SECTION 14 - Polesworth

Summary

Polesworth (Powlesworth, Pollesworth) is a large village in the extreme north of Warwickshire, where an angle of the county is projected between Staffordshire and Leicestershire. The distance from Stratford—travelling by way of Warwick, Coventry and Nuneaton—is about thirty-eight miles. As other parishes in its neighbourhood, until its assignment to the modern diocese of Birmingham, it was included in that of Lichfield. Stratford was in Worcester diocese.

The parish, which now has some 5000 inhabitants, was formerly more extensive, and within its limits contained, as Dugdale writes, nine ‘villages and places of note,’ besides Polesworth. The village is charmingly situated and retains much of its rural and ancient character, though its neighbourhood is defaced by the chimneys and collieries of Wilnecote, which is now a separate parish, formed in the last century out of the civil parishes of Tamworth and Polesworth. Wilnecote has a population about equal to that of Polesworth.

In medieval times the place was called Polesworth in Arderna. It was in the heart of the ancient forest of Arden. To ‘cleere Ankor,’ the river which flows through the village, Drayton dedicates the 13th Amour of his Sonnets (1594):

‘Fayre Arden, thou my Tempe art alone,

And thou, sweet Ankor, art my Helicon.’

‘Polesworth,’ says Professor Oliver Elton in his Michael Drayton, ‘now consists chiefly of a street of ruddy-roofed, black-and-white cottages with the church and adjoining vicarage.