Peter Prattinton, the Man Who Wrote Worcestershire Down

A good deal of what can be said about Bewdley before the nineteenth century comes, at one remove, from the notebooks of a local doctor. He never published the history he was gathering. He is buried at Ribbesford, a few feet from a Norman carving of an archer, and his name turns up in the footnotes of everybody who has written about this town since.

Who he was

Peter Prattinton, 1776 to 1840, was a physician and an antiquary, the son of William Prattinton of Bewdley. The monument on the north wall of St Leonard’s at Ribbesford commemorates them both: William, who died in 1789, and Peter, M.B. of Christ Church, Oxford.

The family had been in the town for generations. His great-grandfather, John Prattinton, bought the old inn up on Wyre Hill that had been the Shoulder of Mutton and later came to be called the Old Town Hall, a building with a projecting upper storey on pillars and a covered market underneath it. That is the part of Bewdley that came first, before the town moved down to the river.

What he spent his life on

Prattinton set out to write a history of Worcestershire and never finished it. What he did instead, for decades, was collect: transcripts, notes, printed books relating to the county, coins, antiquities, seal impressions, and above all his own drawings.

The collection went to the Society of Antiquaries of London, which still holds it and has catalogued it as the Prattinton Collection. It is one of the standard resources for the history of this county, and anybody who writes seriously about Worcestershire ends up in it sooner or later.

Why the drawings matter more than the notes

Among the papers is a large number of coloured drawings Prattinton made himself, of coats of arms in the churches of Worcestershire, mostly in painted glass. E. A. B. Barnard, writing about the collection in 1931, made the point that matters: a great many of those windows have since disappeared.

So for a number of Worcestershire churches, a Bewdley doctor’s watercolours are now the only surviving record of glass that no longer exists. He was not recording the county because it was permanent. He was recording it because it was going.

What he preserved of Bewdley

The town’s own oldest chapel is the clearest case. Tradition placed it at the foot of the bridge, nearly opposite the Saracen’s Head, at the spot the Court Rolls of 1748 call St Anne’s Corner. Prattinton identified a small building in Ross’s south-east view of the bridge as that chapel, and recorded that in his own day it was being used as a hearse house.

That is a thin thread, and it is the only one there is. The later chapel, the timber building dedicated to St Andrew that stood where St Anne’s is now, was pulled down in 1745 and no known illustration of it survives at all. Prattinton was writing close enough in time to talk to people whose parents had sat in it.

When John Richard Burton came to write his history of Bewdley in 1883, Prattinton is one of the sources he leans on. When the Victoria County History compiled its account of the parish in 1924, the same material was there to be used. A man who published nothing has been quietly supplying the footnotes for a hundred and fifty years.