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.)

A REALLY critical edition of the I.ibfr de IVinloniii las

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. Between the Ribble and Mersey there are now
four Hundreds West Derby, I.eyland, Hlackburn, and Salford ;
the last three of these are the same now as they were in the days
of Edward the Confessor ; but. where we have now the one
Hundred of West Derby, Domesday gives us three Derby,
Newton, and Warrington : when were llie^e three condensed
into one ? It would appear that various changes in local boun-
daries were made either slightly before, or very early in, the reign
of Henry III. : the Lancaster, that appears in the I'ipe Rolls
from 1165 onwards, is not the County but the Honor, and \vc
can not be sure of the existence ot the county of I.ancasler
before 1221. A year or two alter that date the Hundreds of
Newton and Warrington had certainly been condensed into the
40 The Domesday Record of the
Hundred of West Derby ; it may be that whatever year saw the
amalgamation of Amounderness and the Lancaster Honor into
the county of Lancaster (the germ of the present county), saw
also the amalgamation of these three Hundreds into one.
It would be interesting if some one with local knowledge could
point out why it is that the boundary between Newton and
Derby Hundreds runs through the middle of the parish of
Wigan ; the townships of Holland, Dalton, Winstanley, and
Orrell being in the latter Hundred. The boundary of the Hun-
dred of Newton is here very nearly, but not exactly, the same as
that of the later Fee of Makerfield, which included the greater
part of Wigan parish. At the present time there is one township
in that parish Aspull by name which is in Salford Hundred,
all the other townships being in West Derby. This fact had
escaped the notice of the lawyers who drafted the Act by which
the Liverpool Bishopric was founded ; and the Bill had made
some progress, before I caused it to be pointed out to Lord
Beauchamp (who had charge of it in the Upper House) that the
Bill, if its wording remained unaltered, would leave the one
township of Aspull in the middle of Lancashire, as an island (so
to call it), under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Chester.
We may notice in passing that there have been many changes
in the Hundreds of Cheshire also. Wirrall appears in Domesday
as Wilaveston, Macclesfield as Hamestan, and other names
are changed, and not only that, but the present Hundreds of
Buckland and Edisbury each contain two of the Hundreds of
Domesday Book.

