Stretton Baskerville Warwickshire Family History Guide
Stretton Baskerville is an Ancient Parish in the county of Warwickshire.
Alternative names: Stratton Baskerville
Parish church:
Parish registers begin:
- Parish registers: 1743
- Bishop’s Transcripts: None
Nonconformists include:
Table of Contents
Adjacent Parishes
Parish History
This parish, the most northerly in Knightlow Hundred, is a small, fairly level, and open tract across which the Harrow Brook, Sketchley Brook, and other small streams wind their way to the River Anker, which forms its south-west boundary. On the north-east it is divided from Hinckley in Leicestershire by the Watling Street, but there are no other metalled roads. Small readjustments of boundary were made with Hinckley and Burbage in 1934. The parish now contains only a few scattered farms and cottages, the village having been extinguished in the inclosures of the late 15th and early 16th century, and the population has shown a more or less steady decline ever since 1801, when eighty-one persons were enumerated. Stretton lies just too far outside the orbit of both Hinckley and Nuneaton to develop as a residential suburb of either place. By 1636 Stretton Baskerville was considered to be a part of Burton Hastings, and Dugdale, writing about the same time, states that there is ‘not now any part of the Church standing’.1
The medieval township constituted a group of a dozen or so houses on a ridge which runs parallel with the stream near the south-east corner of the parish. The site is approached from the Watling Street by a drive which skirts the stables of Stretton House and then turns west along a farm track. This track, which formed the village street, was apparently cobbled and led to a small plateau on the west which was the site of the church. Recent trial excavations on this site have yielded roofing slates, plain red paving tiles, small pieces of glazing leadwork, and fragments of building stone, including a large semicircular block, possibly parts of an internal arcade. A belt of elms divides this western part, known as ‘the Little Township’, from the field to the east called ‘the Township’, where a series of depressions, yielding fragments of pottery, marks the sites of insubstantial cottages of timber or clay. A long field slopes down to former fish-ponds, of which the central borders the stream for about 105 yds., is between 25 and 30 yds. wide, and has two small ponds at each end. The banks vary in height from 5 ft. to 10 ft. and along the north bank are pieces of worked and unworked stone, from the foundations of the church, and bricks of 15th-century type1.
The Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales 1870
STRETTON-BASKERVILLE, a parish in the district of Hinckley, and county of Warwick; 1½ mile W SW of Hinckley r. station. Post town, Nuneaton. Acres, 760. Real property, £1,728. Pop., 74. Houses, 15. The living is a sinecure rectory in the diocese of Worcester. Value, £100. Patron, the Crown.
Source: The Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales [Wilson, John M]. A. Fullarton & Co. N. d. c. [1870-72].
Parish Records
FamilySearch
Administration
- County: Warwickshire
- Civil Registration District: Hinckley
- Probate Court: Pre-1837 – Court of the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry (Episcopal Consistory), Post-1836 – Court of the Bishop of Worcester (Episcopal Consistory)
- Diocese: Worcester
- Rural Deanery: Coventry
- Poor Law Union: Hinckley
- Hundred: Knightlow
- Province: Canterbury
1. ‘Parishes: Stretton Baskerville’, in A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 6, Knightlow Hundred, ed. L F Salzman (London, 1951), pp. 240-241. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol6/pp240-241 [accessed 15 October 2021].