The name, and the ground
The Key to English Place-Names, compiled by the Institute for Name-Studies at Nottingham, derives Ribbesford from Old English and reads it as the ford by the bed of ribwort or houndstongue. The early spellings are Ribbedford and Ribeford in the eleventh century and Rybbesford in the twelfth. It is a ford name, like Bewdley’s own Lax Lane crossing, which is a reminder that this stretch of the river was passable long before anybody built a bridge over it.
The parish is a rough triangle, bounded on the east by the Severn and on the south-west by Gladder Brook, in the lower division of Doddingtree Hundred. When the Victoria County History surveyed it in 1924 it covered nearly 3,713 acres including the borough of Bewdley itself, of which 455 acres were arable, 1,560 permanent grass and 1,224 woodland. A conservation area of about 13.5 hectares was designated over the hamlet in 1991. A landscape survey in 2007 found holloways, boundary ditches and other medieval manorial workings in the ground around it.
The mother church, and how it swallowed the daughter
Bewdley began outside the parish system altogether, extra-parochial, most likely because it started as a settlement in the forest rather than around a church. A private Act in the reign of Henry VI put the town into the parish of Ribbesford, and St Leonard’s became its mother church. The Ribbesford registers begin in 1574 and cover Bewdley down to 1653.
St Anne’s only became a parish church in its own right in 1853, and even then the rector of Ribbesford remained its patron. Bewdley became a separate civil parish in 1866. Then the whole thing reversed. In 1940 the ecclesiastical parish of Bewdley was abolished and the two were united as Ribbesford with Bewdley. Roughly five centuries after an Act of Parliament made the town part of this parish, the hamlet church a mile out of town absorbed the large one in the middle of it.
St Leonard’s, and the two things that make it exceptional
The church is Grade I listed, and it earns it. A small church of about 1100 stood on what is now the north aisle, and only the western half of its north wall survives, along with a reset south doorway and carved fragments re-used elsewhere in the building. A south chapel probably followed later in the twelfth century. Then, in the first half of the fifteenth century, instead of extending the old church the builders put up a new nave alongside it and swallowed the original whole as the north aisle. The south aisle followed later in the same century.
The first exceptional thing is over the north doorway. It is a Norman tympanum of the Herefordshire School, showing an archer with bow and arrow shooting at a fish-like creature, with a hound below. The Victoria County History calls it well executed and in a good state of preservation, which is putting it mildly. Malcolm Thurlby has pointed out that the archer wears a Phrygian cap, as at Kilpeck, and dates the work to about 1125 to 1130, rather later than the church guide’s suggestion. Ribbesford was a Mortimer property, and the Mortimers were among the known patrons of that school of carvers. The timber porch of 1633, with the initials T.H. and H.W. cut into its beam, is very probably the reason the carving is in the condition it is.
The second is the south arcade, and it is made of oak. Five bays of octagonal posts with curved struts springing from the capitals to meet in two-centred arches, probably about 1450. On 13 June 1877 the church was struck by lightning, and the chancel, the east walls of the aisles and two east bays of the stone arcade on the north side had to be rebuilt. The wooden arcade opposite came through it. Frederick Preedy carried out the restoration between 1877 and 1879, and his ground plan and sketches survive at Lambeth Palace Library.
What else is in there
Fragments of the fifteenth century rood screen were re-used in the pulpit, and they are carved with a pig playing bagpipes and a fox preaching to a congregation of geese, the sort of satire usually found tucked away under a misericord where nobody has to look at it. Three monumental slabs stand against the west wall of the north aisle, the northernmost a calvary cross of probably the late twelfth century. There is a stone coffin lid of about 1300 believed to be Mortimer, and fifteenth century painted glass in the west window of the south aisle including a St George and the dragon panel that was found in the churchyard.
Of the three bells, the treble is by Abel Rudhall of 1756 and the tenor by John Rudhall of 1798. The second is of early form, probably twelfth century, in excellent condition and still in use. It is very likely the oldest working object in the parish.
The Burne-Jones window, and two famous grandsons
The west window of 1875 was designed by Edward Burne-Jones and made by William Morris’s workshop. Its subject is a beggar girl being given a cloak. It is dedicated to Hannah Macdonald, who was Burne-Jones’s mother-in-law, and who was also grandmother to both Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling.
That is a real and checkable connection sitting in the west end of a small parish church, and Bewdley makes remarkably little of it.
