vacation ludlow shropshire, Town Walls

vacation ludlow shropshire Town Walls vacation ludlow shropshire vacation Ludlow Shropshire, Ludlow castle, Ludlow town, town walls, the marches, ditches and ramparts, town's charter, Ludlow, garden, murage grant, town, portcullis, Broad Gate, holiday cottages, vacation ludlow shropshire, You may find the text below interesting to read if you are planning to stay in our holiday cottages. Welsh marauders and vagabond kidnapping thieves seem a good enough reason to want to build a gate and wall system around any town I would think, so it was for the early settlement in Ludlow. Some form of protection was needed for the townsfolk and their merchandise. The early earthwork defences at the time, mostly comprising ditches and ramparts, one such being the later redundant Christcroft, needed vast improvement but as with all things of worth this would come at a cost. There was needed therefore a plan of action, also money and an agreement as to what, when and how much? First things first then, get permission, so it was that this entry is found in the Patent Rolls on 17 December 1233, "the men of Ludlow have letters for the enclosure of their town". Next a plan, the gates would have been the easy bit, one across every road into Ludlow at the point where the wall came to the road, the position of the wall would have been the tricky bit. One can imagine the uproar when the occupants of a property found that the proposed new town walls were going to take part of their garden, or even the whole of their home, the ensuing agitation, disputes and then compulsory acquisitions. It was no surprise then that not much more was done until 1260, and perhaps only then because there were more attacks on the town by the Welsh in the 1250's. So now for the financing of the project, the townsfolk could not and the Lord would not, but help was at hand in the form of a new taxation, nothing changes. As there were many more towns in the marches that needed walled and gated protection built, and repaired, the King's exchequer thought up the "murage grant". It meant that a Lord responsible for a town could apply and be granted a "murage", which was the right to charge a set tax on a list of goods brought into their town to be sold, the money taken would have by law to be spent on the towns defensive town walls and gates. This murage grant was for a set number of years usually anything from 3 to 12 and was renewable, as in Ludlow, until this right of murage was enshrined in the Town's Charter by Edward 1V on 7th December 1362. The substantial walls, with Ludlow castle forming one corner, encircled the outer parts of the Ludlow Town, and became very useful as the support of lean-to homes (a time honoured custom in Ludlow), and in later more peaceful times a very handy ready source of building stones. The sturdy lockable gates, some of which may have been in the form of a draw bridge and defended with a portcullis which helped to control the entry of undesirables, and assisted in the collecting of tolls and fines, were inserted where the walls encountered a roadway into town. Taking the name of the roads for their names they became now known as :- Mill Gate, Linney Gate, Old Gate, Galdeford Gate, Corve Gate, Dinham Gate and the only surviving one the famous Broad Gate. So there were 7 gates in all, and with the wall it took a possible 10 years to complete the bulk of the work, from then just a bit of tweaking and repairs. Oddly though, the tax was still taken for quite a few hundred years.

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