Wellingborough

Sister cities

• Wittlich
• Niort

History

The town was established in the Anglo-Saxon period and was called "Wendelingburgh", deriving from the Old English waendelburh or waendelingburh meaning 'Waendel's burh' (fortification). It is surrounded by five wells: Redwell, Hemmingwell, Witche's Well, Lady's Well and Whytewell, which appear on its coat of arms. Henrietta Maria, the Queen Consort of King Charles I, came with her physician Théodore de Mayerne to take the waters on 14 July 1627. The medieval town of Wellingborough housed a modest monastic grange – now the Jacobean Croyland Abbey – which was an offshoot of the monastery of Crowland (or Croyland) Abbey, near Peterborough, some down-river. This part of the town is known as Croyland. All Hallows Church is the oldest existing building in Wellingborough and dates from c. 1160. The manor of Wellingborough belonged to Crowland Abbey Lincolnshire, from Saxon times and the monks probably built the original church. The earliest part of the building is the Norman doorway opening in from the later south porch. The church was enlarged with the addition of more side chapels and by the end of the 13th century had assumed more or less its present plan. The west tower, crowned with a graceful broach spire rising to , was completed about 1270, after which the chancel was rebuilt and given the east window twenty years later. The church was restored in 1861 by Edmund Francis Law. The 20th-century Church of St Mary was built by Ninian Comper. Wellingborough was given a Market Charter dated 3 April 1201 when King John granted it to the "Abbot of Croyland and the monks serving God there" continuing, "they shall have a market at Wendligburg (Wellingborough) for one day each week that is Wednesday". In the Elizabethan era the Lord of the manor, Sir Christopher Hatton…

Geography

The town is sited on the hills adjoining the flood plain of the River Nene. In the predominantly agrarian Middle Ages, this combination of access to fertile, if flood-prone, valley bottom soils and drier (but heavier and more clay-rich) hillside/ hilltop soils seems to have been good for a mixed agricultural base. The clay-rich hilltop soils are primarily a consequence of blanketing of the area with boulder clay or glacial till during the recent glaciations. On the valley sides and valley floor however, these deposits have been largely washed away in the late glacial period, and in the valley bottom extensive deposits of gravels were laid down, which have largely been exploited for building aggregate in the last century. The most economically important aspect of the geology of the area is the Northampton Sands ironstone formation. This is a marine sand of Jurassic age (Bajocian stage), deposited as part of an estuary sequence and overlain by a sequence of limestones and mudrocks. Significant amounts of the sand have been replaced or displaced by iron minerals, giving an average ore grade of around 25 wt% iron. To the west the iron ores have been moderately exploited for a very long time, but their high phosphorus content made them difficult to smelt and produced iron of poor quality until the development of the Bessemer steel-making process and the "basic slag" smelting chemistry, which combine to make high-quality steelmaking possible from these unprepossessing ores. The Northampton Sands were a strategic resource for the United Kingdom in the run-up to World War II, being the best-developed bulk iron-producing processes wholly free from dependence on imported materials. However, because the Northampton Sands share in the regional dip of all the sediments of this…