Description:Marchington is situated in the Dove Valley four miles from Uttoxeter. The high street is on the main road between Tutbury and Uttoxeter. Marchington also once had its own railway station on the Crewe-Derby line, which opened in 1848 and closed in 1958.
The name Marchington is derived from ‘Maercham’. This comes from the old English ‘merece’ and ‘hamm’ meaning a settlement, where ‘smallage’ or ‘wild celery’ grew by meadow land beside the river.
In the Domesday Book of 1086 Marchington is recorded as ‘Merchametone’. It was part of the extensive lands of Henry de Ferrers. The land was valuable being worth 100 shillings per year. The recorded population was one serf (an unfree tenant who held land in return for rent and service), 18 villeins (an unfree tenant who held his land by performing agricultural services) and nine bordars (a small holder of land who farmed on the edge of the settlement). There were 40 acres of meadow, and sufficient arable land for seven plough teams which would make Marchington an important agricultural estate. The woodland for pasture was nine miles in length and four and a half miles in breadth.
In the Hearth Tax assessment of 1666 45 households at Marchington were assessed as liable for tax on 75 hearths. The largest property was that of Hondill Hall with eight hearths.
There is evidence of a priest, named Ellis, at Marchington in the late 12th century. Although the original medieval church of St. Peter’s is no longer in existence, there is a medieval beam and a medieval chest which may be from the original church. The church was a dependent of St. Werburgh’s Church at Hanbury until the 19th century. In the 1730’s the church of St. Peter was in desperate need of repair and in danger of falling down, so in 1743 Richard Trubshaw of Haywood was commissioned to rebuild the church in brick. Additional alterations took place in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the enlargement of the vestry in 1998 to include a meeting room with modern facilities.
A Primitive Methodist chapel was built in the village in 1841 and a house was registered for worship by Wesleyan Methodists in 1840. The Methodist chapel closed in about 1970.
A Roman Catholic church was built in 1955 by Dorothy Methuen in memory of her brother Richard Longdon of Marchington Hall, who had died in 1953.
There earliest buildings in the village are timber-framed houses dating from the late 16th or early 17th centuries. Other 18th and 19th century brick houses are also in evidence including the gothic styled almshouse built in 1860.
Marchington Hall was built in the late 17th century either by John Egerton, Earl of Bridgwater, or possibly his son Charles Egerton who owned the manor in 1684/5. It is built of brick with a gabled front. It belonged to the Talbot family in the late 18th and early 19th centuries until it was sold again and for a while it was under the ownership of the Vernon family.
Houndhill Farm, situated close to a medieval moated site, was built at a similar time to Marchington Hall but replaced an existing house. The farm dates back to the 12th century when Earl William de Ferrers was renting land to Engenulph de Houndhill. The name may be Scandinavian in origin so it is possible that Hound Hill may have been used by the Vikings as an observation point. By the 16th century the Vernons were living at Houndhill manor and remained there until the early 20th century.
There was a boys’ grammar school in existence in Marchington during the 1660s. The present school dates from the 1780s and was funded by an endowment from Francis Wheeldon, a farmer who rented Houndhill Farm. In the early 19th century a new school was built which contained two rooms and a master’s house. Reading, writing, accounts and singing were taught by the master, and the girls were taught knitting and needlework. An infants’ school was added in the mid 1830s and also a Sunday school. The school was damaged by the Fauld explosion of 1944 when 4,000 tons of stored bombs exploded at nearby Fauld. The school was declared unsafe in 1948 and later demolished. The children were taught in an army hut until a new school was built in 1964.
While agriculture provided much employment in the area so too did the building trade. A builder’s and wheelwright’s yard was in existence in 1780 and was run by Samuel Bagshaw in the 1830s. It was a major employer for the area until 1951, as was the firm of Woolley & Wainwright, a firm of builders, joiners and plumbers. In addition, Tutbury gypsum was worked at Houndhill for short periods of time during the 15th, 17th and 20th centuries. The stone was used for floors, ceilings and the walls of timber and plaster houses.
In 1941 a USA army camp was built in Marchington. The vicarage became the headquarters and an officers’ mess was built in Silver Lane. It became a prisoner-of-war camp in 1944 when the soldiers left for the D-Day invasion of Europe. The British army was still using the camp until the 1960s but the land was finally sold in 1980.
To find out more about the history of Marchington see The Victoria County History of Staffordshire Volume X.