The effect the Norman conquest had on Bilston was that one set of landowners was replaced by another. For the inhabitants the round of agriculture would have gone on as before. Lawley gives the following translations of the local entries in Domesday Book: "In Bilston there are two hides of land (The hide was originally an amount of land sufficient to support a household), which is four caracates, and there are eight villeins (Villein, was a term used in the feudal era to denote a peasant (tenant farmer) who was legally tied to a lord of the manor.) and three boarders with three ploughs. Also one acre of meadowland. The wood is about a furlong long and a half broad. Walbertus holds of Williams (Fitz Ansculf) one hide in Bradley. There are 2 caracates, with them are 4 villiens having one plough. The wood is 3 furlongs long and one furlong broad. Valued and now of the value of 67 pence. Untan holds by sac and soc. There are two acres of meadowland."

The figures indicate that Bilston was, by the standards of its time, a sizeable village and that Bradley might be described as less developed, having more woodland and fewer inhabitants. There is no mention in Domesday Book of a church in either Bilston or Bradley and this is certainly because the church at Wolverhampton was the local parish church. Lawley insists that there was a church of some sort in Bilston from the earliest Christian times and that references in old deeds to Wolverhampton church and its chapelries show that there must have been a chapel, at least, in Bilston. It is possible; but it is more likely that St. Leonard’s found its origins at the end of the 11th century, when there was a spate of church building throughout the country.

It seems that after 1066 Wolverhampton and its surrounds came to be in only two manors, the Deanery Manor and the Stow Heath Manor. Stow Heath spread from the centre of Wolverhampton to the east and Bilston itself was in it. Bradley was not – it was in its own Manor of Bradley. Of Stow Heath manor Chris Upton (in his “A History of Wolverhampton”, (1998)) says that “Stowheath represented, in fact, a merger of the royal manors of Bilston, Willenhall and one half of Wolverhampton, a process only completed in the 13th century. The first lord of the manor was Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells and Chancellor of England until his death in 1292. His main dwelling was … at Acton Burnell”.

The descent of the ownership of the manors of Stow Heath and Bradley can, to a large extent, be traced – and the details are in Lawley. Suffice it to say here that Stow Heath Manor came into the hands of Bilston based people and seems to have been run from the house which is now the Greyhound and Punchbowl. Where the manor of Bradley was run from is not known. The main function of a manor was to regulate the course of agriculture in its area, though it exercised rather wider influence over its inhabitants than that might suggest, not least because, in early post-conquest times, there was not the same distinction between criminal and civil matters as we would make today.

In addition to the manorial courts, the area would have been run by various royal officers in various guises, most of whom would, in due course, have been replaced by magistrates (or Justices of the Peace) sitting in petty sessions and quarter sessions, at both of which minor criminal matters would have been dealt with, alongside some civil matters. There would also have been a hundred court – and Bilston was in Offlow Hundred – and a county court. These courts would have dealt mainly with what we would see as civil matters. Doubtless Bilstonians attended all these courts but their impact, other than that of the manorial courts, on their daily lives would have been small.

In medieval times we must imagine Bilston as a village, surrounded by open fields and some meadowland, and, beyond them, woodland areas on all sides, with the extensive royal forests beyond them to the north and to the west. The village’s principal roads would have been much as they are now with the exception of Wellington Road and Oxford Street, both of which were not to appear until the 19th century.

Water would have come from wells and, at a little distance, from the brook. The chief well was known as Crudely or Cruddley Well and was situated, Lawley says, “just off Lichfield Street, near to the entrance to Proud’s Lane”. There was another well at Spring Vale, known as Lady Wulfruna’s Well. Both of these wells were considered, from time to time, to be Holy Wells with curative properties.

The village would have been not unlike that shown on the 1832 map of the town – basically a village spread along a single street with a few branches off it developing over a period of time. The housing would have consisted of an accumulation of cottages – mere hovels to our eyes – and a wider scattering of the better houses of the better off landowners. These houses would have been “half timbered” on brick, or possibly stone, bases.

The single street layout would have been broken around the chapel, as it is today. A chapel is known to have existed on the site of St. Leonard’s, in 1090, when the priest was one Robert Fitzstephen. Lawley describes this as a free chapel, one not allocated to any of the prebends of St. Peter’s. But a chapel it was and a chapel of ease – that is an ecclesiastical building, with a curate (not a vicar or rector), which was provided for the convenience of people living at some distance from their parish church, in this case, St. Peter’s.

Beyond the village, presumably near the brook, was some meadowland, which would have been used for making hay and grazing cattle. The back yards of the cottages would have been used for growing vegetables and keeping pigs and the pigs would have foraged the surrounding woodlands.

The main agricultural activity of crop farming would have been carried out in Bilston, as it was almost everywhere else in the Midlands, in open fields. These were very large fields which were divided into strips (usually about a furlong long and about 20 feet wide) and the villagers would each have held an allocation of strips scattered around each of the open fields.

Bilston had a market, almost certainly on the site where it still is; although the date of its origin is uncertain, Lawley says that a market charter was granted by Edward III. At some date a “market cross” was erected. A market cross was, originally, just that: a large cross, on a plinth, which marked the centre of the market and around which local people came to sell their goods to other locals and visitors. Later the cross itself might have been replaced by a building, usually in the form of an open area at ground level, with an upper floor supported on pillars.

Bilston seems to have had two crosses: the Nether Cross and the Overas Cross. The Overas Cross was taken down in 1698 and the materials used to rebuild the Nether Cross. As was common with such buildings the open area beneath the Overas Cross was bricked in to form a ground floor room. In 1738 it was leased to a private individual and thereafter disappears from the records.

Open field systems of agriculture usually had three open fields, but variations on this, from two to five fields, are not unknown. We do not know for certain how many open fields Bilston had but it seems, from the names occurring at various points in Lawley’s History, that there were three:
Upper or Windmill Field; Middle Field; and Cole Pit Field. One would guess that Middle Field was to the west of the village (where Middle Field Lane ran); that Upper Field was to the north and west, it being described in 1458 as lying “near the way from the said Bilston to Wolverhampton”; and that Lower Field was to the south, the eastern side being occupied by the meadow near the brook. It was the chief business of the manorial court to decide on the course of agriculture – what was grown in each field; when ploughing, sowing and reaping took place and when, after harvest, the fields were to be thrown open to all villagers for grazing.

The notes made by the Reverend Ames show that this system of agriculture was still operating, over a greater or less area, in his time. The name “Windmill Field” indicates that there was a windmill but windmills did not appear in England before the 13th century; before that corn was probably ground at a mill powered by the brook. Certainly there was a water mill, as one is mentioned in a deed of 1378 cited by John Price.