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 1547 by Henry VIII. and in 1631 by Charles I. The bailiff was to be chosen annually by the burgesses, but his election seems to have depended entirely upon the lord of the manor, and, after a contest in 1821 between Lord Forester and Sir W. W. Wynne, the lord of the manor at that date, was nominated by each of them alternately. In the report of 1835 the borough is said to consist of seventeen parishes and to be unfit for corporate government. By the charter of Edward IV. the town obtained the right of sending two members to parliament, but was disfranchised in 1885. The first grant of a market and fair is dated 1227, when the prior of Wenlock obtained licence to hold a fair on the vigil, day and morrow of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, and a market every Monday. The incorporation charter of 1468 granted these to the burgesses, who continue to hold them.

See Victoria County History: Shropshire; John Randall, Randall's Tourists' Guide to Wenlock (1875); “Borough of Wenlock,” The Salopian and West Midland Monthly Illustrated Journal, March, April, November, December, 1877, April and October, 1878, March, 1879 (1877–1879).

 WENLOCK GROUP (Wenlockian), in geology, the middle series of strata in the Silurian (Upper Silurian) of Great Britain. This group in the typical area in the Welsh border counties contains the following formations: Wenlock or Dudley limestone, 90-300 ft.; Wenlock shale, up to 1900 ft.; Woolhope or Barr limestone and shale, 150 ft.

The Woolhope beds consist mainly of shales which are generally calcareous and pass frequently into irregular nodular and lenticular limestone. In the Malvern Hills there is much shale at the base, and in places the limestone may be absent. These beds are best developed in Herefordshire, they appear also at May Hill in Gloucestershire and in Radnorshire. Common fossils are Phacops caudatus, Encrinurus punctatus, Orthis calligramma, Atrypa reticularis, Orthoceras annulatum.

The Wenlock Shales are pale or dark-grey shales which extend through Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, through Radnorshire into Carmarthenshire. They appear again southward in the Silurian patches in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. They thicken from the south northward. The fossils are on the whole closely similar to those in the limestones above with the natural difference that corals are comparatively rare in the shales, while graptolites are abundant. Six graptolite zones have been recognized by Miss G. L. Elles in this formation.

The Wenlock limestone occurs either as a series of thin limestones with thin shales or as thick massive beds; it is sometimes hard and crystalline and sometimes soft, earthy or concretionary. It is typically developed in Wenlock Edge, where it forms a striking feature for some 20 m. It appears very well exposed in a sharp anticline at Dudley, whence it is sometimes called the “Dudley limestone”; it occurs also at Aymestry, Ludlow, Woolhope, May Hill, Usk and Malvern. The fossils include corals in great variety (Halysites catenularis, Favosites aspera, Heliolites interstinctus), crinoids (Crotalocrinus, Marsupiocrinus, Periechocrinus), often very beautiful specimens, and trilobites (Calymene Blumenbachii, the “Dudley locust,” Phacops caudatus, Ittaenus (Bumbastes) barriensis, Homolonotus delphinocephalus). Merostomatous crustaceans make their first appearance here (Eurypterus punctatus, Hemiaspis horridus). Brachiopods are abundant (Atrypa reticularis, Spirifer plicatilis, Rhynchonella cuneata, Orthis, Leptaena, Pentamerus); lamellibranchs include the genera Avicula, Cardiola, Grammysia, Murchisonia, Bellcrophon, Omphalotrochus are common gastropod genera. Conularia Sowerbyi is by no means rare, and there are several common cephalopod genera (Orthoceras, Phragmoceras, Trochoceras).

The greater part of the known Silurian fauna of Britain comes from Wenlock rocks; J. Davidson and G. Maw obtained no fewer than 25,000 specimens of brachiopods from 7 tons of the shale. Not only are there many different genera and species but individually certain forms are very numerous. The three principal zonal graptolites are, from above downwards: Monograptus testis, Cyrtograptus Linnarssoni, Cyrtograptus Murchisoni.

