Austrey
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MEDIEVAL AUSTREY ‘The
District of the Midland Station’ Austrey lies at the heart of
an area described by the practical agriculturalist, William Marshall in 1787 as
‘The District of the Midland Station’. The central ridge rising some 400
feet above sea level between the catchment basins of the Anker and the Mease,
divides this Warwickshire parish from the neighbouring parish of Appleby in
Leicestershire. Although mixed farming combining livestock and grain was well
established in this region by the late medieval period, the medieval farmers
probably farmed mostly for subsistence or to meet their ‘feudal’ obligations
such as the payment
of averagium or newly-threshed corn
and malt, to the monks of Burton. While
there were some barren patches on the sandy uplands and the cold clays of the
Ashby Wolds remained intractable, the soil was extremely productive. Recent
glaciation had covered the area with extensive surface deposits of sand, gravel
and boulder clay which generations of farmers have mixed with the underlying
Keuper marl and sandstone to produce a rich loam. In the words of William
Burton, the soil was ‘equally apt
to bear corn and grass’. The farmers added manure to increase crop yields and
lime to ‘mellow the soil in tillage and sweeten it in grass’. There were of
course other sources of income like coal shale outcrops at Measham and
Donisthorpe to the north, and at Shuttington, south-west of Austrey. But the
surface pits operating at Measham from the early 1600s and at Shuttington by the
1690s made only a marginal contribution to the region's economy because there
was no economical means of transporting the coal to the industrial centres where
it was most needed until the construction of the Ashby canal in 1804 Early
Medieval Settlement
Map 1 shows some of the towns
and villages around Austrey in early medieval times. The Mease and the Anker
river valleys were a buffer zone between Mercia and the Danelaw. After the
humiliating treaty of 877 which ceded a large part of East Mercia to the Danes,
the area north of Watling Street was colonised by Danish settlers moving up the
Trent valley and establishing their administrative capital at Repton in
Derbyshire. The Saxons had already established themselves on the best sites,
which explains why the Old English place names tend to identify townships giving
access to the more easily-worked, permeable soils while most of the Scandinavian
place names describe settlements on secondary sites.
Thus the Saxon -hams and -tuns (Measham, Snarestone, Norton, Shuttington,
Warton) lie adjacent to sand and gravel outliers while the Danish -thorpes and
-bys (Donisthorpe, Oakthorpe, Ashby and Appleby) are sited on Sandstone or
shale. Austrey, which was sited just outside the Danelaw, has been identified as
the farmstead of a Saxon thegn called Eadwulf. While there is some dispute about
this, William Dugdale’s assertion that it was originally a British vill
seems plausible in the light of recent discoveries about celtic settlement in
the midlands. Farming was certainly well
established in the region by 900 AD. The Domesday Book lists at least eighty
separate place names (not all necessarily nucleated settlements) scattered along
the two river valleys by 1066. The comparatively rare mention of woodland
suggests that the inhabitants of the region had cleared much of the oak and
thorn forest that originally clothed the hill slopes and river flats. Domesday
figures for population and plough teams provide a rough idea of population
density of perhaps 3,500 people spread over about 120,000 acres in the thirty
parishes in the area around Austrey. The ancient ridgeway which follows the county boundary on
one side of the parish is perhaps one of the oldest trade routes in the region.
In eighteenth-century enclosure maps it is marked as ‘Salt Street’, which
lends support to the suggestion that it originated as a prehistoric saltway
giving access to the Cheshire salt pans. After leaving Austrey the ridgeway
crosses No Man's Heath and follows the Mease as far as Harlaston, before its
junction with the Tame at Salter’s Bridge. Salt Street is intersected by another ancient ridgeway, the
highway from Tamworth to Ashby, which passes through Newton Regis on the
northern side. This was probably part of the ‘Upper Saltway’ connecting the
trading port of Saltfleet on the Lincolnshire coast to the Droitwich salt pans.
The section of Salt Street which branches off from Watling Street was invested
with a special, strategic importance in the early medieval period.
After the partition of Mercia in 877 AD it was probably the southern
limit of the Danelaw, allowing a territorial buffer around Tamworth.
It was probably incorporated into the shire boundary at a somewhat later
date, possibly as late as 1000 AD, as a sort of political and cultural divide
between ‘Danish’ Leicestershire and ‘Saxon’ Warwickshire. Medieval Towns and Markets In
early Norman times the market towns in this region were not very large.
