Tutbury, Staffordshire

Historical Description

Tutbury, a small town and a parish in Staffordshire. The town stands on the river Dove, 4½ miles NW by N of Burton-upon-Trent. It has a station on the North Staffordshire railway, and a post, money order, and telegraph office under Burton-upon-Trent. A bridge of five arches crosses the Dove, and connects Staffordshire with Derbyshire. The parish comprises 4145 acres; population of the civil parish, 2153 of the ecclesiastical, 2030. There is a parish council consisting of eleven members. The manor belongs to the Queen as Duke of Lancaster. Byrkley Lodge, The Elms, and Castle Hill are the chief residences. Tutbury Castle was a Mercian stronghold, went after the Norman Conquest to H. de Ferrers, and was then rebuilt. On the revolt of Robert de Ferrers, Earl of Derby, it was conferred by Henry III. on his son Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, and has remained in the possession of the Earls and Dukes of Lancaster ever since. It was again rebuilt by John of Gaunt, became the prison of Mary Queen of Scots in 1569-72, was visited by James I. in 1619, 1621, and 1624, and by Charles I. in 1636, was garrisoned for the Crown at the commencement of the Civil War, and visited by him both before and after the battle of Naseby, was taken by Brereton in 1646, and soon after dismantled. It seems to have occupied an area of about 3 acres, and is now represented by considerable ruins, including gateway and part of walls and towers, surrounded by a deep dry moat. Upwards of 100,000 ancient coins, supposed to have been lost in 1321, were found in the Dove in 1831, and some of them are now in the British Museum. There are a corn mill and a large glass manufactory. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lichfield; gross value, £265 with residence. The church, with the Cluniac priory, now totally destroyed and once a cell to St Peter-super-Divam in Normandy, dates from 1079, and is a large edifice. The nave is Norman; the S aisle is partly Norman and partly Decorated; the N aisle, built in 1832, is very debased; and the apsidal chancel was built in 1867, at the restoration of the nave by the late Mr Street. The great feature of the church is its magnificent W front and gateway, one of the richest examples of Norman architecture in the kingdom. There are Congregational, Primitive Methodist, and Wesleyan chapels. The impostor Anne Moore, who pretended to live without food or drink, was a native.

Administration

The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.

Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.

Church Records

Findmypast, in association with the Staffordshire & Stoke on Trent Archive Service have the Baptisms, Banns, Marriages, and Burials online for Tutbury

Civil Registration

For general information about Civil Registration (births, marriages and deaths) see the Civil Registration page.

Directories & Gazetteers

We have transcribed the entry for Tutbury from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Tutbury (St. Mary))
• Staffordshire and Warwickshire, Past and Present, 1884

Land and Property

A full transcript of the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Staffordshire is online.

Maps

Online maps of Tutbury are available from a number of sites:

• Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• Google Streetview.
• National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
• OpenStreetMap.
• old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
• Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)

Newspapers and Periodicals

The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Staffordshire newspapers online:

• Staffordshire Advertiser
• Tamworth Herald
• Lichfield Mercury
• Staffordshire Sentinel
• Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser