∞ A Warwickshire parish on the River Avon

Ashow

The Making of a Warwickshire Village

Nine hundred years of one small place — its fields, its families and its losses — read from old maps, rentals and a single famous crime.

FOLLOW THE RIVER

Most villages keep no record of themselves. Ashow is different: since 1561 its landlords mapped and counted nearly every field, farm and family.

What follows is drawn from those surveys — 1597, 1649 and 1776 — from the parish church, from wills and probate inventories, and from David Clark’s 1990 study of the parish. Scroll the river of years, open the maps, and search the rentals for a name you know.

1 The river of years

Nine centuries on the Avon

Tap a year to follow it downstream →

2 The parish index

Find a name

Type a surname. The rentals of 1597, 1649, 1776 and the 1884 directory will tell you which years that family farmed, rented or lived in Ashow — and the village’s great theme: how rarely the same names last.

Names transcribed from the original surveys. See the full scanned tables for exact acreages and rents: 1597 holdings · 1649 holdings.

The vanishing names

The surveys expose Ashow’s real character: its families rarely lasted. From each roster of households, only a handful carried over to the next count — and no surname appears in more than two of the four surveys.

1597 24 households in Ashow Towne
4surnames survive to 1649Dadley · Clarke · Hollicke · De Lene
1649 an almost wholly new set of tenants after enclosure
1surname survives to 1776Tym / Tims
1776 15 principal tenants
6surnames survive to 1884Billington · Dormer · Freeman · Lee · Lynes · Russell
1884 41 households

Survivors after David Clark’s comparison of the 1597, 1649, 1776 and 1884 lists. Search any of these names above to trace them through the parish.

3 The surveyor’s hand

Explore the maps

The Leighs’ surveyors drew the parish field by field. Tap any map to open it full-screen, then pinch or scroll to zoom into the numbered closes and copperplate field names.

4 A test of belonging

The parish quiz

Ten questions drawn from nine centuries. Answer them, and the parish will tell you your station — from passing stranger to Lord of the Manor.

5 The whole account

The story, chapter by chapter

David Clark’s full text. Open a chapter to read.

Words from the old parish

Yardland
Not an area but a measure of entitlement — the share of the common fields and grazing a tenant could claim. In 1597 Ashow, one yardland was about 43 acres.
Husbandman
A working farmer holding land by yardland: the broad middle of village society.
Cottager
Held a cottage and garden but no rights in the open fields; usually worked for the farmers.
Tenant at will
After enclosure, one who rented from the lord with no fixed term — held only at the landlord’s pleasure.
Open fields
The medieval system in which arable land lay in scattered strips, farmed in common to a shared rotation.
Enclosure
The consolidation of those strips into private, hedged fields — in Ashow, around 1647.
Fulling
Cleansing and thickening woven wool: steeped in stale urine, beaten in the mill, then stretched on tenterhooks.
Maslin
A mixed crop of rye and wheat, sown and harvested together.
Lynchet
A bank or terrace built up along a slope by generations of ploughing — as in the Roman fields at Glasshouse Wood.
Glebe & advowson
The glebe was land supporting the priest; the advowson, the right to appoint him — held at Ashow by the Leighs.
Rood & perch
Old land measures: four roods make an acre, forty perches a rood — the units in the rental tables.
Petty treason
The killing of a social superior, such as a servant her mistress — the charge that hanged Ann Heytrey in 1820.
6 Beyond the book

The record continues

David Clark wrote in 1990. Here is the same parish on today’s public record — including one detail his book got wrong.

The parish, counted

1001502002051801176183114918611171981104200110820111412021

Residents at selected censuses (shown evenly, not to time-scale). A Georgian peak of 205 in 1801, a long decline to a low of 104 in 2001, then a modest recovery.

Still here, still small

From that peak of 205 in 1801, Ashow dwindled through the Victorian years — just 117 by 1981. The 2021 census counted 141 residents (69 men, 72 women) in about 51 houses: a modest recovery, yet still a fraction of the parish the old surveys describe.

Protected ground

The whole village is now a Conservation Area. The Church of the Assumption of Our Lady is Grade I listed (1967); Trinity Cottage and the Ashow Village Club — the former school — are Grade II listed (1987).

The bells still hang

The four bells John Briant of Hertford cast in 1793 remain in the tower. Long believed unringable, recent work has brought them back into use.

Clark’s guess came true

He wondered in 1990 whether the estate might become a golf course. Stoneleigh Deer Park Golf Club opened on the Stoneleigh estate, the Avon winding through it, in 1991 — the very next year.

The murder, corrected

Clark dates the hanging to August. The contemporary execution broadside is unambiguous: Ann Heytrey was hanged at Warwick on 12 April 1820 — the killing of Sarah Dormer having taken place months earlier, on the day of the village Wake, 29 August 1819. She was the last woman publicly executed at Warwick, and the case is still argued today. Local legend makes her ghost the ‘White Lady’ of Chesford Bridge.

Sources: Historic England (National Heritage List for England); Victoria County History of Warwickshire; UK censuses 2001–2021 and 19th-century Parliamentary & Imperial Gazetteers; Harvard Library English Crime & Execution Broadsides; Church Bells of Warwickshire. Compiled 2026.

7 Add to the record

Do you know this place?

If you live in one of these houses, recognise a family name, or have an old photograph of the village, the parish would love to add it to this record.

Spotted an ancestor, recognise a house, or have an old photograph or memory to add? Get in touch — every scrap helps the record grow.

nicksibly@hotmail.com