History
Kindly written by Andrew Houldey for Corse Parish Council, Millennium 2000
A thousand years ago Corse formed part of the home estate of the great minster church of Deerhurst. There was at that time no village, no church and little in the way of settlement: this was a landscape of dense oak woodland broken by tracts of heath, moor and open scrubland. To the south was a fenland wilderness of reed, sedge and alder from which the parish takes its name: Corse is British for marsh or bog.
In the Middle Ages all that part of Gloucestershire between the Severn and the Leadon formed part of Corse Chase. The hunting rights belonged to the Earls of Gloucester and they governed the chase through special forest laws framed to protect the deer and preserve their woodland cover. Assarting, the enclosing and clearing of land for farming, was regulated by licence and the taking of wood for building or firewood or even the pasturing of swine in the oak woods was strictly controlled through a forest court held at Witcombe Gate near Wickridge Street. Enforcement sometimes went well beyond the bounds of law. In 1276 the foresters of Corse Chase were said to have arrested men in Gloucestershire and imprisoned them in Worcestershire without trial and to have beheaded a man whom they merely suspected of sheep stealing.
The long process of clearing the woodland by axe and fire and bringing it into cultivation began in the west and was not completed until the late 18 th century. The earliest settlement was probably at Oridge Street where Domesday recorded a small estate of half a hide (60 acres) in 1086. The name, first recorded in the early 11 th century, signifies an enclosure into which wild beasts could be hunted.
On the southern boundary of the parish, the settlement of Corse, comprising the church and the adjacent moated manor house known as Corse Farm, was first mentioned in 1155. Corse Church was probably originally established by the occupants of Corse Farm. Stone built, with a western tower and broach spire, the fabric of the church dates from the late fourteenth century, although the font is Norman. It is first recorded in 1290 when the Prior of Deerhurst was patron of Corse church. The church is described as a chapel to Deerhurst in 1312 and 1384, indicating that Corse had been part of the large area served by Deerhurst priory church.
Corse Farm preserves a cruck-framed open hall dating to c.1280. The elaborately carved cusping on the cruck blades and traces of soot on the roof timbers hark back to a time when the hall was open to the roof and the smoke would have wafted upwards from the open hearth and out through the still-surviving smoke vent in the roof. Three carved arches and remains of a bench indicate where the Lord of the Manor of Corse, his reeve and his bailiff would have held court. The house was brought up to date in Tudor times when the jettied cross wing was added and an upper floor and chimneys inserted before it was sold off in 1592 as a farm.
Corse lawn from Corse Wood Hill
The fork where the Ledbury and Upton Severn roads divide is seen in the foreground. In the centre is Course Vicarage, to the right is End House, and to the left is the church with Corse Farm just discernible. In the background is May Hill.
In the medieval period land was held mostly as unfenced strips scattered around the parish within large open fields. The decisions as to how strips were allotted, which crops were grown and the rights of each tenant to pasture animals were made in the manorial court. The names Corse Field and Haw Field indicate that Corse and Oridge had their own separate open fields originally. Corse was the name of a township in 1221 as was Oridge in 1248: they are both recorded as separate townships as late as 1287. The two townships combined c.1300, leading to the clearance of Stone Redding Field, south west of Oridge Street and a new assart called Barente on the road leading through Oridge. The name Barente indicates clearance by burning. A small planned street settlement known as Woodrow (Wodereue) in 1327 was then laid out here on the edge of the chase, but a series of wet summers, poor harvests and the worsening economic conditions in the 14 th century led to its partial desertion and it now survives as an example of a shrunken medieval village.
Assarting was also underway at Wickridge by 1240 and in the north of the parish the Hawthorns, first recorded in 1280 as Gillcroft, stands within a medieval moat. Despite such clearances, the woodland cover was still extensive. In 1263 Corse Chase was valued at little less than Malvern Chase and in 1322 it was considered wooded enough to hide a rebel army of horse and foot. By 1478 the chase had become known as Corse Lawn indicating that the glades and clearings were as widespread as the woodland cover.
