West Country

This small parish, 1 mile from north to south and 1½ miles from east to west, is bounded on the north-east by Watling Street, on the north-west by Waste Lane running from the Street to Baddesley Common, and on the east by the Innage Brook.

The parish was formerly much larger, including some 1,500 acres lying in three detached areas in Leicestershire, but these were added by Local Government Orders in 1880 and 1885 to the Leicestershire parishes of Sheepy, Orton, and Norton-juxta-Twycross. Ouston Grange and Mill, on the River Tame, are also said by Dugdale to have been 'sometime a Grange belonging to Merevale Abbey, and for that respect still [c. 1650] reputed a member thereof', and then owned by Sir Charles Adderley, who in 1660 was presented for not repairing Hance bridge 'in the parish of Merevale near Ousterne house', called in 1647 'a mill way leading from Curdworth to Shustoke'. Ouston has long been absorbed into Lea Marston, but the date of the transference is not known.

The Coventry Canal and the Trent Valley section of the L.M.S. Railway cut through the extreme northeastern corner of the parish, which just includes Atherstone station. The south-eastern half of the parish is occupied by Merevale Park, containing a large lake and the Hall, a fine house faced with stone and partly rebuilt in the middle of the 19th century and now the seate of Sir William Francis Stratford Dugdale, bart. In the Hall are preserved the library, diary, and other relics of Sir William Dugdale, the famous antiquary and historian of Warwickshire. To the north of the Park a road runs from the Watling Street, at an elevation of 273 ft., south-west to Baxterley Common, where a height of 500 ft. is attained. Centrally on this road lie the church and the remains of the abbey, with the Abbey Pool and Black Pool. Apart from the parish church, which was the Chapel of Our Lady at the Gate, there are few relics of the abbey.

Of the great abbey church no masonry whatever remains above ground, except possibly a little of the south wall of the south aisle, and its site is now indicated only by excrescences in a field east of a farmyard. The site was partly excavated in 1849 by Mr. William Stratford Dugdale of Merevale Hall and Mr. Henry Clutton the architect, and apparently only enough was discovered to identify the size and shape of the church. Mr. M. H. Bloxam wrote a description in 1864 and produced a 'conjectural' plan based on Mr. Clutton's discoveries. It shows a large church of cross plan with north and south aisles to the nave. Certain dimensions are specified, but the proportions of the plan as drawn, and to which no scale is attached, by no means tally with the sizes mentioned. The foundations actually traced by Clutton were those of the presbytery, specified as 40 ft. by 28 ft., parts of the transept (88 ft. by 28 ft.), the north arcade and parts of the south arcade walls of the nave (28 ft. wide), parts of the walls of the aisles (15 ft. wide; total width 60 ft., and length of the building 230 ft.), with the beginning of the east wall of the west claustral range. The walls of these parts are scored on the conjectural plan, which is of the normal Benedictine type. The west wall of the church and the walls of the claustral ranges are shown only in outline, except the Frater, the side-walls of which are still standing to some height. The monastic buildings were evidently never properly excavated or, if so, no foundations were discovered. The Frater was parallel with the cloister, instead of following the north-south tradition of the Cistercians, and marks the south side of the cloisters. The quadrangle, taking the length of the Frater as a guide, was about 112 ft. from east to west, and according to the scale-less plan it was, therefore, about 140 ft. from the north to south. It is now a rick-yard.

The remains of the Frater (about 96 ft. by 32 ft.) stand in a garden east of the farm-house and consist of the eastern halves of the north and south walls, standing about 12 ft. high. They include the south stair to the pulpitum, also a scrap of the west end of the north wall containing the entrance from the cloister and west of this the entrance to the former kitchen, all dating from the middle of the 13th century. The remains of the north wall (about 51½ ft. long) are 3 ft. 2 in. thick in the lower part, of local yellow and cream sandstone ashlar. It has a moulded string-course about 6 ft. high inside, forming the edge of a ledge. Above this ledge the wall-face sets back and is divided into 11½ bays of 4 ft. 2 in. span, by attached round filleted shafts with moulded 'holdwater' bases; five of them still retain the moulded capitals. Two low buttresses have been added since the Dissolution. The exterior of the wall, towards the former cloister, has a plinth comprising a moulded course above a vertical course and two lower chamfered courses. At the east end is a 3½-ft. shallow buttress or wide pilaster. West of this the wallface is divided into 10½ bays of 4 ft. 9 in. span by semioctagonal pilasters that cut through the plinth. At the tops the chamfers are stopped to square and the pilasters finished with gable-heads. The bays do not tally with those of the internal shafts. The next 30 ft. westwards is now closed by a modern wall; beyond this is the 5 ft. 2 in. original entrance doorway, in very weather-worn condition. The inner order of the jambs has a filleted edge-roll; the other orders were two nook-shafts (now missing) alternating with rolls cut from the solid; the moulded capitals are in place. The two-centred head is of three moulded orders and has a hood-mould, and chamfered rear-arch. Immediately east of it is the west jamb of the original lavatory recess, about 18 in. deep, with unrecognizable mouldings, and the beginning of an arched head. West of the doorway is another, with square jambs and segmental-pointed head, that probably opened into the kitchen. The west wall of the Frater, between the doorways, has entirely disappeared above ground.

