the population increase after 1560. The number of those in tax and suit lists with the male patronymic rose from 0.7% in 1433 (3/413) and 2.8% in 1474 (13/465), to 7.3% in 1525 (33/453) and 11.7% in 1563 (54/462).(47) By 1546 St. Chad's parish, which included the Welsh quarter, was employing a Welsh priest during Lent,(48) and despite statutory discrimination, erased by Jacobean legislation,(49) the Welsh presence in Shrewsbury had emerged as a distinctive feature of its ethnic topography. Analysis of surnames and related evidence (e.g. the geographical origins of burgesses or their fathers) suggests that by the early 17th century as much as 40 per cent of the town’s population may have been Welsh or of Welsh origin – a remarkable transformation since the Middle Ages.

Although variations in the class and social composition of Shrewsbury's topography can already be found in the 1520s, for example between the poorer suburbs and the knot of high-status residents in Dogpole and St. Mary's churchyard, such contrasts also became sharper after 1560. One incidental symptom, as elsewhere, was the way in which the incidence of plague increasingly became a suburban phenomenon.(50) Whereas outbreaks in 1518 and 1576 had affected St. Alkmund's parish in the town centre,(51) both the epidemics of 1631 and 1650 began in Frankwell (where infection via the river-trade may be suspected) and were largely confined to St. Chad's parish.(52) In 1631 the division was ruthlessly exposed when Frankwell was quarantined from the rest of the town and an attempt by its inhabitants to force a way over the Welsh Bridge had to be repulsed by force.(53) It was in this period too that many of the notorious courts in Frankwell, lying off the street, were first erected, providing well into the 19th century ideal conditions for the spread of infective disease.(54)

Nonetheless, the extent to which the town's social topography had polarized by 1640 should not be exaggerated. Alehouses remained almost evenly distributed throughout the town, (55) and although greater merchants still tended to congregate in the principal streets, they continued to live in close proximity to more modest tradesmen. That was true even in Knockyn Street (Hill's Lane), one of the most Welsh and demotic quarters of Shrewsbury, as the mansion built there in 1616-18 for the draper-brewer William Rowley suggests. The subsequent history of Rowley’s Mansion sugests that it was not until the later 18th century that this kind of residential proximity began to deter respectable residents. (56)

