Wolverhampton is a city in the English Midlands with a population of roughly 250,000.

 

The town was founded in AD 985 and was known in Anglo-Saxon as Wulfrūnehēantūn, which translates as “Lady Wulfrun’s high farm”  on land granted by royal charter by King Ethelred the Unready. The Lady Wulfruna (c.935–c.1005), was a Mercian noblewoman and a statue to her stands outside St Peter’s Collegiate Church, which itself dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, opposite the University of Wolverhampton’s Wulfruna Building on Wulfruna Street. The Mercians and the West Saxons formed an alliance to repel marauding Danes in 910, with battles taking place at Wednesfield (Woden’s Field) to the northeast, and Tettenhall to the northwest.

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Wolverhampton is mentioned in the Doomsday Book of 1086, a manuscript initiated by William the Conqueror, the first Norman king of England, which was probably the first census of England and Wales. By the 13th Century Wolverhampton was an important market town, by the 14th and 15th Centuries it was a centre for the wool trade, and by the 16th Century a centre for lock-making, factors leading to the inclusion of a woolpack and a padlock on the town’s coat of arms.

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People from overseas may be puzzled by the traditional burning of an effigy, a “Guy” on top of a bonfire on November 5th each year. The event celebrates the foiling of a plot to assassinate King James I of England (who was also King James VI of Scotland) at the State Opening of Parliament in 1605. After 45 years of oppression under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), the Catholic families of England hoped for better times under the Catholic King James (1566–1625). When he failed to deliver they determined to get rid of him and put his nine-year-old Catholic daughter Elizabeth on the throne. The eleven conspirators had purchased a cellar under the house next door to Parliament, where they stashed 36 barrels of gunpowder and a load of firewood guarded by Guy Fawkes (1570–1806) aka Guido Fawkes, an English mercenary who had fought for the Spanish in the Spanish Netherlands. But the “Gunpowder Plot” was discovered and Fawkes captured, while most of the other plotters fled London for the Midlands, only to be run to ground at Holbeche House on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. Having arrived in the rain the plotters set about drying their gunpowder in front of the fire but it was ignited by a spark and several of the men were seriously injured. Meanwhile, the Sheriff of Worcestershire surrounded the house and there followed a fight where three plotters were killed as they ran from the house towards the sheriff’s posse. The others were wounded, captured and taken back to London where they and Fawkes were “hanged, drawn and quartered”. Two local farmers who had aided the fugitives were executed in Wolverhampton.

 

The Gunpowder Plot, which could have changed the course of British history, effectively ended at Holbeche House, 11 km south of Wolverhampton, but it was not the last time the fate of English royalty would be destined by events close to the town.

 

Boscobel House is a 17th Century farmhouse 15 kilometres northwest of Wolverhampton which was owned by the Catholic Giffard family [1] and it was here that the then Prince Charles II sought shelter following his defeat at the Battle of Worcester (1651) during the English Civil War [2]. While Parliamentarian forces hunting him Charles is reputed to have hidden above their heads in the “Boscobel Oak”, a descendant of which still stands on the site today. Charles also took refuge in the “priest holes”, hidden chambers in the walls and floors of the large Catholic houses left over from the time when Catholic families illegally took Mass at home from priests and sometimes had to hide them from Queen Elizabeth’s soldiers and sheriffs. Charles also hid in the priest holes of nearby Moseley Old Hall before fleeing the country, remaining abroad for nine years,  before returning as King Charles II following the death of Oliver Cromwell.

 

Wolverhampton even appears in Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), when he referenced the landscape of the Galapagos Islands, with its smoking geysers, “As resembling chimneys, the comparison would have been more exact if I had said the iron furnaces near Wolverhampton”.

 

During the Industrial Revolution Wolverhampton was every bit an industrial town. Prior to her reign the soon-to-be Queen Victoria visited Wolverhampton and found it “a large and dirty town” and she was said to close the curtains of her carriage windows when the Royal Train passed through the “Black Country”, so called because of the industry and its accompanying grime and smoggy atmosphere. However, she did return to the town for the unveiling of a statue to her beloved Prince Albert, the Prince Consort (1840–1861), in Queen Square, her first public appearance since the death of her husband.

 

For sports lovers, the name Wolverhampton is synonymous with Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, aka the “Wolves”. Formed in 1877 as St Luke’s FC, the Wolves, who play in old gold and black, was one of the original founding members of the Football League in 1888. They have won the FA Cup four times, in 1893, 1908, 1949 and 1960. Wolves are currently in the Premier League and their stadium is the Molineux, which is located a short walk from the Springfield and City Campuses of the University of Wolverhampton. This is where we plan to host the Conference Banquet.

 

It is also interesting to note that Wolverhampton lies within the English Shires, even though it is now part of the County of West Midlands. The English Shires were the backdrop to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, with the industrial Black Country proposed, rather unkindly, as Mordor. George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is also based on a very British Isles map which would also place Wolverhampton in the thick of the action. Peaky Blinders is set to the east in Birmingham’s Small Heath district.

 

Wolverhampton was granted city status in the year 2000.

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Footnotes:

[1] The Giffard Arms is a pub in Victoria Street, Wolverhampton with a long history as a goth and rock venue.

[2] There were effectively three English Civil Wars. The first, between King Stephen and Empress Maud, took place during a time known as “The Anarchy” (1138–1487); the second was the War of the Roses (1455–1487) when the Houses of Lancaster and Tudor battled the House of York; the third English Civil War (1639–1653) was effectively three separate but connected wars (The Wars of Three Kingdoms), between the Parliamentarian forces, the “New Model Army” led by Oliver Cromwell, aka the “roundheads” and the Royalist forces, the “Cavaliers” of King Charles I, who was captured and executed in 1649, and then his son, Charles II.