Wolverhampton St Peter, Staffordshire Genealogy

England Staffordshire

Parish History
Wolverhampton St Peter is an Ancient Parish and a market town in the county of Staffordshire.

Other places in the parish include: Bentley, Bradle Manor, Featherstone, Hatherton, Hilton, Kinvaston, Manor, Willenhall St Giles, Wolverhampton East, Wolverhampton Eastern, Wolverhampton St John, Wolverhampton St Johns, Wolverhampton West, and Wolverhampton Western.

The collegiate chapter consists of four (till lately seven) non-resident prebendaries, with a net revenue of £641, formerly payable to a dean, but now received by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners: each of the prebendaries has a separate revenue from his prebend. The living is a perpetual curacy, in the gift of the Bishop of Lichfield: the tithes payable to the Duke of Cleveland have been commuted for £715. The church, built in the reign of Edward III., and anciently one of the king's free chapels, to which many immunities were granted, is a spacious cruciform structure, partly in the early decorated, but principally in the later English style, with a square embattled tower rising from the centre, the upper part of which is a very fine specimen of the later style. It has been lately repewed by subscription. The piers and arches of the nave and transepts, if not of the early English, are of that style merging into the decorated. The pulpit, of one entire stone, is adorned with sculpture; and the octagonal font, of great antiquity, supported on a shaft, the faces of which are embellished with figures of St. Anthony, St. Paul, and St. Peter, in bas-relief, is richly ornamented with bosses, flowers, and foliage. In the chancel, which is in the Italian style, is a fine statue of brass, erected in honour of Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, who commanded under Sir Francis Drake against the Spanish Armada; also a monument to the memory of Colonel John Lane, the protector of Charles II. after the battle of Worcester. What was anciently the Lady chapel contains an alabaster monument to John Lane and his wife, the former represented in armour. In the churchyard, which is inclosed with a handsome iron palisade, is a column twenty feet high, divided into compartments, and highly enriched with sculpture of various designs, supposed to be either British or Danish. Near the south-western angle of the churchyard is a large vault, the roof of which is finely groined, and supported on one central pillar; the walls are three yards in thickness, and on both sides of the doorway are slight vestiges of sculpture: the interior is in good preservation. It appears to have been the basement of some edifice, probably connected with the monastery of Wulfruna, the exact site of which has not been ascertained.

The living of St. Johns is a perpetual curacy; patron, the Earl of Stamford and Warrington. The church, which was erected at an expense of £10,000, including £1000 given by the then patron, was consecrated in 1760. It is an elegant structure in the Grecian style, with a handsome tower surmounted by a lofty and finely-proportioned spire; the prevailing character is a mixture of the Ionic and Corinthian orders. A pleasing and appropriate effect is produced from the arrangement of the interior, and the altar is ornamented with a good painting of the Descent from the Cross, by Barney, a native of the town. In this church is the celebrated organ built in the 17th century, for the Temple church, London, by Harris, the competitor on that occasion of Schmidt; it was purchased for the cathedral of Christ Church, Dublin, where it remained until about 50 years ago, when it was sold for £500, and set up here.

From: 'Wollaston - Wolviston', A Topographical Dictionary of England (1848), pp. 643-649. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=51422 Date accessed: 29 March 2011.

Civil Registration
Birth, marriages and deaths were kept by the government, from July 1837 to the present day. The civil registration article tells more about these records. There are several Internet sites with name lists or indexes. A popular site is FreeBMD.

Church records
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Census records
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Poor Law Unions
Wolverhampton Poor Law Union, Staffordshire

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Rutland Probate Records to find the name of the court having primary jurisdiction. Scroll down in the article to the section Court Jurisdictions by Parish.

Maps and Gazetteers
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 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain

Web sites
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