III. As to the Townships mentioned in South Lancashire.

It is well known that Domesday is here much more meagre than
in most parts of England. Newton and Warrington are the only
places spoken of by name in their respective Hundreds. In
Blackburn Hundred we have the names of Blackburn, Whalley,
Huncoat near Accrington, Walton-le-Dale, and Pendleton near
Clitheroe ; in Salford Hundred those of Salford, Ratcliff, Man-
chester, and Rochdale ; whilst Leyland and Penwortham are the
 Land between Kibble and Mersey. 41
only names given in Leyland Hundred. On the other hand, in
Derby Hundred we have the names of more than 40 townships
or hamlets ; but this is all out of the iSS manors which Domes-
day itself says existed between Kibble and Mersey.
Every one knows that amongst these manors Liverpool is not
mentioned, or at least only appears under the name of Esmedune
or Smithdown, a place mentioned in documents of the 131!!
century in connection sometimes with Toxtcth and sometimes
with the forest of West Derby. Four hundred years later, we
find receivers appointed for the crown-rents of Toxtcth, Smith-
down Moss, and Liverpool : and the name is still perpetuated in
Smithdown Road, that runs towards Liverpool along the boundary
of the townships of Toxteth and West Derby. Smithdown then
probably lay west of Derby and north of Toxteth, and contiguous
to both, and therefore occupied the site of, at any rate, a con-
siderable portion of Liverpool, which latter name was perhaps
confined at the time of Domesday to the well-known pool or
inlet of the Mersey, now built over, answering to Wallascy Pool
on the opposite side of the river. If this be so, the transference
of the name from the inlet to the group of houses on its banks
is exactly paralleled by the instance of the modern village in
Cheshire, which is now called Hoylake, a name formerly applied
to the tidal channel washing the coast at that spot. This theory
would of course account for the name Liverpool not appearing in
Domesday Book. Our learned Secretary, however, believes in
an ingenious and probable derivation of the word from a British
source, which would make it the name of a place, and not of a
pool, from the very first,
Judging from the scantiness of the information, it would cer-
tainly seem as if the Domesday Commissioners had contented
themselves with crossing over from Chester to the king's manor
of Derby, and there had gathered sworn information about that
Hundred, and gleaned further pieces of knowledge about the five
other Hundreds (especially about the king's land in thenii, with-
out troubling themselves to penetrate into a part of the country
so wild and desolate, and inhabited by people full of a sturdy
independence.
42 The Domesday Rtcord of the
IV. When we pass on to the Landlords, we naturally take first
those with whom our sympathies lie the Englishmen, who are
spoken of in the past tense, some of whom were dead and gone
before the Domesday survey, but many of whom must have been
living on, dispossessed of their lands for no other crime than love
for England. The first and foremost of these is, of course, King
Eadward, who (besides being, as it seems, Lord of the Hundreds
of Warrington, Blackburn, Salford, and Leyland) owned West
Derby and six unnamed berewicks or hamlets dependent on that
manor, Warrington and three hamlets in that neighbourhood,
Blackburn Huncoat and Pendleton in the north-east, Salford and
Ratcliffe in the east, Walton-le-dale Leyland and Penwortham in
the north. These 19 townships belonged to the Confessor, and
passed at his death to his nobler successor King Harold, whom
the compilers of Domesday Book mention as seldom as possible;
indeed, when they have to speak of the nine months of his reign,
they generally use some periphrasis, such as, ' after the death of
" King Eadward, before that King William had come into
" England." We, who have been born between Kibble and
Mersey, may be proud to think that our native district must thus
have contributed largely to the assistance of the one king of the
English who has died fighting in defence of his country, helped
him (we will hope) by both men and menus in his struggle against
the Norwegian King and the Norman Duke.
The dispossessed Englishmen of lower degree are not named,
excepting those in the Hundred of West Derby, and one, Gamel
of Rochdale, in the Hundred of Salford. There were many
different landholders in the Derby Hundred. One of them was
a lady, Godgilu by name, frenchified into (lodiva, but no doubt
a different person from Earl l.colric's famous wife ; whether the
name of Teos. the owner of Barton, is feminine or not, I am not
scholar enough to say ; it is no doubt the Eicnch clerk's ignorant
way of pronouncing some good old English name. Of one of
these landholders we would gladly know more Ulured, a groat
man in the district, tor he held more than 15 townships in the
Hundred, viz., Kirkby, Roby, Knowsley, Crosby, Maghull,
 Land between Ribble and Mersey. 48

Aughton, Kirkdale, Little Woolton, Speke, Litherlancl, Dalton,

Skelmersdale, Lathom, Lydiate, and Altcar, together with part of
Scarisbrick and Marton. We would gladly identify him, if we
could, with one of the Uhtreds of the great House of Kadwulf,
which held the northern counties against all the inroads of the
Danes, and for generations ruled Northumberland so inde-
pendently that up to the eve of the Norman Conquest the writs
of the king at Winchester did not run north of the Humber a
House which was so famous, that Scotch kings and Gnlwegian
princes and Cumbrian lords were proud of their descent from it,
and which still exists in the direct male line, the head of it bear-
ing the surname of Nevill, which an ancestor of his took from
his Norman mother in the twelfth century. Such identification,
however, would be mere guess work, darnel of Rochdale may
have been a kinsman of Uhtrecl, for his name, too, was not
unknown amongst the descendants of Kadwulf of Bamboioiigh,
and he and Uhtred appear to have had rights and liberties not
possesseil by all the landlords of the district. We may notice,
before we pass on, that the Uhtred of whom we have been speak-
ing owned Wallasey, and Wallasey only, on the south bank of the
Mersey ; this connection between Wallasey and the land between
Ribble and Mersey may allow us to conjecture that the time was
not then far distant when Wallasey had been an island, and when
the more important of the two mouths of the Mersey had been
where Leasowe C.'astle now stands, thus leaving Wallasey a part of
the Hundred of West Derby rather than of the peninsula of
Wirrall.
It is with a certain malicious satisfaction that an Knglishman
finds that " held," and not " holds," i-> usi d of Roger of 1'oitou
himself, to whom the Conqueror had granted the whole land
between Ribble and Mersey, together with 210 other manors
398 in all. Roger -'of I'oitou " wa> so < ailed from his residence

