Fig 45. Detail of Survey of Plaish Park with lodge SA 6035/A 1670
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the Owen family until 1629. The house looked out across extensive formal gardens, with a great walk and a bowling green, towards the new deer park, the wall of which is recorded as being built in 1600.288 This park may
well, however, have been revived on an earlier site, since Stamper writes that the creation of the park was made possible by a grant of freehold land dating from1308 when a certain Richard de Houghton obtained permission to clear 200a of Buriwood – that land being purchased by the lord of the manor in 1565. It seems that the park, which extended south from Condover village, had also appropriated one of Condover’s open fields, known as Ley Field, 289 the name suggesting that this field had earlier been cleared from an area of woodland lying in the
royal forest. In spite of the date attributed to the park by Stamper (1600), it is not recorded by Speed in 1611 - yet another indication of his relying on Saxton's evidence - but from Morden’s map of 1695 onwards it appears
consistently into the nineteenth century (Fig 47).
Although many of the new owners of country houses were what Mowl describes as "trumped up gentry"290 it would be wrong to conclude that the aristocratic families of Shropshire had all disappeared after the
Wars of the Roses or died out through lack of heirs by the sixteenth century. Existing landowners took the opportunity to purchase additional lands after the sale of the monasteries, enabling them to extend existing parks or to create new ones. Families such as the Corbets, the Talbots, the Cressetts, the Vernons, the Actons, seem if anything to have increased their estates, both through such judicious purchases and through marriages. The Cressetts had been lords of Shropshire manors since the Conquest; around 1540 Robert Cressett, Sheriff of Shropshire (1584) built Upton Cressett Hall, lying southwest of Bridgnorth, an Elizabethan brick house encasing an earlier timber-framed house, with a fine surviving gate-house (Fig 49). A new park setting for the mansion seems to have been in place as early as 1517 when, according to Wolsey’s Inquisition of Enclosures, it was created from previously arable land.291 The park is recorded continuously at Upton Cressett by Saxton,
Speed, Bowden and Rocque, both Saxton and Speed showing the building on the northeast boundary of the park. A survey of the Lordship of Upton Cressett made by John Browne for Richard Cressett Esq. in 1647, although now barely readable, shows buildings in the vicinity of the church, surrounded by parkland 292 (Fig 50).
The Cressett Papers held in the Shropshire Archive include a lease of 1621 which states that Edward Cressett “has put a pale for his park of Upton Cressett extending from a place called Sidgley….. to a corner of a leasow called the Parke”.293 A pre-nuptial settlement of October 1652 between Robert Cressett and Catherine Berkeley
refers to “ a park or enclosed ground for deer”.294 This does not necessarily mean that the park was still stocked
with deer so soon after the Civil War, but they may well have intended to re-stock it.
It would be wrong to consider Shropshire as a cultural and architectural backwater during the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, since although traditional timber-framed houses continued to be built, there were also
288
Stamper, Report 1993, op cit., p.325 289 ibid.
290 Mowl, op cit. p.21
291 Rowley, T., The Shropshire Landscape, op cit. p.123 292
SA 5460/5/1/1 Survey of Upton Cressett by John Browne, 1647 293 SA 5460/4/1/6 Cressett Deeds, lease of 1621
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Fig 48. Moreton Corbet Hall , built c,1560-83 Fig 46. Condover Hall, 1586-1600
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Fig 49. Upton Cressett Hall , gatehouse 1580
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outstanding mansions, such as Condover Hall, which Pevsner has compared with Hardwick Hall (Derbyshire); and Moreton Corbet Hall whose sixteenth-century ruins remain as evidence of the county’s only sophisticated Renaissance house (Fig 48 ). Robert Corbet, one of the few Shropshire aristocrats to have played a diplomatic role at court, built his new mansion in the1560s and modified it in 1583, to replace the original medieval castle on the same site northeast of Shrewsbury. Stamper suggests that there was a deer park created north and west of Moreton Corbet parish church in the late seventeenth century.295 While there is some archaeological evidence
of a contemporary formal garden, there is no sign of the park. Moreton Corbet does not appear on any of the county maps, and it seems more likely that the park in question was Sowbatch deer park, recorded by both Morden and Rocque, associated with the sixteenth-century home of Andrew Corbet, Robert’s younger brother. But this remains pure speculation. Whether or not there was originally a deer park associated with Moreton Corbet, the new mansion was fired by Parliamentary troops in 1645 and never reinhabited. It survives as an evocative ruin.
Around 1588 Robert Corbet began work on Stanwardine Hall and park, as a residence for himself and his wife Jane Kynaston. Once again, there is no evidence of a deer park on any county map before Rocque, who shows a wooded site framed by a road southwest of and separate from the hall. However, there is good
evidence to suggest that a deer park was established at Stanwardine-in-the-Wood at the same time as the house. Based on field names researched by Foxall from nineteenth-century tithe awards, the park appears to have lain about a mile south of the house. A surviving document shows that it was still stocked with deer in 1671, when Philip Henry wrote in his diary of 12th July, “With wife at Stanwardine…..I accompanied them (the
Corbets, owners of Stanwardine), killing a buck in their own park, far from being taken with any great delight or pleasure in ye sport; they sent part of him to Broad-oke after us”….296 - an interesting comment on contemporary
attitudes to hunting and hospitality which had survived from medieval times. By the time the park appears on the Rocque map (1752), it was probably no longer a deer park, the estate having been sold in 1701.297
A deer park that appears on the county maps with great consistency is that of Tong Castle, a medieval survivor depicted by Saxton, Speed and Morden. In none of these county maps is there any suggestion that the residence ever lay within the boundaries of the deer park. The early history of this once important medieval castle has been told in the previous chapter; the residence was rebuilt by Sir Henry Vernon c.1500. Pevsner credits this house with being the first large-scale building in brick to be constructed in Shropshire.298 There are
two surviving images: both showing a courtyard house, with towers at the corners that may have been used for viewing the park. One is a contemporary carving in stone currently lying in the churchyard, and the other an engraving of 1731 by Buck (Figs 51 & 52 ). The medieval park associated with Tong Castle lay to the east of this residence, and will be discussed in more detail in the following pages (Fig 53).
295 Stamper, Report 1993, op cit. p.183 296 ibid., p.211
297www.parksandgardens.ac.uk Stanwardine in the Wood