It was in this year that the remaining rights of the Earls of Chester passed into the hands of Queen Isabella, the widow of King Edward II, who she'd had murdered in Isabella had been banished by her son, Edward III, who was to rule England strongly for fifty years, but now from Cheylesmore Manor, she had a new interest - the control of the former Earl's half of Coventry.
As explained above in A Town of Two Halves" , since Coventry had remained under the singular control of the Prior. During this time of the Prior's seignority, the more commercially enlightened men of the southern half of the town were constantly in bitter dispute with their oppressive overlord. Obviously very upset that Roger de Mold had lost much of the Earl's power in Coventry, Isabella used her influence as Queen Mother to fight back against the Prior at every opportunity in an attempt to gain increased control of the town.
She broke many written agreements, and made herself extremely unpopular with the churchmen, but the free men of Coventry had a new champion, and it only took Isabella fifteen years for the most significant stage in Coventry's development to occur It was supposedly the first municipal charter of its kind in England, and it meant that Coventry could now have its own Council which could elect its own Mayor.
Coventry's first Mayor was John Ward , however, his election did not occur until We now officially had a city. This act would have come as a fatal blow for the Prior and his monastery because the Charter of Incorporation effectively excluded their involvement with the more powerful Earl's half of the town.
A decade later, with another agreement called the "Tripartite Indenture" in , the Prior's and Earl's territories came under the singular control of the Corporation. After centuries of influence, the Prior was no longer a significant power in Coventry. Coventry as a County y medieval times, due largely to a thriving textile and weaving trade, Coventry had become the fourth largest and possibly the best defended city in England, only smaller in population and wealth than York, Bristol and, of course, London.
Our city was, in effect, the 'capital' of the Midlands. The Royals fled here in June after an uprising by 50, men of Kent. In , King Henry VI granted Coventry along with its surrounding hamlets the elevated status of County , and so, from the 6th December there existed the "County of the City of Coventry" which would carry this status for nearly four centuries. For many years the people of the outlying areas forming Coventry's county had been unhappy with their situation.
Compared with their Warwickshire counterparts they were paying much higher rates to Coventry Corporation - and yet they also had fewer rights, for instance, not being allowed to elect Members of Parliament. The Municipal Reform Bill in spelled the end for our county status and also for the various powers and privileges held by the Craft Guilds for many years, and so seven years later, new Town Councils took over the running of each municipality around England.
Many local people feel that Warwickshire is still our rightful home, and when one looks at a political map showing county boundaries, Coventry stands out like a sore thumb from its current position in the West Midlands, which has been our administrative county since the restructuring. Perhaps one day we will revert back to the county where we belong. Coventry the 'Capital City'! King Henry VI had become prone to periods of mental illness, and in suffered a second bout, lasting into It was perceived that the King's power, and indeed his life, might be in danger, and so Queen Margaret, now effectively in charge, moved the Royal Court to Coventry, known by many as her "secret harbour".
In August at St. Mary's Guildhall , Coventry's Mayor and 91 councillors met, and pledged money and allegiance to the Lancastrian cause in the ongoing War of the Roses. Coventry was now the seat of government, and it is said that Margaret surrounded herself with all the trappings of luxury and culture with which she had become familiar in their London household. For all the prestige that this may have brought on our city, providing home to the Royal Court was a tremendous strain on local resources, and the ordinary people of Coventry must have wondered what advantage was being gained by our sudden fame and hospitality towards the Royals.
The final parliamentary meeting to be held in Coventry occurred in December as events were turning for the worse between the Yorkists and Lancastrians. Although Henry VI was to have another brief spell as king between and , again, with help from Richard Neville, known as "Warwick the Kingmaker" Edward IV's return for the next twelve years spelled the end for Lancastrian rule.
Mary's Priory - an event which became known as the "Parliamentum Indoctorum" or "Unlearned Parliament" , so called because all lawyers, who were deemed to be troublesome or, more to the point, too familiar with the law , were excluded from the meeting. The Dissolution of the Monasteries hilst most people are familiar with the destruction that the bombing by the Luftwaffe inflicted upon Coventry in World War Two, fewer will be aware that Coventry was uniquely unlucky in being the only city to lose its cathedral church in this manner.
However, it's likely that fewer still will realise that our city has suffered a similar fate twice in its history! The 16th century dissolution of the monasteries at the hands of King Henry VIII had every bit as devastating an effect on Coventry as Adolf Hitler's reign of terror in the mid 20th century.
