Bilston after The Norman Conquest

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By Frank Sharman

BILSTON AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST

This page is decorated with line drawings taken from medieval manuscripts. They have no specific connection with Bilston but do represent typical scenes from the times.

The chief, if not the only, effect that the Norman conquest had on Bilston was that one set of landowners was replaced by another. For the inhabitants the round of agriculture would have gone on as before.

Lawley gives the following translations of the local entries in Domesday Book:

In Bilston there are two hides of land, which is four caracates, and there are eight villeins and three boarderers with three ploughs. Also one acre of meadowland. The wood is about a furlong long and a half broad. Was worth 20s, now 30s.

Walbertus holds of Williams (Fitz Ansculf) one hide in Bradley. There are 2 caracates, with them are 4 villiens having one plough. The wood is 3 furlongs long and one furlong broad. Valued and now of the value of 67 pence. Untan holds by sac and soc. There are two acres of meadowland.

St. Leonard's in modern times.

The figures indicate that Bilston was, by the standards of its time, a sizeable village and that Bradley might be described as less developed, having more woodland and fewer inhabitants.There is no mention in Domesday Book of a church in either Bilston or Bradley and this is certainly because the church at Wolverhampton was the local parish church.

Lawley insists that there was a church of some sort in Bilston from the earliest Christian times and that references in old deeds to Wolverhampton church and its chapelries show that there must have been a chapel, at least, in Bilston. It is possible; but it is more likely that St. Leonard’s found its origins at the end of the 11^th century, when there was a spate of church building throughout the country. It seems that after 1066 Wolverhampton and its surrounds came to be in only two manors, the Deanery Manor and the Stow Heath Manor.

Stow Heath spread from the centre of Wolverhampton to the east and Bilston itself was in it. Bradley was not – it was in its own Manor of Bradley. Of Stow Heath manor Chris Upton (in his “A History of Wolverhampton”, (1998)) says that “Stowheath represented, in fact, a merger of the royal manors of Bilston, Willenhall and one half of Wolverhampton, a process only completed in the 13^th century. The first lord of the manor was Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells and Chancellor of England until his death in 1292. His main dwelling was … at Acton Burnell”.

The Greyhound and Punchbowl in modern times.

The descent of the ownership of the manors of Stow Heath and Bradley can, to a large extent, be traced – and the details are in Lawley. Suffice it to say here that Stow Heath Manor came into the hands of Bilston based people and seems to have been run from the house which is now the Greyhound and Punchbowl. Where the manor of Bradley was run from is not known. The main function of a manor was to regulate the course of agriculture in its area, though it exercised rather wider influence over its inhabitants than that might suggest, not least because, in early post-conquest times, there was not the same distinction between criminal and civil matters as we would make today. A royal hunt in a royal forest such as Cannock Chase or Kinver Forest.

Bradley seems to have been a hunting ground, but not a royal one.In addition to the manorial courts, the area would have been run by various royal officers in various guises, most of whom would, in due course, have been replaced by magistrates (or Justices of the Peace) sitting in petty sessions and quarter sessions, at both of which minor criminal matters would have been dealt with, alongside some civil matters. There would also have been a hundred court – and Bilston was in Offlow Hundred – and a county court. These courts would have dealt mainly with what we would see as civil matters. Doubtless Bilstonians attended all these courts but their impact, other than that of the manorial courts, on their daily lives would have been small.

In medieval times we must imagine Bilston as a village, surrounded by open fields and some meadowland, and, beyond them, woodland areas on all sides, with the extensive royal forests beyond them to the north and to the west. The village’s principal roads would have been much as they are now with the exception of Wellington Road and Oxford Street, both of which were not to appear until the 19^th century.

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Before the Conquest