On an elevated situation in an adjoining meadow stands the primitive parish church of Sutton, a characteristic specimen of the little Norman churches erected in villages. The west front is crowned with a cupola, and displays a modern window, but those on the other sides of the fabric are of the earliest kind, narrowing towards the exterior surface of the wall. The town may be regained by different routes over the meadows, which lead to
THE SUBURB OF COLEHAM,
situated on the southern banks of the river, where the Meole or Rea brook joins the Severn. This was until the present century the lowest part of the town, and consequently most liable to be inundated by floods; but of late years the street has been raised about nine feet.
The township is populous, and consists of two districts, called Longden Coleham and Meole Coleham from their respective thoroughfares to those villages. In the latter direction is Trinity Church, and in the former the extensive foundry of Mr. Hazledine, where the iron-work used in the construction of that surprising proof of human ingenuity, the “Menai Bridge,” was cast, and proved by an engine whose pressure was calculated at thirty-seven tons.
TRADE AND MANUFACTURES.
Our town for more than three centuries possessed almost exclusively the trade with Wales in a coarse kind of cloth called Welsh webs, which were brought from Merionethshire and Montgomeryshire to a market held here weekly. In reference to this, Camden, in his “Britannia,” published in 1586, writes of Shrewsbury—“It is a fine city, well inhabited, and of good commerce; and by the industry of the citizens and their cloth manufacture and their trade with the Welsh, is very rich, for hither the Welsh commodities are brought as to the common mart.”
The termination of this branch of commerce is an event of too much importance to be passed over. It is thus graphically alluded to by Messrs. Owen and Blakeway: “Every Thursday the central parts of the town were all life and bustle; troops of hardy ponies, each with a halter of twisted straw, and laden with two bales of cloth, poured into the Market-place in the morning, driven by stout Welshmen in their country coats of blue cloth and striped linsey waistcoats.”
At two o’clock the drapers, with their clerks and shearmen, assembled under the Market-house, and proceeded up stairs (according to ancient usage) in seniority. The market being over, drays were seen in all directions conveying the cloths to the several warehouses, and more than six hundred pieces of web have been sold in a day. The whole was a ready money business; and as the Welshmen left much of their cash behind them in exchange for malt, groceries, and other shop goods, the loss of such a trade to the town may be easily conceived. This took place about the year 1795, and was occasioned by individuals (not members of the Shrewsbury fraternity of drapers) travelling into those parts where the goods were made, from which the manufacturers soon learnt that they might find a mart for their goods at home without the trouble and expence of a journey to the walls of Amwythig. In March, 1803, the company relinquished the great room over the market-hall, where they had for nearly two centuries transacted their business, and though much traffic in flannels was subsequently carried on in the town, the total extinction of this branch of our local commerce is fast approaching, from the market having diverged to Welshpool, Newtown, and Llanidloes, where the advantages of machinery are now substituted for manual labour in its manufacture.
The cessation of the woollen market in this town has been ascribed to the improvement of the roads in Wales, which opened a more free communication to the interlopers of the Drapers’ company; and this again afforded some compensation to the town for the loss of this branch of its trade. For if Shrewsbury was no longer the emporium of North Wales, it was becoming the centre of communication between London and Dublin; and the agriculture of the neighbourhood and the trade of the town received a new impulse from the vast increase of posting and stage coaches, but far inadequate to the advantage which it derived from its trade in Welsh woollens and the weekly visits of the Cambrian farmers.
That Shrewsbury, however, may reap the full benefit of its central situation as the great thoroughfare from whence all the roads into North Wales diverge, and being also the general market of the surrounding country, acknowledged to be one of the finest agricultural districts in the kingdom, it is highly expedient that our town should possess the advantage of a Railway communicating with the great lines to Birmingham, London, Liverpool, &c.