Shifnal () is a market town and civil parish in Shropshire, England, about east of Telford, 17 miles (27 km) east of Shrewsbury and 13 miles (20 km) west-northwest of Wolverhampton. It is near the M54 motorway and A5 road aka Watling Street. At the 2001 census, it had a population of 6,391, increasing to 6,776 at the 2011 census.
Etymology Shifnal is thought to be the place named "Scuffanhalch" in a 9th-century charter, as a possession of the monastery at Medeshamstede (later Peterborough Abbey).Birch, W. de Grey, Cartularium Saxonicum, 3 vols., London, 1885-93, no.48. Though this seems a dubious claim, and the ancient charter is in fact a 12th-century forgery, the full picture is more complex. Sir Frank Stenton considered that "Scuffanhalch", along with "Costesford" (Cosford) and "Stretford", formed part of a list of places which had once been connected with Medeshamstede; and the charter purports to have been issued by King Æthelred of Mercia, during much of whose reign the bishop of Mercia was Sexwulf (or "Saxwulf"), founder and first abbot of Medeshamstede.Stenton, F.M., 'Medeshamstede and its Colonies', in Stenton, D.M. (ed.), Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England Being the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton, Oxford University Press, 1970, pp.180-1 (see also Pretty, K., 'Defining the Magonsæte', in Bassett, S. (ed.), The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, Leicester University Press, 1989); Bede's Ecclesiastical History, iv, 6.
The first part of the name "Shifnal" is reckoned to be a personal name, "Scuffa", while the second part, from "halh", means a valley, thus describing the town's topography.Ekwall, E., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn., Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 417.
Unusually, the name of the town has alternated through the centuries between Idsall and Shifnal. Idsall (said to be relating to potential Roman links) is mentioned in a 9th-century charter as "Iddeshale", meaning "Idi's nook" or corner. A nook is said to be an area of land of approximately . It is often conjectured that the two names of Idsall and Shifnal were names of settlements on the east and west sides respectively of Wesley Brook, a brook which runs through the town, and is a tributary of the River Worfe. In the 19th century, J. C. Anderson, in his Shropshire its Early History and Antiquities, wrote that Idsall means "Hall of Ide", and that Shifnal is "Hall of Sceafa".
A Key to English Place-names has an entry for Shifnal that reads '*Scuffa's nook of land'. It was also known as Iddeshale, '*Idi's nook of land'.
History Pre-Norman
The town most probably began as an Anglian settlement, established by the end of the 7th century. The oldest part of the town is said to be the area around St Andrew's Church, Church Street and Innage Road where excavations have turned up evidence of ancient buildings.
Norman The village, as it would have been in 1086, is recorded in the Domesday Book within the hundred of Alnodestreu. The initial part of the entry states:
Robert, son of Theobald, holds of Earl Roger Iteshale. Earl Morcar held it."
This entry records that possession was lost by the Saxon Earl Morcar when he rebelled against the Norman conquerors.
The church of St Andrew has a Norman chancel and was almost certainly built on the site of an earlier church. It was a collegiate church or minster with a chapter of priests ministering to the needs of congregations in outlying settlements. St Andrew's lost its collegiate status when it was given to Shrewsbury Abbey c. 1087.Guidebook to the church.
Plantagenet period In 1245 Walter de Dunstanville, the Crusader and lord of the manor, applied to King Henry III for, and was granted, a market charter for the town. Walter then laid out a broad market street that is Broadway, Bradford Street, Market Place and Park Street for the markets.St Andrew's Church Shifnal, p.2. This area to the east of the stream was known as Shifnal and gradually this name superseded Idsall as the town's name.
Just outside of Shifnal are the Caynton Caves, a system carved into the sandstone. Local legend has them made by followers of the Knights Templar 700 years ago, although Historic England – the government body responsible for historic monuments – believes the caves were probably excavated in the late 18th or early 19th Century.
Tudor and Stuart times
Shifnal had something of an early industrial revolution during the late 16th century with the construction of a charcoal fired blast furnace near to the Manor House.
A fire swept through the town on 7 July 1591, setting alight the roof of the church. The fire is thought to have been started by a maidservant's candle that accidentally set fire to some hanging flax. The fire devastated many, if not all, of the buildings east of the Wesley Brook. The church, although damaged with its bells melted and reportedly reduced to its standing walls,St Andrew's Church Shifnal, p.3. and the timber-framed Old Idsall House at its foot to the east (a listed building), are said to be the only two buildings to have survived the fire that destroyed the rest of the settlement. This is now commemorated by a blue plaque fixed to the wall of the house. After the fire, Elizabeth I sent money to help rebuild the town.
A wall memorial tablet inside St Andrew's Church is for Mary Yates – known locally as Nanny Murphy – who walked to London as a teenager just after the Great Fire of London in 1666, married her third husband Joseph Yates when she was 92, and died at the age of 127.St Andrew's Church Shifnal, p.11. There is a Nanny Murphy's Lane just to the north of Shifnal. The same stone memorial tablet records that William Wakely was baptised on 1 May 1590 and was buried on 28 November 1714, after living through the reigns of eight kings and queens.
