History of Coventry
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This article is about the history of Coventry, a city in the Midlands of England.
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[edit] Early history
Coventry is traditionally believed to have been established in the year 1043 with the founding of a Benedictine Abbey by Leofric, Earl of Mercia and his wife Lady Godiva. Current evidence suggests that this abbey was probably in existence by 1022, therefore Leofric and Godiva most likely endowed it around 1043. In time, a market was established at the abbey gates and the settlement expanded.
By the 13th century Coventry had become a centre of many textile trades, especially those related to wool. Coventry's prosperity rested largely on the dyers who produced "Coventry blue" cloth, which was highly sought after across Europe due to its non-fading qualities.
Due to its textile trade, by the 14th century and throughout the medieval period, Coventry was the fourth largest city in England, with a population of around 10,000, only Norwich, Bristol and London were larger.
Due to its commercial and strategic importance, in 1355 construction began on city walls. The walls were completed in around 1400 and were an impressive feature, they measured nearly 2 1/2 miles (4km) around and consisted of two red sandstone walls infilled with rubble 9 feet (3 metres) thick, with five main getehouses where roads entered the city. With its walls, Coventry was described as being the best defended city in England outside London.
In February 2000, Channel 4's Time Team archaeologists discovered significant remnants of a major pre-Tudor cathedral/monastery complex (St Mary's) adjacent to the current cathedral, with the team revisiting the excavation site in March 2001 (the only occasion when the team have returned to a site).
On several occasions Coventry briefly served as the "second capital" of England. firstly in 1404 King Henry IV summoned parliament in Coventry, he needed money to fight rebellion and wealthy cities such as Coventry lent it to him. During the Wars of the Roses the Royal Court was moved to Coventry by Margaret of Anjou the wife of Henry VI. On several occasions between 1456 and 1459 parliament was held in Coventry, which for a while served as the effective seat of government. This came to an end in 1461 when Edward IV was installed on the throne.
Due to its importance, in 1345 Coventry was granted a city charter by King Edward III, and in 1451 King Henry VI granted Coventry a charter, which made Coventry a county in itself, a status it retained until 1842, when it reverted to being a part of Warwickshire. During the county period it was known as the County of the City of Coventry. The original city hall is still known as "County Hall" as a relic of this period.
Cheylesmore Manor House is the home of Coventry's Register office. Parts of the building date back to 1250 and Edward the Black Prince and Henry VI were among the royals who lived there. Remnants of the main house survived the Second World War, but were demolished in 1955. Edward used Cheylesmore Manor as his hunting lodge. His grandmother, Queen Isabella of France, had gained the manorial rights when the Crown had acquired them from previous owners. It said that he was a frequenter of the area. Edwards armour was black, hence the Black Prince, and his helmet was surmounted by a "cat-a-mountain".
The seal of the city bears the motto "Camera Principis" or the Prince's Chamber which, it is said, it owes to the close tie with the Black Prince. Also the cat-a-mountain of the Black Prince surmounts the Coat of Arms as a crest.
In the 16th century due to the restrictive practices and monopolies of the trade guilds, the cloth trade declined and the city fell into hard times.
[edit] Civil War and aftermath
During the English Civil War Coventry became a stronghold of the Parliamentarian forces. On several occasions Coventry was attacked by Royalists, but on each occasion they were unable to breach the city walls.
In 1645 the parliamentary garrison was under the command of Colonel Willoughbie, Colonel Boseville and Colonel Bridges with 156 officers and 1,120 soldiers. The garrison was supported by levies from surrounding villages, troops ranging across "several counties", imposing forced levies and taking horses and free quartering from villages in south-west Leicestershire.[1]
The king made an unsuccessful attempt to take the town in late August 1642, appearing at the city gates with 6,000 horse troops, but was strongly repulsed by the Coventry garrison and townspeople.[2]
Coventry was used to house Royalist prisoners. It is believed that the phrase "sent to Coventry" grew out of the hostile attitude of residents of the city to either the troops billeted there or the Royalist prisoners held there in St. John's church, for whom being "sent to Coventry" was quite an ordeal.
In 1662, after the restoration of the monarchy, in revenge for the support Coventry gave to the Parliamentarians during the Civil War, the city walls were demolished on the orders of King Charles II. Now only a few short sections survive.
