Austrey

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Austrey is a village and civil parish in the North Warwickshire district of Warwickshire, England. The village is situated in the northern extremity of the county, near Newton Regis and No Man's Heath, and close to the Leicestershire villages of Appleby Magna, Norton-juxta-Twycross and Orton on the Hill.

The village was also sometimes spelt 'Alestry'. [1]

1 Origins of the parish
2 Settlement Notes
3 Printed sources
4 External links

[edit] Origins of the parish

In Saxon times Austrey formed part of a great block of seventy or eighty midland vills belonging to Wulfric Spot, the Mercian king who founded Burton Abbey. In Wulfric Spot’s will of 1004 Wulfric left Austrey 'as it now stands with meat and with men', to one of his thegns who later transferred this part of the vill to the abbey.

After the Norman Conquest the abbot was forced to share suzertainty with Nigel d'Aubigny, one of the Conqueror's trusted retinue, who was given lands in the parish as part of the spoils of the Anglo-Saxon defeat. Although he retained two and a half hides in Austrey, the abbot was no longer the principal landowner in the parish. Domesday Book records 42 ‘inhabitants’ in the town.

The monks of Burton took advantage of rising wool prices in the medieval period to sublet their estates for sheep walks. Aubigny lands reverted back to Burton Abbey.

Between 1530 and 1580 there was a major redistribution of lands in the parish, triggering off a spate of land speculation. From the late Elizabethan period onwards the freehold farms were sold off and snapped up by the wealthier tenants. One of the Austrey manors came into the possession of the Kendalls of Smithsby through marriage with one of Henry Alstre’s co-heiresses in 1433. The Kendalls were well-established in Austrey by 1550 and they continued to consolidate their position after this date. The other Austrey manor held by Sir Walter Aston was broken up and divided among his tenants in the early 1600s.

By the Tudor period the village was divided into two separate parts: the original settlement cluster around the church and market cross at the Upper End and a later extension at the Nether End.

The parish church is dedicated to St. Nicholas and has a mid-thirteenth century tower and refaced fourteenth-century windows and chancel with four bells cast by Hugh Watts of Leicester in 1632.

The Kendalls, hereditary lords of the manor, declared support for Parliament at the outbreak of the Civil War and became involved with conventicles and dissent in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Henry Kendall was governor of the parliamentary garrison at Maxstoke from March 1644 to October 1645. The parish provided free quartering for a considerable force of parliamentarians commanded by Colonel Drummond and Sir Thomas Fairfax in 1646.

[edit] Settlement Notes

The antiquity of the original settlement is attested by a line of defensive earthworks below the church, and by its proximity to a natural spring or holy-well. The new settlement at the Nether End probably originated with Earl Leofric's original grant to Burton Abbey, which would account for the siting of the monks' farmstead at nearby "Bishop's Farm". The medieval pattern of settlement was scythe-shaped with tenements lining the main street running roughly parallel to the ridgeway from Orton to No man's heath. The earliest record of the customary tenants on Sir William Paget’s demesne in Tudor times is a partial list of the Austrey copyholders with the number of virgates held by each from a surviving manor court roll. All but two of the twelve tenants listed on the demesne in 1546 held a single virgate; one (Richard Cryspe) had a quarter and the other (Elizabeth Clerke) two virgates. Most of these family names are listed in the seventeenth century attached to Austrey farmers or craftsmen paying for a single hearth in the hearth tax returns.

[edit] Printed sources

Warwick County Records: Hearth Tax Returns, Vol. II, pp. 2-10.
C.G.O. Bridgeman, 'The Burton Abbey Twelfth Century Surveys', Staffordshire Historical Commission, 1916, 244-7.
Jeayes, 'Burton Abbey Charters', SHC,1937, pg. 187.
Calendar of Patent Rolls (Philip and Mary) II, pg. 135.