Tamworth, the old Mercian capital, site of a ninth-century royal palace and
mint, is only briefly mentioned in the Domesday survey apart from a reference to
nearby manors contributing burgesses to the town. In fact Tamworth is the only
town described as a ‘borough’ with burgesses or householders with burgage
tenure. Mention of some of these burgesses living in nearby Drayton Basset
working alongside villeins in the field suggests that the townsfolk mainly
relied on agriculture. The nearest outside urban centre of any size was Nuneaton,
south of Watling Street, with 88 recorded inhabitants. Ashby, Market Bosworth
and Atherstone all record populations so small as to suggest that they were mere
hamlets in 1086. Austrey, with its
40 villagers and a priest, seems to have been one of the most populous
settlements in the entire region. The frequent Domesday references to 'waste' at Oakthorpe,
Donisthorpe, Willesley and Measham, and the evidence of shrunken populations at
places like Shackerstone and Norton, can be traced back to the Conqueror’s
savage campaign of 1068 which left a trail of destruction in its wake.
Tamworth's borough status and the need for certain essential items like salt to
be brought from further afield indicates that there was some trade being carried
out in the region. But none of the
surrounding towns could really be described as ‘urban’ centres.
The Domesday evidence tends to suggest that most of the eleventh-century
villagers did not produce enough surplus to supply the town markets.
The
emergence and expansion of local market centres and an increase in the number of
towns with borough status and markets provides evidence of steady economic and
commercial growth, one of the signs of economic recovery after 1200. But there
was a difference between the ‘official’ market towns with permanent
marketplace fixtures and burgage tenure, and local produce markets.
By 1350 both Ashby and Atherstone had been granted burgage tenure. A
measure of Ashby's relative importance was its grant of a Saturday market in
1260 - a privilege usually reserved for the larger market towns.
Tamworth , whose charter was reconfirmed in 1336, was the only other town
in the region to receive such a valuable grant. Although Atherstone and Tamworth
were both hit with fire, pestilence and plague, both survived as market towns
because their Saturday markets gave them an advantage over towns with weekday
markets. Medieval
Communications and Trade
In
medieval times a capillary network of customary ways between villages and manors
serviced the great arteries of long distance trade. Trade helped to break down
the natural isolation encouraged by communal farming. The emerging network of
trade links between neighbouring towns exposes shifting patterns social contact.
In the 1350s for example bondsmen from the Burton abbey estates in
Austrey and Appleby probably used the ridgeway to convey their customary averagium
to Harlaston, receiving cartloads of unthreshed grain in exchange for their
newly-threshed corn and malt. However this route had probably fallen into disuse
by the late Tudor period. Frequent
references to the maintenance of highways and bridges in quarter sessions
presentments suggest increasing traffic along the network of highways, fords and
packhorse bridges giving access to the rapidly expanding local market towns at
Ashby, Tamworth and Atherstone. The absence of navigable waterways continued to
discourage the long-distance movement of bulk grain.
At least one attempt to circumvent this problem, Lord Conway's scheme to
make the tributaries of the Anker navigable as far as Austrey to bring corn to
Fazeley mill, proved too costly and had to be abandoned after 1636.
Map 2
shows the relative position of markets and communication routes in the later
medieval period, which saw a proliferation of grants for local markets.
M.W.Beresford estimates that the Crown granted market rights to over
1,200 townships in England and Wales between 1227 and 1350. In addition to those
already mentioned there were at least four other market charters within the
region. One of the earliest grants
was to Polesworth, which conferred rights to a weekly market on Thursdays and an
annual fair from 20th-22nd July. Similar
grants for weekday markets were made to Bosworth (1285), Measham (1311), and
Seal (1311). The granting of markets and fairs on separate days from those of
neighbouring towns was obviously meant to prevent excessive competition but it
also provided villagers with a choice of markets, just as the staggering of
annual fairs provided a circuit for itinerant traders. This sudden growth of
chartered towns and villages in a broad arc from the Eastern Lowlands to the
Trent shows an increase in the demand for new trading outlets by 1350.
