Читать книгу History of Madeley including Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale, and Coalport онлайн

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The Court House, formerly surrounded by this park, and near to the station now called by its name—on the Great Western line—is an exceedingly interesting building, and one claiming the attention of the visitor. The present structure is in the Elizabethan style of architecture; but the grounds present traces of earlier buildings. In the years 1167, 1224, 1250, and again in 1255, mention is made of the Madeley Manor. In 1379 the estimated value of pleas and perquisites of the court is entered at two shillings.

Near the old mansion is the Manor-mill, formerly worked by a steam called Washbrook, which formerly supplied the extensive vivaries or fishponds that furnished the kitchen of the establishment with the necessary means of observing fast-days. Interesting traces of former pools and fisheries are observable. Under date 1379, we find the water-mill at the Court or Manor house “fermed” for 10s. per annum, and at a valuation taken of the prior’s temporalities at an earlier period, viz., 1291, the same mill is mentioned. Mills, then, were invariably the possession of the lord of the manor, lay or ecclesiastical, and tenants were compelled to grind there. They were therefore an important source of profit, and carefully enumerated, and it is worthy of remark that where a mill is described as being at a particular place, even at an earlier period—as in the Domesday survey of the country—there, as in the case of the Manor mill at the Court, one is now generally to be found in ruins or otherwise. In the garden, which is still highly walled, and which was probably originally an enclosed court, upon an elegant basement, approached by a circular flight of steps—the outer one being seven feet in diameter and the inner one about three—is a very curious planetarium, an horological instrument serving the purpose of a sundial, and that of finding the position of the moon in relation to the planets. It is a square block of stone three feet high, having three of its sides engraved, and the fourth or north side blank. Over this is a semicircular slab of stone so pierced that the eye rests upon the polar star.