I
(one would sii|']ose) at his wile's (asile in i'oitc.11 rather than at
his own at Lancaster, or at the one, whu h he had himsell built
at Penwortham, the only castle then existing between Ribble
and Mersey, and doubtless the abode of such oppression and
44 The Domesday Record of the
cruelty as he and his knew well how to exercise. Roger had
married Almodis, Countess, in her own right, of La Marclie, in
Poitou. He was the third son of Roger of Montgomery, who
was the head of a house connected by " the spindle side " with
the dukes of Normandy, and who, at the great battle of 1066,
had been in command of the right wing, which consisted of
Frenchmen and other " soldiers," i.e. (for the word was then used
in its strict sense) mercenaries, the same Roger of Montgomery,
who, when Earl of Shrewsbury, became the one Norman robber
that left his surname to be borne in future ages by a county in
this island. Roger of Poitou's mother was Mabel Talvas, the
heiress of the chiefest of all Norman families in power and in
wickedness, ' small in stature, talkative, clever, and witty " (as
the old chronicler calls her), guilty of fearful crimes and doomed
to a fearful end ; she passed on her evil nature to her eldest son,
the famous or infamous Robert of Belesme, Earl of Shrewsbury
and Arunclel in P^ngland, Count of Ponthieu and Alencon in
France, a horrible tyrant of the worst feudal type, who drew
down upon himself the hatred of our English forefathers in a
more abundant measure than did any other Norman oppressor.
But, if the wickedness of the family culminated in Robert of
Belesme, we cannot say much to the credit of his younger
brother, Roger of Poitou. In 1077, forgetful of what he owed
to the Conqueror, he espoused the cause of King William's
rebellious son Robert, and was deprived of his English posses-
sions, the revenues of which William, with characteristic grim
pleasantry, employed in hiring mercenaries to fight against their
former owner.
Thus, when Domesday Book was compiled, the King himself
held the land between Ribble and Mersey ; and the names of the
few tenants mentioned as having received lands from Roger of
Poitou (Ralph, Tetbald, Osmund, Adelard, and others,) arc too
insignificant to detain us, with the exception of two, who
apparently held between them the Hundred of Blackburn, and
whose descendants still own estates between Ribble and Mersey.
The first of these is Roger de Busli or Basse), afterwards Baron
 Land between Kibble and Mersey. 45

of I'enwortham, whose descendant, Avice Busscl, just before the

year 1279, brought to her husband, William ffarington, as her
marriage portion half the manor of Ley land, which is still held
by her descendants in the male line; and the second is Albert
Grcslet or Gresley. the founder of a family which held Manchester
from the days of the Conqueror to those of Edward II., when
Joan, its heiress, carried that barony into the house of I>e la
Warr ; it was from these Gresleys that the great Lancashire family
of Assheton received that carucatc of land in Asliton-under-Lyne,
which gave them their surname, when Emma (iresley became the
bride of the Englishman, Orm, the son of Eadward.
To return, however, to Roger of Poitou. He was afterwards
reinstated in his lordships by William the Red, but, joining in the
insurrection of his elder brother against Henry I., he once more
lost all his English fiefs in 1103, and England finally got rid of
the house of Montgomery, though both Robert and Roger left
children to inherit in Erance the lands, the power, and the evil
name, of their forefathers.

V. I have already tried your patience too much, and can

only allow myself a word about the churches. The only two
churches alluded to in the Derby Hundred arc Childwall, under
which name we read " there was a priest, having half a carucate
"of land,'' and Walton-on-the-IIill with twice that amount of
glebe. Newton Hundred was much smaller than Derby, but we
hear of two churches there also, Wigan and Winwick ; " the
" church of the same manor had one carucate of land, and
" S. Oswald of the same vill had two carucates ;'' it is well known
that the rectors of those two churches are still considerable
owners of glebe-land. In Warrington Hundred, Warrington
church is the only one mentioned, and was called then, as now,
S. Elphin. Blackburn and Whalley were the churches of the
north-eastern Hundred ; Leyland Church stood alone in its
Hundred; whilst in Salford Hundred we find ''the church of
" S. Mary and the church of S. Michael ;" the former of these is
the " old church " at Manchester; as to the latter, Mr. Beamont
46 The Domesday Record of the

