In 1491 a man called Thomas Croft committed what Parliament itself described as a detestable murder in the Marches of Wales, and then he came to Bewdley. The record of what happened next is not local tradition and it is not a story handed down. It is the preamble to a Bill of Forfeiture passed in Parliament, which sets out that Croft had “commytted a detestable murder within the Marches of Wales, and thereupon is fledde, and hath taken the Sanctuary of Beaudeley”. He is the earliest fugitive here we can put a name and a date to, and he was a long way from being the last, because for a good part of a century Bewdley was one of the hardest places in England for the law to reach.
A town in neither county
The reason was almost comically simple. Nobody could say for certain which county Bewdley was in. The town sat on the boundary between Worcestershire and Shropshire, its jurisdiction had never been settled cleanly, and the townspeople worked out what that was worth. The Victoria County History puts the mechanism in a single sentence: “if any were indicted in Worcester they said their town and franchise was in Shropshire and vice versa”. The result was that Bewdley became, in the same account, “a harbour for fugitives and criminals”.
This was not sanctuary as most people picture it. Beverley and Durham held the right by formal grant, with marked boundaries and a recognised procedure. What Bewdley had was manufactured out of an argument over a line on a map, and it worked because neither county’s justices could be confident the ground under their feet was theirs.
The best witness to the confusion is a man who walked into it. John Leland, the king’s antiquary, came through Bewdley about 1539 and wrote the description that has been quoted ever since, of a town on a hillside that at sunrise “glittereth (being all of newe Building) as it were of gould”. What is less often quoted is how he opens. He says he entered Bewdley “in Schropshire, as some saye”, and then explains that the east end of the bridge and the left bank of the Severn were in Worcestershire, “but many say and hould” that the west end of the bridge and the right bank within the town were in Shropshire. That is a professional observer, standing on the medieval bridge, unable to tell you which county he had arrived in.
The priest who talked his way out of it
Thomas Croft is the clearest case but not the most entertaining one. Sir Thomas Tye, a priest, preached sedition at Bewdley in terms that were thought to sound much like treason. He was not prosecuted, and the reason given is the whole story in one line: the justices, “being here in the shire ground”, could not proceed. They had come to arrest a man and found themselves standing in what they had to concede might be the wrong county.
Bishop Lee’s ten-year campaign
Somebody in authority found this intolerable, and he lived up the hill. Rowland Lee, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, was President of the Council in the Marches of Wales, which worked from Tickenhill above the town. He had a reputation for hanging offenders in large numbers, and he had a lawless franchise on his doorstep that his own justices could not touch.
Lee and Sir Thomas Englefield pressed for years for an Act of Parliament to declare, once and for all, which shire Bewdley stood in. Lee’s argument was practical rather than legal. It “were better made part of Worcester”, he wrote, “as their parish church is clearly in that shire”. The parish church was at Ribbesford, a mile downstream and indisputably Worcestershire, and Bewdley’s own chapel was only a chapel of ease to it.
He did not think badly of the people. In the middle of complaining about the town he conceded that “they are as tall men as any the king has”, which in Tudor English was a compliment about courage rather than height.
The Act, and the two men who did not live to see it
The reform came in 1544, in the statute of 34 and 35 Henry VIII known as the Act for certain ordinances in the King’s Majesty’s dominion and principality of Wales. It placed Bewdley in Worcestershire, in the Hundred of Doddingtree, and that is where it has stayed. After nearly ten years of agitation, neither Rowland Lee nor Sir Thomas Englefield was alive to see it pass.
It was one of several pieces of legal tidying the town needed. Bewdley had been extra-parochial altogether until a private Act in the reign of Henry VI placed it in the parish of Ribbesford. A town that grew up quickly on a river crossing had arrived in the world without any of the usual paperwork, and it took Parliament two separate interventions to give it a parish and a county.
What was actually abolished, and when
There is a genuine puzzle here that our sources do not resolve, and it is worth setting out rather than smoothing over.
Leland, writing about 1539, states plainly that “There was a Privilege of Sanctuary given to this towne that now is abrogated”. That is the language of a formal grant, given and then taken away, and by his account it had already gone five years before the Act of 1544. The Bill against Thomas Croft in 1491 uses the same word, calling the place “the Sanctuary of Beaudeley”. The Victoria County History, by contrast, explains the whole thing as a practical consequence of the county dispute, which the 1544 Act ended.
Whether Bewdley ever held a formal privilege of sanctuary, or whether the word was simply the one people reached for to describe what the county dispute produced in practice, is not settled by anything we have been able to consult. Both readings sit in the sources. We have recorded the question rather than choosing an answer.
The chapel the fugitives are said to have built
One tradition attaches itself to all of this, and it should be read as tradition. The story, recorded by the town’s Victorian historian John Richard Burton, is that it was the fugitives themselves who first built the chapel in the town, so that they could receive the consolations of religion without going beyond their bounds. It is a good story and there is no evidence for it, which is a combination this town produces fairly often.
What is left of it
Nothing stands. There is no boundary stone, no marked limit, no building that says this is where the law stopped. What survives instead is a certain reputation, and a set of half-remembered ideas about Bewdley as a place where a man could disappear.
What can actually be demonstrated is narrower and considerably better than the legend. For something over fifty years either side of 1500, a man who reached this town was very difficult to prosecute, because two counties each maintained he was the other’s problem. It took a determined bishop, a decade of lobbying and an Act of Parliament to close it, and the two men who fought hardest for it both died first.