Lillington Local History Society Is Ten Years

LillingtoLillingtonn Local History Society NOVEMBER 2018 NUMBER 26 NOVEMBER 2018 Lillington Local History Society Lillington Local History Society Is Ten Programme of meetings Years Old !!! Regular monthly meeting at the This special edition of the newsletter charts Lillington Free Lillington’s history over the past 1000 years Church, Cubbington Road, at 4.30 pm on the first Friday of each Cubbington Road with Hereford Cattle month. - pre World War 1 and now Contact us by -Coming to one of the Society’s monthly meetings, -or by referring any queries about the society, Images Peter Coulls contributions, photographs or From reminiscences to Graham Cooper – A Saxon church telephone 01926 426942 and village settlement The 16 households in the “town” of Lilla in the 1086 tax records [Domesday Book] WHY NOT VISIT 350 years as part of the Kenilworth Abbey monastic estate the Lillington The 1711 survey map showing the roads we still use today Local History The development of grand villas as Royal Leamington Spa Society Website became fashionable The website Victorian/ terraces for shop keepers, married servants from the big address is: houses and the “new” lower middle class www.lillingtonhi To the vast expansion of house building before and after WW2 story.org 1 LILLINGTON HAS A HISTORY TOO It is easy to imagine an area of sprawling housing, such as Lillington, as a place with no history. But the traces of a thousand years of history lie just beneath the surface. The principal roads still follow the tracks laid down in medieval times, Bins Brook still follows the line of Valley Road [albeit in a pipe], Lucas’ Brewery is now the Maltings, and the residents of Kiln Close struggle to make their gardens grow on the site of the Brickworks. The church stands proud on Saxon footings, the roof timbers in Manor Farm and the Bowls Club betray their ancient origins, buses still head for Stud Farm and the River Avon continues to flood at Chesford Bridge. In 2008 local residents were asked by the Record Office if they were “Interested in local history?” Linda Price, the Community Development Worker, called a meeting at Lillington Library. The six people who attended learned that the Record Office had been allocated funding to research the Waller Collection. This consisted of recipe books, letters and legal documents relating to the Waller, Wise and Wathen families - previous landowners in the district. The Outside the Box project was designed to involve local people in the research - and we were invited to take part. In January 2009, the original five members of the Lillington Local History Society held their first official meeting in the Chain in Crown Way. As well as making a display ‘banner’ that recorded high points in Lillington’s history, as part of the Outside the Box project, they decided to work to bring together existing research into the Lillington area and to start recording local residents’ memories of the recent past. Ten years, and 110 meetings later, fifty to sixty people meet every month to discuss and learn about Lillington’s history. The Society has a regular programme of speakers who have a particular local interest, and arranges visits to local places of historic importance. The Society leads a regular walking tour of Lillington’s historic centre, gives talks to pupils from local schools and residential Homes, and makes regular contributions to a wide range of community events. The Society has helped to celebrate local celebrities including the Blue Plaque in Manor Road [left] for Herbert Cox the artist, and to Richard Maudslay, ‘Dam Buster’ pilot, in Vicarage Road. This special edition of the newsletter gives a brief overview of Lillington’s history over the last 1000 years and is to encourage local residents to celebrate and record their past 2 LILLINGTON IN 1086 The Domesday Book, 1086, records that Lillington consisted of 16 households, four plough lands, nine acres of meadow land, woodland and the mill [presumably on the site of the current water mill opposite the present day Rugby Ground]. Four of the adults are identified as “slaves”: a man or woman who owed personal service to another, and who was un-free, and unable to move home or work or change allegiance, to buy or to sell, without permission. The value of Lillington to the Lord was £2, and had doubled since the Norman invasion twenty years before. You can just make out the name Lillington in the original Latin text. It has a red line through it. One imagines that the settlement lay on the rising land around the church, roughly where Manor Road and Farm Road now exist. The Lord of the Manor in 1086 was the Count of Meulan. He was an older brother of Henry de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Warwick. He fought at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and was leader of the infantry on the right wing of the Norman army. “He was as yet but a young man and he performed feats of valour worthy of perpetual remembrance. At the head of a troop which he commanded on the right wing he attacked with the utmost bravery and success". His service earned him the grant of more than 91 English manors, including Lillington, confiscated from the defeated English. 