Historical Snippets
In the year 1086 William The Conqueror’s agents visited Harley and made their notes for subsequent entry in The Domesday Book - so-called because it was as difficult to escape its reckoning as would be The Book of the Day of Judgement.
The entry reads:
The same Helgot holds Harlege: Edric, Ulmar, Elmund and Earic held it for four manors and were free men. There four hides pay geld. There is land (enough) for four and a half ploughs and three serfs and (there are) one villein and one bordar. There is a mill and wood(land) for fattening one hundred swine. TRE (i.e. In the Reign of King Edward the Confessor) it was worth twenty-one shillings. Now forty shillings. He found it waste. Nowadays, we have rather more free men and women rather than the few villeins, serfs and bordars mentioned here, though Harley remains pretty un-crowded. The mill is still here and some of the land is still farmed though the last working farm within the village ceased operations a couple of years ago. Despite this loss, this nucleated village maintains its agricultural character.
It is a designated Conservation Area and pretty rare in that agricultural land comes right into the built environment. On the edge of one such piece of land (known as Pound Filed or Pound Piece - although early maps refer to it as Coneygree and the rabbits are still there in numbers!), bordering the central village lane, is the village pound, the subject and purpose of this website.
It is a listed building despite looking until recently (to some, untutored, eyes only, it has to be said) a mound of rubble. But now we, the community of Harley, have restored it as a reminder of our agricultural heritage, whatever we now do for a living. It symbolises our pride in our heritage here in rural Shropshire, according to P.G.Wodehouse, England’s best effort to create paradise on earth.
Harley, by the way, comes from two Saxon words: har meaning hare, and ley meaning a clearing in the forest. A thousand years ago the areas all around Harley, across the Severn to the Wrekin, up over Wenlock Edge to the Forest of Shirlett, down the eastern lands of the Ape Dale, was all woods. Ape Dale refers not to our primate ancestors, of course, but to the fact that the valley at the head of which Harley lies, was once a place where the monks and nuns of Much Wenlock Abbey placed their beehives. (Apiaries!)
In 1348 The Great Pestilence or Bubonic Plague arrived in England and spread to south Shropshire within a few months. This area was hit even harder than most, it seems, from the numbers of clergy who died. It is recorded that rents fell in Harley from £4 to ten shillings because of the pestilence. There was a manor house in Harley but not long after the Plague the lord seems to have vacated it and there is no trace of it now.
In 1868, the National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland recorded:
"HARLEY, a parish in the hundred of Condover, county Salop, 2 miles N.W. of Much Wenlock. It is situated on a branch of the river Severn. The surface is level, and the soil generally light. The tithes have been commuted for a rent-charge of £260. The living is a rectory in the diocese of Lichfield*, value £276. The church is dedicated to St. Mary. The charities produce about 21 per annum."
(Transcribed by Colin Hinson © 2003)
*St Mary’s Church in Harley is now within the diocese of Hereford
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