[7] In 1221, a charter for a Friday market at Brewood was granted to the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield by King Henry III, suggesting considerable growth and increased prosperity since the Domesday survey.

In medieval England, the local priest, in this case titled the vicar from 1275, was not a salaried official but a feudatory, dependent on a benefice designed to support him in office and owing service to his patron, the dean, in return.

He somehow persuaded the nuns of Blackladies to let him impose a tithe on sheep and lambs that belonged to other people but were kept on their land – a long-standing matter of dispute between the parish and the nunnery.

In 1646, after the first round of the English Civil War the living was valued at a mere £20 and the vicar was bailed out by Parliament's Committee for Plundered Ministers, which gave him £50 from the sequestered estates of the dean and £8 from those of John and Peter Giffard at White Ladies and Blackladies.

In the early 18th century the vicarage needed another subvention, this time from Queen Anne's Bounty, a fund designed to aid the poorest Anglican clergy.

In the early 19th century the parish consisted of eight liberties or constablewicks: Brewood town, Chillington, Coven, Engleton, Gunstone and the Hattons, Horsebrook, Kiddemore, and Somerford.

This sounds like large-scale farming for the market by the landowner, as well as subsistence cultivation by the peasants, and the fact that Sir John preferred at least some of his dues in rents suggests that he was using some paid workers instead of inefficient compulsory labour.

By 1337, the bishop was complaining that John de Aldenham had diverted the Saredon Brook for his own purposes, greatly reducing the capacity of Somerford Mill.

[18] Francis Somerford's complaint was not only that the forge stole his water supply, but that it had also flooded the surrounding meadows (presumably by use of a dam or weir), and that his family was disturbed "by the usual knocking thereof at several times of the night", and by "the unwholesome smoke, sparks and air .

By the 18th century, timber sales and a tannery brought their own particular smells and noise, as well as employment, to the town, and in 1817 the chief industry was reckoned to be manufacture of agricultural machinery.

The lord of the manor of Brewood was letting out a forge by 1485 and there was probably iron production and working in the woodlands – a pattern very similar to that in nearby areas where rivers ran close by woods that could supply charcoal, as along the Smestow and the Stour.

[19] By this time, Brewood was living in the shadow of an industrial revolution that transformed the nearby Severn valley, Wolverhampton and the Black Country, but largely passed it by.

The only major landowning dynasty to survive in Brewood through all these transitions of the medieval and modern periods were the Giffard family, whose main local seat was, and still is, Chillington Hall, about three miles south-west of the village centre.

On the land of White Ladies, a short distance north of the former priory buildings, they adapted a farmhouse into a hunting lodge, which they named Boscobel House.

[21] Like many of the Staffordshire and Shropshire gentry, the Giffard family remained Catholic Recusants throughout the Reformation and the English Civil War, sheltering priests and hearing mass in their houses, despite continuing to be buried in ornate tombs in the chancel of the Anglican parish church for four generations of religious turmoil and persecution.

The network of alliances and patronage among the gentry of Brewood played a pivotal role in the escape of Charles II after his defeat by Parliamentary forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

Most famously, White Ladies Priory and Boscobel House, together with nearby Moseley Old Hall, provided refuge for Charles as he sought a way out of the West Midlands.

Finally, Charles was spirited away from the Midlands mainly by the efforts of Jane Lane of Bentley, whose family were major landowners in Brewood, although Protestant and formerly supporters of Parliament.

Charles publicised the role of those local Catholics who aided his escape and a not entirely reliable account of his adventures by Thomas Blount, published after his Restoration in 1660, was actually entitled Boscobel.

This was one of fourteen buildings in Staffordshire designed by Augustus Welby Pugin and promoted by John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, in the period 1836–48, as part of a campaign to revive and consolidate Catholicism in the region.

However, from this time, the influence of the gentry in English Catholicism was on the wane, as immigration from Ireland brought large Catholic working class communities to towns like Wolverhampton, making it an urban faith.

A simple potato plough, for example, could harvest several acres a day, undermining the bargaining power of labourers at precisely the time of year when it was traditionally strongest, and starving families of the little extra, often earned by women and children, that cleared debts and kept their heads above water.

By 1940, eleven of the farms exceeded 150 acres[19] – very different from the small holdings of one and two centuries earlier – and the full effects of mechanisation and scientific agriculture were yet to be felt.

As a result, most of the growth in population and the new housing within the parish, through to the early 20th century, appeared either at Coven or along the Kiddemore Green Road to Bishops Wood, not in Brewood itself.

Brewood acquired a coach stop, on the London to Liverpool run, only later, and that needed extra horses to get it over the bad road through Bishops Wood to Watling Street.

In the 20th century, this residential growth became the central feature of Brewood's history – especially after World War II, when rising general prosperity and the ubiquity of the motor car totally transformed the situation of the Village and the parish as a whole.

Road building gathered pace after World War II and Brewood was to find itself at a favoured corner of the motorway network – albeit after long delays in planning and execution.

Previously National Express West Midlands operated service 54 on an hourly basis Monday-Saturday between Wolverhampton and Stafford but this was withdrawn due to cuts in funding by the owners of the i54 Business Park.

Evolved from a vestry system of government by local notables in the early modern period, it became an elected Civil Parish council in Victorian times.

The oldest surviving purpose-built meeting places for Protestant nonconformists are Wesleyan in origin, although there were significant Congregationalist and Primitive Methodist groups in Brewood during the 19th century.