The Annals of WillenhallHackwood, Frederick William
History
The Annals of Willenhall
Hackwood, Frederick William
Willenhall (Walsall, England)
Although the precise location of the Tettenhall battleground has always
puzzled the antiquaries, there are, says one authority, “three lows on
the common between Wombourn and Swin, placed in a right line that runs
directly east and west, and about half a mile to the north of them is
another, by the country people called Soldiers’ Hill. They are all large
and capable of covering a great number of dead bodies.
“There cannot be the least doubt but this place was the scene of action,
for King Edward, to perpetuate the memory of this signal victory, I
presume, here founded a church, called by the name of the place Wonbourn,
now Wombourn; and took this whole parish out of the parish of Tettenhall,
which, before this battle, extended as far as the forest of Kinver.” It
may be added, for whatever such support is worth, that in times past a
number of ancient weapons have been dug up at Wombourne.
Coming to the latest and most reliable authority, Mr. W. H. Duignan, of
Walsall, here is what he writes in his admirable work, “Staffordshire
Place Names,” under the heading “Low Hill,” which is the name of an
ancient estate at Bushbury:—
“Huntbach the antiquary, wrote in the 17th century that there was then a
very large tumulus here. Much, if not the whole of it, has been since
destroyed. The hill is lofty and a place likely to be selected for the
burial of some prehistoric magnate. In 911 a battle was fought between
the Saxons and the Danes, called in the Chronicles the battle of
Tettenhall, but which was really waged on Wednesfield Heath (now Heath
Town).
“The dead were buried as usual under mounds, which in Huntbach’s time
still remained, and were known as North Low, South Low, the Little Low,
the Great Low, Horselow, Tromelow, and Ablow (many of these names
survive), besides others which had then disappeared. It is therefore
difficult to say whether the low here was a prehistoric tumulus or a
battle mound.”
Dr. Langford, in his “Staffordshire and Warwickshire” (p. 177), writing
less than forty years ago, says that “a large number of tumuli exist near
Wednesfield”; but the utilitarianism of the farmer and the miner would
make it difficult to find many of these grass-crowned records on the
Willenhall side of the battleground now. Dr. Windle, in his able work,
“Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England” (published in 1904) gives a
list of existing Barrows and Burial-mounds in this country, including
some nine or ten in Staffordshire, but makes no mention of Wednesfield,
Wombourne, or Tettenhall.
[Picture: Decorative flower]
II.—The Saxon Settlement
Fourteen or fifteen centuries ago the cluster of places which we now know
as the town of Wolverhampton, and the numerous industrial centres grouped
around it, were then primitive Saxon settlements, each of them peopled by
the few families that claimed kinship with each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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