By the late 1620s the forest and deer chase was in the hands of an absentee landowner, Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex. The commoners' custom of cutting wood from the forest for fuel and the depredations of deer poachers, who were in many cases neighbouring gentlemen, put great pressure on the chase. In 1631 it was stated that there had been great destruction of the woods in recent years and that swift action would be needed to preserve the wood as adequate cover for deer. The Keepers of the Chase complained of being unpaid and being threatened by gangs of poachers and in 1634 six poachers killed the keeper John Beale. Middlesex set up a new administration, and a new overseer for the deer was appointed in 1641 as no less than 40 horsemen and 6 footmen undertook a survey of the chase. He used the Star Chamber to prosecute both the gentleman poachers and the peasant woodcutters alike as enemies of the forest. This led to an alliance between poor farmers, gentlemen, woodcutters and poachers who were unhappy with his administration and to the Great Deer Massacre of 1642 in which more than 600 of Middlesex's deer were destroyed in a "rebellious, devilish way". As the steward tried to placate the angry mob, they threatened that "they would not only destroy the remainder of the deer but rifle your Lordship's house at Forthampton and pull it down to the ground and not let a tree or bush stand in all the chase."
By 1779 the trees had all been cleared and Corse Lawn was now a wide, open, undrained common on which the parishioners pastured large flocks of sheep but there was little restriction on numbers and it was said that in a wet season it is so rotting that scarce a sheep survives. The common was crossed by the new turnpike roads from Gloucester to Ledbury and Upton on Severn. In medieval times, the main road, then known as Port Street, ran through Blackwell's End towards Hethelpit Cross. A number of small squatters' cottages had also been built upon the common: in 1785 the lord of the manor's steward and several of the freeholders, resenting this reduction of their common rights tore down the fences of these illegal encroachments. Carried away with their enthusiasm they then set about pulling down the fences of the authorised enclosures too.
Inclosure by Act of Parliament followed soon after in 1796. Corse Lawn, which then covered two thirds of the parish, was surveyed and divided up amongst 54 landholders who dug ditches, erected fences and planted hawthorn hedges, resulting in the regular landscape of large rectangular fields and wide, straight roads which still characterises the eastern half of the parish today. A second inclosure act was needed after freeholders of Staunton and Eldersfield complained that they had not been compensated for common rights that they enjoyed within Corse. After the inclosure of Corse Lawn seven new farms were built in the east of the parish on what had been common. There was a shift away from sheep farming to cereal production as much of the new land went under the plough.
The next major change in the 19th century was the coming of the Chartists. The Chartists were the first organised independent working class movement in the world. Their objectives were political and included universal male suffrage and election by secret ballot. The Chartist (or National) Land Company was founded in 1845 by the famous radical Feargus O'Connor. His aim was to reverse the tide of human labour back into the countryside, settling families from the factory towns on smallholdings so that they would qualify for a vote. By 1848 a school house (now the "Prince of Wales") and 85 cottages had been built and O'Connor proudly talked of "the paradise that I have preparedfamilies, heretofore slaves, and living in underground cellars, taking possession of their own castles and their own labour fields." The scheme was not a success. Tenants resisted paying their rent, the Colonists meeting the bailiffs with the threat that they "would manure the land with their blood before it should be taken from them". The method by which holdings were allocated to successful shareholders through lottery was soon the subject of a Parliamentary Inquiry and in 1851 the National Land Company was dissolved.
The legacy of Corse's fascinating past as royal hunting forest and as radical utopian community remains. The present pattern of scattered settlement and the lack of a village centre results from historically recent woodland clearance. Landscape features and place-names still remind us of the former extent of the chase. Corse Grove in Hasfield is a remaining fragment of the medieval woodland and that part of Corse Lawn that extended into Eldersfield still survives as an open common. Tirley Court, the former manor house of Corse Lawn, was until the late 19 th century known as Corse Court. In Corse itself there are two Lawn Farms, and a Lawn Road leading to Ashleworth. Woolridge at Hartpury, a common until 1809, was the southernmost of the four administrative divisions or walks of Corse Chase. And despite much infilling by new house building in the 20 th century, it is Feargus O'Connor's vision of a New England that has given us the wide crescents of single storey gabled cottages that are such an attractive and distinctive feature of Corse today.