The south wall, of which about 58 ft. remains, has at a distance of 38 ft. from the east end the open entrance to the pulpitum-stair; it has moulded jambs and two-centred head, over which the string-course is carried as the hood-mould. Two small piercings in one stone pierce the 11-in. wall immediately east of the doorway, one a quatrefoil and the other a trefoiled circle. The straight stair of seven steps up remains, and the wall is projected 1½ ft. outside to take it. The rectangular space, 6½ ft. long, for the reader projects 2 ft. still farther, and the internal west angle with the stair is moulded with twin shafts with moulded bases, probably for an archway across the head of the stair. The wall-face inside from the east end up to the doorway is plain, but 2½ ft. west of it are nearly three bays of wall arcading (like that of the north wall) before the wall finishes with a modern end. The bays were pierced by lancet-windows above the moulded ledge; a course or two of the chamfered and rebated east jamb of the first are left in place. Externally the ground dips a little before rising to the height on which stands Merevale Hall. The plinth is similar to the northern, but has an additional lower chamfered course. A stringcourse, of which parts remain, ran below the sills of the windows. At the east end is a narrow buttress, and 11 ft. west of the stair projection is another, but there are no pilasters like the northern. Only a few lowest courses remain of the east wall; it appears to have had a similar buttress at the south end A 3-ft. gap near the north end may have been a former doorway. A few loose stones, and pieces of window tracery, &c., are lying on the site. Apart from the Frater the only other remains of masonry are (1) a piece of the adjoining west wall of the cloister, containing blocked post-Dissolution doors, &c., and (2) the rubble core of a wall about 20 ft. high, forming part of farm-buildings, which may have been part of the south wall of the south aisle. In the fields on the other (north) side of Merevale Lane are various banks, &c., indicating sites of fishstews and pools for the abbey corn mill, which faced the Watling Street.

Merevale was probably the woodland, 1½ leagues by 1 league, attached to the manor of Grendon (q.v.) which was held by Henry de Ferieres in 1086; as when Earl Robert de Ferrers founded the Abbey of Merevale in 1148 he gave to it 'all my forest of Arden'. This grant was confirmed by Henry II in 1155 and again by Edward II on 12 March 1326, two days after the king had visited the abbey. After the dissolution of the abbey its site and lands, including an iron-mill or smithy, were granted in tail male to Sir Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, in December 1540. In the following February the grant was renewed, with the additional mention of 'the manor called the Graunge' in Merevale, in the tenure of Richard Overton. In 1550 Sir Walter, now Viscount Hereford, obtained a fresh grant of the premises to himself, his heirs and assigns, under which he is said to have conveyed them to his second son, Sir William Devereux for life. On the death of Sir William in 1579 the property passed to Robert, Earl of Essex, son of his nephew Walter.

The earl was dealing with the manor of MEREVALE in 1596, but five years later he was attainted and executed for his plot against Queen Elizabeth. This manor, however, remained in the hands of his widow Frances, who married Richard Bourke, Earl of Clanricarde, and they were dealing with it in 1605. The lands and honours of the Earl of Essex were restored to his son Robert, the Parliamentarian general, who died in 1646 leaving two sisters as his co-heirs. The manor of Merevale seems to have passed to the younger, Frances, who married William Seymour, Marquess of Hertford, and to have been sold by them, probably in 1649, to Edward Stratford. His descendant Penelope Bate Stratford, daughter and co-heir of Francis Stratford, married Richard Geast, who in 1749 inherited the property and took the surname of his uncle John Dugdale, and from them the estate has descended to the present Sir William Dugdale, bart.

Dugdale. Argent a cross moline gules with a roundel gules in the quarter.