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Next Griff House and the hamlet of Griff which is now on the border of Bedworth and Nuneaton was the home of George Eliot, the famous Victorian novelist for the first 22 years of her life. Baptised Mary Ann Evans in 1819 she left Griff in 1841 to live nearby in Coventry with her father. The property itself remained in the Evans family for the rest of the century and is still there, now the Griff House Hotel, a comfortable Travel Inn.
By
Peter Lee The modern borough of Nuneaton and Bedworth is a small metropolis with a population of 118,000 people. Its very location, in the centre of England means that it near the hub of the country’s motorway and rail system. For this reason it has become a large distribution centre. Transporting goods does not employ many people but it takes up large acreages of land, for warehouses and concrete lorry parks swallowing up what had hitherto been green fields. It is for this reason that the area we know today is so very different from 50 or 100 years ago. All those years ago Nuneaton produced much of the tonnage shipped away through the rail and canal system, coal, bricks and clayware products, good stone for road making and railway ballast, not to mention woven goods such as silk, woollen cloth, velvet and curtain materials, rayon from the large Courtaulds mill, elastic webbing for shoe and boot manufacture. It was also a market town with a busy livestock market. Bedworth was a coal mining town, again with its own brickyards and silk trade. Both were separate and different in outlook, as indeed they are today, but now joined under one council administration. My emphasis is on the old town of Nuneaton, which had a unique character, and encompasses the adjacent rural parishes of Attleborough, Chilvers Coton, Stockingford, Caldecote and Weddington. The settlement known as Ea-ton (literally meaning water-town) was so named because it was built in a less densely wooded part of the great forest of Arden, at a place where there was a crossing of the River Anker. The Anker was, and still is an insignificant rivulet but it powered a mill in a clearance of woodland. This mill was mentioned in the Domesday book completed in 1080 and was worth at that time just 100 shillings per annum. After the Norman Conquest the lands around Nuneaton were given to William the Conqueror’s countrymen and so it descended through various landed Norman families.. . These Norman lords had a preferred method for ruling their far flung estates. They installed a religious order there to provide trustworthy administration. A daughter house of the great French Abbey of Fontevrault was created on land a little to the east of the old town and building work started about 1157 or 1158. It was quite natural that this religious house should be chosen because the then lord of the manor and owner of vast estates in this part of Warwickshire, Robert, Earl of Leicester was a friend of King Henry II and Queen Eleanor who had a special relationship with the newly founded religious house. It was in this great Abbey that both Henry II and his son, Richard I Coeur de Lion chose to be buried. The daughter house in Nuneaton was never afforded the status of an Abbey and was strictly known as a Priory as it was ruled both by a Prior and Prioress. Nevertheless the term “Abbey” found itself in common usage locally. The terms Abbey End being used to donate the end of town where the priory was situated, Abbey Street was the long street which led up to it and Abbey Gate, at the Market Place end of Abbey Street probably barred the common people from entering the Abbey Street where many of the Priory staff and retainers, together with the Burgesses who were the wealthier townspeople and owned long Purging plots on tenure from the Priory. If the labouring classes sought to leave that part of town they had to skirt around the Abbey Street along a narrow lane commonly known as Burgage Walk, as it is known to this day. In 1233 a market was established and it is from about that year that Ea-ton began to use the prefix Nonne-eaton and this became more commonly used but even as late as the 18th century some documents refer to the town as Nun-eaton (with hyphen). The market was a great commercial venture with every opportunity being taken to relieve the local townspeople and traders of the little cash they had. Pontage was charged for travelling over the town bridge. Tolls were charged for trading in the market and produce from the Priory estate, fish from the Abbey Pool and other commodities sold to finance this prosperous institution. In return people who were sick and poor were helped, travellers provided with a bed and board at the sign of the Bulle (The Bull Inn). In 1539 Henry VIII had Nuneaton Priory dissolved, presumably to get his hands on their hoards of cash, and from that day forward the buildings fell into disrepair. Local people robbed the stone work to build their own dwellings and there are many references to buildings made of old stonework throughout the town, presumably some of which came from the old religious buildings. The lands then dispossessed by Henry VIII were given to those with whom he wished to curry favour. In this way the Nuneaton estates were split up and smaller estates established which hemmed in the town on every side. Nuneaton stayed little more than a village with one long street, Abbey Street with smaller streets leading off terminating in three ends: Abbey End, Bond End and Church End, until the end of the 18th century until for some reason, that has not been satisfactorily explained, a large increase in inhabitants occurred in which the population probably rose by fifty percent within a few years. This was caused by a surge of employment in the silk ribbon trade. In order to accommodate this increase in population what had been the old Abbey Street Burgage plots which had long open back gardens rapidly filled up with mean and squalid tenements and cottages. The property owners with their “good front” houses could cram as many as twenty or more tenements into his back garden with little reference to sanitary arrangements, lack of natural light, offensive pig styes, cabbage patches etc. The rent these ribbon weavers produced more than compensated for his lack of privacy. With so many tenants crammed into one or two up, one or two down damp and dingy premises he could open his front room up as a beer house and extract even more cash from them, much to the suffering and impoverishment of their families. The collapse of the ribbon trade from the 1840’s onwards meant that families sought other employment, and the only other trades capable of taking the number so dispossessed were the coal mines, brickyards and quarries. Coal had been mined in the Stockingford and Griff area of Chilvers Coton since the 14th century, and by the mid 1860’s and 70’s new capital, increasingly efficient mining methods, together with the building of the railways, brought about a golden bonanza of coal production in this area of Warwickshire. The building of railways and roads generated the need for good stone, and Nuneaton had plenty of that too. The town was also blessed with beds of the finest brick clay in the country. Entrepreneurs took over old brick kilns, modernised them, and created the opportunity for their products to be shipped countrywide. Nuneaton and district’s population grew again from about 10,000 people in 1880 to about 30,000 in 1920. Today all that has changed. The town still enjoys good communications with the rest of the country but we no longer produce coal, bricks and tiles and output of stone has dwindled as the quarries have been worked out.
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