Ibstock is a former coal mining village and civil parish in North West Leicestershire, England. The population of the civil parish was 5,760 at the 2001 census increasing to 6,201 at the 2011 census[2] and 7,615 at the 2021 census.[3]
The toponym Ibstock could be a derivative of Ibestoche meaning the farmstead or hamlet of Ibba, which is an Old English personal name also found in other toponyms.[6]
Manor
The Domesday Book of 1086 records Ibstock as a hamlet with six ploughlands. In the first half of the 14th century, and probably before, the Lord of the Manor was Robert Garshull, whose daughter and heiress Elizabeth carried it to her marriage with Robert Burdett, Lord of the Manor of Huncote, Leicestershire. He was still living in 1347. Early in the 15th century Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of John Burdett of Huncote, carried the manor of Ibstock in her marriage to Sir Humphrey Stafford (1384-1419) Lord of Grafton, Worcestershire.[7] Two hundred years later the Staffords were still in possession when Sir William Stafford of Blatherwycke in Northamptonshire is recorded as Lord of the manor of Ibstock.
Ralph Josselin, the noted clerical diarist and incumbent of a parish in Essex, briefly stayed in Ibstock during the English Civil War. On 17 September 1645 he marched from Leicester with the parliamentary army and quartered at Ibstock, noting that it had been "Laud's living, and now Dr Lovedyn a great Cavailier" and that although his diet was "very good" his lodgings were "indifferent". Josselin was alarmed to discover on his return the next day that a man had been killed just outside his lodgings near where he had stood closely a while before "not knowing of the pardue [sic] in the ditch".[9]
In 1774, the village was enclosed and in 1792 a free school for fifty poor children of the parish was founded. The 1801 Census gives a total population of 763, in 152 families, two-thirds engaged in agriculture, the rest in trade and manufacturing. By 1811 the population had increased to 836.
Ibstock is a former coal mining village and also has historical and current manufacturing plants that produce tiles, bricks, boots and shoes, and light engineering.[10]