[edit] Industrialisation
In the 18th century Coventry became home to a number of French immigrants, who brought with them silk and ribbon weaving skills, which became the basis of Coventry's economy. Coventry began to recover, and again became a major centre of a number of clothing trades.
Connections were made with the expanding national transport networks. The Coventry Canal was opened in the late 1700s, and one of the first trunk railway lines, the London and Birmingham Railway was built through Coventry and opened in 1838.
Coventry's first industrial boom based upon textiles and ribbon weaving, came to a sudden end during the 1860s when foreign imports killed off the industry, and Coventry went into a slump. However before long other industries began to develop and Coventry regained prosperity. Industries which developed included watch and clock making, manufacture of sewing machines, and from the 1880s onwards bicycle manufacture, which was pioneered by James Starley. Due to this industrialisation Coventry's population grew rapidly.
In fact, one of the first modern bicycles was invented in Coventry. The Starley Safety Bicycle invented by John Kemp Starley and produced by Rover in 1885, was the first bicycle to include modern features such as a chain driven rear wheel with equal-sized wheels on the front and rear. Prior to this, most bicycles had been of the Penny-farthing design.
By the 1890s the cycle trade was booming and Coventry had developed the largest bicycle industry in the world. 248 cycle manufacturers were based in Coventry, and the industry employed nearly 40,000 workers.
[edit] 20th century
By the 1930s bicycle making had evolved into motor manufacture, and Coventry had become a centre of the British motor industry, Jaguar, Rover and Rootes being just three of many famous British manufacturers to be based in the area. The city remained prosperous and largely immune to the economic slump of that decade. In fact during the 1930s the population of Coventry grew by 90,000.
As late as the 1920s, Coventry was being described as "The best preserved Mediaeval City in England". However the narrow medieval streets proved ill suited to modern motor traffic, and during the 1930s many old streets were cleared to make way for wider roads.
On the 25 August 1939, Coventry was the scene of an early mainland bomb attack by the IRA. At 2.30 in the afternoon, the bomb exploded inside the satchel of a tradesman's bicycle which had been left outside a shop on Broadgate. The explosion killed five people, injured 100 more and caused extensive damage to shops in the area. Five IRA members were put on trial for murder and two were hanged in February 1940, although the identity of the man who rode the bicycle to the Broadgate and planted the bomb was never discovered. The bomb plotters had been operating out of a house at 25 Clara Street. Coming nine days before the outbreak of World War II, the IRA bombing was an omen of what was to about to happen in the City at hands of the German Luftwaffe.
[edit] Bombing during the Blitz
- main article Coventry Blitz
Coventry's darkest hour came during World War II when Adolf Hitler singled out Coventry for heavy bombing raids, due to the fact that it was a major industrial centre providing the manufacture of aeroplanes, tanks, engines and armament. Large areas of the city were destroyed in a massive German bombing raid on November 14, 1940. Firemen from throughout the Midlands came to fight the fires but found that each brigade had different connections for their hoses. Consequently much fire-fighting equipment could not be used.[1]
568 people were killed, 4,330 homes were destroyed and thousands more damaged in the attack which destroyed most of the city centre and the city's medieval cathedral. Industry was also hit hard with 75% of factories being damaged although war production was only briefly disrupted with much of it being continued in shadow factories around the city and further afield.
Aside from London and Plymouth, Coventry suffered more damage than any other British city during the Luftwaffe attacks, with huge firestorms devastating most of the city centre. The city was targeted due to its high concentration of armaments, munitions and engine plants which contributed greatly to the British war effort. Following the raids, the majority of Coventry's historic buildings could not be saved as they were in ruinous states or were deemed unsafe for any future use.
The devastation was so great that the word Koventrieren -- to "Coventrate" or devastate by aerial bombing -- entered the German and English languages. In response, the Royal Air Force intensified the carpet bombings against German towns.
On the 8 April 1941 Coventry was hit by another massive air raid which brought the total dead to 1,236 with 1,746 injured.
A common myth surrounding the bombing is that Coventry was deliberately sacrificed in order to prevent the Germans knowing that Enigma cipher machine messages were being read by British codebreakers. This has been proven untrue — Winston Churchill was aware that a heavy raid was to take place, but it was not known where, and was expected to be in London.
[edit] Postwar
After the war, the city was extensively rebuilt. The new city centre built in the 1950s was designed by young town planner Donald Gibson and included one of Europe's first traffic free shopping precincts (in 1946 the first one was realized in Rotterdam, the idea of which was copied throughout the world.)