Thinly disguised as a method of reducing the enormous power that the church, and in particular the monasteries, held across the land, Henry slowly began to dissolve the age old institutions.
The real reason that appears to prevail, however, was greed. The monies and treasures gained were not to go to charitable institutions, as had been presumed by the Priors, but to bolster the King's coffers. The ordinary townsfolk had been softened up by the King who promised that the income from the dissolution would mean no more taxes would be asked of them.
Not completely satisfied with the return from the first round of suppression, in Henry ordered that the remaining monasteries be dissolved. The first monasteries in Coventry to fall were Whitefriars and Greyfriars ; the Fransiscan monks of the latter finally surrendered on the 5th October These two institutions had very modest incomes of just a few pounds per year.
In , the order was given to dissolve the much larger Benedictine priory and cathedral of St. Coventry's Bishop, Roland Lee and the Prior of the church, Thomas Camswell, pleaded for it to be saved, suggesting that it could be used by the Church of England but their pleas were unsuccessful, perhaps partly because two substantial parish churches lay nearby, but certainly due to the fact that Coventry was a shared diocese with Lichfield and two cathedrals would be an unnecessary luxury.
The choice made by Henry VIII was not a difficult one; he particularly disliked monks, and Lichfield was secular and conformed more with the king's wishes. The Coventry abbey was officially taken by the Crown on the 15th January , and that same year the smaller St.
Anne's Charterhouse on the London Road also fell. The Priory had been by far the single largest creator of industry in the town, and this is supported by the fact that after the event the population fell from around 7, to somewhere in the region of 3, The general effect of the suppression around the country was also testimony to the false economy made by Henry VIII. The money raised for the Crown by the dissolution turned out to be only a small fraction of the income generated by the church through its monastic activities.
As for the former priory itself, records indicate that it remained largely untouched for the first six years. It can be assumed that during this period King Henry VIII robbed it of all valuables, but in all attempts to retain the church had been exhausted, and St. People flocked into the city, drawn by the development of ribbon weaving and watch making. By the population of the city was 36, The great slump in the weaving trades in the s is reflected, however, in a decrease of over 3, in the population of the municipal borough between and ; numbers decreased in all the parishes of the city and former county of the city, but the greatest decline was in St.
Michael's parish and in Foleshill. Michael Without and Holy Trinity Without. In the population was , again including St. Michael Without and Holy Trinity Without , and in the enlarged city had , inhabitants. It is almost certain that Coventry first came into existence as an Anglo-Saxon settlement. Although Dugdale implies a pre-Roman origin by his derivation of the name Coventry from 'Convent' or 'Cune' an alternative name for the River Sherbourne and 'tre' a British word for 'town' , fn.
However, the site, lying as it did within a bend of the River Sherbourne the name is Old English , fn. The word 'Cofa' may, however, refer to the shallow basin in which the place lies.
The church of St. Nicholas, subsequently a chapel of Holy Trinity, fn. Osburg, its abbess, in the late 10th century, that this nunnery was destroyed by the Danes under Edric the Traitor in , and that Leofric and Godiva used the same site for the foundation of their Benedictine house c.
Mary, St. Peter, St. Osburg, and All Saints. Osburg's day survived: in Bishop John Burghill ordained that in the city and suburbs of Coventry there should be a special feast of St.
Osburg the Virgin and special services held in her honour; fn. It is as yet impossible to locate with certainty the first settlement of Coventry. Dugdale thought that the most ancient site was on the hill outside Bishop Gate to the north and he cited in evidence the then recent discovery of the 'foundation of much building there' and the presence of St. Nicholas's churchyard; fn. Nicholas's Church probably already in existence for at least a century was the centre of a flourishing suburb in the 12th century fn.
The suburb probably developed, however, out of an early settlement, for Middleborough Terrace laid out by fn. Osburg's Pool, and the low-lying 'moor' between them skirted by two branches of the River Sherbourne. But a settlement in the wooded river valley at Spon or in the well-watered Gosford area would have been more in character with the known practice of the Angles and Saxons. If the tradition that a Saxon nunnery dedicated to St.
Osburg stood on the same site as the later Benedictine abbey has any validity, then Saxon occupation must be assumed very near the centre of the medieval and of the modern city. The abbey site is partially enclosed by the River Sherbourne on the north and rises fairly steeply to the south. If Leofric and Godiva had any dwelling within Coventry it probably lay due south of the abbey. Archaeological evidence for Saxon occupation has so far been scanty and inconclusive.
