The Victoria History of Herefordshire: Eastnor

Eastnor lies at the southern end of the Malvern
Hills and has always been an agricultural
parish. In the 19th and 20th centuries it was
dominated by the Castle, built between 1812
and 1820, and by its owners, the Somers Cocks
family, Barons and later Earls Somers, and their
descendants. The Somers Cocks owned most
of the land in the parish and employed many
of its inhabitants, and this ownership saved the
parish and its many timber-framed houses from
modern development. In earlier centuries the
pattern of land ownership was very different;
at the time of Domesday Book the bishop of
Hereford's manor covered the whole parish.
From the later Middle Ages the owners of small
freeholds extended their holdings, so that in the
16th and 17th centuries several gentry families
owned small estates in the parish. In the course
of the 18th century these were bought up by the
Somers Cocks family. This book explores, using
the extensive archival records, how these changes
in land ownership affected the inhabitants of the
parish and the way in which the land was farmed.

Eastnor is the first parish history to be
produced by the Trust for the Victoria County
History of Herefordshire, and complements
some of the work on Ledbury undertaken for
the Heritage Lottery-funded England's Past for
Everyone project between 2005 and 2009. In
its expanded treatment of the parish history,
emphasising the economy and society of the
parish as well as landownership and religious
life, Eastnor is modelled on the first individual
VCH parish history to be published, that of
Mapledurwell, Hampshire, in 2012.