Place:Harley, Shropshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Harley is a village and civil parish in the English county of Shropshire. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 UK census was 163.

The village lies at the foot of Wenlock Edge about 9.5 miles to the southeast of Shrewsbury. The A458 road Shrewsbury to Bridgnorth road goes around the village on a bypass. The village is about 105 metres (344 ft) above sea level on the southern slope of an extensive bed of sand and gravel, which creates an undulating landscape to the northeast of the parish. Harley Brook runs north to east across the centre of the village.

To the southeast of the village is the market town of Much Wenlock. Nearby rural parishes include Kenley, Cressage and Hughley. (Wikipedia states that the parishes of Harley and Kenley merged in 1939, but there is no evidence of this on later maps which illustrate parish boundaries.

History

Harley was recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086 as a manor with enough wood for 100 swine, and before 1066 the parish consisted of 4 manors: Harley, Domas, Rowley and Blakeway.

St Mary’s parish church is first recorded in 1291, the medieval church consisting of a chancel, nave, north aisle and western tower. The small 13th-century tower was rebuilt in the early 16th century in Perpendicular style. This is the only part of the pre-Reformation church remaining, as it was mostly rebuilt in 1845-6.

Until the 18th century the houses in the village were along the roads to Domas and Wigwig (in Much Wenlock parish) and between the church and the mill on Harley Brook on the west side of the Wenlock road. The Old Rectory, to the west of the church, may be oldest surviving house, although it has been altered and enlarged over time. The oldest of the existing farmhouses appears to be Harley Forge Farm, to the west of the Domas road. It is a brick-cased timber-framed house, probably built in the early 17th century. The timber-framed house opposite the church is one of several timber-framed houses on the Wenlock road, but is unlikely to have been built before the 17th century.

In the 18th century the houses became more widely scattered and several were then rebuilt in stone, for example the mill, the cottages on the church lands and Harley House. The farms became larger and less numerous. A crenellated brick tower built by John Corfield in 1791 gave its name to Castle Hill House, built in 1840 near Forge Farm on the Domas road. A stone bridge over the brook was built by Thomas Carline in 1843.

History of Governance

The parish was located in the Condover Hundred. From 1894 until 1974 the parish was in the Atcham Rural District of Shropshire.

In 1974 rural districts throughout England were abolished and replaced with new non-metropolitan districts which combined the rural districts, urban districts, municipal boroughs and county boroughs that existed within their newly drawn geographical borders. The Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough, so created, existed until 2009 when it was replaced by a unitary authority called the Shropshire District which covered the whole of the county with the exception of The Wrekin District (to the east of Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough) which was formed in 1998.

Research Tips

• The historical short form for Shropshire was "Salop". This is quite often found in archive material.
• Shropshire Archives, Castle Gates, Shrewsbury SY1 2AQ
• Shropshire Family History Society.
• The GENUKI main page for Shropshire provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and there is also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then.
• GENUKI also provides transcriptions of parish registers for numerous parishes throughout Shropshire. These will be noted at the bottom of this list as time permits for the parishes involved. Each register is preceded by historical notes from the editor-transciber and other details than simply births, marriages and deaths that have been found in the individual books from the parishes. These registers probably only go up to 1812 when the proscribed style for registers across the country was altered.
• GENUKI lists under each parish further references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. (URLs for these other websites may not be up to date.)
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851. There is a list of all the parishes in existence in 1851 with maps indicating their boundaries. The website is very useful for finding the ecclesiastical individual parishes within large cities and towns.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Shropshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are similar pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions that existed pre-1974. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• The two maps below indicate the boundaries between parishes, etc., but for a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from this selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile.

• Map of Shropshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. (Unfortunately the online copy of this map has pencil codings in each parish which make it difficult to see the orignal.)
• Map of Shropshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were a number of changes to urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.

• A map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds" is to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time. Some of the hundreds were broken into separate sections with other hundreds in between.
• The website British History Online provides four volumes of the Victoria County History Series on Shropshire. Volume 2 covers the religious houses of the county; Volume 4 provides a history of agriculture across the county, and Volumes 10 and 11 deal with Munslow Hundred, the Borough of Wenlock and the Telford area (i.e., the northeastern part of the county). The rest of the county is not presently covered. References to individual parishes will be furnished as time permits.
• A transcription of the Harley parish registers is online and is provided through the auspices of GENUKI.