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Appleby Magna 
Village Site

Appleby Fields and Tenements in Tudor Times

Appleby's situation in a small valley half a mile from the highway between Ashby and Tamworth fulfils the two indispensable requirements for an agricultural settlement: a supply of fresh water and access to cultivable land.  The first was provided by a small brook which flows between the church and the moat house before crossing the town meadow and draining into the Mease.  An irregular block of long, narrow tenement crofts enclosed between two roughly parallel streets backed onto this natural drainage channel to form a classic ‘two-row settlement’ . The second was provided by the fertile Keuper marl which covers most of the parish providing excellent ground for both livestock and tillage.

The Tudor tenants

The earliest record of the customary tenants of the manor in Tudor times is a list of admissions to the Great Court drawn up in May, 1546 in a stray court roll among the Paget papers which provides a partial list of the Appleby copyholders with the number of virgates held by each.

The list of copyholders shows nineteen customary virgates, a quarter of the standard unit of land for the support of a medieval villein, shared between ten copyhold tenants together with the cottager, Thomas Powdton who probably had only grazing rights on the commons. Nearly all of these names except Thomas Powdton appear in the seventeenth-century registers and other sources, such as probate records, or hearth tax assessments after 1660, although not always as copyholders. Cicely Howell's Kibworth study has shown that it was quite common for tenement plots to change hands, be severed and/or amalgamated into larger holdings.  John Heere (or Heire) who held two virgates on Paget's manor in 1546 was probably typical of the copyhold tenants in Appleby.  A man of the same name appears in a list of 25 inhabitants taking the view of Frankpledge at Great Appleby on 15th April 1594.  John's descendants retained their Appleby holding until the early Stuart period; Henry Heyre, identified as a husbandman, is cited in a 1604 Chancery dispute as lawful possession of a messuage with the remaining lease of arable lands for six years. But after 1629 the surname disappears from the register.  The absence of any further reference to the family before John and Catherine Here registered the first of their four children in 1719, suggests that the original holding had been granted to another tenant.

Comparisons of field outlines on modern ordnance survey maps suggests that the customary tenants on Paget's manor may have occupied a sixty to eighty acre enclosed site between the main streets containing their tenement yards, gardens, orchards and small paddocks, with the open fields extending out beyond this area as at Wigston Magna. The medieval church and moat house representing spiritual and secular authority, are centrally placed, the church on a slight eminence, the moat house on lowlying ground making defensive use of the brook.  In  Elizabethan times there was a rectory on or near the site of the late Victorian almshouses opposite the church, and a large tithe barn alongside the eastern wall of the churchyard. The hallyard, alongside the moat house, was divided into four ‘closes’ one of which contained an orchard. Besides orchards and dovecotes which provided a supply of fresh fruit and meat for the household, the demesne comprised six yardlands of arable, three of ‘ley and meadow’ and five pasture closes, covering altogether 460 customary acres. A condition attached to a lease of 1628. that all ‘lease and grass ground’ belonging to the demesne was to be marked with a ‘greate Roman S’ on the baulks at the end of each ridge, suggests that some of the field strips were leased and others given over to pasture.

When William Paget granted the manor of Great Appleby to Eleanor Brereton in 1554 there were twelve houses, four tofts or unoccupied tenement plots, and six cottages.  This, together with the lists of jurors in the manor court rolls from 1594, indicates that there may have been as many as twenty households in the village at this time. Preliminary field investigations have established the location of some of the sites mentioned in the early records. Although the findings are speculative, the surviving medieval building structures, field outlines and earthworks help to support the information provided in some of the early documents.  Leases of the demesne, for example, refer to two water mills belonged to the lordship.  One probably lay close to the moat house where there are traces of a sluiceway.  The other, rebuilt in 1620, was at Measemeadow. Brick and rubble foundations in Dormer's Hall close are almost certainly the remains of the homestead occupied by a seventeenth-century family of that name while numerous marl pits in an adjacent enclosure are testimony to the attempts made to improve the heavy clay soils

