Invisible Fortress
The Vanishing of Shipbrook Castle
The castle at Shipbrook near Davenham is long lost to us today, its last traces being cleared from the land in the 1790s. However, in balancing the brutal events of early Norman England together with the history of a key local family, not only can we better appreciate this often overlooked corner of medieval Cheshire, but perhaps for the first time, look to understand the story of Shipbrook Castle and its ties to a bloody revolt against King Henry IV.
A New Technology
When images of historical England are brought to mind, what do you think of? For many of us, few things better represent the distinct charm and lure of English history than the image of the castle. Imposing in construction and romantic in ruin, the castle offers a tangible connection to both the history and accompanying fantasy of the medieval world.
The gatehouse, the keep, the moat, and the towers; all are easy images to drum up. These great fortresses have played host to kings, queens, rebellion, and battle, if more recently primarily finding their audiences in those visitors enjoying a historical day out. The castle is the one historical structure that everybody you know will recognise, irrespective of their interest, or lack therefore, in history as a whole.
This is true in most part for the wider world as well. It is the castles that draw the more inquisitive visitors from the US, Japan, and Australia, whereas our great palaces tend to cater for those with a majority interest in British history that lies in the more personal trials and tribulations of the royal family. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I can’t imagine they’ll come across too many oubliettes.
In reality though, our castles are far more than mere agents of the period in which they were built, which in itself is a complex issue. Castles are often built on sites with a defensive legacy stretching back into the time of the Anglo-Saxons; a time that was as distant to those individuals who laid the castle’s foundations as it was to those who bore witness to the events that would place most of them in ruin during the seventeenth century.
Those with an interest in such topics as that of the castle will appreciate that the grand structures of Warwick and Windsor are rarified examples. Most are tumbling, blow-hole-laden vestiges of all we imprint onto them in our minds. For the most part, a visit to an English castle, or a Welsh one for that matter, will bring far more by way of knee-high ruined walls, floor plan information boards, and cannon-blasted crumbled towers than it will anything classically grandiose. And that of course, is the biggest part of their charm.
In Cheshire, we are blessed with a startling array of castles to visit and study, primarily due to the county being one of the original administrative centres of England established by the Norman regime following their victory at Hastings in 1066. Before the Norman conquest, when William, Duke of Normandy landed at Hastings in order to claim the throne of England, the Anglo-Saxons had their strongholds, but they weren’t like our traditional castles in their aesthetics. These were much broader defensive structures, built around communities as a whole, sometimes along the lines of earlier Roman fortifications. Founded primarily under the rule of Alfred the Great, these burhs have survived in administrative terms to give us many of our ‘borough’ borders today.
Castles, as we have come to know them, find their origins in Europe during the tenth century, and it was this new style of fortification, employed to establish control of an area both militarily and economically at speed, that would provide William of Normandy, latterly known as William the Conquerer, with the key tool for the cementation of his rule in England. Built in large numbers across the Saxon landscape to provide immediate protection from, or perhaps more importantly, to promote the subjugation of, rebellious local populations, the castle was as crucial to the success of the new Norman regime as the Spitfire was to the Battle of Britain. Without them, history would be very different indeed.
Far from the classic image we have today, these early constructions were primarily formed of an earthen mound (motte) and protected courtyard (bailey), all of which would then be surrounded by a further protective ditch and palisade wall. They were cheap to construct and quick to build. The perfect ‘pop-up’ defensive site. Around a thousand were built in the aftermath of the invasion and for the existing population in the settlements around them, they constituted a new and frightening concept; especially when reinforced with a stone keep atop their central mound.
From their beginnings in earth and timber, some would go on to find themselves decommissioned whilst others would grow into stunning examples of stone-built engineering. Later, as their benefits became increasingly evident, more and more castles were built in stone from the off; which together with their earlier Norman counterparts, give rise to the suite of fortifications that we now have available throughout the country as a whole.
Stronghold Cheshire
In the years following the conquest, Cheshire would be cast as a frontier region, a swell of land keeping Norman England from the warring, neighbouring kingdoms of Wales. It is no fluke that of the twenty castle sites located in the county, nine are found within just a few miles of the Welsh border.
