The Domesday Record of the Land Between Ribble and Mersey

THE DOMESDAY RECORD OF THE LAND BETWEEN RIBBLK AND MERSEY. By Andrew E. P. Gray, M.A., F.S.A., RECTOR OK V.'AI.I.ASKV. (Read nt December, ,887.) REALLY critical edition of the I.ibfr de IVinloniii las A Domesday Hook is technically called] one which would bring the full resources of modern scholarship to hear upon all the points suggested by it, is still a desideratum, and, as Pro fessor Freeman says, it is an object which ought to be taken up as a national work. A considerable amount of Domesday litera ture has appeared since the royal order in 1767 for the publication of this amongst other records : but much remains to be done, for a great deal of that which has been given to the world on the subject is deficient in breadth of treatment and in accuracy of criticism. We in this part of the country are greatly indebted to Mr. Beamont for his Introduction and Notes to the photozinco- graphic facsimile of the Domesday Record of the two north western counties palatine. Mr. Beamont has been a member of this society almost ever since its foundation 40 years ago, and is one of whom the society is justly proud. It seems, indeed, rash for me to venture upon the subject which I have chosen, lest I should be supposed to be putting myself in competition with him, or setting myself up as a critic upon his Introduction ; but Dt 2 86 The Domesday Record of the I thought that perhaps we might be led over some new ground to-night, if we turned to the Domesday account of the land Inter Ripam et Afers/tani, and considered, firstly, the history of that territory, and then its hundreds, the townships mentioned, the landlords, and the churches. Into general points affecting the whole country (as, for example, the differences between radmen and drcnghes, or the dimensions of the carucate and hide of land), we need not enter this evening ; but perhaps we may find time, at the end of the paper, for a momentary glance into the bye-laws (so to call them) and customs which were then in force in this particular neighbourhood. I. As to the history of the territory. U'hilst our heathen English forefathers were gradually lirst devastating, and then themselves settling down in, the eastern and southern parts of the country, to which they gave their name, the British princi palities in the north-west drew together into the kingdom of Strathclyde a kingdom which stretched from the Clyde to the Mersey, and from the sea to the hills that form the watershed. The capital of this kingdom was Alclwyd, or Dumbarton, which was strongly fortified to protect the British from the incursions of the Scots and Picts of the north ; the hills guarded them on the east from the Northumbrian English and the Britons of Elmet (which, roughly speaking, answered to the West Riding); south of the Mersey was another British kingdom, Gwynedd, of which the capital was Chester. It was not until the seventh century that the southern portion of the kingdom of Strathclyde, that part which now forms the county of J^ancaster, became English territory ; it was gradually dismembered by the Northumbrian English. In the year 613, .'Ethelfrith, the King of Northumber land, whose grandfather Ida had founded the Bernician kingdom, advanced over the moors at the head of Ribblesdale into our south l^ancashire, and, crossing the Mersey, marched on to Chester, where his rival, Eadwine, had taken refuge. The battle of Chester need not detain us ; it has been fully described by Mr. Green in his Making <>f England. It was a decisive Land between Kibble and Mersey. 87 victory, and marked an important step in the English conquest of Britain, for it thrust a wedge of English territory between the Britons of what we now call Wales and their kinsmen of Strath- clydc ; and amongst other results of the battle was the transference of the land between Ribble and Mersey from the kingdom of Strathclyde to that of Northumberland. Klmet, thus cut off from other British principalities, yielded to Eachvine thirteen years later ; and Leeds (which was then called Loidis or Lothene, and which it is consequently difficult to distinguish sometimes from the Lothian which stretched from the Forth to the Tweed) Leeds had become Northumbrian before 655 ; and about twelve years later, lands on the Ribble and in Amounderness were granted to St. \Vilfrith, so that part (at any ratei of Lancashire north of the Ribble must have become English by that time. It would be interesting to enquire into the further dismemberment of Strath clyde, and speak of the long-continued independence or semi- independence of Galloway and Cumberland ; but to do so would lead us too far from the subject in hand. Lancashire south of