Upton Magna
How I love Ellis Peters’ Cadfael novels! In One Corpse Too Many, it is on the collapse of the siege of Shrewsbury in the 12th century that Empress Maud’s followers Fitzalan and Adeney escape the clutches of King Stephen. With Cadfael’s help, Fitzalan’s treasury is eventually smuggled across the border and back to its owner whilst Adeney’s daughter is returned safely to her father.
The Fitzalan portrayed in Cadfael (Ellis Peters based her stories on real people and events in history) was possibly one of the ancestors of the earls of Arundel whose large estates, along with the monasteries, were dominant features of the medieval landscape in Shropshire.
I have become fascinated by one of the earl of Arundel’s manors – Upton Magna, about 5 miles east of Shrewsbury. From the 1868 National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, I summarise: “494 inhabitants living in a parish comprising over 3000 acres of chiefly arable land… a considerable hill on one side forms a rabbit-warren and sheep-walk, and the remainder is divided into farms: the soil is generally good, and under profitable cultivation”.
My folks lived and worked on the farms in the area at least as far back as 1759 and probably earlier. Thomas Cheshire (b 1759) and his wife Jane lived to see their three score and ten, but their children were not so lucky – if they survived their teens, they didn’t make it much past thirty, as the burial records at St Lucia’s church in Upton Magna attest.
Especially following the BBC’s showing of Lark Rise to Candleford, I feel a close bond with country women, even though I live in a town and my hands rarely turn soil in my own garden. My grandmother Eliza Hotchkiss was the green-fingered owner of an allotment just down the road from Shrewsbury castle – she was born near Chirk in Wales. Her husband’s great grandma Jane was born in 1785 in Ellesmere, married to Richard Cheshire of Upton Magna, widowed in her forties, an outdoor servant and head of her household until past her mid-seventies. I wish I knew her maiden name and I’d love to continue the Cheshire line back to the time of King Stephen and the Empress Maud.
The Fitzalan portrayed in Cadfael (Ellis Peters based her stories on real people and events in history) was possibly one of the ancestors of the earls of Arundel whose large estates, along with the monasteries, were dominant features of the medieval landscape in Shropshire.
I have become fascinated by one of the earl of Arundel’s manors – Upton Magna, about 5 miles east of Shrewsbury. From the 1868 National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, I summarise: “494 inhabitants living in a parish comprising over 3000 acres of chiefly arable land… a considerable hill on one side forms a rabbit-warren and sheep-walk, and the remainder is divided into farms: the soil is generally good, and under profitable cultivation”.
My folks lived and worked on the farms in the area at least as far back as 1759 and probably earlier. Thomas Cheshire (b 1759) and his wife Jane lived to see their three score and ten, but their children were not so lucky – if they survived their teens, they didn’t make it much past thirty, as the burial records at St Lucia’s church in Upton Magna attest.
Especially following the BBC’s showing of Lark Rise to Candleford, I feel a close bond with country women, even though I live in a town and my hands rarely turn soil in my own garden. My grandmother Eliza Hotchkiss was the green-fingered owner of an allotment just down the road from Shrewsbury castle – she was born near Chirk in Wales. Her husband’s great grandma Jane was born in 1785 in Ellesmere, married to Richard Cheshire of Upton Magna, widowed in her forties, an outdoor servant and head of her household until past her mid-seventies. I wish I knew her maiden name and I’d love to continue the Cheshire line back to the time of King Stephen and the Empress Maud.
posted by linda | 10:51 AM
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