You will see it on the Guildhall gates, on the war memorial plaques, on a bronze sent to a minesweeper in 1942 and on a painted board made for the town’s five hundredth birthday. A blue anchor on a silver shield, a gold fetterlock threaded through its shank, a sword on one side and a red rose on the other, and underneath the motto Pro Deo Rege Grege. It is Bewdley’s coat of arms, and it is more informative than most.
What the blazon says
Heraldry has its own language, and the official wording, recorded at the College of Arms, runs like this: “Argent an Anchor in pale Azure ringed and the shank interlaced by a Fetterlock Or enclosing on the dexter a Sword erect Azure hilt and pommel Or and on the sinister a Rose Gules.”
In plain English: on a silver field, a blue anchor standing upright with its ring showing, the shaft threaded through a gold fetterlock, and inside the fetterlock a blue sword pointing up with a gold hilt on the right and a red rose on the left. Dexter and sinister are given from the shield’s point of view rather than the viewer’s, which is why the sword looks like it is on your left.
A fetterlock, for anyone who has not met one, is a shackle: a padlock with a hinged loop, the sort used to hobble a horse.
What it means
The anchor needs no explanation in a town that lived off the Severn for six hundred years, though Bewdley’s boats were flat-bottomed river trows that never needed much of an anchor. It stands for the river trade rather than the sea.
Beyond that the design invites more interpretation than any of the documents actually supply. The College of Arms certificate records the blazon, not the reasoning. What can be said is that the fetterlock is a badge with strong royal associations, and that Bewdley owes its borough status to Edward IV, whose house used a fetterlock as one of its devices. Whether that is the intended reference is a fair question for the Town Council or the Historical Research Group rather than something to assert here.
The motto, Pro Deo Rege Grege, means for God, for the King, for the people.
Where to find them
A painted wooden shield hangs in the Guildhall, its brass plate reading: “Presented to the Borough of Bewdley by His Worship the Mayor Councillor Rowland Fellows, 5th February 1957.” It is the version most people picture when they think of the arms.
The arms are also worked into the wrought iron of the Guildhall gates on Load Street. And there is a third that almost nobody looks at, though thousands of people drive over it every day: Historic England’s listing for Telford’s bridge records that the central pedimented tablet on the balustrade bears the arms of Bewdley. Next time you cross, look up at the middle of the parapet.
How a borough’s arms outlived the borough
This is where the story turns, because in 1974 the borough of Bewdley ceased to exist. Local government reorganisation swept away hundreds of small boroughs and put Bewdley into the new Wyre Forest district, and arms belong to a corporate body rather than to a place. When the corporation went, its arms should in principle have gone with it.
They did not, because somebody made sure of it. By an Order of Her Majesty in Council dated 16 April 1975, the armorial bearings of the corporation of the borough were transferred to the Town Council of Bewdley, so that they now “as of right pertain and belong” to the successor body. The certificate recording it, signed at the College of Arms on 10 December 1975 by Anthony Wagner as Garter King of Arms and J. R. B. Walker as Clarenceux, hangs in the Guildhall.
The practical effect is that a shield granted to a medieval borough, and used by a corporation that no longer exists, is still flown by the parish council that took its place. It appears on the twinning certificates, on the Charter Festival board of 1972, and on that bronze plaque sent out to a trawler in the Mediterranean. For a town that has spent five centuries holding on to what Edward IV gave it, keeping the arms through the abolition of the borough is entirely in character.