The manor, and a very long descent
Ribbesford belonged early to the priory of St Mary at Worcester and was lost in the Danish invasions. Recovered, it was given by Wulstan, Archbishop of York and Bishop of Worcester, some time between 1012 and 1023, to his sister for life on her marriage. After the Conquest the church of Worcester lost it again to Turstin the Fleming, who, in the chronicler Heming’s splendid phrase, “not long afterwards justly lost all his own possessions, as well as those he had unjustly kept from God”. Domesday records two manors of Ribbesford, both berewicks of Kidderminster and both in the king’s hands. Only one of them appears afterwards.
The Mortimers of Wigmore held the overlordship, and under them a family took the name of the place. Simon de Ribbesford, Roger Mortimer’s steward, held the manor in 1176. A later Simon gave up his right to hunt in La Oke wood and to pursue deer in Wyre without leave, with a proviso worth quoting: if his hounds chased deer out of his own woods into the forest, “the trespass, if it can be so called, is to be determined by friends”. Sir Henry de Ribbesford was keeper of Cannock forest in 1278, became a justice of the King’s Bench, was knighted before 1288, and in 1286 was commissioned to pull down the illegal weirs on the Severn between Gloucester and Shrewsbury.
The male line failed, and after a lawsuit in 1379 the manor went to the Earl of Warwick, then through the Warwick and Talbot inheritance to the Actons, to John Churchill in 1606, to Sir Henry Mildmay in 1621, and back to the Crown. Charles I gave it to the Herberts in 1627. It was sold in 1787 to Francis Ingram, passed by bequest to the Winnington-Ingrams, and left the family in 1904.
The Master of the Revels, and the chest nobody opened
Sir Henry Herbert was Master of the Revels to Charles I and again to Charles II, which meant that every play performed on the London stage went past his desk to be licensed. He was also MP for Bewdley in 1640, disabled from sitting by the Commons in 1642 for executing the king’s commission of array, compounded as a Royalist, and sat again after the Restoration until his death in 1673. He gave St Leonard’s a silver chalice in 1636 and a flagon in 1639.
When he died, Ribbesford held a large quantity of his manuscripts, including his office-book: the record of every licence he issued from 1623 until the theatres closed in 1642. An old chest containing that office-book, together with a manuscript of Edward Herbert’s autobiography, stayed at Ribbesford until 1789, when Francis Ingram found it. The family papers remained with the Ingrams until the British Library acquired them in 1998.
A primary record of the Jacobean and Caroline stage sat in a box in a house outside Bewdley for a century and a half before anybody looked.
One caution. George Herbert the poet held a share in Ribbesford, and scholars have built a good deal on it, including arguments about how the money affected his decision to take orders. Ronald W. Cooley has argued that the standard account of how the Herberts acquired the manor rests on an insecure foundation and must be revisited. Until that work is properly read, the safe statement is that the estate came to the Herberts in 1627 and that the details of the transaction are disputed.
Ribbesford House
The house is Grade II* listed, and the listing is unusually frank about why: partly for the potential archaeological interest of the fabric. Historic England describes it as mid sixteenth century, partly rebuilt in the late seventeenth, remodelled in the early nineteenth with some mid twentieth century alterations. What you see from the garden front, two octagonal towers capped with leaded onion domes, is not what was built. An eighteenth century painting once owned by the family showed the turrets as originally circular with conical roofs.
Sir Robert Acton built “a goodly mansion howse” here some time between about 1535 and 1558, and John Leland saw it and called it “Mr. Acton’s goodly mannour Place”. There was a moat, still traceable in 1924, filled in about 1790 when much of the old house was pulled down. The surviving fabric is brick, mainly of the first half of the sixteenth century, now completely disguised outside by an early nineteenth century facing of stucco in a loosely Elizabethan manner.
Two remarks about living in it have survived. In 1627 it was described as “pleassant for the somer, but not healthful for the winter”. And in 1666 Lady Herbert wrote to her husband about improvements she wanted, including another staircase, so that “we neade not cary strangers by the buttery hach”.
During the Second World War the house was the officer training academy of the Free French, which is a story of its own. In 1947 it was bought by Wing Commander Alfred John Howell, who converted it into twelve flats. His family held it for seventy-one years and sold it at auction in April 2018 for £810,000 against a guide price of £500,000. It went on to the Heritage at Risk Register with serious water ingress, and was sold again in March 2026.
One thing to be careful about
The long sandstone building opposite the church is often called a tithe barn, and the conservation area appraisal calls it one. The Victoria County History says the T-shaped sandstone range south of Home Farm probably formed the stables of Ribbesford House, and notes a tablet bearing the Herbert shield that would put it in the first half of the seventeenth century. Those are two quite different buildings to be describing, and on a question of building history the county history is the stronger source. Until somebody settles it properly, it is safer not to call it a tithe barn.