The hamlet of Little Appleby

Little Appleby is a secondary settlement or hamlet about a mile south of the church.  The original settlement appears to have grown up at the crossroads where the fieldway between Appleby and Austrey intersected the highway from Atherstone to Burton-on-Trent.  The late medieval settlement pattern has been largely obliterated by eighteenth-century alterations to the highway However, a line of cottages facing onto a small lane to the east of the new road provide a clue to the sixteenth-century layout, which conforms to a standard crossroad pattern on a north-south alignment, clearly shown on John Prior 1777 map of Leicestershire.  In 1506 Edmund Appleby left twenty houses on his demesne at Little Appleby, which suggests that the settlement was as large as its parent village by then.

Sources and Notes

For an explanation of the settlement typology see: B.K. Roberts, 'Timeless Villages from Medieval England', in Man-Made the Land: Essays in English Historical Geography, eds.  A.R.H. Baker and J.B. Harley (Newton Abbot, 1973), 46-58.

S.R.O. Paget Papers, Court Roll D(W) 1734/J2009; Paget held lands in Appleby and Austrey for 1/20th of a knight's fee in 1546: Jeayes, 'Burton Abbey Charters', SHC,1937, 187;

L.R.O. Bosworth School Rental (1650), DE 43/456; Appleby Hearth Tax Assessments E 179/134/332, E 179/251/9-18.

L.R.O. Appleby Court Rolls, DE 40/37/1.

P.R.O. Chancery Proceedings, Heyre v Wathew, 1604: C2/JAS i/w15-16.

Cf. for field layout at Wigston: W.G. Hoskins, 'The Fields of Wigston Magna', TLAS, xix (1936-7), 164-7.

A 1606 Appleby glebe terrier refers to ‘the parsonage ... lying between the Pooleyard on the north syde and the streete on the south syde’; The moat house and tithe barn are shown on a 1785 map of Bosworth School lands (DE 43/106); the other sites are discussed in, 'Notes for European Architectural Heritage Year' (1975), L.R.O. DE 176/11/1-3.

The hallyard closes are mentioned in a 1601 Plea of Trespass: HMC,Series 13, Tenth Annual_Report, Appendix IV (1885), 61.

 Ref. to demesne, L.R.O. DE 43/55; 43/63-4; 43/104-8.

Customs relating to the marking of boundary baulks are discussed in E. Kerridge, Farmers of Old England, 49.

Cal.Pat.Rolls (Philip and Mary) 11, 135; L.R.O. Manor Court Rolls, SE 40/37/1; Rental c. 1650, DE 43/456.

For field outlines see in particular the 1882 '25 inch' O.S. Sheet, Leics. XXII, 15; References to the mill at Mease Meadow in Babyngton Deposition (1552), L.R.O. DE 42/528; A letter from the miller to Thomas Moore listing repairs in 1705: DE 43/106; A possible site for the mill adjacent to the moat in the 1785 map: DE 319

I am grateful to Mr Richard Dunmore, former churchwarden of Appleby, for the topographic information upon which this section is based.  The traces of a well worn footpath due west from the church to the highway at Wigston (lit.Viking's tun) lend support to Mr Dunmore's suggestion of a Danish farmstead at this approach to the village.  Cf. Witghiton­  close in will of John Wright, (L.R.O. wills, 1606/83); The line of earthen banks and ditches due west of the church may be the remains of Danish or Saxon fortifications, later used as archery butts (Cf. Butyard end in field name survey (DE 176/1112; DE 40/37/1); Crosemerle Pitt and Fishmarlpit in Sloane terrier (c.1450), and limestone in Richard Erpe's inventory (PR I/56/36); For marling: W.G. Hoskins, 'The Fields of Wigston Magna', TLAS, xix (1936-7), 169.

The Late Tudor Inhabitants of the Parish

In late Tudor times Appleby’s population probably never exceeded 400 inhabitants, even allowing for the influx of labourers and transients from other parishes. The Liber Cleri of 1603 which is regarded as an accurate count of those who attended church regularly recorded 225 communicants. The parish registers, probate records and other sources provide a fairly accurate record of the surnames of all of the families associated with the parish in this period.