Place:Shrewsbury Liberty, Shropshire, England

A liberty is described as an "area in which special privileges in relation to the administration of justice and other local affairs [having] been conferred by the Royal authority", and to an extent, "exempt from the Royal prerogative and from the jurisdiction of the county justices" (Jackson, 1966, p.5). ...it could refer to a group of manors held by a lord with certain privileges granted to the lord by the Crown. (Source: A Vision of Britain through Time)

Shrewsbury Liberty is similar to a hundred, but it was centred on the market town of Shrewsbury. "After the formation of the Church of England [circa 1535-1540], it is believed that the town was offered the status of "cathedral city" by Henry VIII, as the part of a proposed "Diocese of Shropshire". Reputedly, the citizens of the town rejected this offer, preferring to remain a "first of towns". (Source: Wikipedia) It was probably from this point that the term Shrewsbury Liberty came to be used.

The list of parishes comes from A Vision of Britain through Time and includes the ecclesiastical parishes of Shrewsbury itself, some of which stretched out into rural areas, and parishes beyond, some of which were also within a hundred. The Liberty was disbanded when Shrewsbury became a municipal borough in 1836-37. Not all the outside parishes were included in the municipal borough immediately, but some were added to the borough in 1934 and very few are outside the Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough which was in existence 1974-2009.

List of Parishes

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.
• There is another much longer list of the parishes and townships of the Liberty in GENUKI