Those Places Thursday - Ludlow

I succumbed to temptation (as usual) today and bought a book in the Summer Sale in The National Archives bookshop. The book that I bought, Ludlow: an Historical Anthology, by David Lloyd and Peter Klein, isn't one of the online bargains, it was only available in the on-site shop, and there were only a couple of copies (sorry). I mention it because it's about Ludlow, a place I have only visited once, several years ago, but I just loved it.

Ludlow has a lot of history, which always tends to endear a place to me, and a lot of old buildings there are intact. The biggest of these is Ludlow Castle, and one of the most famous is the Feathers Hotel.

Thomas Wright's History of Ludlow (1852) is on Google Books, with some fine illustrations, and the Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Ludlow Castle and the Church of Saint Lawrence, Ludlow (1869) by the same author. You can find some gazetteer entries and a several travellers' accounts of Ludlow on A Vision of Britain Through Time.

As befits such an historic town, it contains many listed buildings - 402 of them to be exact. You can feast your eyes on these on the English Heritage Images of England site, and a collection of old photographs the related Viewfinder site.

The Feathers hotel

Records for Ludlow are held at Shropshire Archives, which has a good range of information leaflets and guidance on family and local history. They are also working on a series of Place Guides, which look very promising, although they are working through the alphabet and have reached the letter G, so no Ludlow yet, but it will be worth looking out for, judging by the standard of the guides they have produced so far.

The historic Feathers Hotel dates back to 1619, and as you would expect in a building of that age there is hardly a straight line in the place. It is reputed to be haunted, but I suspect this is the result of a combination of overactive imaginations and creaky floorboards. I didn't see any ghosts when I was there, and I loved it. Writing this has made me want to go back to Ludlow - and the rest of Shropshire, come to that, it's a lovely county.

Ludlow is dominated by its medieval castle, which has a fascinating history of its own. it is adjacent to the town, but is not part of the parish of Ludlow, it is an extra-parochial place.

Ludlow Castle

Manorial Documents Register - Shropshire now online



Acton Burnell manor house, Shropshire      


Few people consider using manorial records while researching their English and Welsh ancestry, but you’d be surprised how useful they can be. One of the difficulties can be that they are not always easy to track down – they can be held a long way from the place they relate to, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find them, you just need to know how.

When I first began doing family history research, to track down manorial documents I had to go the National Register of Archives building, discreetly tucked away in Quality Court, Chancery Lane in London. This was the same street that housed part of the Public Record Office, but at that time there was no other connection between these two organisations. In 2003 they combined to form The National Archives, and both are now entirely based at Kew.

The first thing you had to do was identify the manor that you wanted, which might or might not have the same name as the parish where your ancestors lived. If it did have the same name, it didn’t have the same boundaries, and there might be a number of manors connected with the parish. You had to ask for the parish books, which were lovely chunky little volumes, arranged by county, that listed all the manors relating to each parish. Once you knew the manor or manors you were dealing with, you needed another set of books, the manor books, which told you what records survived for each manor, and where they were held. Some of them were roughly where you might expect them to be, and others were in places you might never think of looking. For example, most of the manorial records for Chesham, where I live, are in the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, or in record offices in the neighbouring counties of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire. But if you are interested in Andover, Hampshire, you’ll find plenty of records in the Hampshire Archives, or Winchester College Archives, but also a sizeable number at Magdalen College, Oxford, which is not the first place you’d look for Hampshire records! There are even some documents here at The National Archives, and one set which isn’t in a record office at all, but is in private hands.

Nowadays this part of the process is a little easier, because the chunky little books have been microfilmed, and are on open access here in The National Archives, Kew. For some counties, including the whole of Wales, you can even do the search online, although for the really interesting bit, looking at the actual records, you still have to go to a record office in person. The latest county to be added to the online Manorial Documents Register is Shropshire, so this might open up some new possibilities for research if you have a connection with that county. I don’t, but I wish I did, because it’s a lovely place to visit.

If you want to know what you might find in manorial records, and why they might be useful to you, there is a useful Research Signpost on the subject, with links to more in-depth information.