County town: Shrewsbury
Shropshire was established as a shire in the 10th century. Following the Norman Conquest it became a powerful earldom, with Roger de Montgomery controlling it as a marcher lord against the unconquered Welsh kingdoms.
Shropshire is a marcher county of extraordinary landscape diversity: the Long Mynd and Stiperstones uplands in the south, the Shropshire hills, the Severn valley in the centre, and the gentler farming country of the north. Shrewsbury, almost entirely enclosed by a loop of the Severn, was a fortified town of great medieval importance and the administrative capital of the Welsh Marches. Offa's Dyke, the great 8th-century earthwork marking the boundary between England and Wales, runs along the county's western edge. The Ironbridge Gorge, where Abraham Darby first smelted iron with coke in 1709, is the cradle of the Industrial Revolution and a World Heritage Site.
Shropshire was surveyed in the Domesday Book of 1086, William the Conqueror's great census of England. The survey recorded 436 settlements in the county, with details of their lords, landholders, population, and resources.
Browse 436 Domesday settlements in ShropshireEngland's 39 historic counties, established between the 9th and 12th centuries, are the framework through which English local history, legal records, and landscape have been organised for a thousand years. Most survive today as ceremonial counties, their boundaries deeply embedded in place identity.
An Aubrey report for a specific location in Shropshire draws on historical maps, archaeological records, Domesday data and landscape history to tell the full story of any site in the county.
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