Bracton's response, an enactment that no grants should be given to towns
within a six and two-third mile radius of another sought to prevent
overcrowding. One of the reasons why many of the markets in the Mease and Anker
valley region were only three or four miles apart was the lack of navigable
waterways which made it difficult and expensive to carry produce like wheat and
grain very far. Local
evidence hints at the existence of another layer of marketing which has gone
unrecorded in standard gazetteers and almanacks: the illegal, or ‘customary’
markets. We don’t know how many
customary markets there were but the extent of
private trading is revealed in a list of Leicestershire markets and fairs
drawn up in 1600 which refers to Henry de Appleby's rights to hold a market in
Overseal on the grounds that he had ‘free warren’ there. He also had rights
to free warren in Little Appleby which seems to suggest that he may have
occasionally held markets there as well. Austrey’s ‘butter cross’ at the
upper end of the village, which local tradition ascribes to the monks of Burton
may be another example of this sort of customary or private market. There is a
record of a market cross here as early as 1332 and a suggestion, from Mr Leonard
Mellings of Austrey, that butter and cheese from the monks’ demesne farm may
have been sold on the site. The ancient parish and its
medieval manors
The
spiritual and secular lives of early modern English villagers were regulated by
a complex system of local administration which comprised several, overlapping
layers of authority. Ecclesiastical
authority was exercised by the archdeacon and his officials who supervised the
parochial clergy and the laity, while civil authority was exercised by the
manorial and shire courts. David Hey has remarked upon ‘the extraordinary
capacity for survival’ of ancient land divisions. The old shire boundary
between Austrey and Appleby on the north-east was particularly important as it
marked the common border between Warwickshire and Leicestershire, the diocesan
boundary between Lichfield and Lincoln and the limits of manorial juristictions.
A series of ancient meres, hedgerows and field boundaries from Austrey meadows
to Hastley Hill, connecting with the Warwickshire boundary, divides Austrey from
Newton Regis to the northwest, while the Hollow Brook, a small, swift-flowing
tributary of the Anker, forms the southern boundary. The irregular field boundaries are much older than
we might suppose, possibly marking the ad
hoc meeting of plough teams colonising virgin wasteland in the early
medieval period. The
parish boundary, familiarised by usage and ritual perambulations, was probably
the most important administrative limit as far as the villagers were concerned
since besides defining the collection area for church tithes it marked the
limits of the common fields and hence of the physical production unit. As David
Hey remarked with reference to Myddle, ‘The
parish framework … might have
been an arbitary one, but for many purposes it was the one that mattered’:
Austrey’s inhabitants shared a strong sense of parochial identification
through weekly attendance at church, the appointment of churchwardens,
constables and overseers, and their communal regulation of the common fields Sources and Notes
William Marshall, The
Rural Economy of the Midland Counties 2 Vols. London, 1790.
William Burton, Description of
Leicestershire, R. Blome, Britannia: Or a Geographical Description of the Kingdom &c.
London, 1673. John Speed, Theatre of the
Empire of Great Britaine London 1611
M.W. Beresford, ‘The Origins
of Medieval Boroughs in Warwickshire’ and ‘Additional Note: Atherstone’, Warwickshire
History I, no. 2 (1969), no. 3 (1970)
B.E. Coates, ‘The Origin and Distribution of Markets and Fairs in
Medieval Derbyshire’, DAJ 85 (1965),
96. Illegal markets in M.J. Kingman, ‘Markets and Marketing in Tudor
Warwickshire: the evidence of John Fisher of Warwick and the Crisis of
1586-87’, Warwickshire History, iv.
No. 1 (1978). Lists of markets and fairs from Palmer’s index in the Public
Record Office. Austrey’s market cross in W.F. Carter, ‘The lay subsidy rolls
for Warwickshire of 6 Edward III’, Dugdale
Society Occasional Papers, 6 (1926), 56.
Ashby references in C.J.M. Moxon, A
Social and Economic Survey of a Market Town, 1570-1720, Oxford D.Phil. 1971 David
Hey's observation in Myddle, 20; Reference to customary perambulations of the
boundaries in a 1628 Shuttington tithe dispute, VCH Warws. IV, 214. P. Sawyer (ed.) Medieval
Settlement: Continuity and Change (London, 1977), 13; For reconstruction of
parish boundaries from fragmentary evidence see,C.V. Phythian-Adams,
‘Continuity, Fields and Fission: the Making of a Midland Parish’.