A fragment of a carved cross-shaft, thought to date from the late 10th century, was found in the s below the present level of Palmer Lane, where it had been incorporated in earlier street paving; it has been suggested that this cross may originally have stood in the forecourt of St. Osburg's nunnery. For the 12th and particularly for the 13th centuries there is considerable evidence in deeds for street names and for descriptions of properties lying in those streets; fn.
The main outline of Coventry's street plan in the later Middle Ages was, therefore, to persist for nearly years. The most striking feature of this plan fn. During its course through the builtup area this thoroughfare was nearly a mile and a half long, stretching from the suburb of Spon outside Spon Gate on the west to Gosford Green beyond Gosford Gate on the east. The River Sherbourne lay mostly to the north of this road, but was three times crossed by it, at Spon Bridge in the extreme west, at Smithford Bridge, and at Gosford Bridge.
From Broadgate the main exit to the north was by way of Cross Cheaping, St. Nicholas, and towards Nuneaton. A central outlet from the city on the south side was precluded by the presence of Cheylesmore manor-house and its park. To the north-east of Broadgate was a network of lanes leading to the churches of St. Michael and Holy Trinity and to the Benedictine priory; the Great Butchery and the Little Butchery lay immediately outside the west gate of the priory precincts.
Further north, beyond the river, were Cook Street and St. Agnes Lane. It is clear from the evidence of corporation deeds that most of the streets lying north of the east-west spine road had been built up at an early date, so that when the city wall was erected in the later 14th century there was considerable disturbance of properties on its northern perimeter.
Before the middle of the 14th century Queen Isabel had rented as many as 88 building plots in Cheylesmore Park to citizens of standing in the city. This lay-out has been called 'Coventry's first piece of town planning'. Outside the walls the western suburb of Spon stretched from Spon Gate to Spon Bridge with the 12th-century leper hospital and its chapel of St. Mary Magdalen beyond. The leper hospital was founded in Henry II's reign. It was referred to as a vill in the early 13th century fn.
A croft called Bannecroft lay northwards towards Spon Cross, which may have been at the top of Hill Street. To the north of the city, also outside the walls, were the suburbs of St. Nicholas and Harnall, fn. South of the highway was Shortley Field and north of it was the common field of Coventry, Harnall Field, which stretched as far as Gosford Green.
It was more probably, however, a third bridge situated north of Far Gosford Street in Harnall Field, where the most important of the many small bridges over dykes and streams in the area mentioned in were situated. At the dissolution of the monasteries and of the guilds and chantries only two of Coventry's nine religious foundations, Bond's Hospital and Ford's Hospital, were allowed to remain. At the Whitefriars and the Charterhouse surviving buildings were converted into residences and the precincts became the private grounds of their owners.
The site of the Greyfriars' house was left vacant, only the tower and spire of the church surviving. John's Hospital became the home of the Free Grammar School and much of the land formerly attached to the hospital was not developed until the mid 19th century.
Buildings belonging to the College of Bablake were used partly for a boys' hospital later Bablake School in and partly for the Bridewell in The ground occupied by the leper hospital at Spon End seems to have remained open except for its ruinous chapel, later converted into a barn.
On the site of the Benedictine priory, however, a few houses were built in the 17th century and two new streets were formed across it, Hill Top and New Buildings or Priory Lane. A comparison between the map of medieval Coventry and a survey of the city made by Samuel Bradford in —9 fn. The presence of the wall was one factor in stabilizing the street plan, limiting as it did any outlets from the town to those provided by the medieval gates.
Demolition of the wall was begun after the Restoration but not completed, and it was only in the late 18th century, when the roads through Coventry became important for coaching traffic, that the principal gates were cleared away. In the last decade of the century the north side of Earl Street and the east side of Burges formerly St. John's Bridges were rebuilt, fn. As the result of an Act of fn. This led from Broadgate to Greyfriars Green, fn. Between and Broadgate was widened and its junction with Smithford Street was rebuilt.
By the early 19th century the steadily increasing industrial population of Coventry provided an even more pressing reason for topographical change. At the same time the persistence of Lammas and Michaelmas rights over most of the land round the western perimeter of the city placed a stranglehold on expansion.
