Place:Newport, Shropshire, England

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source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Newport is a constituent market town in Telford and Wrekin in Shropshire, England. It lies north of Telford, west of Stafford, and is near the Shropshire-Staffordshire border. The 2001 census recorded 10,814 people living in the town's parish, which rose to 11,387 by the 2011 census.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Newport was located in the historic kingdom of Mercia, near where Wreocensæte was once situated. Humans inhabited the surrounding area long before the creation of the town. Once established, Newport became a market town in the centre of the rural farming area between Stafford and Shrewsbury.

Saxon period

In Saxon times, there were two settlements in the area. The first, Eastun, has been identified as Church Aston, and the second was Plaesc which is now Newport. In AD 963, Plaesc was described as having a High Street, a stone quarry, and a religious community. The name Plaesc means a shallow pool. Few signs of the Saxon settlement exist today, apart from the High Street, the Quarry, which could be either the Quarry on Stafford Road, or the Hole Meadow on Wellington Road. This has not been definitely confirmed.

Norman period

At the time of the Norman Conquest, the land where Newport sits formed part of the manor of Edgmond, which William I gave as a gift along with the county of Shropshire to Roger, Earl of Shrewsbury. Henry I founded the borough, first called Newborough, after the manor came into his hands from Robert de Belesme.

Newport was omitted from the Domesday Book of 1086, but this is not uncommon. Other towns omitted include London, Tamworth, Oswestry and Ludlow, all boroughs since Saxon times.

The Normans planned the new town around the older one during the reign of Henry I. The wide main street was designed for its market, and the narrow burgage plots running at right angles to it are typical of Norman architecture and planning, though today only Newport Guildhall and Smallwood Lodge are clear signs of Tudor buildings, due to the 1665 fire which destroyed most of the High Street.

Medieval Newport flourished with trade in leather, wool and fish. Novoportans possessed the right to provide fish for the Royal table. The many half-timbered buildings surviving from the late medieval and Tudor periods confirm Newport's success, leading to the first market charter which was granted by Henry I.

The town is mentioned once by John Leland in a list of castles, though now no visible remains of the castle exist; however, the most probable location for it would have been the traditional site of a manor house at Upper Bar, where there is a fragment of a square, broad moat, or on the higher ground along the Forton road, where the Castle House school stands. As regards the moat, nearly square, forming by measurement an area of 60 square yards, two sides have been filled with rubbish. Nothing is known about the occupants of the moated site. It could have pre-dated the town or, perhaps more likely, could have been the manor house of the Audleys, who were granted the manor in 1227. By 1421, the manor house was in ruins.

One of the main reasons for Newport's early wealth was the surrounding fisheries and the chief service of the burgesses, being that of taking fish to the Royal court wherever it might be. This custom was continued after Henry III had granted the borough, with the manor of Edgmond, to Henry de Audley; Henry's son James granted in the middle of the 13th century that the burgesses need not take the fish anywhere except within the county of Shropshire.

The burgesses received certain privileges from Henry I; Henry II, in an undated charter, granted them all the liberties, rights and customs that they had enjoyed in the time of Henry I, including a guild merchant, which is mentioned in the quo warranto rolls as one of the privileges claimed by the burgesses. Confirmation charters were granted by Edward I in 1287 and Edward II in 1311, while the town was incorporated in 1551 by Edward VI, whose charter was confirmed by James I in 1604. The governing body consisted of a Lord High Steward, deputy steward, two water-bailiffs and 28 burgesses, but the corporation was abolished by the Municipal Corporation Act of 1883, and a Local Board was formed, which, under the Local Government Act 1894, gave place to an urban district council.

Regency period

In 1665, many buildings were damaged in the Great Fire of Newport, and only a few of the medieval structures remain. However, there remain many fine Regency and Georgian frontages built on the site of the former Norman plots. This allows the main streets of Newport to be wider and less cluttered than those of the other towns of its age.

Edwardian period

By the 19th century, Newport was surrounded by large estates that came right to the verge of the town, determining size and development. The vivary and open fields at Norbroom had gone making the town dependent on its rural hinterland. The few fields that remained were for hay or cattle, forming a small green belt. These estates exerted a powerful influence on the town, something obvious in the deference shown and respect paid to these landed families until at least the First World War.

Beginning in the southwest of the town was the largest estate, the Lilleshall estate of the Duke of Sutherland. This dates from the dissolution of the monasteries, the lands of Lilleshall Abbey being purchased in 1539 by James Leveson of Wolverhampton.

The next estate is that in the south-east of Woodcote Hall, a smaller one belonging to the Cotes family.

On the west between Lilleshall and the town was the Longford Estate of the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury, sold in 1789 to Ralph Leake of Wellington who had made his fortune in the East India Company.

North of the town is the Chetwynd Park estate of the Pigotts, bought in 1803 by Thomas Borrow of north Derbyshire who changed his surname to Burton Borough.

The Aqualate Estate to the east lies mostly in Staffordshire.

20th century

The town was fortunate to avoid civilian casualties during the Second World War when on Christmas Eve 1944, a V-1 flying bomb launched from a Heinkel bomber and aimed at Manchester landed in a field east of Newport, about 300 yards from the Newport to Gnosall road. This bomb is now on display at Royal Air Force Museum Cosford.^[1]

The passenger service on the railway line between Stafford and Wellington was withdrawn in 1964 as a result of the Beeching Axe, and the line closed completely in 1967. The track was lifted soon afterwards, and the Newport end was subsequently redeveloped for housing.

In the 1960s to early 1970s, when the population of Newport was nearer 3000, over a third of the local workforce was employed at Serck Audco Valves, Greenwood Moore, Kwiz Feather Flights etc. All of this industry and large-scale employment has since gone - mostly during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

On 23 November 1981, an F1/T2 tornado which formed over the nearby civil parish of Chetwynd later moved over Newport, causing some damage in the town.

At Harper Adams University College just outside Newport in Edgmond, on 11 January 1982 the English lowest temperature weather record was broken (and is kept to this day): .

Modern-day Newport

Newport is now predominantly a commuter town, with people travelling to Telford, Shrewsbury, Stafford, Wolverhampton and beyond for employment.

Previously, very little redevelopment happened in Newport from the 1960s—attention going instead to nearby towns including Wellington and Oakengates, which make up the new town of Telford—until the Telford and Wrekin Council borough towns incentive was brought about in 2007. The town received major investments over the following years, including a major redevelopment of the canal and surrounding area, the lower bar of the High Street area, planned housing, bars and restaurants set to line the canal. New sporting facilities, including a climbing wall in the Springfield's area of the town, were provided.

In the spring of 2010, the first stage of the town's £1.5million regeneration began, with the £250,000 and £300,000 redevelopment of Victoria Park behind the now-defunct The Royal Victoria Hotel. The next stage of the regeneration, which was mainly focused on the High Street area of the town and Central square, involved re-surfacing the High-Street pavements and changing the design of the High Street around the Puleston Cross, removing the cobblestones and replacing them with paving and the traced outline of the 1850s market hall.

In July 2011, Telford and Wrekin Council unveiled plans for green land off the A518 bypass. The proposals included hundreds of new homes, a new supermarket, a business park and improvements to Burton Borough School.

House prices in the town are the highest in the TF postcode area (including the towns of Telford and Market Drayton) and among the highest in the county.

The town is currently attempting to acquire Transition Towns and Fairtrade Town statuses.

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 registers of Newport's Ss. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church (1785-1837) is online and is provided through the auspices of GENUKI. The Church of England parish registers for Newport are not available online in this collection.