Weobley: a Herefordshire Village in History

Weobley is the village I know best in England. I have lived there for fourteen years, so that, by local reckoning, I am no longer a “foreigner”; and “like a dog on a scent,” as James Bryce said of J.R. Green, I have followed its fortunes through the ages. I do not propose, however, to tell the story of Weobley, except in so far as it is concerned, through its people, with the wider movements of our national life. For, if I interpret history aright, the bald statement of an old inhabitant that “there has seldom been a time when Weobley has not touched history” should be modified to read “there has seldom been a time when Weobley people have not played their part in the history of the nation.” Weobley is in North-West Herefordshire, twelve miles from Hereford, ten miles from the Welsh border. It has a wealth of half-timbered houses, a Lord of the Manor—the Marquis of Bath—who can trace his descent from Roger de Laci, the first Norman lord; it has a fourteenth-century church and the remains of a twelfth-century castle; from 1295 to 1305, and again from 1643 to the Reform Act, it was a Parliamentary Borough.