the Ribble became Northumbrian, then, in 613, and seems to have continued to belong to Northumber land until the arrangement made in 877 between the Danish host and Ceolwulf, the under king of that part of the Marchlancl, which the English still retained : ir. the previous year Yorkshire had been parted amongst Danish landholders, and then, in 877, the eastern half of the Marchland was in the same way parcelled out amongst the Danes ; but a long strip of territory, embracing the valleys of the Mersey and the Severn, was handed over to Ceolwulf ("an unwise Thegn," as the Chronicle calls him), and the name of Marchland was afterwards confined to this territory, stretching from the Ribble to the Biistol Avon, and shut in cast and west by the Danes and the l>riti.sli. '1 his was the first con nection between South Lancashire and the Mercian kingdom a connection, that we may regard as having become an incorpora tion, when the great King Eadward, who was almost the peer of his father /Elfred, set about, in 923, the building of a (ort at Thelwall (a township near Warrington, partly in Lancashhe and 88 The Domesday Record of the partly in Cheshire, for the Mersey runs through the township), and despatched thence a Mercian force to garrison the old Roman town of Manchester, which had probably lain desolate since the days of /Ethelfrith. These fortresses of Manchester and Thelwall, together with two built a few years before by King Eadward's sister at Chester and Runcorn, were intended no doubt to render any effective alliance between the Danes and the Britons impossible. South Lancashire from that time was part and parcel of the Mercian Ealdcrmanry, or earldom, as it was afterwards called; and, although not absolutely incorporated with Cheshire, it was regarded as an appendage to that county, which at the time of Domesday Book embraced also a considerable portion of Flintshire and Den bighshire, the Hundreds of Atiscross and Exestan being after wards handed over to Wales : it will be an interesting question for those who advocate Home Rule or Disestablishment for Wales to decide what the boundary of Wales is; will they go by Domesday Book, or will they prefer Henry VIII.'s ipse dixit in 1536 as to what is Wales, and what is England ? It is of course commonly said that South Lancashire appears in Domesday Book under the head of Cheshire, but this is not strictly true; the account of it is given on two pages, after the account of Cheshire, and just as each page of the portion about Cheshire is headed by the word Catrcscire in red ink, so these two pages relating to South Lancashire have their own separate heading, also in red ink, Inter Kipam ct Afersham. This anomalous district was granted to Roger of Poitou, of whom we shall speak later on ; and, after his second forfeiture, the gieater portion of it was given by Henry I. to Ranult, ti,e ihird palatine Eail of Chester, though it never became part of the palatinate. On the extinction of the male line of these Earls of Chester in 1232, the land between Kibble and Mer.-ey was inherited by the great house of Ferrers ; and either in thai year, or in 1266, at the downfall of that restless family (which had shared in every intrigue and con spiracy since the reign of Stephen), it must have been incor porated with the newly-formed county of Lancaster. That county Land between Ribble and Mersey. 89 had previously consisted of the Honor of Lancaster and the Hundred of Amounderness, and it was shortly to be augmented by the Liberty of Furness, taken from Westmorland in 1295. and again seemingly in 1312 by that portion of South Lancashire which had not been granted to the Karls of Chester, viz., the Honor of Clitheroe, which 'Thomas Karl of Lancaster inherited in right of his wife. Such is a sketch of the vicissitudes which the land between Ribble and Mersey went through before it finally became part of the county of Lancaster. II. And now we will turn to its Hundreds. This of course is not the place to enquire into the history of the division of the country into hundreds ; the liishop of Chester in the first volume of his Constitutional History has said 11 suppose) all that can be said on the subject. lint one can not forbear quoting the delightfully naive remark of I-Saines, which is (I am sorry to see) repeated in the edition now being issued in monthly parts : " There are evidently no sufficient data to determine into how " many hundreds South Lancashire was divided in the Roman " period, and still less in the time of the aborigines," which is very much the same sort of thing as if one were to wonder into how many bishoprics Asia Minor was divided at the time of the Trojan War.

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