Our earliest strongholds are found at Chester, Frodsham, and Halton. All were originally constructed shortly after the Norman conquest circa 1070, their differing fortunes across the years illustrating well the diverse manner of destiny for the castle at large. Chester is still very much a feature of the city centre today thanks to its conversion to stone during the twelfth century and the fact that it came to play a prominent part in our national history during the years that followed. The list of prisoners held at Chester throughout its heyday reads like a roll call of England's later medieval history; King Richard II, Andrew de Moray, and John Neville plus many more spent significant time within the crypt of the Agricola Tower.
Frodsham was never converted to stone, and had fallen into disrepair come the 1300s, with modern interpretations of the castle coming from the fortified manor house that replaced it. Halton, sits somewhere between the two. With roots as a pre-historic defensive site, it enjoyed a busy history from its inception right up to the Civil War period, and although now ruinous, its refurbishment in sandstone during the thirteenth century means that a good portion of physical evidence remains on site today; a later courthouse built in the 1700s surviving completely intact and now serving as the Castle Hotel.
I share these examples to show how no matter the strength of the classic image, that popular, a-typical vision, with its great walls and stone towers is in fact, for the most part, a historical trick-of-the-light. It is a snapshot, frozen in time, surviving into the modern age by way of private conservation and national schedule, representing an ideal of time and place. As such, they are vital bastions of legacy, providing a clear and defined portal through which we can view the past, but we should always try to remember that no matter how awe-inspiring these stone castles may be, they serve to show only one part of a far greater tale. For every great castle still with us today, there are a dozen that have long since vanished. Some by way of war, but just as many, by fluke of economics and simple ill-fashion.
I've personally lost count of the number of times I've seen a Castle Street, Castle Hill, or Castle View with no sight of such a structure for miles around. Yet in most instances, on looking a little closer, such places tend to have certain details in common. They may be found on a modern street that follows the line of a Roman road or they may present to the world as a children's play area perched atop a conspicuous-looking hill. More elusive still, they may consist now of little more than a bumpy quarter of earth in an overgrown woodland, which only after careful study will reveal a commanding view of the land around it. It is one such place that we will explore in this piece, and one with a history so rich it should perhaps be considered as much a part of this county's heritage as any of its far more famous counterparts; the lost castle of Shipbrook.
From the nature of its purpose to its precise location, the history of Shipbrook Castle is shrouded in mystery. A significant part of this confusion is centred on an often-quoted academic view that, as with many castles built in Cheshire, Shipbrook was first constructed in response to the Norman-Welsh wars of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. This has held firm for the better part of seventy years, even though Shipbrook lies more than twenty miles away from the Welsh border and too far behind the Norman defensive network along the Dee to denote itself of practical use. My research into the castle will suggest something very different - and something much more personal to its founder.
There are significant clues as to the original purpose of Shipbrook Castle when we consider its location, which I will share now before further exploration of its history and custodians. Leaving the village of Davenham along Church Street, within a mile we reach Shipbrook Bridge, an ancient crossing over the River Dane, where today the river is in fast flow. As the land then rises gently beyond the bridge towards Shipbrook Hill Farm - once known in the local record as Castle Hill - there are clear markings on the land escapement as it arrives at the setting of the farm buildings. These earthworks suggest a deliberately landscaped approach from the river. Visiting in person, the view from the farm too, back across the river towards the village of Davenham, is completely befitting the strategic positioning that one would expect to find at such a site.
Corroboration of these observations comes from George Ormerod’s immense 1882 work The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, which states the last remains of the castle as having been cleared around 1790 to make way for the farm, which itself contains antiquated sandstone in its construction, suggesting the repurposing of masonry a-typical of sites which vanished throughout the period. This is important, as the fact that there was masonry present confirms that the castle was affluent enough to have been rebuilt in stone during its early history.
