On 20 October 1472, at Westminster, Edward IV put his seal to a document that changed what Bewdley was. The town stopped being a possession and started being a place that governed itself. The original charter, written in Latin, was still kept in the town four hundred years later, in an ancient box decorated with roses.
What it actually said
The wording is worth quoting, because charters of this kind are usually summarised out of all recognition. Edward granted, at “the humble supplication of our dear lieges the Burgesses and Inhabitants of our town of Bewdley”, that the town “with its precincts may be a free Borough for ever”. The burgesses were incorporated as a body, given perpetual succession and a common seal, and made capable in law of buying and holding land, tenements, rents and services.
Then comes the part that mattered commercially. Bewdley’s burgesses were freed, throughout the whole kingdom, from a formidable list of charges: tolls, bridge taxes, ferry payments, harbour dues, duties for weighing wool, payments for anchoring ships, charges for market stalls, service with carts, tolls for driving pigs through a forest, contributions for making ditches and repairing town walls, and payments for unloading goods at a wharf. For a town whose living came from moving other people’s cargo, that was worth a great deal more than the honour.
Why Edward IV?
He had inherited the local estates through his Mortimer ancestry, so Bewdley was already his. But local tradition has always held that there was more to it, and that the charter was a reward. The Battle of Tewkesbury had been fought the previous year, and the story goes that the men of Bewdley did the new king great service there. Whether they did is not something we can prove, and it should be told as tradition rather than fact, but Tewkesbury is close enough that it is entirely plausible.
Charter after charter
The 1472 charter was the first of many. Further privileges came under Henry VII, and Henry VIII confirmed them twice, on 20 February 1509 and again on 5 November 1525. That second charter was still in the Corporation chest in the nineteenth century.
The most consequential of the later ones came from James I, who re-incorporated the borough on 12 September 1606. It set the governing body as a Bailiff and twelve Capital Burgesses, and it granted Bewdley the right to return its own Member of Parliament. One of the reasons the charter gives for the favour is that the town was the “frequent abode and residence of our Council in the Marches of Wales”. That charter, as modified by later reform, remained the governing charter of the borough into the Victorian period.
It was nearly lost. In 1684, in the last years of Charles II, the Crown was systematically annulling borough charters and issuing new ones on its own terms. Bewdley’s corporation agreed to surrender the James I charter, tempted by two promises: that every boat passing under the bridge would pay toll to the corporation, and that they could form themselves into companies and shut out traders from elsewhere. The alternative was to be taken to court. Charles II died before the new charter could be issued, and James II granted one instead, dated 4 May 1685. A further charter came from Queen Anne, and the town still has two maces from her reign, which is rare though not unique.
What the borough got out of it
An early survey sets out the practical rights plainly. The town held four fairs a year and two markets a week by charter, and the tolls of both the markets and the bridge belonged to the corporation. Against that, twenty shillings a year was reserved to the King. On any reading, the town had the better of the arrangement.
Five hundred years on
In 1972 Bewdley marked the quincentenary with a Charter Festival, and the painted board made for it still hangs in the Guildhall: the borough arms between the dates 1472 and 1972, with the older spelling Beaudeley on one side and Bewdley on the other. Princess Alexandra came to the town for the celebrations on 12 July 1972, and a photograph of her visit, presented by the then Mayor, Councillor Harold J Simmonds, hangs in the Guildhall too.
Three years later the borough itself came to an end in the local government reorganisation, and by an Order in Council of 16 April 1975 the armorial bearings of the old corporation were transferred to the new Town Council, so that the anchor and the rose granted to a medieval borough now belong to the parish council that succeeded it. Five hundred and three years after Edward IV sealed his charter, Bewdley was still arranging to keep hold of what it had been given.