A few new streets were constructed across open ground — Chantry Place in , Union Street and Whitefriars Street in fn. Many gardens were rapidly built up with parallel rows of small dwellings, often with weavers' workshops on their upper floors. Passages through or between the houses on the street frontages provided the only access to these crowded and often insanitary courts.
William Reader, writing c. In the building of the so-called 'New Town' was begun at Hillfields to the north-east of the city, the only area then available for expansion; its new streets were largely occupied by ribbon weavers. Three water mills within the city were cleared away in the s, fn. Meanwhile to the west of the city, between Spon Street and Hertford Street, development had taken place in the s along the north side of Summerland Butts Lane later the Butts and Queens Road.
After the land further north had been built up with streets of small houses and Crow Moat had been filled in. Poddy Croft, a patch of Lammas land to the east of Crow Moat, remained open as gardens until late in the 19th century. Thomas's Church on the south side of Summerland Butts Lane was consecrated in Development immediately south of the city was of a different kind. In the early 19th century the new buildings in Hertford Street were occupied by banking houses and superior shops, while some good town houses had already been built in Warwick Row overlooking Greyfriars Green.
Between the park and Whitley Common the new cemetery, opened in , was so imaginatively laid out that it became a favourite promenade for the townspeople. The cutting of the railway across the park and the opening of Coventry Station beside Warwick Road in fn. By a terrace of large houses, known as the Quadrant, had been built on a former orchard near Greyfriars Green. By the late 19th century, when building land on the high ground to the south of the railway became available, the character of the area as a superior residential suburb had been firmly established.
The Lammas and Michaelmas lands were at last inclosed in and , and in and the first boundary extensions took place. Soon after fn. There was similar but more sporadic development along Stoney Stanton Road, leading north-eastwards to the colliery settlements at Alderman's Green and Hawkesbury.
Building to the east of the city had spread as far as Swan Lane, almost linking it with Upper Stoke. The former residential suburb round Stoke Green was rapidly being engulfed by streets of small houses. Development had also begun on the former Boston estate to the south of Far Gosford Street and at the northern end of Cheylesmore Park. South of the railway large detached houses had been built along Warwick Road, while further west Earlsdon was expanding eastwards to meet the residential streets near Spencer Park.
In the extreme west Chapel Fields was still an island of urban development, but much new building had taken place nearer the city which now extended as a continuous built-up area as far west as the branch line to Nuneaton. In addition there was a great tongue of built-up land, mostly industrial in character, extending north-eastwards to include much of the former parish of Foleshill.
Earlsdon, now joined to Chapel Fields by a solid block of streets north of the railway, formed another salient in the south-west. Partly because of sewage difficulties, fn. To the south some new residential streets, with a block of factories to the east of them had been built near the station on what was formerly Cheylesmore Park, but most of the park, together with Stivichall Common and Whitley Common, still formed a large tract of open land.
After the First World War a major contribution to the expansion of Coventry was made by corporation housing schemes, laid out for the most part at lower densities than the earlier terraced streets. The first estate, at Stoke Heath, had been started during the war itself to accommodate munition workers at the Ordnance factory in Red Lane. After , when sewerage had been provided, large estates were built at Radford, and at Hill Farm further north.
At Holbrooks, in the extreme north, a corporation estate was laid out just inside the city boundary in , to be followed by much private development in the same area. A sewerage scheme for the Sowe valley to the east of Coventry was carried out between and , fn. By new building stretched from Stoke Heath in the north to Pinley in the south and extended nearly as far east as Walsgrave-on-Sowe.
In the later s corporation and private estates began to cover the southern half of the former Cheylesmore Park and the hitherto rural land at Stivichall. The War Memorial Park to the west of Stivichall had been opened in fn. This was mostly in the form of detached residences in large gardens, but a few streets of small houses were also built. To the extreme west of the city, beyond Fletchampstead Highway, there were large areas of private building on both sides of Tile Hill Lane before , and corporation housing had been started at Canley to the south of the railway.
Between the wars the pattern of Coventry's growth was influenced not only by the availability of sewerage but also by the location of important factories which were built or enlarged on the outskirts. Franciscan friars arrived in Coventry at about They were known as Grey Friars because of their grey costumes.
