Ashby dans la Forêt
If you know Ashby de la Zouch, then you probably won’t need to scrutinise the rest of this blog post. I’m betting, however, that at least some of you may never have visited this Leicestershire town. As it happens, we hadn’t either, but we did have reason to be in neighbouring south Derbyshire around 6pm of a Friday evening and, thanks to a certain chain of hotels offering a decent rate, we elected to stay the night in nearby Ashby de la Zouch. We were glad we did.
It turns out that Ashby dl Z seems to exemplify everything you ever learnt in history and geography lessons (and quite a few other subjects as well). Obviously Terroir enjoyed history and geography, but even if you didn’t, there is something very comforting in experiencing a real life example of the sort of things which teachers tried to instil in us from the age of four-and-a-bit to those teenage years when we were forced to specialise and may have parted company with history or geography, or indeed both.
Ask the internet for a history of Ashby de la Zouch and you tend to be tipped straight into Medieval England largely because of Ashby’s Castle (now part of the English Heritage portfolio) and partly because most people want to know why it is ‘de la Zouch’. We’ll come back to that when we’ve taken a look at what was around before the Norman Conquest.
School, legend, Shakespeare and the film industry taught us that the English midlands were once largely enormous forests: Sherwood Forest, Charnwood Forest, Needwood Forest, the Forest of Arden and so on. Terroir isn’t arguing with this but would point out that the legal term Forest as in say, a royal hunting forest, didn’t necessarily mean the areas was totally covered in trees. I suspect that there were plenty of clearings in this wooded area where people lived, farmed and mined useful materials, as well as hunted.
Aschebie, as it was known in pre Norman times, was probably typical of this type of landscape. It is recorded in the Domesday book of 1086 as having 21 households ‘putting it in the largest 40% of settlements recorded’ (https://opendomesday.org/place/SK3616/ashby-de-la-zouch/). Thank goodness for websites like these - we couldn’t make head nor tale of the Domesday survey when we were school kids but now access and interpretation is so much easier.
In modern times, this woodland heritage is beautifully referenced by the glorious ‘floorscape’ which was designed and constructed in Ashby just prior to Covid. Sadly, its nearby companion piece, ‘The Heart of the Forest’ struck us as less photogenic.
Enter the Normans in 1066: junior school history lessons were big on Norman castles - there were lots of them and they were, and still are, major features in the English landscape.
According to English Heritage, Ashby Castle started out as ‘just’ a manor house and formed part of the estate of the Earls of Leicester who ‘granted it to a family of Breton descent with the name ‘le Zouch’ (meaning ‘a stock’ or ‘stem’) in return for military service’ (https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/ashby-de-la-zouch-castle/history/). So now you know.
After the de la Zouchs, the manor was granted in 1462 to William, Lord Hastings, a wealthy and powerful man who cracked on with constructing the castle from the 1470s. However, we don’t think that Lord Hastings featured in junior school history lessons.
While we are in the middle ages, did you have those lessons on medieval agriculture? All that stuff about lords of the manor, villeins and strip farming? Leicestershire was always quoted as having very visible remnants of the ridge and furrow landscape created by the open field system. Here is how the Ashby Museum describes the sort of landscapes which developed around this feudal world.
The 19th century poet John Clare mourned the loss of these vast, medieval open fields as the Enclosure Acts enabled landowners to divi up the fields and commons into smaller units delineated by quick thorn hedges. In the late 20th century, we mourned the loss of so many miles of these hedgerows, grubbed up to allow landowners to farm this same land with ever larger machinery.
It seems that the Ashby parish church – St Helen’s - was technically medieval, as Lord Hastings started its construction, but it was reworked around 1670, 1829 and again in 1878-80. It is splendid inside and out and is Grade I listed, despite all that restructuring.
Two features, in particular, struck Terroir. At first inspection, the list of incumbents (image below left) appeared pretty standard until we spotted that not only were the vicars listed but also their patrons, ie the Lords of the Manor in whose gift the living lay. Not until 2015 did the patron become the established church itself, in the person of the Bishop of Leicester.
The finger pillory (below right) is mentioned in every website devoted to St Helen’s history, and rightly so. School taught us about pillories for the neck and stocks for the legs but no-one ever mentioned a finger pillory.
There are plenty of other churches in Ashby today and their denominations and history are a great example of all the politico-religious shenanigans which you may or may not have studied but will certainly have heard about.
Obviously St Helen’s incumbents were caught in the revolving catholic/protestant door initiated by Henry VIII in the 16th century.
During the Civil War in the 17th century, Ashby Castle was held for the King and became a geographically significant garrison town and the subject of an uncomfortably long siege. Royalist Commander Henry Hastings was finally forced to surrender in 1646, much to the ‘great relief to the surrounding towns and villages’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashby-de-la-Zouch).
Take one look at Ashby’s ‘townscape’ and you will know immediately that it is that quintessential English urban phenomenon, a market town. Market Street is the main north/south highway and is lined with magnificent timber frame buildings, or Georgian and Victorian brick properties, punctuated only occasionally with an unsympathetic 20th century intrusion. Ashby is heaving with listed buildings.
Even today, Ashby is well supplied with that essential adjunct to any market place - the inn or tavern. During the 17th century, however, there were more than 40 ale houses in the town, an abundance which caused the Puritan community much concern over unruly drunken behaviour, but also evidenced the continuing religious diversity of the English community.
In our brief visit, we saw little physical evidence of the industrial revolution, but the countryside around was pocked with mining enterprises, supplying coal, limestone and other minerals to industry throughout the Midlands. The Ashby canal – aiming to link the Trent to the Coventry Canal – never quite made it to Ashby itself and transport was supplemented by a horse drawn tramway. The 19th century brought the railway boom, with the Midland Railway finally arriving the 1870s, carrying coal and, increasingly, passengers. Passenger services stopped in 1964 but the neo classical, grade II* listed station still remains.
As an aside to the industrial and transport geography of the 19th century, Ashby also had aspirations to become a spa town, using water from a local spring, transported by canal and later railway. A large bathing complex, theatre, race course and assembly rooms were built but, after some initial success, the town failed to compete with more fashionable spa towns.
Our reminiscences of childhood geography lessons would not be complete, however, without returning to where we started, in the forests of Robin Hood and Shakespeare. The great midland forests are returning under the guise of ‘The National Forest’. Planting started in the 1990s, to extend and blend new woodland with the remnants of the old forests:
‘The National Forest is right in the heart of the country, embracing 200 square miles of the Midlands. It spans across parts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire and aims to link the two ancient Forests of Charnwood and Needwood. With a history of coal mining and heavy industry, the landscape is now that of rolling farmland, ancient forests and new planted woodlands. Its main towns and villages include Burton upon Trent (famous for its brewing), Coalville and Swadlincote (formerly associated with the clay and coal mining industries) and the historic town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch.’ https://www.nationalforest.org/about/what-is-the-national-forest
So it looks as though Ashby de la Zouch will once again become Ashby dans la Forêt. Bonne chance.
