Transcript:Shropshire, England. Shropshire Parish Registers/Lichfield Diocese/01/Broughton

Shropshire Parish Registers.

Diocese of Lichfield.

VOL. I. (1900)

The Register of Broughton.

Broughton Registers.

The Parish Register Abstract, 1831, contains the following account of these Registers :—

“ Broughton, P.C. No. I. Bap. Bur. 1714–1773 ; Marr. 1714–1753. No. II. Bap. Bur. 1774–1812. No. III. Marr. 1754–1811.” This statement is on the whole correct, except that the earliest volume really begins in 1705.

The first Register is a small quarto book, 9½ by 7 inches, without a cover, and contains twelve parchment leaves. It commences in 1705, and extends to 1774. The first or outer page, which contains entries for 1705 and 1706, is stained and much illegible. The second leaf is mostly torn off and is missing. From 1714 onwards, the Register is mostly in good condition and legible. It is in a good hand until 1726, in an illiterate hand from 1727 to 1735, in a fairly good hand from 1736 to 1747, and in a different but good hand from 1748 to 1774.

The second Register is also a small quarto book, 8½ by 7 inches, and contains ten parchment leaves in a paper cover. It has entries of baptisms and burials from 1774 to 1812. The burials from 1796 to 1812, are entered at the end of the book. It is in good condition, and is mostly well written, but some entries are in an illiterate hand. The first three entries of baptisms for 1774–5, are written on the fly-leaf.

The third Register is the usual printed marriage register ; it is a paper book in a parchment cover, and it contains 39 entries of marriages from 1754 to 1811, besides one in 1835 entered here by error. It is curious to note that from 1716 to 1738, several marriages by licence, where both parties were of Shrewsbury, took place here ; and marriages of persons residing at Wem, the Clive, Grinshill, &c., were also sometimes celebrated at Broughton.

An earlier Register commencing in 1586 was missing in 1831, but some extracts from it, chiefly relating to the Wicherley family, are preserved in the late George Morris's M.S. Extracts from Shropshire Registers, and are here printed.

There are no very important entries in the Broughton Registers. In the lost register, the Lysters are styled “ gent.” The entries relating to the families of Rogers (styled “ Mr.”), Wicherley, Otley, Kilvert, Onslow, Newnes, and Maddox, are of interest.

Broughton is a parish in the diocese of Lichfield, rural deanery of Wem, and formerly in the Liberties of Shewsbury. It contains 879 acres, and the population in 1881 was 204. In Domesday it is called Burtone, and it was then in the hundred of Baschurch, and was held by the Shrewsbury Church of St. Chad. Its township Yorton, in Domesday written Lartune, was also held by St. Chad's. The chapelry of Clive and Sansaw is also called Burtone in Domesday, but this Burtone was held by the Shrewsbury Church of St. Mary ; and Clive and Sansaw are still two townships in the parish of St. Mary's.

The old church of St. Margaret at Broughton was a small building, which was stripped of its roof, and left to decay in the year 1857, when a new church dedicated to St. Mary was erected on higher ground at Yorton. It had a bull from Julius II. and Leo X., early in the sixteenth century, by which every pilgrim who visited the chapel, and said certain prayers there, received 1500 days of pardon with clear remission. This document is printed in Gough's Middle, and in Phillip's History of Shrewsbury, p. 94. Of the old church, portions of the east, south and west walls now remain. In the old churchyard is the base of a cross, and several tombstones to the Hales, Brid, Parr, Maddox, and other families.

The Communion Cup is really a pre-Reformation Standing Pix of hammered silver, temp. Henry VII. It has a cover, probably Elizabethan, on which is a serpent forming a ring.

A fuller history of Broughton will be found in the Shropshire Archæological Transactions, Second Series, vol. II., pp. 319 to 332. A list of the Incumbents and Curates is given at p. 330.

The transcript of the registers was made by me, and has since been checked with the originals, and it is here printed by the kind permission of the Rev. John Wright, M.A., Vicar of Grinshill and Broughton.

W. G. D. FLETCHER, M.A., F.S.A.

Shrewsbury, August, 1899