The Carmelites arrived in Coventry in They were called white friars and lived in the Southeast corner of Coventry. They were run by the church. In it monks cared for the sick and poor as best they could. In Coventry had a population of 6, but it slowly declined and by it was only 6, In the priory was closed. However, Coventry Grammar School opened in Bablake Free School was founded in Like all towns in those days, Coventry suffered from outbreaks of plague. One severe outbreak was in Then in came civil war between king and parliament.
During the civil war, prisoners were held in the Church of St John. The phrase came to mean excluded from polite society. In Charles II ordered the people of Coventry to destroy the walls around the city perhaps remembering how his father had been refused admission in Most of the walls were broken up and the stone was used for new buildings, but the gates remained.
The traditional industry of Coventry, weaving and dyeing wool declined in the 17th century. On the other hand, a new industry appeared.
As early as silk was woven in Coventry. By the end of the 17th-century silk weaving was an important industry. The spire and steeple of one of the churches are very high and is thought the third highest in England.
In the same churchyard stands another large church, which is something unusual, two such great churches together. Their towers and the rest of the churches and high buildings make the town appear very fine.
The streets are broad and well paved with small stones. The traditional wool industry in Coventry continued to decline although silk ribbon weaving boomed. From the midth-century watchmaking also became an important industry in Coventry. In the later 18th century most of the town gates of Coventry were demolished as they impeded the flow of traffic.
New Gate went in Spon Gate went in and Greyfriars Gate was demolished in Bastille Gate survived until but today there are only 2 surviving gates, Swanswell and Cook Street. The Market cross in Coventry was destroyed in However, it was rebuilt in In a dispensary was opened where poor people could obtain free medicines. Coventry gained its first newspaper in and from night watchmen patrolled the streets of Coventry.
It is doubtful if they were very effective! The first stretch of Coventry canal was built in By it connected Coventry to the Trent and the Mersey. In the population of Coventry was 16, By the standards of the time nit was quite a large town.
By the population of Coventry had reached 37, and by about 62, There were many improvements in Coventry in the 19th century. A gasworks opened in Coventry in and the town soon had gas street lighting. For the next years, Coventry had no cathedral, but changing patterns of population settlement meant that a major reorganisation of Church of England diocese structure was inevitable, and in the Diocese of Coventry was created.
But what to use as the cathedral, since the original cathedral building had been destroyed by Henry VIII? The answer was to use St Michael's parish church, which stood just a few yards from the site of St Mary's Priory. St Michael's was begun in the late 14th century and though it was considerably smaller than the original cathedral building it was still one of the largest parish churches in England. This second of Coventry's cathedrals was destroyed on 14 November , when the German Luftwaffe raided the historic city centre of Coventry.
The raid levelled most of the city centre and devastated the cathedral building. Despite the destruction, the west tower of the cathedral miraculously survived, relatively intact.
Immediately after the bombing raid, the decision was made to build a new cathedral, leaving the shell of the medieval building to serve as a reminder of the futility and waste of war.
In the aftermath of the bombing the Provost of Coventry Cathedral, Richard Howard, made a fateful decision, one that still echoes today.
He decided that rather than simply build the new cathedral as a focus for Anglican worship, the new cathedral would be at the heart of a movement for peace and reconciliation between all people, of all faiths.
On Christmas Day Provost Howard made a radio broadcast, offering a vision that when the war was over he would work to build ' a kinder, more Christ-child-like world ', with the new cathedral acting as a Centre for Reconciliation. As you explore the cathedral you find numerous sculptures emphasising the focus on reconciliation and building bridges between people of all faiths and backgrounds.
Beside the ruins of the medieval cathedral is the third building to act as Coventry Cathedral; a striking modern building designed by Sir Basil Spence, with the help of some of the leading artists and architects of the day. Rather than a purely Church of England sacred space, Coventry's new cathedral was intended from the beginning as a space where people of all denominations and all faiths could gather together.
Spence, who was later knighted for his work, was clear from the start that the old cathedral should be retained, to act as a garden of remembrance, and should be linked to the new structure to essentially create one large church with both an indoor space for worship and an outdoor space for contemplation.
The new cathedral was consecrated in and the opening ceremony was the first performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. The modern design caused comment at first, but was quickly embraced by the public as a symbol of reconciliation and peace. One of the interior highlights is a huge tapestry of Christ, thought to be the largest tapestry in the world. On the exterior wall is a sculpture by Jacob Epstein showing ' St Michael's Victory over the Devil ', and another Epstein sculpture graces the ruinous medieval cathedral.
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