Sources
1 This section scarcely does justice to the many ways in which this subject could be developed.
2 W.A. Champion, Population change in Shrewsbury (unpubl. TS, 1983, copy at Shropshire Archives 6001/6821), 230-2.
3 M. Gelling, The Place-Names of Shropshire, iv. (2004), 10.
4 Analysis from SA 3365/1054, 1842 (box 4).
5 SA 336/76, fo. 193r.
6 SA 6000/2619; National Archives (NA) Prob 11/71, 72 Spencer. Other instances in Elizabeth’s reign where new houses are mentioned include: Grope Lane (post 1559, T.S.A.S. vi. 356); Corvisors Row (post 1560, NA C3/455/77); Under the Wyle (1561, T.S.A.S. liv. 76); near the town walls (1565, Bodleian Lib. Gough Shropshire, 12, 102v); a dyehouse near the Stone Bridge (1569, SA 840/29); St. Julian’s church stairs (1574, SA 3365/76, fo. 287r); Wyle Cop by St. Julian’s churchyard (c. 1577, Bodl. Lib. Gough Shrop. 12, fo. 103v); St. Alkmund’s churchyard (1578, Bodl. Lib. Gough Shrop. 12, fo. 99v); Shoplatch (1585, SA 3365/1046); Roushill Lane (1585, SA 3365/1098, Mardol presentments); a tavern in Fish Street (1586, SA 3365/1098); beside the Stone Bridge (1590, NA Req2/186/151); Coleham (1597, NA Prob 11/90 105 Cobham, will of Ric. Owen);
7 SA 6000/3380; 1709 (boxes 209-10). See also the biography of Robert Ireland jnr. on this site.
8 M. Moran, Vernacular Buildings of Shrosphire (2003), 272-3.
9 SA 3365/76, fos. 66r, 114r, 125r; Bodleian Lib. Gough Shropshire 1, fo. 171v.
10 Champion, Population change, 67, n. 14.
11 SA 3365/518, p. 32; Brit. Lib. Add. MSS 30,317, fos. 100-114.
12 Transactions Shropshire Archaeological Society (T.S.A.S.), 4th ser. x. 199; Champion, op. cit. 28-35 (figures adjusted for the annualisation of the company accounts after 1610).
13 Except where noted the next four paras. are based on H.E. Forrest, The Old Houses of Shrewsbury (5th ed. 1935); J.T. Smith, Shrewsbury: topography and domestic architecture to the middle of the 17th century, Birmingham M.A. thesis (1953); Moran, Vernacular Buildings of Shrosphire, esp. 213-76; and notes on particular buildings to appear on this site.
14 T. Churchyard, The worthines of Wales (1587; Spencer Soc. edn. 1876), 78.
15 T.S.A.S. lxiv. 119-20.
16 T.S.A.S. lxi. 46, 53-4.
17 Shropshire Shreds and Patches, 16 Nov. 1887. Wall painting was probably quite common, and there are other surviving examples in Shrewsbury: ex. inf. Katherine Baird.
18 Mac Matters (Dec. 1954 – copy at SA d71.4).
19 Smith, op. cit. 236-42. Cf. ibid. 251, 361-2.
20 See e.g. Forrest, op. cit. 32, 37, 45, 49, 57, 72, 75, 83.
21 SA 3365/2703.
22 SA 3365/1852 (Throppe v Corwen); 3365/1868 (Throppe et al. v Bowells). For the occupation of the litigants in these cases, see SA 3365/1061. No systematic analysis, however, has yet been done on Shrewsbury inventories of this period.
23 R.K. Morriss, P. Stamper, Rowley’s House and Mansion, Shrewsbury, Shropshire Archaeology Service, report no. 69 (1995).
24 T.S.A.S. 4th ser. viii. 2606 (with illustrations).
25 T.S.A.S. 3rd ser. ix. 249-58.
26 Eric Mercer, English Architecture to 1900: The Shropshire Experience (2003), 146-7.
27 Ibid. 164.
28 The overmantel may in fact be an assemblage c. 1888 of pieces already in the house: John Newman, Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Shropshire (2006 edn.), 558.
29 T.S.A.S. iii. 279; [Rev. H. Owen], Some Account of the Ancient and Present State of Shrewsbury (1808), 82.
30 T.S.A.S. lxiv. 120.
31 Above, text to pt. III, n. 64.
32 SA 3365/784, m. 16d; 3365/2623/11; NA C142/85/57.
33 J.L. Hobbs, Shrewsbury Street Names (1954), 73.
34 SA 3365/2621/9/- (petition by parishioners of St. Julian’s parish).
35 Hobbs, op. cit. 19.
36 [Owen], Some Account, 113; Shropshire Shreds and Patches, 8 Dec. 1886; T.S.A.S. i. 41.
37 Nigel Baker (ed.), Shrewsbury Abbey, Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, Monograph Series, no. 2, (2002), 18, 205.
38 V.C.H. Shropshire, ii. 91, 93.
39 C8/106/34, C8/122/20.
40 NA C2/Jas. I/P18/2, 27; C21/P19/11.
41 Sh. Sch. Lib. Taylor MS fo. 218v; Bodleian Lib. Gough Shropshire 1, fo. 163r.
42 Except where noted the next two paras. are based on an analysis of suit lists of 1525 (cross-checked with the subsidy of that year which was drawn up by craft affiliation) and of 1668: SA 3365/172; 3365/1842, box 1, no. 3; 3365/1342.
43 Bodleian Lib. Gough Shropshire, 1, fos. 168v, 169v; Brit. Lib. Add. MSS 30,317, fo. 103v.
44 Hobbs, op. cit. 17-18. The colonization – of what originally had been a row of shoemakers’ shops (hence Corvisors Row, which once gave its name to the whole of the lower part of Pride Hill) – is clearly revealed by deeds evidence.
45 SA 3365/1054.
46 Hobbs, op. cit. 20.
47 SA 3365/840; 3365/163; 3365/1842, box 1, no. 3; 3365/1054.
48 T.S.A.S. 3rd ser. x. 307.
49 21 Jac. I. c. 28.
50 P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985), 164-5.
51 Champion, Popuation change, 87, 94.
52 J.F.D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (1970), 360-2, 435-7.
53 Sh. Sch. Lib. Escutcheons of the bailiffs, fo. 86v; SA 3365/1808 (21, 26-7 July 1631).
54 B. Trinder, Beyond the Bridges. The Suburbs of Shrewsbury 1760-1960 (2006), 116-17. Cf. SA 3365/2639 (petition of Robert Davis).
55 P. Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history 1200-1830 (1983), 69-70.
56 Morriss and Stamper, Rowley’s House and Mansion, Shrewsbury, 4-5. See also the biography of William Rowley on this site.