The key question of that history is why, when comparatively speaking the surrounding Cheshire landscape was chock-full of sites with clear and obvious military functionality, was a castle at Shipbrook needed at all? What was it like? And what of its stewards? I promise, far from the less noteworthy ends met by some, the vanishing of Shipbrook is a remarkable and bloody tale - and it begins with the brutal events that took place across the county during the winter of 1069.
The Harrying
Twenty years after the Norman conquest of 1066, William required some financial understanding. To properly assess the wealth of his new kingdom, to tax it, he commissioned a great survey, sending riders out to every corner of England to collect information on everything from livestock and plough-hands to bridges and slaves; the results of which were bound together for eternity in that now world-famous tome, Domesday Book.
Although the hamlet of Shipbrook is today considered to be a part of Davenham, at the time of the great survey it was valued independently and was found to be worth double the income of its neighbour with an ‘annual value to the lord’ of 10 shillings. The settlement consisted of 2 villagers, 2 slaves, and 2 plough teams. At this point, in 1086, the manor was in the possession of Richard de Vernon, who had been awarded a suite of lands at the expense of the local Saxon lord Osmer following the division of holdings across Cheshire that took place in the wake of the conquest.
What is most telling from the entry relating to Shipbrook, and key to Richard de Vernon’s founding of the castle, is spotting just how much Shipbrook's annual revenue had sunk during the twenty years since the Norman takeover, its previous annual value being placed at the quite considerable figure of 1 pound and double what it was worth in 1086. It is a similar story in Davenham too, with an annual value that almost halved during the same period, and indeed so is the case with the nearby manor of Leftwich. All are signs of the dreadful situation that had arisen in the north of England across the period.
By the winter of 1069, more than three-quarters of the population of northern England had either been killed or exiled during a campaign of brutal savagery waged by the new king in what has become known to history as the ‘Harrying of the North’. Virtually all settlements across what we now think of as Cheshire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire, had been desolated during the campaign as William looked to rid his kingdom of the rebellious northern populations that were proving so troublesome to the completion of his plans.
The rebellion had started in Northumbria, partly as a reaction to the way Norman rule had affected its people during William’s absence in 1067. His return home to France had seemingly taken any notion of concern for the population of England with it, and those that had been charged with ruling while he was away had taken up the dark arts of raping and pillaging with a terrible gusto. As the rebellion gathered pace through 1068 it morphed into a full-on counterclaim to the throne, rallying behind Edgar Ætheling, the last heir of the deposed House of Wessex, and a figure to whom the conquered people of England felt they could turn, in a bid to restore the normalities of life lost since the conquest.
This wasn’t an altogether spurious ambition. At the start of William’s consideration of the campaign he had sent a force of 900 Norman soldiers into the town of Durham in order to secure the peace. Just two made it out alive. Come 1069, the future of England was seriously in the balance as rebellions began to surface across the Midlands too. William needed to act.
Entering the fray directly, he took to crushing revolts across the country in a game of bloody whack-a-mole that was threatening his grip on the crown; something exacerbated further still when, that autumn, the King of Denmark landed in support of the northern uprising. William raced to York to meet the Danish force and in time-honoured tradition, when it came to appealing to those known as ‘Danes’, paid them gold and silver to return home. Once they left, he vowed to hunt down the indigenous leaders of their would-be northern alliance. The problem was though, try as he might, he simply could not find them.
The rebel’s success had largely been found in their ability to operate a gorilla war, attacking quickly, and retreating into the countryside. Frustrated and tired by their elusive nature, William decided he would lay waste to the North in totality, removing any ability the rebels had to feed themselves, let alone rally further banner-men. Settlements, livestock, crops, absolutely everything would burn, and nothing was off limits for the perversions of the soldiers carrying out his orders. It was, some modern observers have suggested, an English genocide. Just how savage this campaign was is illustrated well in the writings of those who documented early Norman rule, as whilst naturally biased and supportive of the new regime, even they found themselves unable to hide their true feelings regarding the levels of barbarity that had been poured onto the people of the land. Writing fifty years after the event, the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis stated how;
‘The king stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. This made a real change. To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools, and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished from starvation. I have often praised William but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.’
