Bromyard and Winslow

Bromyard is mentioned in Bishop Cuthwulf’s charter of c.840. Cudwulf established a monasterium at Bromgeard behind a ‘thorny enclosure’ with the permission of King Behrtwulf, King of the Mercians. Ealdorman Aelfstan, the local magnate, was granted between 500–600 acres of land for a villa beside the River Frome. The settlement in the Plegelgate Hundred was allocated 30 hides for ‘the gap where the deer play.’ The shire court meeting-place was on Flaggoners Green, now a hill in the modern borough and it is where the cricket club is situated, sorry Bromyard . 42 villani (villeins, villagers), 9 bordars (smallholders), and 8 slaves were recorded in the Domesday entry, one of the largest communities in Herefordshire. The first mention of the spelling “Bromyard” was in Edward I’s Taxatio Ecclesiasticus on the occasion of a perambulation of the forest boundaries to set up a model for Parlements in 1291. It began to appear regularly in the church and court records of the 14th century.

Like Leominster, Ledbury, and Ross-on-Wye, the town and fair at the manor of Bromyard was probably founded in c1125 during the episcopate of Richard de Capella (1121–1127). As with those other three towns, the bishops of Hereford had had a manor and minster there since Anglo-Saxon times. As at Ledbury the church was collegiate, with an establishment of clergy known as “portioners”, but without a master and common seal. Surveys for the bishop made c. 1285 and 1575-80 give valuable information about the town’s first few centuries. Bromyard contained 255 burgage and landowner tenancies in the 1280s which paid a total rent of £23 10s 7 1/2d to the bishop. A Toll Shop at Schallenge House (“Pie Powder” from pieds a poudre) was where market tolls were paid and summary jurisdiction dealt out.

After the Reformation (1545) there were 800 communicants making Bromyard then “a markett toune…greately Replenyshed with People”, the third town in the county with a population of about 1200 souls. By 1664 Bromyard had fallen behind Leominster, Ledbury and Ross in population. Besides the central town area, the large parish used to consist of the three townships of Winslow, Linton, and Norton; these areas were civil parishes in the 20th century.

During the civil wars, Prince Rupert’s troops in March 1645 “brought all their on Bromyard and Ledbury side, fell on, plundered every parish and house, poor as well as others, leaving neither clothes nor provision, killed all the young lambs in the country, though not above a week old. Charles I stayed the night in Bromyard at Mrs Baynham’s house (now Tower House) on 3 September 1645 on his way to Hereford In 1648 Parliament ordered the sale of the cathedral’s property in Bromyard Forrens (i.e. outside the borough) for £594 9s 2d.

Bromyard Grammar School was re-founded in 1566 after the original chantry endowments had been nationalized. In 1656 the City of London Alderman John Perrin, who came from Bromyard, left the school £20 a year, to be paid through the Goldsmiths Company. The company improved the school buildings in 1835. The building still stands in Church Street, but the school became part of the first comprehensive school in Herefordshire in 1969, now known as Queen Elizabeth’s. A Congregational Chapel was built in 1701.