Department of English Local History Occasional Papers, 3 No. 4
(Leicester, 1978). W.R.O. CR 468. Nichols
III, 1024; F.T. Houghton gives an account of the ridgeway in ‘Salt Ways’, TBAS,
xiv (1932), 1-17; Ridgeways continued to be used for the carriage of salt in the
early 1700s. See D. Hey, Packmen; Carriers and Packhorse Roads (Leicester, 1980), 153. VCH
Leics. III, 67, 78. The partition of Mercia is fleetingly mentioned in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, the
exact origins of the shires remain hidden.
C.V. Phythian-Adams suggests that Warwickshire may not have been defined
earlier than 1007-16, although Leicestershire is not mentioned before 1066. ‘The Emergence of Rutland and the Making of the Realm’, Rutland
Record, 1 (1980). Customary duties to provide grain are described in C.
Kerry, ‘Bondage Tenure of Harlaston,Staffordshire', DAJ,
xxii (1900), 84. CSPD (1635-6) p 450.
Population Growth in the early modern period
The period from mid
sixteenth century onwards is known as the ‘early modern’ age because there
are signs of a ‘modern’ economy and the breakdown of the old ‘feudal’
order. Between 1500-1700 there was a
dramatic population increase in the survey region.
Church census and subsidy returns for twenty eight of the thirty parishes
show a seventy-five per cent increase in the numbers of listed households
between 1563 and 1670. These increases match the observations of the market
towns described by Richard Blome in his great seventeenth-century survey of the
kingdom.
The fastest growing towns, Ashby, Atherstone and Tamworth were at the
intersection of trade routes. More isolated towns did not grow as fast.
Comparison between the 1563 census and the 1670 hearth tax listings clearly show
this drift of population to the better situated market towns astride the main
trade routes, and a corresponding decline of the smaller trading centres. But
the population figures do not tell the whole story. Some markets declined
despite increased population. In 1563 Nuneaton, with 188 households, was the
most populous town in the Anker valley. No
town in the survey area even approached it in size.
By 1670 however, this lead had been lost and Ashby, Tamworth and
Atherstone, competed to challenge Nuneaton’s position as a connection point
for the lucrative London trade. The
growth of these three local market towns in the Tudor period reorganised local
transport links. In the medieval
period access to markets was provided by packhorse bridges over the Anker and
the Trent: Fieldon bridge gave easy access from Watling Street while the great
bridge over the Trent at Burton served as a link to the north (Map 3).
Although the Burton bridge had fallen into a perilous state of disrepair
by the early 1500s it continued to serve in the words of the abbott of Burton as
‘a comen passage to and fro many countrys to the grett releff and comforth of
travellyng people’.
Ashby
was particularly well placed to take advantage of the increased movement of
goods and produce between towns. Standing
astride the highway that linked Derby and Leicester, it was at the intersection
of several major trade routes, one of the most important of which was the road
which skirted around the edge of Charnwood Forest towards Nottingham at the head
of the navigable Trent. Ashby’s
strategic position, reinforced by its growing reputation as a centre for
livestock and leather-tanning, largely accounts for its transformation from
market village to major trading town in little more than a century.
Even allowing for gross underestimation of the number of households in
the 1563 census, Ashby's population almost certainly more than doubled between
1563 and 1670. Much of this growth was the result of a local influx of workers
into the craft industries. One
estimate is that between 1658-61 a quarter of the householders recorded in the
town register were engaged in leather trades and another 12 per cent were
working in the cloth industry. Ashby
was not the only town to experience rapid expansion as a result of trade and
migration. Tamworth, with more than
320 recorded households in 1670, was the most populous town in the region by
that date. Its strategic advantage was control of two vital bridges across the
Anker and the Tame on the through route from London to Chester. Successive
confirmations of borough privileges, including rights to a third additional fair
in 1588, recognised Tamworth’s historic importance as ‘the seat of Saxon
kings’. Although it was primarily a local market town, it did a brisk trade
providing travellers with the staple bread, ale and accomodation, maintaining
trading links as far afield as Bristol. The existence of a large number of corn
badgers, or traders, living in and around Tamworth in late Elizabethan times is
confirmation of the town’s importance as a market for grain. The infusion of
new life which followed Charles II’s reconfirmation of its borough's
privileges in 1663 is well attested by Blome's account, ten years later, of its
celebrated market, well served with corn, provisions and lean cattle. Increased
prosperity for the market towns meant a corresponding decline for the smaller
local market villages in less favourable locations. Measham, ignominiously dismissed by Wyrley in 1596 as ‘a
village belonging to Lord Shefield, in which are many coal mines, [but] little
else worthy of remembrance’ was omitted altogether from Blome's gazetteer of
market towns in 1673. Polesworth.
