Concept

Brewood

Summary
Brewood ˈbruːd is an ancient market town in the civil parish of Brewood and Coven, in the South Staffordshire district, in the county of Staffordshire, England. Located around , Brewood lies near the River Penk, eight miles north of Wolverhampton city centre and eleven miles south of the county town of Stafford. A few miles to the west of Brewood is the border with the county of Shropshire. The Domesday Book of 1086 documented the town as 'Breude'. The name is probably a compound made up of a Celtic, Brythonic word with an Anglo Saxon, Old English word. The first element is the British word 'briga', which appears in modern Welsh as 'bre'. This is the most common of a number of Celtic place-name elements signifying a hill. It appears in various combinations, but sometimes on its own, as in Bray. Margaret Gelling, a specialist in West Midland toponyms, suggested that it was often misunderstood by the Anglo-Saxons as a name rather than as a common noun. So they thought they had come upon a place called by the natives Brig or Bre, rather than simply a hill. This is why the word is often combined tautologically, as in Bredon Hill, where all three elements have the same meaning. The second element is probably obvious: the Anglo-Saxon 'wudu', signifying a wood. Hence the name Brewood means either "Wood on or by a hill" or "Wood near a place called Bre". The old Roman road, Watling Street, stretching from Londinium across the Roman Province of Britannia Superior to Wroxeter and later Chester, runs one mile to the north of the village as the A5. There were small Roman stations along this route and the most important settlement locally was Pennocrucium, which had an outlying fort. The name Pennocrucium is clearly associated with Penkridge, the town and parish north of Brewood, which is separated from it by the line of Watling Street, and these important remains do lie just outside the parish boundary. However, the remains of a small Roman villa have been found about 500m south of Watling Street, close to Engleton, and so within Brewood parish.
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