Following the campaign, and particularly due to the scorched earth tactics employed during it, the value of land in northern England had been flawed. There was little fertile land left to cultivate crops, few animals left to care for, and a huge reduction in the number of people who were fit and able enough to conduct a labouring life. In the aftermath, Hugh d'Avranches, Earl of Chester and William's main man in the county, was charged with bringing about economic recovery in his local region.
The first step in achieving this would be the creation of new baronial titles, granted to those figures that d’Avranches could trust to manage their estates sympathetically to the cause. Richard de Vernon, a veteran of Hastings, was one of the men in line for such a title, and Shipbrook provided part of his administrative responsibilities in Cheshire alongside lands in Bostock, Crewe, Davenham, and Leftwich.
In such a ravaged world, practical value had temporarily shifted from the immediately obvious to the more strategic. It is in light of this, that from all the lands at his disposal, Richard de Vernon chose Shipbrook as his new baronial seat. The position of the settlement, overlooking a crossing on the River Dane, would have made Shipbrook his most valuable asset. Control of such a river crossing meant control of trade. As such, a fortification at Shipbrook would have been necessary almost immediately.
Above - raised earth at the former site of the castle
Below - earthworks leading up from the river
History Makers
From their base at Shipbrook, the Vernon family would begin a regional dynasty that would see their name etched into the history of both Cheshire and Derbyshire to such an extent that any visit we make today to a local historical site, country house, cathedral, or even large parish church, is more often than not accompanied by the Vernon coat of arms being proudly displayed somewhere in the vicinity. The family's roots may have been back in the Eure region of Normandy, but their Cheshire holdings had given them such a foothold in the new kingdom that they would help shape the fortunes of not just the county, but of wider English history across the centuries to come.
Richard de Vernon would go on to marry Adzelia, daughter of William Peverel (reputedly an illegitimate son of William the Conqueror himself) and would then become an advisor to William’s son, King Henry I, during the difficult early years of his reign. So close did Richard become to the new king that he was often the sole signatory to Henry's charters and decrees. As a result, by the time of his death in 1107, Richard had expanded his personal empire significantly, acquiring lands as far away as Devon, Hampshire, and on the Isle of Wight. Shipbrook meanwhile, had become an established economic centre.
Over the following three hundred years, the castle would continue to prosper as the Vernon’s influence grew throughout England as a whole, and it is likely that it is during this period, probably around the Welsh Wars of the 1280s, that Shipbrook was formally transformed into a stone fortress. As with many such families of the period, great power was often a source of political conflict and the fortunes of castles such as Shipbrook were only ever one twist of fate away from sudden decline.
Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, England was an incredibly turbulent place. The twelfth century civil war known today as ‘The Anarchy’ - when the succession of the throne of Henry I was contested between his daughter, Empress Matilda, and his nephew, Stephen of Blois - saw conflict between various English barons and war leaders as the ruling classes of the nation picked their favoured side.
It is a conflict in which Hugh de Vernon, 3rd Baron of Shipbrook (1113-1165) would no doubt have had a role to play. The fourteenth century too, with the Black Death and the decimation it brought to the population of Europe, is likely to have killed around half of Cheshire’s population, and the laws passed in its wake, designed to maximise economic governance, would have been a serious contention for people such as those living at Shipbrook Castle. But it would the fifteenth century, and its period of Royal turmoil, in which the defining moment for Shipbrook would arrive.
The Hotspur Revolt
The Percys were a powerful family from Northumberland and their lands formed an integral part of England's border defence against the Scots. They had long been staunch supporters of Henry IV and had played a vital role in the war with Richard II that had resulted in Henry taking the throne in 1399. The rewards for such support, as you might imagine, had proved considerable. Star of the family, Sir Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy (so named for his speed in battle) had duly received numerous gifts and titles, not least amongst them the offices of High Sheriff of Flintshire and Justice of Cheshire. His ageing father, the Earl of Northumberland, may still have been head of the family, but there was no doubt as to Hotspur’s new-found station amongst the elite. A personal favourite of the new king, for Hotspur, the future was bright. His new role in Flintshire was a timely appointment, North Wales now finding itself a hotbed of warring activity courtesy of the new rebel leader, Owain Glyndŵr.
