page_title: Little Cowarne
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Little Cowarne / History
caption_attribution_description: English: 1898 Ordnance Survey map detail of Little Cowarne, Herefordshire, England. OS Hereford (Hills) sheet 198 - 1898. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.[1].
context_page_description: Little Cowarne is a village and civil parish in the county of Herefordshire, England, and is 9 miles north-east from the city and county town of Hereford. The closest town is the market town of Bromyard, 4 miles to the north-east.
context_section_description: Cowarne is from the Old English 'cū' with 'œrn' meaning a "cow house or dairy farm". In the Domesday Book it is written as 'Cuure', and in c.1255 as 'Gouern'.
  At the time of the Norman Conquest the manor was in the Hundred of Plegelgete and county of Herefordshire. Domesday records a 1086 population of 12 households. It contained one freeman, four smallholders (middle level of serf below and with less land than a villager), and seven slaves. Ploughland area was defined by three lord's and one men's plough teams. In 1066 Spirtes (the priest) held the manorial lordship, which in 1086 was transferred to Nigel the doctor who was also tenant-in-chief to king William I.
  The Quaker preacher and writer Humphrey Smith (1624 - 4 May 1663), was born at and lived in Little Cowarne as a child and preached between 1654 and his last meeting at Stoke Bliss. He wrote his works while a prisoner before succumbing to gaol fever.
  In 1909 the civil parish—in 1857 also township—is described as being at the west of the road from Hereford to Bromyard, and 6 miles (10 km) east from Dinmore station on the Shrewsbury and Hereford section of the Great Western Railway. It was in the Northern division of Herefordshire, the Broxash hundred, and the Union—poor relief and joint parish workhouse provision set up under the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834—petty sessional division and county court district of Bromyard. The ecclesiastical parish was in the rural deanery of Bromyard and the archdeaconry of the Diocese of Hereford. The parish church, which was restored in 1869–70, was described as being in the Norman style, comprising a nave, chancel, a south entrance and a western belfry with one bell. The church church register dates to 1563. The living was a vicarage attached to the rectory of Ullingswick, which had a joint value of £225 a year net income, and also included 27 acres (11 ha) of glebe—an area of land used to support a parish priest—in the gift of Charles Gore, the Bishop of Birmingham. In 1857 the parish had been a rectory in the gift of Henry Pepys, the Bishop of Worcester, and a chapelry of Ullingswick.
  John Stanhope Arkwright, MP for Hereford, was one of the two major 1909 landowners, whom at the time was living at Lyonshall. Parish soil of 639 acres (259 ha) is described as clayey, with a subsoil of clay and rock, on which were grown wheat, beans, peas, apples, and hops, supporting a population of 134 in 35 houses in 1831, 171 in 1851 and 151 in 1901. The parish mail was accepted and delivered through Worcester via Bromyard. The closest money order and telegraph office was 2.5 miles (4 km) miles away at Burley Gate. School pupils of Little Cowarne were educated at Ullingswick and Pencombe. Commercial trades and occupations in the parish included a blacksmith, a beer retailer who was also a wheelwright, and resident carriers—transporters of trade goods, with sometimes people, between different settlements—who operated between Little Cowarne and Hereford on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and Bromyard on Thursdays. There were seven farmers, one of whom also grew hops, another who was one of the carriers, and another a water miller. The resident assistant Overseer of the poor was also a carrier. Two further carriers were entirely dedicated to the trade. In 1851 there had been seven farmers, a miller, a carpenter, a blacksmith, and a shopkeeper who was also a cider retailer. Children in 1857 were educated at a school supported by voluntary subscription at Ullingswick, 2 miles (3 km) to the south-west, and a school supported by an annual subscription at Felton, 0.5 miles (1 km) farther south-west.
caption: Little Cowarne in 1898
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