BLIDWORTH, a parish within the liberty of
SOUTHWELL-and-SCROOBY, though locally in the wa-
pentake of Broxtow, county of NOTTINGHAM, 5 miles
(S.E.) from Mansfield, containing 744 inhabitants. The
living is a discharged vicarage, in the peculiar jurisdiction
of the Chapter of the Collegiate Church of Southwell,
rated in the king's books at £4, endowed with
£200 private benefaction, and £200 royal bounty, and
in the alternate patronage of the two prebendaries of
Oxton. The church, dedicated to St. Mary, is a small
edifice, built about, the time of Richard III. There are
places of worship for Baptists and Wesleyan Methodists,
also a school with a small endowment. At the
time of the Norman Survey this place formed a berewic
to Oxton. The village occupies a very elevated site,
nearly in the centre of the ancient forest of Sherwood,
in all the perambulations of which, from the reign of
Henry I. to that of Charles II., it is mentioned as a
forest town: several of the inhabitants are employed
in frame-work knitting. At the enclosure of waste land
in the parish, pursuant to an act passed in 1806, upwards
of one thousand acres were planted, and are now
in a flourishing condition. In a field near the village
is a rocky formation of sand and gravel, commonly
called plum-pudding stone; it is fourteen feet high,
and eighty-four in circumference, and is supposed to
have been a Druidical idol.