The best example of Shropshire Scroll, a 16th-century style of swirling wall painting unique to the county, was uncovered in 2010 by renovators in a Grade II listed property on Broadway. The 2 m by 2.5 m work, on display at what is now the Black Orchid hair salon, had been hidden behind a wall for more than a century.
18th and 19th centuries Aston Hall, built about 1720 at the east side of the town, was home to tobacco plantation and slave owners, George Austin and John Moultrie, the latter rising to be acting governor of East Florida. Austin was born in the town in 1710, the son of a mercer and went to South Carolina where he became involved in developing tobacco plantations, one of which he named Shifnal, 1,415 acres next to the Ashepoo river and which had 85 slaves. Austin became one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, but following disputes with his business partner, Henry Laurens, returned to England in 1762 and settled at Aston Hall. Austin was also responsible for the first person of colour recorded as living in Shifnal. In 1766 Benjamin Priouleu "a black servant to Mr Austin" was baptised in the town. 19 years later the parish records note that Lucy Bartlet "a black woman" was buried there. In 1771, Moultrie became Lieutenant-Governor of Florida and encouraged a road-building programme. He became acting governor when his predecessor, James Grant, was invalided home in 1771 and held the position until 1774. Three of his brothers were key players on opposing sides of the American War of Independence.
Thomas Beddoes, a well-known physician, was born in 1760 at Balcony House, named for a room projecting above the roof line, on the east side of Market Place. This building later became the Star Hotel.
A Baptist church was established in Aston Street at the end of the 18th century, but it closed down before the 20th century.
Thomas Telford upgraded Watling Street, the turnpike road that passed through the town, in the late 18th century. This road carried traffic from London to Shrewsbury, Chester and Holyhead for Ireland, bringing considerable prosperity to the town.
There had been a regular stagecoach service through the town from 1681, but when mail coaches began to pass through from 1785 transport became important in the local economy, rising to 18 coaches a day by 1829. Passengers could rest from their travels at three coaching inns: the Jerningham Arms, the Star Hotel and the Unicorn. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Holyhead mail coach could travel from London to Shifnal in 27 hours: by 1831 that had been reduced that to 16.5 hours, using 150 horses along the route. However traffic was already declining by 1844, when there were only nine coaches a day. When the railways reached the town in 1849 the remaining trade rapidly disappeared.
During this period of prosperity many new houses were built, lending Shifnal a Georgian air. The name Idsall was still used to distinguish the area around the St Andrew's Church and the Manor from the market and commercial area of Shifnal.
There are records of a parish workhouse in operation in Shifnal in 1777 with accommodation for up to 40 inmates. A new parish workhouse was built on Park Street in 1817. It was adopted as the workhouse for the Shifnal Poor Law Union and was enlarged in 1840–1 at about £800. The number of inmates was never more than 100. The buildings later became part of Shifnal Hospital before being turned into homes.
In 1855 a house on Broadway, used by the town's 200-odd Catholics for mass, was burnt down during an anti-Irish riot. Lord Stafford replaced it in 1860 with a combination school and church he built on land he donated at the corner of Victoria Road and Shrewsbury Road. The school closed about 1917, but the building has continued as a church. The present presbytery on Victoria Road, the original school-master's house, still has Lord Stafford's coat of arms above the door.
The railway line from London and Birmingham to Holyhead was constructed through Shifnal at high level in the late 1840s. The opening of the line on 12 November 1849 brought an abrupt end to the already declining coaching traffic. The massive viaduct for the railway divided the town: its construction was a considerable engineering achievement, crossing the marshy valley of the Wesley Brook on foundations laid on coarse twigs and vast numbers of sheep fleeces. The viaducts constructed were cast by Horseley Ironworks.History, Gazetteer, and Directory of Shropshire, Samuel Bagshaw, 1851, S. Harrison of Sheffield The original cast iron arched bridge was replaced in 1953 by a more functional but less attractive steel one.
The Shifnal Bank Fraud
One of the biggest bank frauds in Victorian Britain took place in Shifnal when a director and staff stole almost £244,000, worth the equivalent of £16 million today. Alongside the 'insider jobs' were allegations of blackmail, cover-ups and fraudsters being helped to escape.
The Shropshire Banking Company was formed in 1836 from four local banks: in Newport, Wellington, Coalbrookdale and Shifnal. Shifnal became its head office and Abraham Darby IV, of the historic iron master dynasty, was among its first chairmen.
Initially the bank seemed to do well, paying local investors dividends of 12.5 per cent a year, and was successful enough to need new premises in Park Street, Shifnal, with heavy security measures but, in 1856, the bank was forced to write off £193,834 to cover losses through fraud. It emerged that one of the directors, John Horton, had taken an unauthorised overdraft of £10,000 "against worthless security". Horton, who was being paid £300 a year as a director, was forced to resign. However his fraud was dwarfed by the £234,000 siphoned off by the bank's manager, Allen, and his cashier Gilbert over a decade.
Although the police arrived to arrest Allen in Shifnal he managed to slip away while they were on the premises, one version has him vaulting over the counter to escape, reportedly after being tipped off by the bank's directors.