The older half
Wribbenhall appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as an outlying estate of the manor of Kidderminster. Bewdley does not appear at all. The Norman surveyors recorded the east bank and ignored the wooded west bank entirely, and the town that now has the name and the tourists did not yet exist.
The name itself is a puzzle. Burton lists the spellings it has carried over the centuries: Gurbehale, Wrbehale, Wurbenhal’, Wrobbenhale, Wurbenli and Wrignall. The Normans had no letter W, which accounts for some of the variation, and the derivation is still uncertain. He also notes that the name originally covered a larger area than the modern parish, and that it once included Bewdley.
Older still is what has been found in the ground. Archaeological work at Wribbenhall has produced evidence of Mesolithic settlement dating back to around 6800 BC, which currently stands as the oldest known human habitation in Worcestershire. Flint tools, and pollen suggesting that people were already clearing the primeval woodland to farm.
Who owned it
The descent of the manor is a good illustration of how medieval property actually moved. The Bewdley side of old Wribbenhall was given to Worcester Monastery in the eleventh century. The rest, as part of Kidderminster, stayed with the Crown until Henry II gave it to his cupbearer, Manser de Biset.
The Bisets held it until the reign of Edward I, when the family came down to two co-heiresses. One of them had leprosy, and gave her share to the hospital for leprous women at Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire. The other half, including Wribbenhall, was held in 1337 by Sir Nicholas Burnell, whose son gave Eymore Wood to the Priory of Worcester. After the dissolution the wood went to the Dean and Chapter of Worcester.
From the Burnells it passed to the Barons of Abergavenny, was bought from them by Lord Foley of Witley, and in 1838 came to Lord Ward, later Earl of Dudley, who was lord of the manor when Burton was writing.
The canal that nearly came here
This is the part that changes how you look at the place. Wribbenhall had excellent quays, and when the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal was being planned, James Brindley at first proposed putting the canal basin here, at Wribbenhall, rather than three miles downstream.
It went to Stourport instead, and Stourport is a town that exists because of it while Bewdley’s river trade slowly died. Had Brindley’s first proposal been built, the basins, the warehouses and the traffic would have been on this bank, and the history of both towns would read differently.
Some idea of the scale of the trade that did pass through survives in a single detail recorded by the county historian Nash: at a spring tide, as many as four hundred packhorses have been quartered in Wribbenhall for several nights together. Four hundred horses, in a hamlet, waiting for the river.
A chapel, and a long argument about a key
Wribbenhall got its own place of worship in 1701, when the chapel of Christ Church was built by subscription on a piece of garden ground held on lease by one John Cheltenham, on condition that Cheltenham was allowed a free seat. The inhabitants then deprived him of his seat. In response, the lord’s steward had the key taken away from the parish clerk and given to Cheltenham, who kept it, and let the clerk come and ask for it whenever he wanted to toll the bell.
It escalated, and it took fifty years to do it. The land was bought in 1728 by Lord Foley, and in 1750 Foley ordered the curate, Mr Collins, to hand over the keys. Collins refused without the consent of the inhabitants. Foley’s steward responded by padlocking one door and sealing up the other, and Foley’s own nominee turned up to read prayers on Sundays instead. Foley’s position was that he owned the building outright and could do as he liked with it, including pulling it down. The matter went to the Attorney General, who ruled for the parishioners: Collins was curate for life, and the inhabitants had a right in equity to the use of their chapel.
The registers of baptisms and marriages begin in April 1723. Remarkably, given that it had been in use for a hundred and forty years by then, neither the chapel nor its grounds were consecrated until 1841. A district chapelry was assigned in June 1844, and in 1856 Wribbenhall was made a separate parish in its own right.
All Saints
Burton’s verdict on the old chapel is unimprovable: “well built, but completely devoid of architectural beauty”.
Its replacement was built in 1878 on land given by Walter Chamberlain Hemming of Spring Grove, along with the ground around it, which had already been serving as a burial ground for the people of Wribbenhall since 1866. Hemming’s widow paid for a great deal of the building. All Saints was consecrated on the Eve of All Saints in 1879, which is the sort of detail you hope for and rarely get.
Christ Church was then pulled down, its disused churchyard enclosed, and a stone cross set up on the spot where the altar had stood. One thing made the journey from the old church to the new: the original baptismal font, which is still in use.
Inside All Saints is a brass to Colonel Philip Wodehouse of the 15th Hussars, who died at Wribbenhall in December 1846, and who was “actively engaged during the war of the Revolution until he witnessed its termination on the field of Waterloo”. The east window commemorates Hemming himself, who died in 1873, and another window remembers Martha Baugh, who died in 1865, “in memory of an unselfish life”.
The church stands on the same site as the Wribbenhall Parish Rooms and the Wribbenhall Social Club, and shares a vicar with the parish of Bewdley across the river.
What is still there
The oldest houses in the whole town are on this side: Nos. 5, 7 and 9 Stourport Road date from 1310, and a remarkable fourteenth century roof survives at No. 7. The wharves and warehouses that served the river trade line the bank opposite Bewdley’s quay.
And one advertisement, placed in Berrow’s Worcester Journal in 1773, offers Netherton Hall in the village to let, with a selling point that says everything about eighteenth century priorities: “There are Grates in the Fire-places, and the Rooms are genteelly hung with Paper.”
Wribbenhall and Bewdley were finally united as one municipal borough in the 1930s, though they remain separate parishes. It took about eight hundred and fifty years.