3 LORDS OF THE MANOR OF LILLINGTON In 1086 most of the manor of Lillington belonged to the Count of Meulan; a smaller portion [an eighth] was owned by Turchil of Warwick. The land held by the Count passed through many hands until Thomas Wagstaffe sold it in 1611 to Sir Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke of Warwick Castle. His descendants sold the manor and estate of nearly 500 acres to the Wise family in 1805. The land held by Turchil in 1086 was granted to the newly founded Priory of Kenilworth in 1121, whose property it remained until the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1538. We know that the church flourished under the tenure of the Abbey: a small chapel was added to the south side of the main church around 1380, and a west tower about 1480. A bell cast at that time still hangs in the tower. Image: Clker.com In 1596 Elizabeth 1st granted the manor of Lillington to Sir John Puckering, of the Priory, Warwick, whose descendants held it until 1709 when it was purchased by Henry Wise. Left: The “miser’s cottage”, formerly in Cubbington Road, was probably typical of the cottages in the village. The image below shows the cottage once on the site of the present Free Church. All of Lillington’s farms were held by tenants, paying an annual rent to their landlord. Manor Farm, in Lime Avenue, for example, was leased to William Beamish in 1805 for an annual rent which included ‘ three pounds of good clean honeysuckle, three pounds of good clean trefoil, [and] half a bushel of good clean rye.’ The rent covered the land between present day Lime Avenue and Telford Avenue, and included meadows and pasture land; barns, stables and other buildings The estate passed by family connection to Major-General Sir George Waller of Woodcote in 1888. Sir Wathen Arthur Waller died in 1947, left the manor to his widow, Viola, Lady Waller. 4 1711 : THE “EXACT MAP OF LILLINGTON” James Fish, a local artist land surveyor, and one time Clerk to the parish of St Mary’s in Warwick, finished his ‘exact’ map of the Manor of Lillington. The map shows that Lillington stretched from the Chesford Bridge over the river Avon in the north to the boundaries of Offchurch in the south. North is at the bottom of the map. The map is very important because it shows that: Lillington’s farm land was divided into four great fields. Each field was divided into strips so that each of the seven tenant farmers in Lillington had an equal share of good and poor land. Each strip was about an acre, the amount of land an ox team could plough in a morning; they rested in the afternoon. Lillington land is a mixture of soils, with its share of sand and gravel. Upper Lenchams Furlong, in the Nether Field towards Leamington, was well known locally for its clay, and would one day become the brickworks. The pattern of principal roads is much the same as today, although some names have changed. Cubbington Road was named as Great Church Way, and Sandy Lane as Mill Lane, leading as it still does to the watermill [on the side road to Hill Wootton]. The cottages and principal farms were clustered close to the church and Manor House. Many of the cottages had small plots of land attached to them, known as closes. These were for fruit growing, vegetables and pasture for any animals belonging to the tenant. Cottagers paid rent. Widow Rawbone paid1d a year; Edward Hudson paid 13 shillings and four pence, 160 times as much. Widow Nicholls, a principal tenant, paid £5 12/-, about the cost of an average horse or cow. One cottage in Lillington, ‘new built for a poor family’ was not valued by James Fish, and appears to have been excused rent. James Fish was commissioned to make the map because it was so difficult to tell which land belonged to Lord Brooke and which to Henry Wise. This had led to disputes in the past and “has been found very inconvenient, ...and has often occasioned disputes in plowing, in mowing their grass, and is a discouragement to husbandry.” The disputes were settled finally in 1730, under the Enclosure Act, when the great fields were divided up into fields and assigned to particular farms and landowners.

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