described at the Dissolution as one of the ‘chiefest market towns’ in the
kingdom is also omitted from Blome's list, its once thriving market being
described in 1720 as ‘long disused’. Seal was only one of many
Leicestershire ‘market towns of good note and worth’ that had by 1622
according to Burton become ‘quite forlete [sic] and out of use’. Even
medium-sized towns, such as Atherstone and Market Bosworth, felt this drift of
trade to the key marketing centres. In
the medieval period Atherstone was an important staging post for movement down
Watling Street to London; the southern access road into the region branched off
Watling Street from here to cross the Anker and link up with the highway from
Tamworth to Ashby. However, by 1675
the growing importance of Coventry as a nodal hub of the midland road system had
significantly reduced the amount of traffic on Watling Street.
Although Atherstone retained its importance as the collection point for
the London carrier trade and a famous market for cheeses, its history from the
early 1600s is one of slow decline. Rough roads, packhorse bridges and ‘cledgy’
soils Clearly,
accessibility was a crucial factor governing the extent of a town’s marketing
area. William Harrison's
observation. that the common highways ‘in the clay or cledgy soil’ became
‘deep and troublesome in the winter half’ is confirmed by a succession of
sixteenth and seventeenth-century travellers through the midlands. It is no
accident that the most celebrated among them, Bishop Corbett John Evelyn, Thomas
Baskerville, John Conyers and Celia Fiennes, all travelled on horseback rather
than by coach. In 1790 William Marshall reported that the highway between Ashby
and Tamworth was ‘almost impassable for several months of the year’.
He went on to suggest that the road system had suffered ‘total neglect
since the time of the Mercians’. Rough
roads did not always disrupt trade. J.A.
Chartres argues that travellers were always prone to exaggerate and that trade
was seasonal so there was a natural slackening off in the winter months anyway.
The adaptability of horses and horse-drawn carts to bad roads has been pointed
out by writers like T.S. Willan, who cites Sir Robert Southwell’s report to
the Royal Society in 1675 showing that 60 per cent of England’s land trade was
carried by packhorse. Poor roads and high freight costs restricted the distances
that villagers were prepared to travel to sell their heavier, more perishable
farm produce. So while expensive, lightweight, luxury goods such as lace, and
dyestuffs, travelled hundreds of miles and sheep were sometimes driven 40 to 50
miles to the great midlands sheep markets, corn rarely travelled more than 10 or
15 miles. The prohibitive cost of
freight often exceeded the value of the corn where there was no cheap river
transport.. This was the important
factor that determined the orientation of villages to market towns and it
probably explains why severe food shortages in Tamworth in 1598 were not
relieved by massive imports from other parts of the country. Austrey farmers
would have continued to sell their grain at the closest local markets, venturing
further afield only to buy specialised products that were unavailable locally.
And even this need was well catered for by early modern times. During the summer
months a colourful army of petty chapmen, higglers and peddlars, families of
travelling hawkers like the Dabbs of Atherstone and Nuneaton who are repeatedly
mentioned in seventeenth-century toll books, went on a circuit of midland
markets and fairs to meet a growing rural demand for trinkets and smallgoods. Sources and Notes
Letter from the abbot of
Burton re Burton Bridge in C.H. Underhill,
A History of Burton on Trent (Burton, 1941), p. 168. William Wyrley cited in
T. Bulmer’s History, Topography and
Directory of Derbyshire (London, 1895 ed.) J. Gould, ‘The Medieval
Burgesses of Tamworth: their Liberties, Courts and Markets’ TSSAS 13 (1971-2). Corn trade in SHC Quarter Session Rolls, 1598-1602 (1935), 63, 277. John
Ogilby published a series of strip maps of
English roads in Britannia
(London, 1975). William Harrison, The
Description of England, 1587, G. Edelen (Ithaca, 1968) J.A.
Chartres, ‘Road Carrying in England in the Seventeenth Century; Myth and
Reality, EcHR 2nd Series,
30 (1977) T.S.
