Presteigne
The Judge's Lodging
The
Judge's Lodging,
Broad Street
(far right)
A new life for the Shire Hall
In 1542 Presteigne was chosen as a safer venue for the Court of the King’s
Great Sessions, in preference to Rhayader, where a judge had been murdered
in the 1530’s. Presteigne was thus set to become the legal seat of
Radnorshire for more than 400 years.
By the early 1800’s Presteigne was thriving, having the status of county town as well as its long established legal role. It housed the Great Sessions (called Assizes after 1830) and the Quarter Sessions, where magistrates met to try minor offences and to carry out administrative duties similar to those of a modern County Council. (Examples of Quarter Sessions cases from various dates can be seen on the Crime and Punishment and Care of the Poor sections of this website).
dominates
Broad Street
Shire Hall
for the trials and hearings, a lodging house for the Judges, and a gaol.
Both the old Shire Hall and the gaol, however, were in a very poor state
of repair. The state of the Shire Hall gave rise to many complaints from
the magistrates, and many prisoners managed to escape from the insecure
gaol.The prison was the first building to be replaced, with a new building on the edge of the town. A new Shire Hall, Court of Justice and accommodation for the Judges was ordered in 1825, to be built on the site of the old gaol in Broad Street, Presteigne.
Radnorshire juries gained a reputation around this time for being reluctant to convict, not least because they often knew the people who were being tried. In 1834 a Quarter Sessions jury at Presteigne was fined for tossing a coin to decide upon a verdict !
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