IV.—The Founding of Wulfruna’s Church, 996, A.D.
After the advent of Christianity, the new religion was gradually advanced throughout the land by the settlement of priest-missioners in the various localities. Where the missionary settled on the invitation, or under the protection of a thane, or “lord,” that lordship was formed into a parish. Thus some parishes doubtless became co-terminous with the old manors. Owing, however, to the many changes of jurisdiction in the course of succeeding centuries, it is difficult to find instances of parish and manor of identical area in this locality. Bescot was a manor within the parish of Walsall; Bloxwich and Shelfield were anciently members of the manor of Wednesbury, though now included in Walsall; Bentley, at the Norman Conquest, was part of the manor of Willenhall, then belonging to Wolverhampton Church; while Dunstall was a member of the King’s manor of Stow Heath. Tettenhall parish originally included as many as a dozen manors and townships.
England is made up of some ten thousand parishes, each with its parish church, around which for a thousand years has revolved the social and political, as well as the whole religious life of the place. The parish is our unit of local government, and the history of a town is usually a history of the parish.
But Willenhall never was a parish. It is merely a member of a parish—of the extensive, the straggling, and loosely-knit parish of Wolverhampton. In Wolverhampton, three miles away, was located the mother church, to which it owed spiritual allegiance, and there was situated the Vestry for parochial assemblies, and all else that stood for self-government throughout the centuries. And those were the centuries when Church and State were indissolubly bound together; when a dominant church claimed, and was recognised as having an inalienable share in the government of the people. Hence it will transpire in these pages that for centuries the story of Willenhall was involved in the ecclesiastical history of Wolverhampton.
The ancient parish of Wolverhampton lies widely dispersed and very detached, containing no less than 17 townships and hamlets, all subject to the collegiate church in matters ecclesiastical, though in many cases being distinct in matters secular. How broken the area is may be noted in the case of Pelsall, which is cut off from the mother parish by Bloxwich, a hamlet in Walsall parish.
Willenhall is one among several other neighbouring places that, from the earliest period of England’s acceptance of Christianity, had its fate inseparably linked with that of Wolverhampton. In the giving way of paganism before the steady advances of the new religion, progress in this immediate part of the kingdom was marked by the founding of Tettenhall Church (a.d. 966), followed thirty years afterwards by Lady Wulfruna’s further efforts at evangelisation in the setting up at Hampton (or High Town) of another Christian church.
This was in the reign of Ethelred the Unrede, which was a period sadly troubled by the aggressions of the Danes; and it is believed that Wulfruna (or Wulfrun) had designed to found a monastery, though as early as the time of Edward the Confessor, or within a century of its institution, her establishment is found to be a Collegiate Church.
With this accession of dignity, and in grateful recognition of the lady’s pious munificence, the town became known as Wulfrun’s Hampton, now modified in Wolverhampton.
Of Wulfruna herself but little is known. Whether she was sister of King Edgar, as some suppose, or the widow of Aldhelm, Duke of Northumberland, cannot be decided. It is known, however, that she was a lady of rank, and was captured when Olaf, in command of a Viking host, took Tamworth by storm. Hampton did not bear her name until some years after her death.
In founding her noble church at Wolverhampton, Wulfruna endowed it with thirteen estates, including lands in Willenhall, Wednesfield, Pelsall, Essington, Hilton, Walsall, Featherstone, Hatherton, Kinvaston, Bilston, and Arley. Willenhall being only three miles away from Wolverhampton, and being also for a long