hesitatingly identifies it with the ancient church of S. Michael,

Ashton-under-I.yne, which was within the original parish of
Manchester. There can, I .should think, be little doubt about
the truth of this conjecture ; it is certainly preferable to Mr.
Whitakcr's idea of a S. Michael's Church at Aldport, in Man-
chester, a church, the very existence of which remains to be
proved. Mr. Whitakcr adduces the two Manchester fairs to
demonstrate the existence of two Manchester churches, and,
because neither of these fairs coincides with the Feast of S.
Michael, he attempts to shew that Michaelmas day was at one
r
time held in April; the great thing, that he does prove, is the
length, to which a man will go Ct'uu' 6ia</ii'AarTcof, in support of a
favourite theory.
It is pleasant to think that at any rate there were ten times as
many churches as there were castles in this district, and indeed it
is possible that, besides these ten, other churches may have
existed ; but still the parishes between Ribble and Mersey in the
eleventh century must have been very much like what South
African parishes arc now, and, where we have in these days the
busy hum of huge towns and overgrown villages without number,
in those days there seems to have been nothing but the silence
of a vast solitude. Indeed we know that great tracts were unin-
habited, for we read of a forest in the Manor of Derby, (the
predecessor probably of the extra-parochial district of Croxteth,)
two more in connection with some of Uhtred's manors, (one of
which is now perhaps represented by Simonswood, which is also
extra-parochial,) a fourth at Lathom, two more at Melling and
Lydiate, and another at \Voolton, seven in the Derby Hundred
alone. In the little Hundred of Newton there was a forest
15 miles long and 9 broad, and another almost as large in
Salford Hundred, whilst two are mentioned in each of the
Hundreds of Leyland and Blackburn.
The country had indeed been more civilized a short time
before than it was at the time of the Domesday survey. " In King
" Eadward's time'' the six Hundreds were " worth ^145 2s. 2d. ;
" when Roger of Poitou received it from the king, it was worth
 Land between Kibble and Mersey. 47

"^120"; in the same way the fifteen drenghes of Newton Hun-

dred had been diminished to six ; though all this, of course, is as
nothing .compared with the terrible devastation that had fallen
upon Yorkshire, which then included Lancashire north of the

r Kibble. The accounts that we have of William's harrying of the

country in io6g are graphic enough, but they are outdone by the
passionless witness of Domesday, where the significant word
' waste " is attached to Yorkshire manors through page after page.
To take the Lancashire Hundred of Amoundcrness as an instance,
for it, as I have just said, in those days belonged to Yorkshire ;
the Survey reckons up 62 manors in that Hundred, which had
belonged to Earl Tostig, King Harold's brother, and had after-
wards been granted by the Conqueror to Roger of I'oitou, and
then it quietly adds : " Sixteen of these have a few people living
" in them, but we do not know how many ; the rest are waste" !
Perhaps the missing drenghes of Newton Hundred, and many
another valiant man from the land between Kibble and Mersey,
were amongst the large body of Englishmen who made their way
to Constantinople, and there, in the service of the eastern
Emperors of the House of Komnenos, they not uncommonly
had the satisfaction of meeting in open battle the kinsmen of
their conquerors, for the Norman invader in the eleventh century
found the shores of Epeiros guarded by the axes of Englishmen
no less than the hills of Sussex ; and the strangely abiding tie,
which the Waring (or Varangian) Guard thus formed between
England and the New Rome, lasted until the death-throes of the
liyzantine empire, when Harold, the son of Godwine at length
found a worthy compeer in Constanlinc Palaiologos.
Under such a ruler as Roger of Poitou the value of the district
would rapidly decline still further, and civilisation would go back
ward, and even Christianity relax a little of its former hold upon
the people. So indeed we may gather from the startling fact that
the fine for violence against the weaker sex was, between the
Ribble and Mersey, only one quarter of what it was in Cheshire,
no more, in fact, than the fine imposed on one who wilfully
absented himself from the shire-moot; thus, too, in Cheshire
48 The Domesday Record, &*c.
certain offenders paid a double fine if the offence was committed
on a Sunday or during a holy season ; but all days were esteemed
alike in the wilder district north of the Mersey.
With this rather dreary view of the churchmanship and of the
prosperity of our predecessors here in the eleventh century, I
must conclude. I have kept you long enough, and must abstain
from touching upon further points of interest. But may I ask
whether any Liverpool man can prove himself the heir of a certain
/ Ethelmund, of whom Domesday speaks ? for, if so, he might
lay claim to a property which has considerably increased in value
during the last 800 years. " /Ethelmund," we are told, " held
" Smithdown," i.e., as we have already seen, Liverpool; "it was
" worth 32d." !