When traced northward into Denbighshire and Merionethshire the rocks change their character and become more slaty or arenaceous; they are represented in this area by the “Moel Ferna Slates,” the “Pen-y-glog Grit,” and “Pen-y-glog Slates,” all of which belong to the lower part of a great series (3000 ft.) of slates and grits known as the “Denbighshire Grits.” Similar deposits occur on this horizon still farther north, in the Lake district, where the Wenlock rocks are represented by the “Brathay Flags” (lower part of the Coniston Flags series), and in southern Scotland, where their place is taken by the variable “Riccarton beds” of Kirkcudbright Shore, Dumfriesshire, Riccarton and the Cheviots; by greywackes and shales in Lanarkshire; by mudstones, shales and grits in the Pentland Hills, and in the Girvan area by the “Blair” and “Straiton beds.” In

Ireland the “Ferriters Cove beds,” a thick series of shales, slates and sandstones with lavas and tuffs in the Dingle promontory; the

“Mweelrea beds” and others in Tipperary and Mayo are of Wenlock age. Lime and flagstones are the most important economic products of the British Wenlock rocks.

See the article, and for recent papers, Geological Literature, Geol. Soc., London, annual, and the ''Q. J. Geol. Soc.'', London.

 WENNERBERG, GUNNAR (1817–1901), Swedish poet, musician and politician, was born at Lidköping, of which place his father was parish priest, on the 2nd of October 1817. He passed through the public school of Skara, and in his twentieth year became a student at Upsala. He was remarkable from the first, handsome in face and tall in figure, with a finely trained singing voice, and brilliant in wit and conversation. From the outset of his career he was accepted in the inner circle of men of light and leading for which the university was at that time famous. In 1843 he became a member of the musical club who called themselves “The Juvenals,” and for their meetings were written the trios and duets, music and words, which Wennerberg began to publish in 1846. In the following year appeared the earliest numbers of Gluntarne (or “The Boys”), thirty duets for baritone and bass, which continued to be issued from 1847 to 1850. The success of these remarkable productions, masterpieces in two arts, was overwhelming: they presented an epitome of all that was most unique and most attractive in the curious university life of Sweden. In the second volume of his collected works Wennerberg gave, long afterwards, a very interesting account of the inception and history of these celebrated duets. His great personal popularity, as the representative Swedish student, did not prevent him, however, from pursuing his studies, and he became an authority on Spinoza. In 1850 he first travelled through Sweden, singing and reciting in public, and his tour was a long popular triumph. In 1860 he published his collected trios, as The Three. In 1865, at the particular wish of the king, Charles XV., Wennerberg entered official life in the department of elementary education. He succeeded Fahlcrantz in 1866 as one of the eighteen of the Swedish Academy, and in 1870 became minister for education (Ekklesiastikminister) in the Adlercreutz government, upon the fall of which in 1875 he retired for a time into private life. He was, however, made lord-lieutenant in the province of Kronoberg, and shortly afterwards was elected to represent it in the Diet. His active parliamentary life continued until he was nearly eighty years of age. In 1881 and 1885 he issued his collected works, mainly in verse. In 1893 he was elected to the upper house. He preserved his superb appearance in advanced old age, and he died, after a very short illness, on the 24th of August 1901, at the royal castle of Lecko, where he was visiting his brother-in-law, Count Axel Rudenschold. His wife, the Countess Hedvig Cronstedt, whom he married in 1852, died in 1900. Wennerberg was a most remarkable type of the lyrical, ardent Swedish aristocrat, full of the joy of life and the beauty of it. In the long roll of his eighty-four years there was scarcely a crumpled rose-leaf. His poems, to which their musical accompaniment is almost essential, have not ceased, in half a century, to be universally pleasing to Swedish ears; outside Sweden it would be difficult to make their peculiarly local charm intelligible.

 WENSLEYDALE, JAMES PARKE, (1782–1868), English judge, was born near Liverpool on the 22nd of March 1782. He was educated at Macclesfield grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge. He had a brilliant career at the university, winning the Craven scholarship. Sir William Browne's gold medal, and being fifth wrangler and senior chancellor's medallist in classics. Called to the bar at the Inner Temple he rapidly acquired an excellent common law practice and in 1828 was raised to the king's bench, while still of the junior bar. In 1834 he was transferred from the king's bench to the court of exchequer, where for some twenty years he exercised considerable influence. The changes introduced by the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1854, 1855 proved too much for his legal conservatism and he resigned in December of the latter year. The government, anxious to have his services as a law lord in the House of Lords, proposed to confer on him a life peerage, but this