A new modern cathedral was also built. The rebuilt Coventry Cathedral was opened in 1962 next to the ruins of the old cathedral. It was designed by Basil Spence and contains the tapestry, "Christ in Majesty" by Graham Sutherland and the bronze statue of St. Michael and the Devil by Jacob Epstein.
As a result of postwar redevelopment, Coventry now shares the stereotype of 1960s architecture: concrete and brutalist. The development of Coventry's central business district was unnaturally restricted through the construction of a major orbital ringroad in the early-1970s, leading to a hotch-potch of "mixed use" city zones with no clearly defined functions, aside from an increasingly dated 1950s shopping precinct and the cathedral quarter. Residents were unanimously appalled at the construction of the Cathedral Lanes shopping complex in 1990 at Broadgate, and this is still generally regarded as symbolic of everything that is wrong with postwar planning in the city Nevertheless, several pockets of the city centre still have a number of fine medieval and neogothic buildings (Ford's Hospital, The Golden Cross, St Mary's Guildhall, Spon Street, Bluecoats, the Council House and the old Cathedral etc) having survived both the Blitz and the post war planners.
The city was twinned with Dresden, which had suffered an even more devastating bombing attack by the Royal Air Force later in the war, and groups from both cities were involved in demonstrations of post-war reconciliation. Today Coventry has a strong partnership with Dresden and is deeply supported by the populace in both cities; representing the entire English people, Coventry took part on the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden by manufacturing a copy of the roof cross in 2003.
Throughout the 1950s and up until the mid-1970s, Coventry remained prosperous and was often monikered as "Motor City" or "Britain's Detroit" due to the large concentration of car production plants across the city, notably Jaguar, Standard-Triumph (part of British Leyland), Hillman-Chrysler (later Talbot and Peugeot) and Alvis. During this period, the city had one of the country's highest standards of living outside of south-eastern England. The population of the city peaked in the late 1960s at around 335,000.
The introduction of high-quality housing developments, particularly around the city's southern suburbs (such as Cannon Park, Styvechale Grange and south Finham) catered for a larger middle-class (and relatively well-paid working class) population. Coupled with some of the UK's finest sporting and leisure facilities of their time, including an Olympic-standard swimming complex and its pedestrianised shopping precinct, Coventrians enjoyed a short-lived golden age.
However, the decline of the British motor industry during the late-1970s and 80s hit Coventry hard, and in the early-1980s up to 20% of the workforce was unemployed, amongst the highest rates in the UK. A corresponding rapid increase in petty crime also began to give the city a poor reputation nationally.
The economic recession of 1990-1994 also hit the city hard. A hit record widely believed to be about Coventry (although actually inspired by a trip to Glasgow), "Ghost Town", by local band The Specials, summed up the situation in the city in the summer of 1981.
In recent years Coventry has largely recovered, undergoing significant redevelopment and regeneration (again, not to everyone's taste) and encouraging newer industries to locate in the city. Although no further car production will take place in Coventry after December 2006, both Jaguar and Peugeot UK have vowed to continue with their head office and research operations in the city. However, motor production in the city still exists today in the form of the LTI (London Taxis International, formerly Carbodies) production plant in Holyhead Road, which employs 450 people and manufactures the popular "black cab", the current model being the LTI TX11. The world-famous FX4 black cabs were manufactured in Coventry from 1959 to 1994.
[edit] Historic population
- 16,000 (1801)
- 62,000 (1901)
- 220,000 (1945)
- 335,238 (1971)
- 300,800 (2001)
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Albert Smith and David Fry: (1991). The Coventry We Have Lost. Vol 1. Simanda Press, Berkswell. ISBN 0-9513867-1-9
- Albert Smith and David Fry: (1993). The Coventry We Have Lost. Vol 2. Simanda Press, Berkswell. ISBN 0-9513867-2-7
[edit] References
- ^ Regan, Geoffrey (1996). The Guinness Book of Flying Blunders. Guinness Books. ISBN 0-85112-607-3.
- McGrory, David (1993). Coventry: History and Guide. Dover, N.H.: A. Sutton. ISBN 0-7509-0194-2.
- Slater, Terry (1981). A History of Warwickshire. London: Phillimore. ISBN 0-85033-416-0.
- The websites below were also used as references