Willan. The Inland Trade (Manchester,
1976) C.
Platt, The English Medieval Town
(London, 1976). Ref. To Dabbs in T. Kemp (ed) The
Book of John Fisher, Town Clerk of Warwick [1580-1588] (Warwick, 1900), 124- Where
did Austrey Inhabitants go to Market in Tudor and Stuart times?
Distance
and the cost of conveyance were decisive factors which determined local trading
patterns or marketing areas. Midland
villagers often frequented two or three market towns, depending upon the produce
and the possibilities of a good price. Austrey’s
closest market towns were Ashby, Atherstone and Tamworth.
Lichfield and Burton (12 miles to the northwest), Nuneaton and Market
Bosworth (10 miles east and eight miles south-east respectively) formed an outer
ring of market towns beyond the enclosing triangle (Map 3). Of course, poor
roads and traffic congestion combined to discourage too frequent visits to these
outlying markets given Ashby and Tamworth’s famous weekly livestock markets,
Atherstone’s alehouses, cheesemarkets and carrier services and Nuneaton and
Market Bosworth’s annual horse fairs. While the villagers would have been
familiar with the markets and fairs in all of these towns, and perhaps
occasionally went as far as Lichfield and Burton to sell their corn, they
didn’t need to venture far to sell their produce.
Saturday markets discouraged regular attendance further afield since
villagers who wished to attend them would have had to either skirt around or go
through one market to get to another. While evidence of county segregation is sparse, proximity was probably the crucial factor in market attendance:
farmers then as now naturally prefer to take their grain and livestock by the
shortest and most convenient route to market. Ashby and Tamworth both held
Saturday livestock markets and there were regular markets and fairs at Measham
and Polesworth so it seems fairly likely that on Saturdays many of the Austrey
farmers drove their cattle to Tamworth while their Leicestershire neighbours in
Appleby took theirs to Ashby. Dr J.D. Goodacre has found evidence to suggest
that the county boundary near Lutterworth served in a similar fashion to define
the limits of that town’s marketing area.
Some indication of the pattern of movement from outlying townships is
provided by references to ‘foreigners’ in market town registers.
Registrations of baptisms, marriages and burials in Tamworth between 1556-1635
for example suggest that the drift of people from outlying townships was largely
confined to the area south of the Leicestershire county boundary. Market
attendance was also influenced to some extent by customary ties based upon
tenancy, landownership or kinship . Chronology Medieval
11th century – 15th century Tudor
1485-1603 Early Modern
mid 16th –17th centuries (Tudor, Stuart,
Hanoverian) Notes
and Sources
Professor
Everitt points out that a farmer on foot could easily walk 8 or 10 miles and
still return home before nightfall. For
the principal produce markets in the midlands, Agrarian History of England and Wales IV, 492-5; Atherstone
cottagers combined felt-making and tammy-weaving with the management of a
smallholding and the carriage of goods from Nuneaton and Ashby: VCH
Warws. III, 127. An
archdeaconry court case involving William Pecher of Appleby refers to Swepstone
farmers’ cattle outside an alehouse in Atherstone market square; Maps showing
the relative position and importance of local market towns in Dugdale's Warwickshire
(1st ed., 1656), 636-7; R. Plot’s Natural
History of Staffordshire (Oxford, 1686), frontis. In 1698 Celia Fiennes went
from Tamworth to Lichfield in an hour on ‘a fine, new gravel road’. C. Morris, Celia Fiennes, 164. Had
she attempted to travel to Tamworth on Saturday she may have taken longer as the
way would have been crowded with people taking produce to Tamworth from
surrounding villages. Goodacre.
‘Lutterworth’ thesis, 33. Of 1,883 marriage, baptism and burial
entries registered by extra-urban householders in Tamworth between 1558-1635,
only 4 came from Leicestershire parishes (3 from Orton, 1 from Clifton Camville),
79% came from Warwickshire, 20% from Staffordshire and less than 1% from other
counties. For reference to
attendances at horse fairs see: P. Edwards, ‘The Horse Trade in the Midlands
in the Seventeenth Century’, AGHR 27
(1979), 93; I am grateful to Dr Edwards for allowing me to examine his records
of the Bosworth horse fairs. © Alan
Roberts, October, 2000 |
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