Tardebigge

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Map sources for Tardebigge at grid reference SP000690

Tardebigge is a village in Worcestershire, England.

The village is most famous for the Tardebigge locks, a flight of 30 canal locks that raise the Birmingham and Worcester Canal over 220 feet (67 metres) over the Lickey Ridge. It lies in the historic county of Warwickshire.

1 Development
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Development

Tardebigge was once a much greater township, which included much of Redditch, including the modern day town-centre.

Records of the parish, recorded twice in a will as Anglo-Saxon æt Tærdebicgan, begin in the late 10th century. Tardebigge was bought by the Dean of Worcester for his Church from King Ethelred the Unready. In the later Dark Ages there were battles fought between Ethelred's son Ironside and the Cnut the Dane.

The name Tærdebicga (whose dative case is Tærdebicgan) does not appear to have any likely meaning in Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or any other likely known language, and may be a stray survival from whatever aboriginal (perhaps Pre-Indo-European) language was spoken in England before the Celts came.

In the 12th century, the parish was granted to Bordesley Abbey, a Roman Catholic monastery. For three hundred years the area remained in the Church's possession. In 1538 the Roman Catholic Church was disestablished by King Henry VIII, and the area became the possession of the Crown, until under an arrangement with Henry, the possessions of Bordesley Abbey passed to Andrew Lord Windsor, and therefore to the stewardship of the Earl of Plymouth at adjacent Hewell Grange. The land was gradually managed and sold off by the Earl; it was not until the mid 19th century that the parish of Tardebigge began to dissolve and the modern boundaries began to appear.