Glyndŵr represented a serious threat to the fledgling rule of Henry, and so it is a sign of Hotspur’s militaristic prowess that in 1402 he was also appointed Royal Lieutenant in North Wales, tasked with bringing Glyndŵr to heel in a conflict that was quickly beginning to resemble nothing less than a Welsh war of independence.
Behind the scenes however, as the fighting intensified (the king was also fighting the Scots during 1402), Hotspur and the Percy family were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the realities of the new king’s patronage. There was a long list of grievances building, chief among them, the king’s failure to pay wages owed for the defence of the Anglo-Scottish border whilst also demanding that the Percys’ hand over their Scottish prisoners; prisoners who would have traditionally found themselves ransomed in place of the missing wages.
Activities in Wales too brought their share of issues. Not only had the king failed to acknowledge a peace deal that had been drawn up courtesy of the Percys’ hard and risky work, but the king had also then refused to pay a ransom for Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Mortimer, who himself had been captured by the Welsh. The Percy family, who had been promised so much, had come to take these repeated failures as personal slights. This was a serious, treacherous time in England, and it was vital that, should a powerful family wish to survive, they must stay ahead of any portents and omens that were spotted in the skies above them.
The new king, whom they had helped to power, had seemingly proved himself less than loyal. And so, now allying with Glyndŵr’s forces in Wales, the Percys opted to lead a fresh, open rebellion. Spearheaded by Hotspur himself, in the summer of 1403 the family mustered their regional connections and began a march south. Several high-ranking figures had rallied to join their retinue, all similarly slighted by the king and equally keen for redress, but it wasn't until they reached Cheshire that their forces would finally take the shape of a solid, operational concern.
Cheshire had recently seen troubles of its own, with an event we would do well to try and understand before placing Shipbrook into the greater fray. Just three years earlier, in March 1400, the Cheshire Rolls record that the Prince of Wales (and future King Henry V) had issued an order that all governors of Cheshire castles should take personal custody of their fortresses ‘having consideration to the rebellions commenced by some of the county’. It is a reference to one of those events in Cheshire history that seems to have slipped through the cracks of the broader historical record, yet one intrinsically connected to the wider concerns of the nation at the time.
As a ‘palatinate county’ Cheshire was not subjected to the standardised laws of government with quite the same verve as many other counties. Rather, many of its judicious and administrative facets were influenced by auspices of direct Royal overture. It was our county, perhaps more than any other, that enjoyed a genuinely ‘special relationship’ with the Royal household during the period, particularly that of Richard II. Indeed, it was the company of soldiers known as the Cheshire Guard that had formed the personal bodyguard of the deposed King Richard II; and it was in the city of Chester that a force had gathered in 1399 in an attempt to drum up fresh support for his restoration. Richard had been a genuine friend of the county and the concerns of its nobility, and for the most part, the Cheshire elite had little love for the incoming Henry.
Even when Henry was settled on his new throne, events of 1399 would not be easily forgotten, as there is a further mention in the record of more than 100 people in Cheshire being refused pardon in May 1400 due to ‘treasons, insurrections, felonies, rebellions, and trespasses committed by them from Christmas last’ - an apparent nod to Cheshire’s distinctly Ricardian allegiances.
The interesting thing about this entry is that whilst such conflicts meant official pardons and the like were standard practice - how else could you crack on with running your new country if you refused to forgive those that had supported your predecessor - the new king specifically wanted personal apologies from those individuals concerned. He was a man clearly still much concerned about the rumination of their collective mindset.
The Manor of Shipbrook, there should be little doubt, would have been a major benefactor of the favourable esteem in which the deposed king had held his distant and loyal county. Still home to the Vernons, national events would have been watched with avid interest as the summer of 1403 began to unfurl with Hotspur making his way to Cheshire in search of support. Upon arrival, he would not be disappointed.
