Loxley, Warwickshire

Loxley, Warwickshire is a village and civil parish near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The population taken at the 2011 census was 399. Loxley gave its name to a hall of residence at the University of Warwick, within the Westwood campus.

The settlement is first mentioned in the late 8th century, as king Offa of Mercia gave it to the Cathedral at Worcester. The Domesday Book records the community as including a resident priest. Ownership later passed to Kenilworth Abbey. The parish church was consecrated in 1286, built on the foundation of the earlier Anglo-Saxon church. In 1538, Loxley manor was owned by Robert Croft, later passing to the Underhill family and in 1664 to Edward Nash of East Greenwich. A village school was built in the 1830s. In the 1850s, the former parish lands were divided between seven farms. In 1910 the village had 59 households. As of 2011, there were 150 households with a total population of 399.

While the Robin Hood is mostly associated with Loxley, South Yorkshire, Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman in their Robin Hood The Man Behind The Myth (1995) suggested that a certain Robert Fitz Oto of Loxley manor was "the true Robin Hood". Historian David Baldwin in his Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked (2010) proposed Roger Godberd, who is buried in Loxley.

Warwickshire

Warwickshire (ⁱ/ˈwɒrᵻkʃə/ or /ˈwɒrᵻkʃɪər/) is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare, George Eliot, & Aleister Crowley. Commonly used abbreviations for the county are Warks or Warwicks.

The county is divided into five districts of North Warwickshire, Nuneaton & Bedworth, Rugby, Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon. The current county boundaries were set in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972. The historic county boundaries also included Coventry and Solihull, as well as much of Birmingham.

For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region (code UKG13) and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region.

Geography

The county is bordered by Leicestershire to the northeast, Staffordshire to the northwest, Worcestershire and the West Midlands to the west, Northamptonshire to the east and southeast, Gloucestershire to the southwest and Oxfordshire to the south. The northern tip of the county is only 3 miles (5 km) from the Derbyshire border. An average-sized English county covering an area of almost 2,000 km², it runs some 60 miles (97 km) north to south. Equivalently it extends as far north as Shrewsbury in Shropshire and as far south as Banbury in north Oxfordshire.

Warwickshire (UK Parliament constituency)

Warwickshire was a parliamentary constituency in Warwickshire in England. It returned two Members of Parliament (MPs), traditionally known as knights of the shire, to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, elected by the bloc vote system.

History

Boundaries and franchise

The constituency, which seems first to have returned members to Parliament in 1293, consisted of the historic county of Warwickshire, excluding the city of Coventry which had the status of a county in its itself after 1451. (Although Warwickshire also contained the borough of Warwick and part of the borough of Tamworth, each of which elected two MPs in its own right for part of the period when Warwickshire was a constituency, these were not excluded from the county constituency, and owning property within the borough could confer a vote at the county election. This was not the case, though, for Coventry.)

As in other county constituencies the franchise between 1430 and 1832 was defined by the Forty Shilling Freeholder Act, which gave the right to vote to every man who possessed freehold property within the county valued at £2 or more per year for the purposes of land tax; it was not necessary for the freeholder to occupy his land, nor even in later years to be resident in the county at all.