JOHN MOOREHERITAGE SERVICES - Archaeology Data Service

John Moore HERITAGE SERVICES Cobrey Farm, Ross on Wye, Herefordshire
An Archaeological Desk-Based Assessment
The manor of Kingstone formed a large part of the
parish of Weston-under-Penyard parish (Cooke 1882, 218-20). This included the area
that later became Penyard. The first holders of this manor after Domesday are the
Talbot family, when they held the manor it is known to have been subordinate to the
manor of Eccleswall and Linton. The estate was later vested in the 1 st Earl of
Shrewsbury. In 1631 many of the trees across Penyard Park were felled for the
purpose of iron smelting. In the 1630s the holder of the manor was the Earl of Kent
who died in 1639, his widow who inherited the estate held this until 1647 and it
continued to descent in the family. In 1792 the estate was sold to William Partridge of
Bishop’s Wood. The site of the old manor house or castle is considered to be that of
Weston-under-Penyard old rectory, which is considered to be the location of an older
fortification that commanded the defile between Penyard Hill and the Forest of Dean.
The abbey of Cormeilles had a priory cell at Newent in Gloucestershire; it was this
priory that was responsible for the holding of the manor at Kingstone in the parish of
Weston-under-Penyard (Area A). The priory like others produced a cartulary (HRO
AS 85/1-3) this provides an account of the land holdings of the Kingstone Manor, and
shows the payments received by the priory and also some of the field names. There
are various quitclaims between the abbot of Cormeilles and the abbot of Gloucester
accounted in the texts, suggesting that some of the estate bordered lands held by the
abbey of Gloucester (in the area of Hope Mansell). The field names recorded include
Benmede or Benmedw, Hurland, Redale, Hent Tessparoc, Rudarsmede and Belawe.
The only name identified to date is Redale, considered to be an early form of Rudhall,
located on the northern boundary of Weston-under-Penyard parish. The name Belawe
is also worthy of some assessment as the final component is undoubtedly Old English
hlæw or hlāw, a mound or tumulus (Gelling 1976, 880). The word transforms into a –
lowe and ultimately –low. Only one regional name in the parish contains this name
Wallow, now a farm located to the south of Area A. It is possible that the first part of
the name may be corrupted. The extract in the cartulary refers to this place as a
location where horses were bought and sold. A barrow in the Wallow area may be
suspected, it could be Roman, located along the line of a Roman road leading from
the large Roman settlement to the south into the Forest of Dean. The cartulary (HRO
AS 85/1-3) also mentions wood and forest named Yarkeldone in the Forest of Dean
(Smith 1965, 192); this is located on the parish boundaries of Aston Ingham and
Newent and shows that some of the holdings of the manor were detached.
The manorial arrangement of the lands around Walford-on-
Wye and Weston-under-Penyard are complex and it is not simply the case that a
straightforward line of descent can be described for Cobrey Park or the area around
Frogmore in Weston. The manors of the king, which were originally focused on
Linton, and the ecclesiastical manors, focused on Ross-on-Wye, formed a large
cohesive territory (see the parochial arrangements below). The division of this
territory between lay holdings and ecclesiastical holdings must have originally
occurred in the early medieval period, for which we can only start to appreciate the
complexity of the arrangement through the catalogue of manors in the Domesday
Book. Though Coughton and Cobrey Manor and Penyard Park lay in the parishes of
Walford and Weston it is apparent in the later medieval records that these lands must
have originally been catalogued in the estate holdings of the king at Linton, Cleeve
(to the southwest of Ross) and Kingstone. Post the dissolution of the monasteries the
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