Irrespective of how personal the slights may have been at the heart of the Percy family rebellion, here was a chance for the nobility of Cheshire to call their houses together, enabling tangible action to manifest from the thick air of resentment that had been hanging around their great manors for the past four years; and with Hotspur at the head of the mission, it was recognised as being a cause with a genuine shot at success. Cheshire contained a wealth of experienced soldiers including the famed and feared Cheshire Bowmen, some of which were part of the aforementioned Cheshire Guard. Altogether, an estimated 10,000 souls would join the campaign as it passed through the county; and chief amongst them was Sir Richard Vernon of Shipbrook Castle.
The Battle of Shrewsbury
Hotspur would meet his new Cheshire army at Sandiway near Northwich, before marching to Whitchurch and then on again into deepest Shropshire. With Welsh reinforcements set to join them on route courtesy of Glyndŵr, the swollen throng of the Hotspur army moved south intending to take on the forces of both King Henry and the Prince of Wales in a single, definitive pitched battle. Come the evening of the 20th of July, the Percys, together with Sir Richard Vernon, got what they were looking for.
Upon reaching Shrewsbury and setting up camp on opposing banks of the river, 30,000 fighters found themselves staring at one another across the water, banners blowing in the evening breeze. They retreated to their respective camps for the night, but as morning broke King Henry rounded a number of his troops and sent them north in a bid to cut off the rebel road back towards Chester. It didn’t work, but in the attempt, he had shifted the would-be location of the battlefield toward the open ground of the village of Harlescott. With no river to divide them and the heat of the day rising, the fuse was lit.
The two sides lined up and began their parley, trading insults and war cries across the pea field. The king, as was the custom, and in a bid to avoid mass bloodshed, first offered terms for Hotspur’s surrender. They were duly refused and as noon approached, the two sides began their advance. It was the first time in history that English bowmen had faced one another in combat, and it was with the archers that, late in the afternoon, the battle finally began.
The toll of the bowmen across both armies was great, but the Cheshire archers had superior skill, with the English chronicler Thomas Walsingham noting how the men of the king’s army ‘fell like leaves in autumn, as every arrow struck a mortal man’. The Earl of Stafford, commanding the king’s right flank, was killed in the onslaught and his forces, in disarray, fled the field leaving around 7000 horses behind. In the same hail of arrows that had taken Stafford’s life, the Prince of Wales was himself hit with an arrow to the face, but he fought on regardless. A young man in the thick of the action, it was a bloodying that would stay with him throughout his life; later, as King Henry V, he would himself employ the Cheshire Bowmen on the field at the Battle of Agincourt.
In the madness of the fighting, with the rebels in the ascendancy, Hotspur had waited patiently, deliberately choosing his moment to strike. Charging directly at the king, Percy and his men crashed into the Royal ranks, the quartered-lion standard falling to the ground. Percy, lifting the visor on his helmet to assess the situation was then himself struck by an arrow. His men, seeing the fallen standard, exclaimed that the king was dead, but they soon found out he was not, as Henry lifted himself from the melee and declared that in fact it was Percy who was no more.
The battle was over, and the Percy family, together with their Cheshire supporters, were defeated. Hotspur’s body would be salted before being impaled on a spear in Shrewsbury’s marketplace. Then, being quartered, his torso was sent for display at Chester, and his head sent to York. It would be four months until his remains were finally returned to his widow.
Sir Richard Vernon would have been a significant player on the day of the battle, but perhaps even more so during the build-up. His influence from Shipbrook would have played a key part in organising the Cheshire force; something that illustrates just how important his seat had become. From contemporary records, and in particular the chronicle from Dieulacres Abbey in Staffordshire, we can learn a little more about Vernon’s place in the uprising.
Along with Sir Edward Fitton of Gawsworth Hall, Vernon had served in the Irish campaigns of Richard II during 1399 and it would appear from the chronicle that Vernon, together with Sir Richard Venables of Kinderton, were the two most prominent figures of the Northwich hundred in the gathering storm of 1403. Both men were known to have received life-long pensions from Richard, and it was Vernon himself who had been appointed Commissioner for the Peace in Nantwich just a week before Richard lost his throne.
Just how influential a figure Sir Richard Vernon become during the rebellion is further illustrated by his inclusion in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV. Shakespeare's plays are often thought to have been heavily influenced by political propaganda of the day, which is understandable, but increasingly, as with the case of Richard III, his depictions are becoming considered surprisingly accurate. In Henry IV, we get a portrait of Sir Richard Vernon as a man who often finds Hotspur’s decisions at odds with his own better judgement. It is Vernon who is charged with informing Hotspur that the expected reinforcements under Owain Glyndŵr have failed to materialise (true to life) and we could perhaps take this as a nod to Vernon’s genuinely elevated position in Hotspur’s chain of command.
Despite his evident nobility, in defeat, it would follow that Vernon’s contribution to the Percy cause be addressed as a matter of treason. With his men melting into the country night as they began their long and desperate journey back toward Cheshire, he was duly taken prisoner alongside Hotspur’s uncle Thomas Percy, and sent directly to Shrewsbury Gaol. There, he would be hanged, drawn, and quartered, before his head was spiked atop the city walls.
For Cheshire as a whole, the failure of the rebellion equated to a complete disaster, the dead on the field that night in Shrewsbury reading like roll-call of the county’s great historic families. As a result, Cheshire would play little part in the later uprisings during Henry's reign. Safe to say, for Shipbrook Castle and the community that had come to rely on it, a difficult and troublesome time lay ahead. With Sir Richard Vernon’s childless execution, Shipbrook Castle was cast into an inevitable quicklime.
The last of the Shipbrook Vernons’ arrive on the scene in the immediate aftermath of Shrewsbury, with Sir James Vernon of Lostock and Haslington. Upon inheriting the Manor of Shipbrook in 1404, his family already more than comfortable with life at Haslington Hall some 12 miles to the south, it was the beginning of the end for life at the castle and it is shortly after the handover to James that Shipbrook slips away from the historical record altogether.
A Lost Heritage
The story of Shipbrook Castle is one that lasts for the better part of three hundred and fifty years. From its origin as a look-out over the River Dane, through its function as a Baronial seat of Royal influence, and on to its decline following Sir Richard Vernon’s gruesome end in 1403, Shipbrook and its custodians played a pivotal role in not only the development of Cheshire as we know it, but of England as a nation.
As mentioned earlier in this piece, stone remnants of the castle were reportedly still on site as late as 1790, when their last scraps were cleared away by a tenant - a Mr. Edward Tomkinson in the antiquarian record - in order to be used in the local farm buildings. Long-weathered, three stone lintels could still be spotted in a barn at the site as recently as the 1950s.
Today, the castle's former site is occupied by Shipbrook Hill Farm and the lovely Riverside Organic Cafe, where during summer months, families will take their children to sit above the riverbank, remark at the grazing livestock and enjoy ice cream from the local dairy. Whilst there, they will cast their eyes out across the Dane, over the river crossing, and on toward the pastures of Davenham; few realising just how much their experience connects with the very same line of thinking that made the site the chosen baronial home of the de Vernon’s almost 1000 years before.
For more than a brief moment on that summer afternoon in July 1403, it looked very much as though Hotspur and his Cheshire troops were going to emerge victorious. Had the Battle of Shrewsbury turned out differently, and Sir Richard Vernon's direct line survived as a result, it is entirely probable that the ruins of Shipbrook Castle would still stand today in a form that we would associate with that romantic image of the ruined English castle.
There would have been more trials for the building and the family who inhabited it, no doubt, and had it indeed survived the wars of the fifteenth century, who knows what fates would have befallen it come the English Civil War 240 years later. Yet if it had endured, I have little doubt that its crumbling walls would provide a degree of well-deserved recognition for this unassuming and picturesque corner of Cheshire, that, at its heart, contains a genuine treasure trove of fascinating local history.
Eli Lewis-Lycett 2023